One final point worth emphasising is the contrast between the ancient empires and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century European colonial empires in their attitudes towards their subjects. Basically this may be encapsulated in one rather nasty word – racism. The European empires were increasingly based on a core metropolitan state that claimed to be a nation and often a democracy. The empire was a separate area of colonies whose dependence on the metropolitan area could only be easily justified by an allegation of the incapacity of their inhabitants to rule themselves. Nineteenth-century anthro- pologists' findings were used and abused to justify a doctrine of the racial or cultural inferiority of 'coloured' people compared with the 'white' race. In theory official attitudes might not quite go so far as to allege permanent inferiority on the part of the governed. British policy in principle was based on grooming colonies for self-governing 'dominion' status (like the white ex-colonies of Australia, New Zealand and Canada), whilst the French, for instance, were much more prepared to accord equal rights to 'natives' if they assimilated French culture and behaved like black Frenchmen. However, the Nazi view of the permanent inferiority of 'non-Aryan' races probably reflected the practice of European colonial residents more accurately for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The near extermination of the aboriginal inhabitants of Tasmania and the South African colonists' doctrine of apartheid are extreme examples of these attitudes at work.