>>19723270The term Caucasian as a racial category was introduced in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen school of history – notably Christoph Meiners in 1785 and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in 1795[b:lit][page needed]—it had originally referred in a narrow sense to the native inhabitants of the Caucasus region.[25]
In his The Outline of History of Mankind (1785), the German philosopher Christoph Meiners first used the concept of a "Caucasian" (Kaukasisch) race in its wider racial sense.[b:lit][page needed][26] Meiners' term was given wider circulation in the 1790s by many people.[c] Meiners imagined that the Caucasian race encompassed all of the ancient and most of the modern native populations of Europe, the aboriginal inhabitants of West Asia (including the Phoenicians, Hebrews and Arabs), the autochthones of Northern Africa (Berbers, Egyptians, Abyssinians and neighboring groups), the Indians, and the ancient Guanches.
