Here is a study of the growth of knowledge about racial relations, moving from the eighteenth-century concept of race as lineage to the consideration of the nineteenth-century doctrines that have been called scientific racism. These doctrines were destroyed by the theory of natural selection, but the Darwinian revolution was complex, so it took time before its lessons were learned, and the foundations laid for a sociological approach to racial relations. The book then describes orthodox sociological theories in a chapter on race as status, and looks at the major challenge to these theories. It maintains that these orthodox theories will not be superseded by attempts to interpret racial relations in terms of the relations between classes.