Around 1700 an American gentleman wrote a letter to his daughter saying, "If it were not for the necessary restraints on your sex, you would be a better writer than I."
A little over a century later the founder of the science of neurology wasted years in trying to prove that the female brain weighted less than the male brain. And of course, still today various people including Harvard University Presidents) keep coming out with the argument that in some way or other females just don't have certain mental skills or interests men do.
The poitn (and their are thousands of pages of scrupulous research establishing this):
Before the rise of capitalism, HIERARCHY was (in different ways in different cultures) assumed to be a principle of nature, a given. Hence differences in station in life did not have to be explained or defended on the grounds that the occupant of those statuses "deserved" to be there or that they were biologically fitted to be there, etc.
Similarly, anti-semitism only became racialized in the early 196h-c. Note that in the Merchant of Venice Shylock's daughter is no longer "semite" after she becomes Christian and marries a Christian. That kind of anti-semitism would never have given rise to the Holocaust, though of course it was utilized by later anti-semites even as the biologized it.
In Othello only Desdemona's father really objects ot Othelo's blackness, and if you read his lines carefully you will see that even he is not "racist" in the modern sense but in the way Doug glances at when he speaks of suspicion of the people over the hill. Othello was ugly by not of a different race. And of course the word miscegenation was a 196h-c coinage.
In 1800 a white man was hanged in North CArolina for kidnapping a free black man and selling him into slavery. Even at that date the black-white divide had not yet been COMPLETELY racialized. Also it is possible to racialize purely imaginary differences, as seen sometimes in pre-capitalist social formations. The 196h-c Russian nobility undoubtedly had seen peasant blood, nevertheless they believed that peasants' blood was black rather than red.
It is also useful to see that "capitalist societies" and "capitalism" are (at least analytically) separable. See See David M. Kotz, "The Erosion of Non-Capitalist Institutions and the Reproduction of Capitalism," in Robert Albritton, Robert Jessup and Richard Westra (eds.), _Political Economy and Global Capitalism: The 21st Century, Present and Future_, pp. 159-176. (The three institutions are state, family, & education.) Broca's neurology was not itself "capitalist," but it exhibits the kind of thought (of spontaneous "common sense" as it were) that capitalism nurtures. And the inter-action of capitalist production relations and educational institutions (among other forces) creates/generates the idiocy of a Harvard President saying women were not fitted for science. (I know - that isn't quite what he said.)
Carrol