A Cultural History of Race in the Reformation and Enlightenment (The Cultural Histories Series) 9781350067516, 9781350067578, 1350067512

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A CULTURAL HISTORY OF RACE VOLUME 4

A Cultural History of Race General Editor: Marius Turda Volume 1 A Cultural History of Race in Antiquity Edited by Denise Eileen McCoskey Volume 2 A Cultural History of Race in the Middle Ages Edited by Thomas Hahn Volume 3 A Cultural History of Race in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age Edited by Kimberly Anne Coles and Dorothy Kim Volume 4 A Cultural History of Race in the Reformation and Enlightenment Edited by Nicholas Hudson Volume 5 A Cultural History of Race in the Age of Empire and the Nation State Edited by Marina B. Mogilner Volume 6 A Cultural History of Race in the Modern and Genomic Age Edited by Tanya Maria Golash-Boza

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF RACE

IN THE REFORMATION AND ENLIGHTENMENT VOLUME 4

Edited by Nicholas Hudson

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022 Nicholas Hudson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. Cover image: Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay (1761–1804) and her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray (1760–1825). © The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The editor and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permissions for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hudson, Nicholas, editor. Title: A cultural history of race in the reformation and the enlightenment / edited by Nicholas Hudson. Description: London, UK ; New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Series: Cultural histories A cultural history of race ; volume 4 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2021017365 | ISBN 9781350067516 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Race–History–16th century. | Race–History–17th century. | Race–History–18th century. Classification: LCC HT1507 .C868 2021 | DDC 305.8009/03–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017365 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-6751-6 Set: 978-1-3500-6757-8 Series: The Cultural Histories Series Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

L ist

of

P raise

I llustrations

for

A C ultural H istory

vi of

R ace

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General Editor’s Preface Marius Turda

x

Introduction Nicholas Hudson

1

1 Definitions and Representations of Race Dennis Austin Britton

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2 Race, Environment, Culture Jean E. Feerick

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3 Race and Religion Robert Bernasconi

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4 Race and Science Suman Seth

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5 Race and Politics Matthew Bennett

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6 Race and Ethnicity Noémie Ndiaye

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7 Race and Gender Carl Plasa

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8 Race and Sexuality Nicholas Hudson

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9 Anti-Race Roxann Wheeler

165

N otes

179

B ibliography

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N otes

214

I ndex

on

C ontributors

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ILLUSTRATIONS

0.1 ‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother?’. Wedgwood porcelain medallion, c. 1787, designed by William Hackwood

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1.1 Jews in medieval oriental clothes, detail from Giovanni Canavesio’s Jesus before Caiaphas, 1491, fresco

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2.1 John Derricke, ‘Rorie Og, a wild kerne and a defeated rebel, in the forest with wolves for company’

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2.2 Inigo Jones, Design for the Memorable Masque, an Indian as Torchbearer

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2.3 John White, An Eskimo Woman with Baby, c. 1577

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2.4 Lucas D’Heere, ‘Homme Sauvage amene des pais Septentrionaux par Frobisher’, in Theatre de tous Les Peuples Et Nations De La Terre, avec leurs habits et ornaments divers, tant anciens que modernes, c. 1576

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2.5 John White, The manner of their attire and painting themselves, c. 1585–93, watercolour of an Indigious American man

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2.6 Philips Galle after Marcus Gheeraerts, America, late sixteenth century

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2.7 Asphalatus Acacia altera Mauk. Copy from De Materia Medica by the Greek physician Dioscorides. The Acacia tree was described by English herbalist John Gerard as flowing with the gum of Arabia

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3.1 Bernard Picart, Idoles de Tabasco, 1723

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3.2 Bernard Picart, Captif Sacrifie par les Antis, 1723

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3.3 Bernard Picart, Incas Consecrating their Offerings to the Sun

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3.4 Bernard Picart, Widow Burning in India, 1728

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3.5 Bernard Picart, Moon Worship, 1741, African nocturnal ceremony

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4.1 George Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–88): French naturalist

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5.1 Frontispiece of John White’s A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia, 1588

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5.2 Conrad Gesner and Edward Topsell’s ‘The Mantichora’, in The Historie of foure-footed beastes, 1607

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5.3 Jan van Kessel, Scene of cannibalism in Brazil, 1644

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5.4 Theodore de Bry, Battle in Jamaica between Christopher Columbus and Francisco Poraz, 1504

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ILLUSTRATIONS

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5.5 Louis Feuillee, A Traveler’s Representation of a One-Eyed Monster from South America, 1714

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5.6 The Great Chain of Being

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5.7 Diego de Valadés, Friar Preaching to Natives, 1579

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5.8 Andrés de Islas, De Tente en el Aire; nace Albarasado (From Tente en el aire, and Mulatto, Albarazado is born), 1774

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5.9 Theodore de Bry, Slaves process sugar cane and make sugar, 1595

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5.10 Theodore de Bry, Spanish soldiers observe and carry out the punishment of a slave who is flogged and has pitch poured on his wounds, 1595

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5.11 Anonymous, Baptism of Black Slaves, 1757

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6.1 Diego Velásquez, The Adoration of the Magi, 1619

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6.2 Marguerite Van der Mael, Tableau des nations de l’Europe sous le règne de Louis XIII, en tout victorieux, 1669

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6.3 Marguerite Van der Mael, L’Adoration des Nations, 1672

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6.4 Hottentot (Black African tribes), South Africa, from voyages made to Persia and India 1727, by Johan Albrecht de Mandelslo (1616–44)

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7.1 John Elphistone, ‘Illustration to the story of Inkle and Yarico, by Sir Richard Steele: Thomas Incle embarking for the West Indies’, c. 1711

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7.2 John Elphinstone, ‘Illustration to the story of Inkle and Yarico, by Sir Richard Steele: Thomas Incle shipwrecked’, c. 1711

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7.3 S. Hutchinson, Slave Traffic, 1793

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7.4 William Blake, Europe Supported by Africa and America, 1796

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8.1 Hans Burgkmair, Hottentots with Herd, c. 1510

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8.2 Caricature of Englishman and Hottentot Venus

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8.3 Ignacio María Barreda, Casta de nueva espana (The Caste of New Spain), 1777

150

8.4 W. Cope and T. Vernon, Othello Relating his Adventures, c. 1860

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8.5 Charles Gringnion, Mr Savigny in the Character of Oroonoko, 1776

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8.6 Robert Pollard, Inkle and Yarico, 1788

160

9.1 Diego Muñoz Camargo, Aztec emissaries making a treaty with the seated Cortez, his interpreter La Malinche standing to his left, 1585

175

PRAISE FOR A CULTURAL HISTORY OF RACE

‘The detailed, deep and comparative historicization of racial thinking is a very much needed and timely project: much writing about race is temporally and geographically focused and, in its wide-ranging ambitions, this Cultural History of Race represents a very welcome alternative. The use of a common chapter structure throughout the six volumes is a very valuable feature, which makes it easy for readers to follow particular themes, while the multidisciplinary approach is also highly attractive when dealing with a subject as mercurial as race.’ Peter Wade, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester, UK ‘Learning from the past is a necessary act of cultural advancement and A Cultural History of Race, a project of sustained historical inquiry from Antiquity to the present, makes a muchneeded and exquisitely timely contribution. It argues for rigor and depth of exploration through nine recurring categories of inquiry across the six volumes and challenges the notion of a restrictive timeline of the ‘history of race’ as the product of modernity. It transcends temporal and geographic limits while expanding our understanding of the variant and shifting terminologies of race. As a result, readers will appreciate the breadth of material and value highly the intellectual diversity of the project’s multidisciplinary approach.’ Ian Smith, Richard and Joan Sell Professor of the Humanities, Lafayette College, USA ‘Marius Turda, the eminent cultural historian of science and racialization is the general editor for this foundational six-volume study attuned to this ‘moment of global reckoning’ sparked by #BlackLivesMatter and Indigenous justice movements. This is an outstanding critical, nuanced, useful, anti-racist cartography from European ‘Antiquity’ through the ‘Renaissance,’ into colonial ‘Empire’ formations and state eugenics practices through the racially-coded high tech, big data ‘Genomic Age.’ Epic and often brilliant, we become painfully aware of how narrow nationalist and nation-bounded scholarship are so painfully limited in contrast to this masterful, satellite counter mapping. Yes, racism and contesting this degeneration of humans and the natural world is a deeply embedded history and of the moment, it’s relational and intersectional, and it has infected all transregional cultural discourses. A must for all academic and public libraries - five stars!’ John Kuo Wei Tchen, Clement A. Price Professor of Public History & Humanities, Rutgers-Newark University, USA ‘In a contemporary moment afflicted by concocted culture wars that are also proxy race wars, this important collection of essays does what is urgently needed - by explicating the concept of race in a historical frame. Between them, these volumes show how concepts of ‘race’ and ‘an impressive racial edifice’ emerged in the West over several centuries, and became such a powerful political, scientific and cultural force. An important contribution to the historical literacy that is needed if we are to challenge race and racism effectively.’ Priyamvada Gopal, Professor of Postcolonial Studies, University of Cambridge, UK

PRAISE FOR A CULTURAL HISTORY OF RACE

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‘A Cultural History of Race is an admirably ambitious survey of the cultural landscape of race and racism. Analysing the concept of race all the way from antiquity, and drawing in research from every relevant discipline, it paints a story of how difficult it has been for humans to grapple with the idea of human difference. Clarifying and comprehensive, it is sure to become necessary reading for every scholar who wants to understand what race means. It couldn’t have more contemporary relevance either. Truly outstanding.’ Angela Saini, Author of Superior: The Return of Race Science (2021) ‘A Cultural History of Race stands on a league of its own within the broad domain of race studies. This splendid, thoughtful array of essays by scholars in a truly diverse number of fields offers an unprecedented, kaleidoscopic panorama of the myriad permutations of race and racism in the West – from Greek and Roman antiquity all the way to the ages of the Genome and Black Lives Matter. The contributors to this collection exemplify just how fresh and engaging historical insight is when we as scholars remain fully engaged with the pressing issues of our own time. As a whole, this collection of essays forcefully delivers important lessons for a broad readership: first, race, racism and human rights advocacy itself are transhistorical phenomena reaching back to the foundational moments of Western civilization. Second, any truly critical history of race and racism requires an honest scrutiny of the manner in which our own fields of knowledge have been shaped by troubled legacies. And, most urgently, the identification of multiple forms of stigmatization, discrimination and persecution in our times – not to mention the quest for social justice – can hugely benefit from a rich reckoning of the multiplicity of  situated  forces that have shaped overt and systemic racism to this day.  A Cultural History of Race will remain obligatory reference for generations of readers.’ Nicolás Wey Gómez, author of The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (2008) ‘In this moment of global racial reckoning, there is a tectonic shift underway. As a more structural, systemic, and historical analysis of race and racialization is emerging, A Cultural History of Race, will be an important accelerant to this process. The pivot from a focus on identity towards one that more critically considers processes and patterns of identification is a process, one that takes time, sustained engagement and a nuanced understanding of the past and its relationship to the present. A Cultural History of Race is just such a text. Its recent completion will be a gift to scholars, activists, the human rights community, and others invested in a more just future, one that doesn’t posit certain people or for that matter species as disposable; there is no such thing! The time has come for us to embrace this reality and work towards a world in which this eliminationist ideology no longer governs our political, social, economic or philosophical spaces. A Cultural History of Race will prove to be a trusted companion and a useful tool for the long journey ahead and will certainly stake a claim to being a cornerstone text for the pivot that is underway.’ Milton Reynolds, Educator, Author, Diversity Equity Inclusion Practitioner, Critical Race Theorist

GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE MARIUS TURDA

A Cultural History of Race documents the long history of the concept of race from antiquity to the present day. In the six volumes collected here, scholars from a range of academic disciplines engage not only with the historical, cultural and philosophical realities of race but also with its aesthetics, literary functions and representations. To capture the elasticity of race as a concept, one needs to travel widely, across historical periods and geographical locations, to examine texts and images, cutting through the multilayered fabric of culture, science and politics. Viewed on a broad timescale, the densely textured content of the history of race is approached intersectionally, with an understanding of race’s complex relationship with other concepts such as gender, religion, class and nation. Given these vast territories of knowledge, then, to harmonize so many different aspects of the history of race is not an easy task. Besides mediating between the localized traditions of race and their transnational framework, A Cultural History of Race highlights entanglements, disruptions and mutations. At the same time, various national traditions are examined from a global perspective, and, thus, their purported uniqueness is challenged. It is important to understand the long history of race, not only through references to past events but also through the prism of current systemic racism. Engaging with the legacy of slavery, empire, colonialism and genocide, and not just with the overall historical trajectory of race, is another important aspect of this collective work. The concept of race cannot be decoupled from the very idioms that had been used throughout history to describe and classify humans, nor can it be expunged from projects of domination, subjugation and oppression. These projects were politically motivated, state sanctioned and often blessed by scholars and scientists. As adherence to a racial worldview became more explicit and formalized in culture, science and politics, however, its predatory ability widened. Scholars, politicians, artists, philosophers and poets were stirred by it. They created an impressive racial edifice that has, alas, endured until the twenty-first century. A Cultural History of Race offers critical perspectives on the traditional paradigms of thinking about the concept. It reflects as much shifting methodologies in the scholarship as the need to engage publicly with the normative saliency of race in the production of various forms of knowledge. Yet this is not just another cultural history of race but a decidedly analytical attempt to dislodge race from the intellectual pre-eminence it had occupied for centuries, and to disclose racial conceptions, beliefs, values and practices that had been used throughout history to make distinctions among groups of peoples on the basis of the colour of their skin and/or their intellectual abilities. The concept of race manifested itself in different ways at different times, but it always had supporters as well as detractors. Acceptance of race was not always universal. It was often met with suspicion and occasionally rejected. Anti-race thinking occurred in numerous spheres, including but not limited to religion and science.

GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

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A considerable amount of literature exists on the history of race, particularly during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But race had infiltrated major traditions of cultural, religious and philosophical reflection about human diversity already in antiquity. Elements of this discussion survived in the medieval and early modern periods, and new ones were added, particularly as colonial and imperial projects began to emerge in Europe. During the Renaissance and Reformation, and then more forcefully during the Enlightenment, race became a powerful concept, used not just to describe physical features of peoples but also to explain cultural achievements and behavioural attitudes. The subjugation and exploitation of non-European peoples, alongside slavery and extermination of Indigenous populations, only enhanced the power of race in defining white Europeans and their global expansion and dominance. During the nineteenth century and, especially, the twentieth, horrendous atrocities, most notably the Holocaust, discredited the concept of race and eroded its tentacular grip on social and political discourse and realities. Yet, race survived into the early twentyfirst century, continuing to impact the lives of millions with reference to their biological attributes, cultural traditions and historical experiences. Although developments in human genetics, particularly in the second part of the twentieth century, completely dismantled any pretention of scientific respectability appropriated by racists, current debates in genomics reveal how race continues to impact our scientifically informed worldview. Incredibly, the completion of the Human Genome Project, for example, even spurred attempts to define a concept of race that is scientifically credible. A Cultural History of Race is timely. It provides not only academic guidance but, equally important, a nuanced and innovative critique of race and racism as well. These six volumes are informed by research and academic reflection and, equally, by lived experience. This is a critical moment to review how myriad assumptions and attitudes rooted in the history of race and its toxic ideology continue to affect our world in ways both obvious and hidden. To understand the past and present of race in all its different representations is essential in order to name and remove its symbols of discrimination, injustice, abuse and violence against Black, Indigenous and other peoples of colour. Any work on the history of race must unambiguously expose the extraordinary damage caused by racist thinking and practice. While not exhaustive, A Cultural History of Race nevertheless provides numerous historical examples and options of interpretation for anyone who wants to engage, in an accessible way, with problems of race and racism characterizing the world today. Both together and separately, these volumes reassess historical traditions, scientific paradigms and political agendas put forward in the name of race. Equally important, the volumes’ insights and clarity are accompanied by incisiveness and commitment to antiracist scholarship. The overall aim is to strike a balance between scholarly detachment, empathy and direct participation in the current conversations about decolonization, whiteness, anti-racism and Black Lives Matter. In the twenty-first century, the assumption is that race as a meaningful category of analysis has been de-ritualized and de-politicized. The truth is that race continues to lend itself to theories of social, cultural and political inequality. Combined with an aggressive rhetoric of national protectionism and ethnicity, race continues to frame regional, national and international issues around immigration, social justice and gender equality. Wide in scope and detailed in analysis, A Cultural History of Race is therefore strongly embedded in current conversations about race and racism. We are in a moment of global

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GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

reckoning. Presidents are banned from social media platforms, statues are being torn down, names of university buildings are being changed, museums are being decolonized and stolen artefacts are returned to their countries of origin. Continued scholarly engagement with anti-racist activism is critical, not just for understanding the decisions being made today but to help preserve the lessons learnt for future generations.

Introduction ‘Race’ and the Contradictions of Western Ideology, 1550–1750 NICHOLAS HUDSON

The era between the Reformation and the Enlightenment marked momentous changes in Western society and its perceptions of the world. Following the explorations of the fifteenth century, European ships penetrated into all regions of the globe, establishing trading outposts and colonies from the Americas to the East Indies. The invention of moveable type and the increase of literacy and the book market spread reports of these travels and encounters with non-European people to a widening reading public. European scientists broke from the Aristotelian thinking of the Middle Ages to develop empirical methods of enquiry and new ways of understanding the natural world and the place of human beings in the natural order. Challenges to the authority of the Church and traditional royal and aristocratic political structures created unprecedented demands for free thought and more popular forms of representation. The increasing prosperity of Europe, engendered in large part by colonialism, led to more modern forms of economic thinking and the creation of a public that demanded accountability and usefulness from their governors. The idea of natural rights began to emerge along with the belief, as epitomized by the campaign to abolish the slave trade, that these rights should be extended to the peoples colonized by European nations. Yet this age also developed a concept with far-reaching and broadly damaging consequences for future societies, the idea of ‘race’. It is a distinguishing feature of the following volume on this subject that the contributors were asked to understand ‘race’ in relation with other developments and key terms of the period. Each contributor was asked to write on race in connection with the environment, religion, science, politics, ethnicity, gender and the body, along with new forms of taxonomy and counter-reactions against the idea of ‘race’. While each contributor has chosen to approach these connections in their own way, the aim has been to present the evolution of this modern ideology in the broader context of intellectual and cultural transformation. In this introduction, I will attempt a general overview of the emergence of ‘race’ as part of a network of philosophical and political changes that will be examined in greater detail in the individual chapters. As indicated by the title of this introduction, I will present these changes as inherently contradictory. The ideology that emerged from the period covered in this volume was not consistent or uniform but rather dialectical, springing ways of thinking that we might

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now consider as both humane and divisive, forward-thinking and destructive. As ‘race’ has deservedly gained the reputation of being a highly dangerous and insidious concept, modern scholars have tended to obscure its coterminous evolution with Enlightenment concepts that we continue to value such as human rights and democratic expression. This paradoxical combination continues to haunt and divide us. In modern scholarship and pedagogy, the idea of ‘race’ has become most common not in venues that wish to propagate the idea of biological divisions. This term is most insistent, rather, among those with the laudable goal of dismantling the pernicious effects of racial thinking. Yet the quest to end conflict and bigotry, the adherence to standards of global justice, are equally a legacy of the European Enlightenment alongside its racialized view of the world. The joint emergence of these two opposed features of Western thinking – race and the hatred of racialized injustice – is not, I propose, coincidental. They belong to the same general system of thinking and feeling, the products of the same tradition that both globalized the human species and sought to reduce new information about our species to common laws, both scientific and moral. I will begin with discussion of early modern ideas that, while laying the basis for eighteenth-century developments, most commonly understood the world in terms of innumerable ‘nations’. Early modern thought was neither colour-blind nor without violent discrimination, especially on religious grounds. Nonetheless, these ways of thinking gave way to both a ‘racial’ view of the world and idea of common humanity and common rights. As I will go on to discuss, these developments did not erase the idea of ‘nation’, which changed rather than disappeared. Indeed, the idea of ‘nation’ became even deeper and more integral as the result of the new racial thinking. The struggle between these joint concepts, the idea of ‘race’ and new ideas of ‘nation’, continues to trouble the powerful and pervasive force of Western ideology today. As I will conclude by suggesting, our modern perplexities and problems over issues of ‘race’ frequently involve the clash between these correspondent features of Enlightenment ideology – the abhorrence of racial discrimination and the desire for ‘national’ or cultural identity, the extension of a globalized concept of ‘human rights’ and resistance to the imposition of Western ideas.

THE NATIONAL ‘BIRTH-RIGHT’ OF FREEDOM IN PRE-ENLIGHTENMENT THINKING Our modern problems with ‘race’ are entangled with ideas of freedom – freedom from persecution and oppression, the freedom of individuals to express themselves. We might begin, therefore, with the evolving notion of freedom itself. I will propose that the idea of freedom was constructed, if only in part, in contradistinction to the supposed lack of freedom in ‘barbaric’ non-Western cultures, particularly in the Islamic world. The idea of a non-European propensity to ‘slavery’ was nonetheless soon extended to other peoples, such as those of sub-Saharan Africa. Modern readers may well be struck by the apparent contradiction that European people could complain about the brutality of their own enslavement while themselves practicing slavery. In seventeenth-century England, however, ‘liberty’ was initially understood in largely nationalistic terms – as the ‘birth-right’ particularly of English people, a sentiment echoed by French writers who claimed that their freedom was similarly a birth-right. It was only towards the middle of the eighteenth century that the idea of common ‘human rights’ began to emerge

