In discussing the status of the American Indians, the School of Salamanca and their successors habitually referred to them as “barbarians” (barbari). The word derives from the Greek barbaros, an onomatopoeia which described all those who could not speak Greek and whose languages sounded, to Greek ears, merely like people stuttering bar bar. It thus, by implication, meant an outsider, a foreigner, and since on the most extreme interpretation, only the Greeks had articulate speech, it implied both social and political inferiority. What, however, it did not imply, at least for the Europeans of the sixteenth century, was a racial distinction. The American Indians, as we have seen, may have been barbarians; they may even have been, as Vitoria said of them, “unsuited to governing even their own house-holds; hence their lack of letters, of arts and crafts … and in many other things useful, or rather indispensable, for human use”. But they still belonged biologically and psychologically to the same category of person as all the other peoples of the world. They did not, that is, despite the reiterated claim that all modern early-modern empires were organized along broadly racial lines, belong, nor were they generally thought to belong, to district races.

In part, this is because neither Vitoria, nor any of his contemporaries, possessed anything like a fully developed conception of race. This is not to deny that an awareness of something amounting to racial or ethnic differentiation is to be found in all cultures and at all times. In the form the word is most often employed today, however, a race is taken to be a genetically specific group of people – a biological, or rather pseudo-biological – not a cultural entity. Because of this, and the properties which each supposedly possesses, races cannot vary too much over time or space. Racism, thus understood, is clearly the product of nineteenth-century positivism, and any attempt to apply the term to an earlier period would, therefore, seem to be simply anachronistic.