Much writing has attended to how people made (some) Africans into a race collectively dubbed “black.” The distinguished American historian Nell Irvin Painter ambitiously assays to trace how people made (some) Europeans and later some Americans into a race collectively dubbed “white.” She did similar work in her 2006 Creating Black Americans. She reaches far more boldly in examining the twists and turns in meanings in creating white people. She stretches to grasp events and ideas over 2500 years, instead of over 400 years. She reaches back into antiquity and moves through twenty-eight chapters to the present of what she describes as “the fourth enlargement of American whiteness” (383).

Painter's far-ranging historical narrative explains that initially “people's skin color did not carry useful meaning” (1). Distinctions of race emerged not from physical features but from cultures, she says. Yet her evidence shows skin color as an early marker that shifted and in the process indicated much about the shifting meaning of race. Greeks of the classical era, for example, set themselves apart from their invasive lighter-skinned neighbors to the north, the Scythians and Celts, whom they dubbed “barbaric,” seeing them as the monstrous Other. Light skin marked Circassians in early Europe as slaves to be dragged from their homes in the north Caucasus Mountains region between Europe and Asia. So skin color had a useful meaning. It set peoples apart but not along lines later popularized as racial.

Painter at the outset declares that “race is an idea, not a fact” (ix). She interweaves intellectual history, art history, and history of science as each produced and reproduced versions, theories, and images of race ideals. She tracks race's varying concepts as they shifted and, particularly, as they expanded. So she traces white people's moving on a path of types. Their exemplar went from Caucasian to Saxon to Teutonic to Nordic to Aryan. She parades generations of race scholars, identifying key personalities who invented and reinvented the scientific and vernacular vocabularies and lines of argument for separating humanity into distinct groupings called “races.”

A clear destination arrives early in Painter's journey. She lingers in Europe for only the first quarter of her work. She has continuing reference to evolving European thinking. After all, it laid the foundations and framed the structures Americans extended and particularized. The Göttingen physician and professor Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), for example, set out the color-coded tiers of race as black, brown, red, yellow, and white. Painter's ultimate interest lies, however, in white Anglo-Americans more than in white people more generally. She reaches “early American white people” on page 104 of her 396 pages of text.

Painter devotes the bulk of her work to illustrating what she describes as the “expansion” of whiteness. Others have described the process as “becoming white,” as not all Europeans entered America as “white.” Scholars such as Theodore Allen, Karen Brodkin, Noel Ignatiev, Matthew Frye Jacobson, Ian Haney López, and Janice Okoomian have amply evidenced the fact. Painter emphasizes various layers of whiteness rooted among successive waves of European immigrants. Indeed, she focuses much on immigrants. Yet she says little about migration history as such. Only a single entry in her index treats “migration.” Nevertheless, Painter pointedly demonstrates how the westward movement of peoples from Asia across Europe and across the Atlantic with Africans pushed self and social definitions of white people.

Painter's narrative complicates the too-often accepted simple dichotomy pairing white freedom and black slavery. She lays out a complex history of slavery in Europe – slavery of those who would be called whites by others who also would be called whites and by others who would be called nonwhites. White slavery has persisted with a distinct ring, Painter notes. The domestic and international sex trade especially has continued to display slavery's economic hold and its aesthetic grip, as it has endured to grope white women embraced as ideals of beauty. Painter bares slavery itself as inescapably a relation of power universally dimensioned in terms of dominance-and-subordination not simply cast in black-and-white.

Painter says much and leaves much unsaid. Readers and reviewers may well quibble about what she has elided or excluded. Many topics get at most a light touch in her chapters that average fifteen pages. Law hardly gets a whisper. Yet the richness of what she includes and explains in accessible prose offers insight and instruction to a range of readers from the general public to scholars. She transposes whites' position in traditional historiography, treating them not only as subjects but also as objects. Her shifted perspective brilliantly re-images much of the history of the Atlantic world and more. Not simply recasting images of white people, Painter molds fresh impressions of the meaning of race. She exposes the frameworks used to construct not only white people but people denominated in any “race.”