INTRODUCTION

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in opposition to the European practice of enslaving others. As we will later consider, this development was connected with changes in other intellectual fields, particularly in emergent philosophical discourse about human rights and in natural histories of the human species. The use of the term ‘slavery’ became common in the seventeenth century in two major contexts. This term proliferated, first, in narratives of the capture and enslavement of ‘Christians’ by Islamic pirates in the Mediterranean. The second use of slavery drew from the first – Puritan political discourse that condemned the ‘slavery’ of the English people by monarchs and by the ‘Papists’ these kings favoured, a charge thrown back at the Puritans and their political heirs in the Whig Party. The literal enslavement of English people nonetheless came before its propagandistic extension. Beginning with accounts such as John Rawlins’s The Famous and Wonderful Recoverie of a Ship of Bristoll (1622) and Francis Knight’s A Relation of Seaven Yeares Slaverie under the Turkes of Argeire (1640), English merchants recounted their experience of slavery by Turkish and Moorish potentates. These accounts, well discussed by Linda Colley in Captives (2002), consisted of vivid depictions of suffering ‘Christians’ at the hands of barbaric infidels bereft of humanity or justice. ‘Pre-race’ insofar as that they do not impose biological categories on other peoples, these narratives nonetheless bristled with hatred for a range of nonEuropean groups, as unmistakable in Francis Brooks’s Barbarian Cruelty. Being a True History of the Distressed Condition of the Christian Captives under the Tyranny of Mully Ishmael, Emperor of Morocco (1693). In one incident in this work, for example, the ‘Emperor … sent out his Negroes to drive back the Christians’ and force them to build a shanty-town for the ‘Jews’, whom Mully Ishmael tolerates for their usefulness as traders. The irony of Europeans being corralled and beaten by ‘Hellish Negroes’ is not lost on Brooks (1693: 10–11). Brooks nonetheless agrees even with his Moorish captors that Jews are ‘the worst and falsest of all People’ (87). Largely obscured in Brooks’s account is that these various groups are as brutalized by the Emperor as the Christians. He notes in passing that the villainous Mully Ishmael follows the routine of killing one or two ‘Negroes’ before bedtime (71). Nonetheless, the major division in Brooks’s account is between ‘Christians’ and everyone else. Although the European captives derive from many different nations – England, France, Spain, Portugal – their differences are forgotten in their common enslavement by an ‘infidel’ and ‘barbarian’. Barbarian Cruelty certainly makes clear that the hatred and persecution of various groups did not rely on the emergence of scientific concepts of ‘race’. This hatred was inspired largely by religious animosity though, as shown by Robert Bernasconi in this volume, Christians did not really recognize the existence of ‘religions’ besides their own. All others were merely pagans and infidels. Skin colour and ethnic heritage nonetheless counted: as elaborated by Dennis Austin Britton in this volume, early modern thinking was deeply invested in the notion of inherited traits in its understanding of religion, social rank and nationhood. Brooks describes Mully Ishmael as ‘a Molatto by his Colour’, for he was ‘begotten of a Negro Woman by a white Moor’. Interestingly, his colour modulates in accordance with his mood, for though he seems ‘white’ when placid, ‘when he’s in a Passion, he looks just as is, as black as an Infernal Imp’ (Brooks 1693: 50). We find the same link between colour and mood in a later slave narrative, the anonymous Description of the Nature of Slavery among the Moors (1721). As this author observed of his Moorish captor, Mully Mahammad, ‘Joy makes him somewhat whiter than ordinary; but in his Choler, which often transports him, he turns black, and his Eyes are bloodred’ (Anonymous 1721: 27). This modulation accorded with conventions that associated

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blackness with the devil and with ‘barbarians’ whose skin turns darker in the throes of tyrannical fury. The rosy skin of benevolent Christians implicitly signified the opposite, joining Europeans in a common identity. This sense of common identity nonetheless diminished in the face of increased political and religious conflict between European nations. Thomas Troughton’s Barbarian Cruelty (1751), for example, contains a long list of all the captives, all of whom are British (the nomenclature changed with the 1707 union of England and Scotland). Significantly, the designation ‘a Black’ is appended to two of these British names (Troughton 1751: 15–16), implying that the notion of a Black Briton was unsettling. Nonetheless, all Britons had inherited a peculiarly British right to freedom: ‘Slavery’ was especially ‘dreaded by Britons, who could always boast of their Country’s Freedoms’ (3). Here both ‘freedom’ and ‘slavery’ began to take on a strongly political resonance, generating a metaphorical extension of these terms to political conflicts from the English Civil War onwards. Charles I, according to this metaphor, was attempting to ‘enslave’ the nation in the manner of Moorish barbarians. The anonymous author of Jesuite Plots and Counsels Plainly Discovered to the Most Unlearned (1642), for example, charged that the king, who favoured a modified Catholic liturgy in the English Church, had fallen under the spell of Jesuits who had ‘labored these 100. years … to bring people every where to slavery, and Kings to be absolute’ (Anonymous 1642: 2). The Leveller John Lilburne similarly charged that the king and his supporters had reduced the English to ‘mere Bondage and slavery’, a tyranny that he directly linked with the narratives of Islamic slavery: ‘What is Paganisme and Turkish slavery, if this be not such?’ (Lilburne 1646: 6, 24; emphasis in the original). The charge that the Stuart king intended to transform the nation into ‘Slaves and Papists’ was recycled by the founder of the Whig Party, the first Earl of Shaftesbury, during the Exclusion Crisis in 1681 (Shaftesbury, first Earl 1689: 2; emphasis in the original). After the Catholic James II was driven from the throne in 1688, William King similarly charged the deposed king and his French allies with actually recruiting ‘The Common Enemy of Christians, the Turks and Ravaging Tartars’ in order to promote their design of enslaving all of Europe (King 1691: 3–4; emphasis in the original). English political discourse thus became ethnically charged, implicitly and often explicitly associating attempts to destroy English liberty with the slavery practiced by Turks and other ‘barbarian’ people. Not exclusive to anti-royalist and later Whig discourse, these charges were turned back against republicans towards the end of Puritan rule in 1660. In Votiva Tabula (1660), James Warwell charged that Oliver Cromwell and his successors had subjected the nation to ‘Babylonish captivity’ (1; emphasis in the original), evoking a conventional biblical analogy between the English and God’s chosen people, the ancient Jews. The contrast between the liberty-loving English and the tyrannical nature of various foreign peoples was elaborated by Richard Ames in Chuse Which You Will, Liberty or Slavery (1692). A diatribe against James II’s supporters, the Jacobites, in the wake of the Glorious Revolution (1688), Ames’s polemic threw ethnic slurs left and right. Those who still supported the deposed James II, Ames wrote, wished the return of a government ‘most Barbarous in its Nature’ and whose ‘Cruelty exceeds ev’n the most Savage Communities on the Coast of India’. Their cruelty was worse than ‘Indian Cannibals’. ‘The Jews themselves do not in this day with greater impatience and mistaken Zeal expect the coming of the Messias [sic].’ Although Ames gestured at the belief that ‘It is the Nature of Mankind to covet Liberty’ (1692: 10–13, 15; emphases in the original), it is clear that English Protestants were virtually unique among the world’s

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peoples in their love of liberty. As Benjamin Grosvenor pronounced in a sermon preached on 5 November 1709, the anniversary of William of Orange’s landing in England, the ‘Birth-right of the English Man’ was ‘the Ability of chusing our Representatives in Parliament’. This was an English birth-right that Jacobites wished to convert into ‘abject and vile … Slavery’ (Grosvenor 1709: 13, 15). The notion that love of liberty was a particularly national trait was re-echoed by French writers during the same decades. In The Sighs of France in Slavery (1689), for example, Pierre Jurieu noted that the very name ‘Francks or French-men’ derived from the word for ‘Liberty’. Under Louis XIV, the French suffered ‘the greatest subjection of all People, without excepting those that grown [sic] under the Tyranny of the Turks’ (Jurieu 1689: 4; emphases in the original). Political complaints about ‘slavery’ also became part of American revolutionary discourse in the 1770s, for the revolutionaries routinely charged George III with ‘enslaving’ the colonies by not allowing them representation in parliament. Although Samuel Johnson wondered how it was ‘we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes’ (Johnson 1958–2014: 10:454), the early American revolutionaries continued the tradition of regarding freedom as a national trait, the birth-right only of certain peoples. They inherited this thinking from the British. In the 1730s, for example, Spanish ships began confiscating British ships in the Caribbean and detaining their crews, at one point cutting off the ear of a Captain Jenkins. In the midst of the ensuing War of Jenkins’s Ear, the Scottish poet James Thomson wrote the lyrics to ‘Rule Britannia’, set to music by Thomas Arne: ‘Rule, Britannia! Rule the waves! / Britons never will be slaves’ (Thomson and Mallet 1740: 20; emphases in the original). Roared out in London theatres beginning in 1740, this song curiously ignored the fact that many ships taken by the Spanish were laden with African slaves. The dispute indeed arose over the terms of the ‘Asiento’ signed between Spain and Britain in 1713 over the control of slave routes. Nonetheless, this tendency to think of liberty as the exclusive birth-right of Britons – a notion particularly convenient to Britons and colonists involved in real slavery – was beginning to change. Thomson himself returned to his immensely popular poem The Seasons (1726–30) to add lines on ‘that cruel trade / Which spoils unhappy Guinea of her sons’ (Thomson 1908: 89; emphasis in the original). In his poem Of Public Spirit in Regard to Public Works (1737), Richard Savage similarly lamented the slave trade: Why must I Afric’s sable Children see Vended for Slaves, though form’d by Nature free, The nameless Tortures cruel Minds invent Those to subject, whom Nature equal meant? (Savage 1737: 16) The important change here was from thinking of slavery as opposed to the national birthright of Britons to thinking of slavery as opposed to a natural human right to liberty. We will be apt to credit this change to the natural law theories of John Locke and others. It is worth considering, however, that the change of temperament towards a more global and human idea of liberty, building towards the abolitionist campaign, was in large part rising from ‘below’ in the attitudes of people who showed few philosophical inclinations. The abolitionist campaign, though it gained political momentum only in the 1780s, was able to draw from a considerable groundswell of disgust at the slave trade that had built up throughout the century. As early as 1725, James Houstoun felt the need to answer those who wished ‘to put a Stop to the peopling of the European Plantations Abroad’,

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reminding his readers that the product of those plantations ‘sweetens the Ladies Tea, and the generous Bowl’ (1725: 43–4; emphasis in the original). As I will discuss in more detail in my chapter in this collection, audiences of this time were crying at the thwarted love of the African hero Oroonoko for the white Imoinda in Thomas Southerne’s tremendously popular Oroonoko (1695). Carl Plasa similarly examines the popularity of poems and plays based on the Inkle and Yarico legend which, like Oroonoko, would be updated with a stronger and clearer abolitionist message later in the eighteenth century. The idea that freedom from slavery was a ‘natural’ rather than a ‘national’ right drew, that is, from a popular sentiment that scholars tend to underrate, for we are mostly absorbed in the world of intellectual culture and leading thinkers. Intellectual culture was nonetheless also changing, contributing to the new humanitarian mood. In the first printed work in England devoted entirely to the evils of the European slave trade, the anonymous An Essay concerning Slavery (1746), the author set about ‘proving Slavery to be contrary to the Law of God and Nature’ (Anonymous 1746: sig. A3r). This work is presented as a dialogue between an army officer and a West-Indies planter, opening with the planter noticing the officer poring over a pile of books: ‘You will give me Leave to look upon them; bless me, what are here! Puffendorf, Locke, Woollaston, and I know not who’ (2; emphasis in the original). The anti-slavery officer replies by turning the argument that liberty was the Briton’s national birth-right right back against the English planter. Whereas slavery might seem of little importance to a ‘Frenchman, a Slave himself’, this practice should be abhorrent to ‘the generous Free Briton, who knows the Value of Liberty’ (27; emphasis in the original). Significantly, the author indicated that he could hardly expect to end slavery, which was too firmly entrenched by ‘Custom’ (3): this work is largely devoted to improving the conditions of West-Indian slavery rather than ending it. Nonetheless, the officer’s consultation of major theorists of natural law indicated the emergence of an intellectual tradition that was now framing questions of liberty in global and human terms rather in terms of national birth-rights. Here again, however, we confront a historical irony. This same globalizing of the ‘human species’ and ‘human nature’ was giving rise to the scientific doctrine of ‘race’.

