Gosse's premise is that racial and economic motives were not rivals but partners. Any serious study of racism in the Americas, on this account, has to begin with the European setting the British came out of, not with the colonies themselves.

Much of the discussion traces where European racial thinking originated. Gosse takes up William Green's suggestion that the British may have held Africans in contempt before ever reaching the New World, and turns to Portugal, the first European country with a sizeable West African population by the end of the fifteenth century, where Africa below the Sahara was imagined as a place of monsters and where non-Portuguese residents were confined to physical labour and judged inferior for it.

The resulting ideology assigns everyone a rung and demands compliance with it, reserving the top for supposedly pure Anglo-Saxon blood and casting white rule over the enslaved as a duty laid down by nature.