The invention of humanity : equality and cultural difference in world history / Siep Stuurman.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: How cross-cultural equality became thinkable -- Visions of a common humanity -- Religious and philosophical universalisms -- History, ethnography, and the anthropological turn -- Thinking across frontiers in medieval Islam -- The Atlantic frontier and the limits of Christian equality -- Global equality and inequality in Enlightenment thought -- Modern equality and scientific racism in the nineteenth century -- The globalization of equality -- The age of human rights -- Epilogue: The future of global equality.

The Invention of Humanity offers a global intellectual history of thinking about common humanity, cross-cultural equality, and cultural difference. The time span runs from Antiquity to the present. The book traces the history of common humanity, cross-cultural equality and self-critical inversions of the cross-cultural gaze, from Homer and Confucius, Greek, Chinese, and Roman historians, Islamic thinkers in the Medieval world, the polemics occasioned by the Spanish conquests in America, Enlightenment critiques of colonialism, the French and Haitian revolutions, the nineteenth and twentieth-century debates about slavery, anti-colonialism, and the color line, to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the "Clash of Civilizations."--