MAKING THE WORLD ‘WHITE’: ‘RACE’ AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT VISION OF HUMAN PROGRESS In ways that are difficult to disentangle, the doctrine of ‘race’ is part and parcel of the same ideological developments that endowed the West with a belief that it must act with equity and humanity in its relations with non-European peoples. Linking the two developments, as we will consider, was the notion that all human beings share the same physical and mental characteristics, though varied by the influence of climate as well as other environmental and cultural factors. This vision implied that as human nature was uniformly subject to the same scientific laws it also shared the same rights and liberties. Slavery and other forms of oppression could not be defended on grounds of national birthright. Similarly central to this world vision was the notion of progress and perfectibility. On the one hand, this vision implied that certain groups of humans, marked by certain physical characteristics, had ‘degenerated’ below the standards of progress manifested by the white bodies of Europeans. On the other hand, this ideal of Western progress suggested that human rights must be extended to all peoples, whatever their present ‘savagery’ or deficiency.

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As shown by Roxann Wheeler in her chapter in this volume, the idea of a common human species was by no means the invention of the Enlightenment but the product of a long history of classical and Christian thought propagated and solidified by print culture. Her contribution traces the emergence into print of various key terms relating to the common identity of human beings in the mid- and late sixteenth century: common nature in 1548, race of Adam and race of Abraham in the 1560s, fellow creature in 1572, species of man in 1586. Early European travellers indeed seldom doubted that they were meeting fellow humans wherever they went, though they were also aware that these people lacked Christianity and differed as ‘nations’ in degrees of civility and even shades of skin colour. In A History of the New World (1625), for example, which I quote from its first French translation, Johannes De Laet distinguished between the nations of Virginia: Ils different grandement entr’eux en stature de corps & en langage; car il y en a qui sont de grande corpulence, comme les Sasqueshamekins, d’autres de fort petit, comme les Wigcocomos; plusieurs sont grands, car ils naissent blancs, les cheueux noirs & presque tous sans barbe. (De Laet 1640: 89; emphases in the original) (They differ greatly among themselves in stature and in language; for there are those of great corpulence, like the Sasqueshamekins, others very small like the Wigcocomos; several are big, for they are born white, with black hair and almost no beard.) Elsewhere De Laet described the Floridian nations as ‘de couleur oliuastre’ (of olive colour) (De Laet 1640: 129) and the Mexicans as ‘la premiere en nostre description, qui ait eu quelque forme de police’ (the first in our description, who had some form of civility) (151). The same kind of careful distinction between various ‘nations’ of nonEuropean peoples – some savage and some more civilized, some without letters and some with considerable learning – can be found in innumerable accounts of the Americas and Africa during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. ‘Black’ was not yet a firm descriptor of all Africans. Seventeenth-century accounts of the African continent, such as Philippo Pigafetta’s edition of Odorado Lopez’s A Report of the Kingdome of the Congo (1597), displayed a gamut of nations of ‘diuers colours, as white, blacke, and a middle colour between both’ (Lopez [1597] 1970: 210). Well into the eighteenth century, this kind of distinction between ‘nations’ endured: in Nouveaux voyages dans L’Amérique septentrionale (1703), the Baron de Lahontan identified eighty-five ‘nations’ in Canada alone. Like Joseph-François Lafitau in Moeurs de sauvages amériquains (1724), Lahontan distinguished between these peoples on the basis of their manners and languages, though always with the preconception of their common ‘savagery’. In the early modern tradition, that is, the world was a multicoloured patchwork of peoples, some resembling Europeans more than others. This pre-racial consciousness might well seem innocuous, even attractive, when compared with the racial ideology that developed in the eighteenth century. As we have already considered, however, early modern Europeans could be viciously hateful on other grounds, for they exalted themselves as Christians against a world without what could be even called ‘religion’. They generally regarded Moors and other peoples as brutal infidels and barbarians, and associated ‘Negroes’ with the devil. As shown in this volume by Noémie Ndiaye, our rough equivalent to early modern nationality, ‘ethnicity’, can

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be as discriminatory and violent as any kind of division. If the early moderns were less inclined to divide the world into continental regions of ‘black’, ‘white’ and other colours, commentators such as Leo Africanus, a Christianized Moor, still regarded ‘the Land of the Negroes’ as inhabited by peoples who ‘lead a Brutish kind of life’ (1896: 1:28). The colours and disposition of nations varied with differences of climate, allowing the possibility that humans, like plants, were capable of considerable diversity and change, as shown in this volume by Jean Feerick. Early modern travellers and commentators nonetheless expressed little responsibility for alleviating slavery or desisting from this practice themselves. They possessed little ‘world-consciousness’, we might say, or felt much obligation to tamper with the divinely sanctioned world hierarchy. Matthew Bennett’s chapter in this volume shows how the apparatus of colonial administration in Spanish America violently suppressed the freedom of colonized peoples along lines of religion and shades of colour, even judging groups by pureza de sangre (blood purity) long before the formation of a modern racial doctrine. By way of contrast, we might immediately jump forward to accounts of the human species in the second half of the eighteenth century when the idea of ‘race’ was beginning to coalesce, achieving its definitive formulation in the writings of Kant and early nineteenth-century scientists such as Baron Cuvier and William Lawrence. What we generally find instead is an enormous emphasis on the unity of the human species and its entire difference from all other species. As argued by the Comte de Buffon, ‘il est evident que l’homme est d’une nature entièrement différent de celle de l’animal, qui ne lui resemble que par l’extérieur’ (it is evident that man is of an entirely different nature than that of the animal, who resembles him only externally) (Buffon 1854: 4:514). The theory of humankind’s multiple origins, polygenism, was entertained by a relatively few figures in our period such as Isaac de Peyrère, Voltaire and Lord Kames. Though even Buffon believed that Laplanders were probably a different species, he regarded all humans as essentially different from animals in having at least the potential for reason. The dominant scientific view was that all humans derived from the same source, which was now most often conceived as some primal ‘state of nature’ rather than the Garden of Eden. According to this view, all humans had advanced from this lowly origin, rather than fallen from a state of innocence and perfect knowledge, in line with general laws that created extensive varieties or ‘races’. Individual national differences, so stressed in early modern accounts, were regarded as relatively minor and biologically insignificant. As William Robertson observed of American Indigenous people in The History of America (1777), ‘Each tribe has something peculiar which distinguishes it, but in all of them we discern certain features common to the whole race’ (Robertson [1777] 1800: 1:307– 8). Robertson denied that even the Aztecs and Incas, much vaunted in early modern accounts, were much different from the generally debased state of all other Americans (3:30). Similarly, James Grainger in his poem The Sugar-Cane (1764) distinguished between different African nations on the island of Saint Kitts – ‘Pawpaws’, ‘Cormantees’, ‘Mundigo’, ‘Minnah’ – but only in terms of their usefulness as slaves. In general, he treated these nations as only minor variations in the general classification of ‘the Negro’ or ‘Ethiop’ (Grainger 1764: 128–32). Given the brutal legacy of this division of humankind into large subclasses or ‘races’, we rightly find the birth of this worldview an ominous portent of deepening tragedy. Yet another part of the same ideology of ‘one species’ was a sense of moral responsibility to other ‘races’ that may strike us now as blatantly contradictory. Amidst Grainger’s divisions between Papaws and Cormantees, he suddenly bursts into pronouncements on

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the common humanity of all races, a brotherhood which laid a heavy moral burden on the planter: Howe’re insensate some may deem their slaves, Nor ‘bove the bestial rank; far other thoughts The muse, soft daughter of humanity! Will ever entertain. – The Ethiop knows, The Ethiop feels, when treated like a man. (Grainger 1764: 147) Similarly, the American author Samuel Stanhope Smith ardently rejected the polygenetic understanding of racial division, as found particularly in the writings of Kames: indebted instead to Buffon, he insisted that humans had ‘degenerated’ from a common whiteness. This point of view led Smith, on the one hand, to uphold the common moral and legal duties of all humankind. The theory of humankind’s multiple origins, he argued, would make the identification of universally applicable anthropological and also moral laws impossible: The writers who, through ignorance of nature, or through prejudice against religion, attempt to deny the unity of the human species, do not advert to the confusion which such principles introduce. The science of morals would be absurd; the law of nature and nations would be annihilated; no general principles of human conduct of religion, or of policy could be framed …. The doctrine of one race renders human nature susceptible of system, illustrates the powers of physical causes, and opens a rich and extensive field for moral science. (Smith 1788: 164–5) General scientific laws implied general laws of justice. Smith’s statement exemplified the link between the predominant trends of racial thinking and the new conceptions of natural law, both of which generally adopted the ‘one species’ understanding of all humans. For Smith’s outlook also exhibited, like Graniger’s, a racialist understanding of human difference. He believed that African features accorded with a degraded mental capacity: ‘Their genius is dull, and their countenance sleepy and stupid’ (Smith 1788: 91). With regard to Indigenous Americans, Smith noticed the same ‘lugubrious wildness of countenance peculiar to the savage state’, which he contrasted with the ‘softening of features’ typical of ‘civilized emotions and ideas’ (96). Smith’s humanitarianism took the form of improving the Black or Indigenous ‘savage’ by teaching them to lead healthy lives indoors with the advantages of polite manners and an education in European arts and letters. This effort would literally make them ‘whiter’, if only over several generations (198). Smith’s belief in the ‘degeneracy’ of people with different skin colours and body types was also elaborated by Oliver Goldsmith in An History of the Earth and Animated Nature (1774). As Goldsmith wrote in this work professedly indebted to Linnaeus and Buffon: All the variations in the human figure, as far as they differ from our own, are produced either by the rigour of the climate, the bad quality, or the scantiness of the provisions, or by the savage customs of the country. They are actual marks of the degeneracy of

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the human form; and we may consider the European figure and colour as standards to which to refer all other varieties, and with which to compare them. (Goldsmith 1774: 2:239) No polygenist, Goldsmith acknowledged that ‘the olive-coloured Asiatic, and even the jet black Negroe, claim this honour of hereditary resemblance’ with the white European (1774: 2:240). He too upheld the position that the scientific study of the human species entailed common responsibilities and goals among all humans, implying that backwards ‘races’ could be improved over time. Despite what we now see as the degrading racialism of Goldsmith’s account, opponents to the slave trade started from the same premise of the common source and hereditary unity of the human species. As argued by the author of Two Dialogues on the Man Trade, signed by J. Philmore, ‘The black-skinned and the white-skin’d being all of the same species, all of the human race, are, by nature, upon an equality, one man in the state of nature’ (Philmore 1760: 7). The slogan of the abolitionist campaign, enshrined in an image of a kneeling African designed by Josiah Wedgwood, ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ (Figure 0.1), drew from the same conviction in the unity of the human species. Meanwhile in Germany, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach was developing a ‘natural history of man’ (Blumenbach 1865: 298–9), observing that ‘I am

FIGURE 0.1  ‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother?’. Wedgwood porcelain medallion, c. 1787, designed by William Hackwood. © AF Fotografie/Alamy Stock Photo.

