Some of the 20th Century's early genocides, particularly those in Armenia and the Belgian Congo, represented a new, mechanized phase of state-sponsored racial slaughter. During the genocide in the Congo, 10 million African people - almost half the entire population - were butchered by King Leopold's men. For the first time, details of the massacres were made known to people in Europe. These accounts were so lurid and horrifying, that some Europeans, perhaps for the first time, started to wonder who were the 'civilised' and who were the 'savages'. We end the series by looking at the future of this kind of routine institutionalised racism, considering its implications, speculating on how it might be overcome, and looking at what purchase (if any) the concept of 'race' will have in the era of the Human Genome Project. What can science - the discipline that was used to 'prove' the existence of a racial hierarchy over a century ago - tell us about 'race' today? What do our attitudes towards 'race' tell us about ourselves? And is it conceivable that one day, our children or grandchildren might grow up to live in a world without racism? Experts interviewed: Manning Marable, Anthony Appiah, James Allen, Michael Eric Dyson, Thomas Pakenham, Adam Hochschild, Dr Bambi Ceuppens, Prof Deborah Posel, Pallo Jordan, Dr Barney Pityana, Simeon Wright, Hazel Carby, Lee Jasper, Doreen Lawrence, Prof Paul Gilroy.

This episode shows how Europe's 19th Century intellectual culture supplied colonialists and imperialists with a moral - indeed 'scientific' - imperative to claim new territories, crush resistance and impose their rule. This is demonstrated by the colonialists treatment of the aboriginal people in Australia. Science offered racists the theoretical justification for Europeans to fulfill their 'manifest destiny' to impose their rule over all 'lesser breeds'. We see how the ideas that emerged from pseudo-science paved the way for the principle of 'racial hygiene' one of the ideas that would serve to justify several of the genocides of the 20th Century - including The Holocaust. List of experts interviewed: Prof David Dabydeen, Prof Catherine Hall, Prof Henry Reynolds, Prof Bain Attwood, Prof James Moore, Prof Steve Jones, Mike Davis, Dr Maria Misra, Dr Jan-Bart Gewald, Pastor Izak Fredricks, John McNab (Kaptein Rehoboth Basters), Casper W. Erichsen, Edwin Black, Dr Michael Burleigh.

An examination of prevailing attitudes towards human difference in the writings of some of the major philosophers and historians of antiquity, including Herodotus, Aristotle, and Plutarch. The episode also assesses the implications of Old Testament dogmas concerning the pre-destined attributes of the different 'races' (specifically, the idea that the major racial groups were supposedly the descendants of Noah's sons - Ham, Shem and Japheth - and that Black people were victims of 'The Curse of Ham'). The development of the idea of 'race' is traced as a pseudo-biological category throughout the English Tudor period (particularly the literary application of the concept in Shakespeare). Significant changes in ideas about race are identified that coincided with the event that would shape racial ideas for centuries: the Columbian adventure in the 'New World' and the subsequent development and institutionalisation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade - an event that led to the dehumanisation, exploitation and inferiorisation of Africans - and the outright extermination of Native Americans. List of experts interviewed: Prof James Walvin, Prof Joe AD Alie, Ibrahim Bangura (Caretaker of Bunce Island), Dr Talabi Lucan, Prof Orlando Patterson, Prof Robin Blackburn, Prof Charles Mills, Prof Nicholas Guyatt, Dr Barnor Hesse, Prof Gary Taylor, Prof David Theo Goldberg, Prof Peter Linebaugh, Prof Paul Cartledge, Prof Adam Hochschild, Prof George Fredrickson, Prof Laurent Dubois.