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acquainted with no single distinctive bodily character [sic] which is at once peculiar to the negro, and which cannot be found to exist in many other and distant nations’ (305). Yet Blumenbach influentially divided the human species into five varieties or ‘races’ – Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American and Malay – basing his division on various forms of ‘degeneracy’. He shared his monogenism with his German contemporary Immanuel Kant, who nonetheless denied the importance of climate in forming races which he regarded as static and hereditary. The abolitionists and the first racial philosophers were thus building from the same premise, which included not only the doctrine of ‘one species’ but also the progressive nature of human beings. For ‘degeneracy’ implied its opposite of improvement and civilization, always understood in European terms. Of course, the racial subdivision of humankind cannot simply be equated with the arguments of the abolitionists. Some abolitionists, such as James Ramsay, were deeply suspicious of the emerging racial division of humankind (Ramsay 1784: 177–8). Both Ramsay and Thomas Clarkson insisted that Africans were not nearly so uncivilized as Europeans thought, but had possessed great civilizations at least until recently. Racial scientists, they said, based their theories on observations of people brutalized and degraded by the slave trade and European slavery. Nonetheless, the abolitionists were similarly drawing from the assumption that humans should be judged according to their capacity for improvement and civilized accomplishments. As argued by the American Quaker Anthony Benezet, ‘from the most authentic accounts, the inhabitants of Guiney appear, generally speaking, to be an industrious, humane, sociable people, whose capacities are naturally as enlarged, and as open to improvement, as those of Europeans’ (1767: 15; emphases in the original). Like Stanhope Smith, Benezet measured Africans according to a European standard of ‘improvement’ – their sociability and capacity for enlarged conceptions. Hence, in a notorious note appended to his essay ‘Of National Characters’ (1748), David Hume concluded that ‘negroes’ were ‘naturally inferior to the whites’ because there was ‘No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences.’ There had not been a single ‘eminent’ Black man (Hume 1987: 208n10). Although Hume hardened the doctrine of progress in a racist fashion, the answer of abolitionists was not to deny his measure of human improvement but rather to insist that Africans resembled Europeans in civilized arts and manners, at least in the past. Against Hume’s ‘northern pride’, Ramsay cited Virgil’s Dido as an example of African and supposedly dark-skinned civility (Ramsay 1784: 199). No abolitionist argued that Africans would literally become whiter after humane treatment and education, at least to my knowledge. But even the African-descended abolitionist Olaudah Equiano contended that Africa should become ‘whiter’ in a metaphorical sense. Acculturated to European standards of self-worth and success, coming to believe that white people ‘were men superior to us’ ([1789] 2001: 93), Equiano concluded his abolitionist Interesting Narrative of the Life of Gustavus Vasa (1789) with an appeal to Christianize and civilize his original homeland in Africa: I doubt not, if a system of commerce was established in Africa, the demand for manufactures would most rapidly augment, as the native inhabitants will insensibly adopt the British fashions, manners, customs, &c. In proportion to the civilization, so will be the consumption of British manufactures. The wear and tear of a continent, nearly twice as large as Europe, and rich in vegetable and mineral productions, is much easier conceived than calculated. A case in point.—It cost the Aborigines of Britain little or nothing in clothing, &c. The difference between their forefathers and the

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present generation, in point of consumption, is literally infinite. The supposition is most obvious. It will be equally immense in Africa—The same cause, viz. civilization, will ever have the same effect. (Equiano [1789] 2001: 250) Despite portending the destructive colonization of Africa, Equiano’s argument can certainly be defended on rhetorical grounds in the context of his own times. He was addressing prevailing fears among defenders of the slave trade that he had to convince. On the other hand, Equiano’s statement about the civilizing of Africa culminated his personal story of surviving and even prospering in White society. Like Robinson Crusoe, he implied, an ordinary African such as himself could deliver himself from confinement and penury to achieve enlightenment in European letters and a Christian God. He exemplifies Franz Fanon’s observation in The Wretched of the Earth that for the African ‘there is only one way out, and it leads into the white world’ (Fanon 1963: 51). Equiano’s Interesting Narrative demonstrates the power of Western culture not simply in terms of its dominant technologies and institutions but just as importantly in its ideology of progressive civilization. An important difference between abolitionist accounts and emerging race science lay in their understanding of time. Some racial theorists, such as Stanhope Smith, stressed that many generations would be required before darker-skinned peoples escaped from their ‘degeneracy’ and became whiter. As racial theory hardened, separating itself from earlier climactic theories, it was believed that the deficiencies of other human ‘races’ were inherent and could never be changed. Nonetheless, even Kant’s theory of inherent racial division was set out most definitively in an essay on teleological principles: reason dictated that we understand human nature in terms of progress towards a certain end (Kant [1788] 2001). Opponents to the slave trade, such as Equiano, promoted the contrary impression that Africans could progress towards European standards relatively quickly. They denied that the deficiencies of African societies were inherent or especially resistant to improvement. Both groups nonetheless shared the basic premise that the human species was naturally progressive, and that the value of every human group should be measured in terms of their contribution to the general advance of the human species.

‘RACE’ AND THE CULTURAL VALUE OF A ‘NATION’ Postcolonial scholars will of course recognize the dangers of transmitting this vision of Western progress and the ideals of civilization to the rest of the human species. It is the danger exemplified by Edmund Burke’s attack on British colonial practice in India during the trial of the governor of the East India Company, Warren Hastings. With noble-minded intentions, Burke attacked the ‘tyranny’ of this company’s exploitive occupation of the Indian subcontinent. He nonetheless recommended not withdrawal from this territory but rather the benign, nurturing and civilizing influence of an imperial government centred in London (Burke [1783] 1981). Postcolonial theories nonetheless also have a legacy in Enlightenment ideology, in this case in emerging beliefs about the value and integrity of national cultures. For at the same time that scientists and philosophers were developing new biological ideas of ‘race’ they were fostering even deeper and more emotional attachments to the uniqueness and sanctity of every ‘nation’, or what would be later called ‘culture’. ‘Race’ and ‘nation’ overlapped theoretically in ways that led to

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their virtual conflation in later times, as most viciously in the twentieth century. On the other hand, the idea that one’s ‘national’ (or ‘cultural’ and linguistic) identity needed to be respected and protected also emerged as an important principle in modern liberal thought. Despite his development of a more consistent idea of racial division, as discussed in this volume by Suman Seth, Buffon remained conscious of national differences, which in his theory represented more minor variations of the general class of ‘variety’ or ‘race’. As Buffon wrote: Le Danois, les Norwégiens, les Suédois, les Finlandois, le Russes, quoiqu’un peu différents entre eux, se ressemblent assez pour ne faire avec les Polonois, les Allemands, et même tous les autres peuples de l’Europe, qu’une seule et même espèce d’homme diversifiée à l’infini par les mélange des différents nations. (Buffon 1854: 4:655–6) (The Danes, the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Fins, the Russians, although a little different from each other, resemble each other enough to make with the Poles, the Germans, and even all the other peoples of Europe one sole and same species of man infinitely diversified by the mixture of different nations.) Significantly, ‘nations’ and ‘races’ differed only by a matter of degree, making it very easy for a ‘nation’ to be reimagined as a ‘race’, as would indeed happen in a later era. Even at the time that Buffon first published his Natural History (1749), Montesquieu was developing new ideas of nationhood in The Spirit of the Laws (1748) on the basis of much the same methodology. Nations, Montesquieu argued, varied like races as the result of climatic variations. Wise governors should therefore frame laws appropriate to the peculiar character of the people they governed. In his essay ‘Of National Characters’, published the same year, Hume denied the climactic theory of national difference, noting for example, that the Chinese, though one ‘nation’, were spread over a vast area with considerable climactic variations. Hume’s theory of nationhood instead drew from the idea of an ‘ancient constitution’ influentially examined by J. G. A. Pocock (1957). According to this doctrine, the character of a nation was shaped by their inaugural political traditions that, like the early influences on a child, continued into their maturity. Nations wisely looked to their past inheritance in order to rejuvenate their present constitution. Hume was also looking forward to the idea of a national ‘culture’ that would not be fully articulated until the end of the eighteenth century (Cathcart 2007). In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke described the English people as tied by immemorial reverence for the Church, the nobility and their institutions, implying that what truly distinguished a ‘nation’ were not its laws or government but deeper ties of communal feeling. The cluster of works on ‘nation’ in the late 1740s shows that ‘race’ had not eclipsed its subcategory. Indeed, ‘nation’ became even more sharply defined and more integral to the personality of each individual. The emergent idea of ‘nation’ nonetheless drew from somewhat different sources than the idea of race, despite their considerable overlap. Primary among these sources were new ideas about different languages and their importance in creating essentially different national mentalities. Beginning with Locke’s An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689), language came to be regarded as constitutive of the individual’s perception of the world. The heightened importance

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of language in eighteenth-century conceptions of the mind followed logically from the empiricism that increasingly dominated all areas of philosophy and science. In Locke’s conception, all sensory perception consisted initially of ‘simple ideas’. ‘General ideas’, which include all abstract conceptions (including ‘race’ but also any concept like ‘tree’ or ‘dog’) could be formed only through the attachment of an arbitrary ‘sign’ to any group of similar ideas. To a very important extent, then, all general ideas are as ‘arbitrary’ as linguistic signs. The way in which speakers of different languages, or even speakers of the same language, attach signifiers to clusters of objects varies greatly. A whale might be alternatively named a fish or a mammal, depending on one’s criteria. The scientific writers who shaped ideas of ‘race’ in the eighteenth century, such as Linnaeus and Buffon, were in fact deeply conscious that their classifications were provisional. Even Immanuel Kant acknowledged that ‘the thing itself’ of ‘race’ was ‘no where to be found in the world’. Race was rather a ‘concept’ that belonged to the mind rather than ‘nature’ an sich (Kant [1788] 2001: 40; emphasis in the original). This understanding of general ideas and abstract categories implies important qualifications of Michel Foucault’s influential thesis on eighteenth-century taxonomy in Les Mots et les choses, translated as The Order of Things (1966). Whereas Foucault assumed that eighteenth-century writers felt confident in their ability to establish a correct and perfect taxonomy of the world, they were in fact selfconscious as never before about the subjective and heuristic nature of all categorization. This understanding of categorization as essentially arbitrary, however, did not hinder ‘race’ and ‘nation’ from becoming hardened into inflexible classifications that reflected the reality of the world, especially in the course of the nineteenth century. With regard to ‘nation’, moreover, the constitutive nature of language led to a much deeper sense of inherent differences between the speakers of different tongues, generally understood as coextensive with ‘nation’. Developing Locke’s empiricism, the Abbé de Condillac argued in Essai sur l’origine des connoissances humanes (An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge) (1746) that each language represents ‘the picture of the character and genius of every nation’ (Condillac [1756] 1971: 299). What he meant was that different nations each began the process of creating their language in coordination with the objects that most surrounded them, their peculiar customs and the passions that most often motivated their behaviour. Romans developed an extensive vocabulary of military terms while the French forged the elegant and precise language of modern philosophy. Condillac’s influential ideas could be developed in different ways. Professedly indebted to Condillac in his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men (1755), JeanJacques Rousseau indicated that the evolution of modern language towards philosophical abstractions had alienated modern speakers from moral truths apprehended though passion rather than reason. In his posthumous Essay on the Origin of Language (1781), Rousseau elaborated further that highly articulate languages, especially as written and printed, had destroyed the expressive, musical qualities of original tongues. Together, these arguments represented an important counter-thesis to belief in the progressive nature of European societies, foreshadowing modern postcolonial theories on their destructive influence on non-European cultures. A philosopher who developed Condillac’s ideas in a strongly nationalistic direction was Johann Gottfried Herder, ‘the philosophical father of modern nationalism’ (Kidd 1999: 26). It is significant, first, that Herder strongly rejected emergent conceptions of race. In Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784), he argued that racial groups ‘did not exist’ or were at least so malleable that they could be wiped out in a single generation of cross-fertilization. He passionately asserted the brotherhood of

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all humans, exhorting that ‘the American and the Negro are men like thee’ and should not be oppressed, exploited or murdered (Herder [1784] 1968: 7). Nonetheless, Herder regarded national differences, which he believed were shaped fundamentally by language, as inherent to the very modes of thinking and feeling characteristic of each linguistic group. As he wrote, ‘The songs of a people are the best testimonies of their peculiar feelings, propensities, and modes of viewing things; they form a faithful commentary on their way of thinking and feeling, expressed with openness of heart’ (68). The differing languages of Arabs, Caribs and Hurons, to cite some of his examples, reflect the ‘custom, character, and origin of the people’ (Herder [1772] 1966: 155). Any language, he implied, should be treasured as the repository of the inherited traditions and modes of thought and feeling unique to each ‘nation’ (Herder [1784] 1968: 69). Like early modern ideas of ‘nation’, Herder’s conception of nation has a certain appeal to modern ways of thinking. Rejecting a racial conception of the world, Herder upheld the unique nationhood of all speakers of a language. On the other hand, Herder had deepened the ‘nation’ into a category almost equally inflexible as ‘race’. Attempts to ‘civilize’ Indigenous Americans, he argued, were a waste of time as Americans suffered a ‘debility’ inflicted by their languages. The Aztec and Inca empires easily collapsed because they were unable to withstand the incursion of European languages and their accompanying ideas (Herder [1784] 1968: 31–2). James Cowles Prichard’s idea of an ‘Aryan’ race in Researches into the Natural History of Man (1836–47) was based in large part on observations about the spread of Aryan or Indo-European languages from India into Europe. Similarly, in his researches into languages, Wilhelm von Humboldt evaluated the varying ‘success’ of various tongues, judging some languages, such as Chinese, as indicative of an inherent and inveterate deficiency of mental capacity (Humboldt 1988: 231–2). By making language constitutive of ways of thinking and feeling, that is, the philosophical tradition of Condillac ultimately fostered doctrines of national division as rigid and hierarchal as those developed in race science. The founding or refounding of nations on the basis of the ‘rights of man’, as in revolutionary America and France, would appear to break free from both ‘race’ and the problematic status of ‘nation’ in the older sense. Yet the supposed constitution of these nations founded on rationally conceived human rights created its own set of difficulties. For the ‘rights of man’ belonged to same globalizing tendency of Western thought, the same potential for hierarchy, that characterized the emergence of race science during the same era. During the French Revolution, for example, the Marquis de Cordorcet defended the French achievement of a new, rationally organized national project as a form of political progress that had left other nations and peoples in its wake. Like Condillac, Condorcet attributed French progress to the superior refinement of the modern French language. A mathematician, Condorcet saw little to admire in the allegedly imprecise though more musical languages of peoples less advanced than the French. The French language had progressed towards ever greater precision, allowing this nation finally to achieve a rational apprehension of abstract truths hidden from the speakers of other languages. The rights of man, Condorcet thought, were no less a rational formula than modern algebra (Condorcet [1793] 1970). From one perspective, Cordorcet’s argument enshrined the truths of a new world order based on justice and reason. Other nations, he believed, could be taught to advance towards a similar understanding of the rights of man. From another perspective, he had provided a recipe for the linguistic and ideological imperialism condemned in postcolonial scholarship.

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CONCLUSION: ‘RACE’ AND THE USES OF HISTORY Beyond mere academic interest, what can the following volume on the history of ‘race’ teach us about the problems of discrimination, conflict and oppression in our own times? As I have argued in this introduction, the legacy of thought and culture that emerged from the era between 1550 and 1750 was deeply ambivalent and even contradictory. Initially impelled by the search for new territories and new markets, enabled by technologies of travel and domination, Europeans experienced the diversity of the human species that they encountered around the globe. These experiences were transmitted, often in misleading forms, to a widening reading public through the invention of movable type. On the one hand, Europeans developed a much stronger understanding of the commonness of the human species, along with a corresponding sense of universal laws, both scientific and moral. On the other hand, the desire to organize their accumulating information about the human species led to the creation of taxonomies that claimed, on supposedly rational grounds, that certain human groups were less advanced or even inherently inferior to others. The marks of this paradoxical legacy are evident everywhere around us even today. To consider some concrete and well-known examples from the not-distant past, in 1989 the Iranian spiritual leader Ayatollah Khomeni issued a fatwa against the British novelist Salman Rushdie for the supposed blasphemies contained in The Satanic Verses (1988), a religious edict that forced Rushdie into hiding, fearful for his life. One Western response to his event was to condemn the Ayatollah’s edict as a violation of human rights common to all humankind. Other Western commentators, however, accused both Rushdie and his defenders of being Islamaphobic and ‘racist’ (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992). The same kind of controversy surrounded the freedom of cartoonists to portray the Prophet Muhammed in the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, leading to the killing of journalists in 2011 and 2015. The reaction of some Westerners was that freedom of expression was a human right that should be protected from any kind of violence or recrimination. Others in the West argued that these cartoonists had been ‘racist’ in violating the sacred principles of Islam. In both these incidents, two principles, both stemming from the European Enlightenment, came into conflict. The first principle is that the laws of moral and political truth must be applied to every nation or group on earth. The second principle is that every community and nation has an identity and a right to respect, and that any attempt to undermine or offend that right is racist. In recent years, critical race theory (CRT) has become a major force in pedagogy and legal discourse, particularly in the United States. The best known forms of CRT are indeed heavily oriented towards the peculiar mix of American culture, law and politics. This line of critique derived initially from a challenge to a US Supreme Court ruling against segregation in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 by the legal scholar Derrik Bell. Bell argued that the liberal tradition of jurisprudence did not address the hegemony of white privilege encountered every day by people of colour. This hegemony is manifested in the systematic though ‘legal’ harassment of African-descended Americans, their higher rates of incarceration, their lower rates of employment or access to institutions of education and political influence. These are burning problems applicable in different ways to all Western societies. Yet the particularly American orientation of CRT is evident in popular teaching texts such Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (3rd edn, 2017) by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. This text makes little reference to the fact that the United States is a colonial nation, a pre-eminent consideration in other legal jurisdictions such

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as Canada and Australia. Citizens of those jurisdictions might be surprised at the authors’ use of terms such as ‘Indians’ and ‘Eskimos’. As shown by this text, moreover, CRT must address a range of conflicting concerns from different groups. African Americans desire equality not only in law but in all spheres of life not addressed in law. Like Asian Americans, they desire the same freedom from discrimination as white citizens. Latino Americans, on the other hand, desire not only equality but also recognition of their distinctive identity as a culture and a Spanish-speaking community. Much the same can be said of Indigenous Americans. The first demand stems from a general Western principle of human rights: all members of the human family should be treated equally. The second demand derives from a principle similarly endorsed by Western tradition, that every nation has its distinct identity that must preserved and even promoted. A final observation on CRT perhaps ventures into more controversial territory. Western discourse on issues of ‘race’ and identity remains deeply shaped by the doctrine of ‘progress’. Rightly or wrongly, the relative status of every ‘racial’ or ‘ethnic’ community is measured by their rate of ‘success’ – the number of their prominent or lauded individuals, their contributions to the arts and sciences, their per capita income. Oddly consistent with David Hume’s notorious footnote, nations and communities cannot simply exist according their own measures of value but must be shown to have done their share in promoting the progressive teleology of the human species. A particularly Western way of conceiving the world, which includes not only human rights but also a highly competitive understanding of history, must be embraced by those engulfed by Western technologies and ideology. ‘Race’, in short, belongs to a broad, complex history of intellectual and cultural developments that are inherently paradoxical and conflicted, as is evident in innumerable controversies and indecisions over rights and individuality, pan-human values and cultural identities, that we witness every day. We are still in the throes of dilemmas created by the history covered in this volume. In the face of these apparently intractable contradictions, what is to be done? It is perhaps counter to the nature of the present book that we cannot depend on intellectuals and historians to provide answers. We are much better at creating problems. Nonetheless, certain historical events can provide inspiration, such as the abolitionist campaign of late eighteenth-century Britain. As suggested above, this movement had roots early in the eighteenth century and was consistent with the theoretical conception of a single human species that emerged from the late seventeenth century. Abolitionists also often harboured, in varying degrees, the prejudices of emergent race science and philosophy during the same era. Nonetheless, abolitionism was not fundamentally a philosophical or scientific movement. It was a popular movement without clear leaders but rather spokespeople such as Granville Sharpe, Thomas Clarkson and Hannah More. It was fuelled largely by poems, songs, plays, pamphlets and popular images. While often viewed cynically by modern scholars, this was a mass movement of common people who signed petitions and were willing to go without sugar in their tea and punch. Below the cogitations of Buffon and Linnaeus, Locke, Hume and Kant, that is, common people motivated by ordinary experience and popular sentiment made a stand for justice and humanity. In the eighteenth century, Olaudah Equiano experienced his most communal and accepting world aboard a warship with sailors who did not care very much about the skin colour of a man who faced the same toils and dangers. The lesson of history is, perhaps, that human beings can negotiate problems of sameness and difference without a philosophical theory about how to do so.

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CHAPTER ONE

Definitions and Representations of Race Word Usage, Meaning and Concept DENNIS AUSTIN BRITTON

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘race’, meaning ‘A group of people, animals, or plants, connected by common descent or origin’ (OED Online 2021: n.6 definition I) and more precisely ‘A group of people belonging to the same family and descended from a common ancestor; a house, family, kindred’ (n.6 definition I.1.a), emerged about 1547, appearing in Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey’s The Fourth Boke of Virgill, intreating of the Loue betweene Aeneas and Dido, translated into English (1554).1 The word appears five times in the translation. The first two instances recount Dido’s impressions of Aeneas after she hears his tale: BVt nowe the wounded Quene wyth heuy care, Throughout the vaines she nourisheth the plai, Surprised with blynde flame: and to hyr mynd. Gan eke resort the prowes of the man, And honour of hys race: whyles in her brest Imprinted stacke his wordes, and pyctures forme: Ne to her lyms care graunteth quyet rest. The next morrow, wyth Pheebus laumpe the earth Alyghtned clere, and eke the dawnyng daye The shadowes darke gan from the pole remoue: When all vnsounde her syster of lyke mynde Thus spake she to: O syster Anne, what dreames Be these, that me tormented thus afray? What newe guest is thys, that to our realme is come: What one of chere? how stout of hart in armes? Truely I thynke (ne vayne is my beliefe) Of Goddish race some offpryng should he be: Cowardry notes hartes swarued out of kynde. (Surrey 1554: sig. A4r; my emphasis)

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Surrey translates Virgil’s ‘gentis honos’ (4.4) as ‘honor of his race’ and ‘genus esse deorum’ (4.12) as ‘Of Goddish race’. The Latin word gens is the original ancestor of ‘race’ as a word if not also a concept, and gens could variously denote a nation, a people, a family sharing the same ancestor, a descent or a descendent.2 Howard’s translation of gens as ‘race’, then, seems entirely fitting, especially as scholars have suggested that race in the early modern period denotes these very concepts while also enfolding rank and class into its domain.3 These usages of ‘race’, however, tell us more than just what the word meant in Howard’s day; the passage also informs mid-sixteenth-century English readers what race is, how it can be known and why a knowledge of race is important. The heroic nature of Aeneas’s tale, coupled with Dido’s emerging desire, leads the queen of Carthage to make the assumption that Aeneas not only makes his ancestors proud as the ‘honour of hys race’ but also that he is descended from gods. Of course, Dido is correct about both: Aeneas will become progenitor of the Roman Empire, and Venus is his mother. The assumptive nature of race, Dido’s confident movement from ‘Truly I thynke’ to a firmer ‘beliefe’, however, merits pause. Behind Dido’s belief lies the understanding that heroic behaviour is a genealogical trait passed from ancestors to their descendants. Behaviour is understood as a racial characteristic. We should also consider the fact that Dido comes to knowledge of Aeneas’s race through narrative, through his skilful telling of his deeds within the larger political story of the fall of Troy. If we can learn anything about race from this early usage, it is that race emerges in the early modern period as a set of inherited traits and behaviours within narratives of power and empire – the tragedy of the Trojan War is that such a noble race (a people and a city-state) is destroyed, but the triumph of race is that it will be born anew through Aeneas’s military defeat of Turnus and translatio imperii. The question remains, however, where Howard learned the word ‘race’? The origins of the word have been the source of debate. Many years ago, Leo Spitzer (1941) investigated the origin of ‘race’, tracing it back to usages of the Latin rationes to mean ‘types’ in the writings of St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Spitzer also observes that usages of espèces – from the Latin speciēs, variously meaning appearance, type, and kind, and from which our modern word ‘species’ derives – are equivalent to rationes in medieval and early modern French texts. Spitzer then links all of these to the Italian razza, which was originally used within the context of animal breeding and is commonly pointed to as the origin for the English word ‘race’ via French.4 In English, ‘race’ had already been used with reference to a grouping of horses in Thomas Elyot’s Of the knowledge whiche maketh a wise man (1533). Spitzer’s philological sleuthing troubles our ability to find a single linguistic origin for the word and concept, suggesting instead that race emerges within a network of related words, denotations and ideas – type, kind, appearance, breading and lineage. Howard’s translation suggests that gens plays an important role in this network, and already in the mid-fifteenth century we see race as a category bridging ideas of human lineage, animal breeding, appearance and power into proximity. At this point, we have a necessary foundation upon which the Enlightenment’s racial science is to be built. This chapter examines usages of the word ‘race’ alongside discussions of genealogy and lineage. Nicholas Hudson has discussed the close association of gens and race-as-lineage, observing that ‘gens connotes a common ancestry or stock (hence its etymological link with genero, to beget or produce), reflecting an ancient way of understanding a nation not as a social or political unit, but as a group of people linked by origin’ (1996: 248). Focusing on Shakespeare’s England and early modern dictionaries, Margo Hendricks has suggested that ‘philological inquiry can shed light on the multivalent nature of the idea of

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race’ (2000: 15). I build upon these insights. Word usage, to be sure, tells us much about the meanings of words and the development of concepts. Race develops and mutates through accretion, a layering of ideas about inheritable differences – passed through the generations – that seeks to establish social hierarchies and the unequal distribution of power. That ‘race’ in the early modern period usually refers to lineage has been used to argue that the concept as we know it today was non-existent prior to the advent of racial science, and such arguments have sought to restrict specific types of exploration of human difference and power relations – namely, those that would implicate the preEnlightenment world in the history of the transatlantic slave trade and white supremacy. Kim F. Hall has asserted, however, that ‘the easy association of race with modern science ignores the fact that language itself creates differences within social organization and that race was then (as it is now) a social construct that is fundamentally more about power and culture than biological difference’ (1995: 6). Additionally, as Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton suggest, ‘early modern discourses clearly indicate that ideas about “culture” and “biology” do not occupy separate domains and that they develop in relation to one another. Thus, the bifurcation of “culture” and “nature” in many analyses of race needs to be questioned’ (2007: 8). Hall’s and Loomba and Burton’s insights are no less true about the early modern period than they are about our present. Despite the fact that genomics has debunked the racial science that developed from the seventeenth through the twentieth century, Michael Yudell and colleagues note that ‘by some measure, the use of race as biological category has increased in the postgenomic age. Although inconsistent definition and use has been a chief problem with the race concept, it has historically been used as a taxonomic categorization based on common hereditary traits (such as skin color) to elucidate the relationship between our ancestry and our genes’ (2016: 534). Race is a cultural construction, but it is one that imputes cultural ideas onto biologized bodies. Early moderns did not understand the workings of genes, but they did believe that gens transmitted a variety of ‘natural’ characteristics – religious identity, somatic features and dispositions towards certain behaviours. Early usages show that the word ‘race’ did in fact racialize people.

RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCE In this section I examine varying usages of ‘race’ and discussions of genealogy in Reformation theology. The historian Colin Kidd argues that ‘The idea of race-as-lineage is capable of generating pronounced tensions between the notion of a family of races underpinned by the sacred anthropology of the Old Testament and the universal message of the New, and the idea of cursed and blessed lineages. In these respects the Bible serves, confusingly, both to diminish and to exacerbate racism’ (2006: 22).5 Although race in the theological contexts discussed below is often used to resolve doctrinal controversies or to establish Christian difference, the examples show how theology uses ‘race’ to establish the particularities of religious groups. Early modern theologians often used genealogies to connect the natural and the spiritual. In A Lesson of the Incarnation of Christe (1549), the Protestant martyr John Hooper finds ‘race’ useful for confronting the heresy ‘whych denyithe Jesus of Nazareth our sauioure to haue receauyd hys humanite and manhede of the blyssyd & holye virgine Marye and supposithe ether he brought hys humanite wyth hym from heauen, or else

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toke it of some other, thē of here’ (1549: sig. a.ii.v). As any good Protestant should, Hooper uses scripture as evidence: ‘Esaie in the. 11. Chap. sayth. There shall come forthe of the rase of Jesse a braunche, and a floure of hys rote, and so forth, reade the place’ (sig. a.viii.v). The translation of Isaiah that Hooper provides here is unusual because early English Bibles speak of the ‘rod’ (Coverdale Bible 1535 and King James Bible 1611), ‘root’ (Wycliff Bible 1388 and Geneva Bible 1560) and ‘stem’ (Bishops Bible 1568) rather than the ‘rase of Jesse’. The other English translations produce a consistent plant metaphor: out of ‘rod’, ‘root’ and ‘stem’ of Jesse come branches, grass, shoots and blossoms. Hooper’s metaphor mixes plant and animal, not entirely unusual given that human genealogies have long been mapped onto trees. That said, translating the Vulgate’s ‘radice Jesse’ as ‘rase of Jesse’ is curious given that ‘root’ would be a more direct translation of radix. The translation likely moves away from plant metaphors because Hooper’s whole point is to insist that Christ was fully human; he uses ‘rase’ to emphasize his point. The translation also shows that ‘race’ could be seen as an acceptable translation of ‘root’. Although ‘race’ in the period might refer to ‘The stock, family, or class to which a person, animal, or plant belongs’ (OED Online 2021: 4.a.), Hooper’s usage suggests that the word is especially useful for designating things pertaining to human roots and origins. Hooper was not alone. John Foxe also yokes race with humanity in his 1583 edition of Acts and Monuments. Foxe records the confession of the martyr John Warne, written the day he was burned at the stake on 30 May 1555. Warne provides his personal reflections on the Apostle’s Creed. To the Creed’s pronouncement ‘From thence he shall come to iudge the quick and the dead’, Warne responds, They which haue followed him in regeneration, which haue their sinnes washed away in his bloud, and are clothed with his righteousnes, shal receiue the euerlasting kingdome, and reigne with him for euer: and they which after the race of the corrupt generatiō of Adam haue followed flesh and bloud shall receaue euerlasting damnation with the Deuill and his aungels. (Foxe 1583: 1580–1) Here ‘race’ is used to make a distinction between Christians and non-Christians; race demarcates the damned as the ‘generatiō of Adam’. Yet, as all humans within the Christian doctrine of monogenesis are descended from Adam, all humans are corrupted through descent by ‘flesh and bloud’. Implied in Foxe is a yoking of the body, lineage and the spirit. Christ’s sacrifice allows the elect to escape the effects of race-as-lineage, the penalty of original sin that all humanity inherits from Adam as genitor. Original sin was indeed commonly understood as a racial characteristic. The Church of England’s ‘Thirty-nine Articles’ (1563) states, for example, that ‘Original sin … is the fault and corruption of the nature of every man, that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam’ (Church of England [1563] 1996: 62). Similarly, after the fall in the second edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1674), Eve laments being with Adam the ‘cause of misery, / Our own begotten, and of our Loines to bring / Into this cursed World a woful Race’ (10.982–4). Christ’s sacrifice, however, allows ‘regeneration’, through which Christians are incorporated into a new gens. What is thus implied is that the elect become a race unto themselves.6 In fact, in Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie Eygth bookes, Richard Hooker describes Christians as ‘the race of Christ’ and ‘that the scripture nameth them children of the promise which God hath made’ (1597: bk 5, 151; emphasis in the original). Hooker

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does not explain how it is that Christians are a race – the lack of explanation, perhaps, suggests that it was well understood by his readers. Calvinist defences of infant baptism against Anabaptists indeed argued that Christian identity was passed from parents to their children. In A Short Instruction for to Arme all Good Christian People agaynst the Pestiferous Errours of the Common Secte of Anabaptistes, Calvin made a distinction between the baptisms of the children of Christians and of ‘heathens’: For whē there is a mā which is an estraūger frō the christē church: as a Turke, a Iewe, or any other heythē mā: for to make hym a christian, it is wythoute question that we ought not to begynne wyth hym fyrst by baptisme, but before he be baptised, he muste be instructed … . And we muste also note this, that when a man is receyued of god into the company of the fayethful: the promise of saluatiō which is made to hym: is not onely for hys person, but also for hys chyldren. For it is saied vnto hym. I am thy God, and the God of thy chyldren after the. (1549: sig. A8r–v)7 While Turks, Jews and other non-Christians need be instructed prior to being baptized, the infant children of Christians can be baptized because God makes covenants with not only individuals but also entire lineages. Christian justifications for pedobaptism drew from God’s covenant with Abraham as recounted in Genesis 17. Although Calvin notes that the children of converts to Christianity, too, are incorporated into the family of the faithful, he nevertheless understands Christian identity in genealogical terms. That is exactly why Anabaptists criticized Calvinist doctrine. In The Character of the Beast: or The False Constitution of the Church … concerning true Christian Baptisme of New Creatures, or New Borne Babes in Christ: and False Baptisme of Infants Borne after the Flesh, John Smyth refutes the Calvinist position, arguing that pedobaptists follow an ‘Old Testament’ logic of spiritual family: ‘Their carnal Church in matter & forme came by carnall Genealogie.’ Pedobaptists ‘continue a Church by succession of a carnall line’ (1609: sig. K2v). Smyth explicitly states what Calvinists only implied: Christian identity is a racial identity, passed down from generation to generation. Calvinist arguments rest on an understanding that Christians are a metaphorical family united through Christ’s blood. An English translation of the Huguenot Jean de L’Espine, entitled A Very Excellent and Learned Discourse, says as much quite explicitly: ‘We are of the race and lineage of God, (as S. Paul saith)’ (1592: sig. G4r). Yet metaphor slips into racial ontology, and we see in Calvinism an attempt to racialize Christian and nonChristian identities. A 1580 translation of Calvin’s Three Propositions or Speeches, for instance, employs race to clarify differences between Jews and Gentiles. In his exposition of Ephesians 2, Calvin claims, And this is that which the Apostle S. Paule sayeth, wee that are Iewes by nature. Now this worde nature importeth not the common creation of all men: for the Iewes came from Adam, and descended from Noah also after the flood. So that there was in that respect a common nature betwene the Iewes & the gētiles. Moreouer it is certayne, that in Adam, all both Iewes and Gentyles are accursed & corrupted: was not Dauid a Iewe? and yet notwithstanding hee confesseth, that from his mothers wombe he was a sinner, and cōceiued in iniquitie. Wherfore when S. Paul speaketh thus of the Iewes, & sheweth that they are Iewes by nature, hee meaneth that they are not peruerse and corrupted, not considering them, as descending from Adams lyne, or race, but as

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comming frō Abrahams race. Wherefore to make a short resolution, there is a double nature. The first is common to all: the second is speciall or particular. (Calvin 1580: sig. E6r–v; emphases in the original) Calvin attempts to distinguish Jewish particularity from that which is universally human. ‘Nature’ plays a significant role in the distinction. Calvin not only uses ‘race’ repeatedly, but he is specifically interested in the parts of nature that do not pertain to ‘the common creation of all men’. Jews and Gentiles are all of Adam’s and Noah’s race, and thus inheritors of original sin, but ‘Iewes by nature’ are understood as ‘peruerse and corrupted’ because they are Abraham’s descendants. Calvin focuses on the ‘special or particular’ nature of Jews – they are racially particular and have a particular perversity and corruption derived from being Abraham’s descendants. Race separates Christian from Jew, elect from reprobate, and saved from damned; it suggests that salvation and damnation are partially heritable. Discussion of race in Protestant theology show that ‘race’ and genealogy provided a means to understand God’s relationship with and promises to groups of people. Race helped Christians understand the sources of their election. Although Calvinists necessarily pointed to Christ’s sacrifice as the ultimate source of regeneration, spiritual election (and through implication, one’s status as reprobate) are transmitted through human lineage. Alexander Ross, in The Second Booke of Questions and Answers vpon Genesis (1622), indeed implies that being anti-Christ is a racial characteristic passed from Noah’s son’s Cham (or Ham) to his offspring. ‘The wickednesse of Cham to his father’ has been duplicated by ‘the cruelty of his posterity against the Church of God’ (1622: 53; emphases in the original). In effect, if not in intention, salvation and damnation were partly determined by race.

SOMATIC DIFFERENCE The theological arguments discussed above do not employ somatic understandings of race. This does not mean, however, that discourses of Christian racial election and understandings of somatic race do not operate within the same sphere. We might consider, for example, what it means for King James to write in his heroic poem Lepanto that the battle for Cyprus is ‘Betwixt the baptiz’d race / And the circumcised Turban’d Turkes’ (James I 1603: 10–11). The difference between the ‘baptiz’d’ and the ‘circumcised’ and ‘Turban’d’ is a matter of race; in writing a heroic poem, James writes in a mode that had long racialized ‘paynim’ and Muslim enemies in fights for land conquest.8 Apart from noting that Turks are circumcised, and through implication noting that Christians are not, James does not describe physical bodies. Arguably, however, he does not need to do so. The figure of the Turk was likely to inspire a range of racial stereotypes in the minds of his contemporary readers, and according to Bruce Holsinger, medieval romances had already established white as ‘the color of salvation’ (Holsinger 1998). Religious identity – and one’s status as blessed or cursed – was often represented in chromatic terms, and those terms were mapped onto racialized bodies. This section examines discussions of the genealogical causes of somatic difference. Calvin’s mentioning of Noah in Three Propositions or Speeches is worth consideration; the racialization of the earth’s peoples has origins in discussions of the post-diluvian world. In his analysis of Noah and his sons Cham (or Ham), Japheth and Shem, Kidd offers, ‘To all intents and purposes, for orthodox readers of scripture, Old Testament

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genealogy was the essential point of departure for understanding the races, linguistic groups, ethnicities and nations of the world’ (2006: 20–1). Discussions of Cham and his son Chus are especially relevant here because they often explicitly link race-as-linage to somatic difference. The English explorer George Best’s A True Discourse of the Late Voyages of Discoverie (1578) provides an often-discussed example of blackness as the mark of an inheritable spiritual trait: Blacknesse procéedeth of some naturall infection of the first inhabitāts of that Countrey, and so all the whole progenie of them descended, are still poluted with the same blot of infection. Therefore it shall not be farre from our purpose, to examine the first originall of these blacke men, and how by lineall discente, they haue hitherto continued thus blacke. It manifestly and plainely appeareth by holy Scripture, that after the generall Inundation and ouerflowing of the Earth, there remayned no moe mē aliue, but Noe & his thrée sonnes, Sem, Cham, and Iaphet, who only were lefte to possesse & inhabit the whole face of the earth: therefore all the land that vntill this daye hath bin inhabited by sundry discents, must néedes come of the ofspring eyther of Sem, Cham, or Iaphet, as the onely sonnes of Noe, who all thrée being white, and their wiues also, by course of nature, should haue begotten and brought forth white children. But the enuie of our great and continuall enimie the wicked Spirit is such, that as he could not suffer our old Father Adam to liue in the felicitie & Angelike state wherein he was first created, but tempting him, sought & procured his ruine & fal: So againe, finding at this floud none but a father and thrée sonnes liuing, he so caused one of them to transgresse & disobey his fathers commandement, that after him, all his posteritie shoulde be accursed … God would a sonne shuld be borne, whose name was Chus, who not only it selfe, but all his posteritie after him, should be so blacke & lothsome, that it might remaine a spectacle of disobedience to all the World. And of this blacke & cursed Chus came al these blacke Moores which are in Africa. (Best [1578] 1938: 30–1; emphases in the original) According to Best, blackness is ‘manifestly and plainly’ explained by scripture. We also learn that because Noah, his sons, and their wives were all white, blackness is a deviation from nature. Black skin signifies sin. And in Best’s digression to Adam’s disobedience, blackness as the ‘spectacle of disobedience’ is implicated in the fall of humankind itself. Like Calvin, Best focuses upon natural particularities, claiming that blackness results from a ‘natural infection’. Loomba reads this passage alongside George Sandys’s discussion of blackness in ‘Relations of Africa’ in Samuel Purchas’s Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625), noting that ‘both suggest that blackness is rooted in the blood, and yet both revert to the story of Ham in order to suggest that blackness originates in sinful behavior, which transmits itself over the generations’ (2007: 614). Discussions of the curse of Cham make explicit connections between past and present; Best links ‘the first original of these black men’ to ‘the progenie of them descended, all still polluted’. Best employs an all-encompassing rhetoric, claiming that ‘al these blacke Moores’ are temporally marked as ‘still polluted’ ([1578] 1938: 30–1; emphasis in the original). Spiritual pollution is heritable and somatic. The curse is biologized: it is carried in the blood, appears on the skin and is passed from generation to generation.9 Cham’s descendants were not the only ones marked by somatic difference in accounts of Genesis. Henoch Clapham’s popular A Briefe of the Bible drawne first into English

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Poesy (first published in Edinburgh in 1596 and in London in 1603, 1608 and 1639) claims that racial mixing of the holy and unholy was the cause of the flood: Lamech and Noah, that time Sheths petigre, Matcht with Kains daughters, to their dyre decay. That sinne so greiued God, as plainlie he Foretold to Noah, the world should drowned be. (Clapham 1596: 25; emphases in the original) Clapman glosses his own verse: ‘Here Sheths seede was deeply degenerate from Henoch and Sheths sinceritie: for they seeing the daghters of Men (viz. of Kains lawles race) to be snowt- faire, Sheths Petygre marrieth with them: mixing the holy seede with the vnholy: by reason whereof, Gyants and strong Miscreants abounded’ (1596: 25–6; emphases in the original). The desire to mix races becomes a sign of spiritual degeneracy: Seth’s offspring after Enoch do not have the spiritual ‘sinceritie’ of their forefathers, leading to both the spiritual and racial degeneracy of Seth’s descendants as they marry the daughters of ‘Kains lawles race’. The ‘mixing of the holy seed with the vnholy’ causes the great deluge. Given how often black and white were mapped onto religious identity, we might expect the holy and unholy to be marked in terms of white and black. Here, however, the daughters are desirable because of their whiteness, because they are ‘snowt-faire’. The unholy may have white skin, but the unlawful nature of the racial mixing is evidenced in the progeny of ‘Gyants and strong Miscreants’. Size is the somatic feature that marks this mixed-race unbelieving people. The non-normative body becomes the mark of spiritual and racial corruption. Nevertheless, the curse of Cham seems to have had the greatest influence on linking race to non-normative somatic features, especially blackness. Thomas Browne notes that blackness as the mark of cursedness was a commonly held opinion. In Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or, Enquiries into very Many Received Tenents and Commonly Presumed Truths (1646), Browne provides and disputes a variety of theories of blackness. Concluding his discussion of classical understandings of black skin, he writes, ‘However therefore this complexion was first acquired, it is evidently maintained by generation, and by the tincture of the skin as a spermaticall part traduced from father unto son’ (Browne 1646: 329). Despite providing a biological conclusion to his analysis of the causes of black skin, Browne goes on to note, A Second opinion there is, that this complexion was first a curse of God derived unto them from Cham, upon whom it was inflicted for discovering the nakednesse of Noah. Which notwithstanding is sooner affirmed then proved, and carrieth with it sundry improbabilities. For first, if we derive the curse on Cham, or in generall upon his posterity, we shall Benegroe a greater part of the earth then ever was. (Browne 1646: 330) Scriptural and scientific explanations for blackness appear side by side in the text. Browne is sceptical that black skin is a sign of Noah’s curse because not all of Cham’s descendants are black. Nevertheless, Browne’s disbelief in this theory is less important than his observation that it is a common explanation of blackness, which he goes on to refute at great length, devoting two chapters to this rebuttal. Browne’s analysis demonstrates

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the imaginative hold this understanding of genealogical and spiritual blackness had in the middle of seventeenth century, a hold that Pseudodoxia Epidemica was not able to break as the story of the curse of Cham continued to be used to justify the enslavement of Africans.10 We see in Best, Browne and others that anti-blackness emerges in discussions of race-as-lineage, and that from early on this racialization of Black Africans was used to normalize the white body and to justify feelings of white racial and spiritual superiority. Black Africans are not the only racial group marked by non-normative somatic difference discussed in Pseudodoxia Epidemica. In book four, chapter ten, ‘Of the Jews’, Browne discusses foetor judicicus: That Jews stinck naturally, that is, that in their race and nation there is [an] … evil savour, is a received opinion, wee know not how to admit; although we concede many questionable points, and dispute not the verity of sundry opinions which are of affinity hereto: we will acknowledge that certaine odours attend on animalls, no lesse then certaine colours; that pleasant smels are not confined unto vegetables, but found in divers animalls, and some more richly then in plants. (Browne 1646: 201) As he did with blackness, Browne disputes commonly held understandings of the somatic difference of Jews. And as he discusses Jewish difference in relation to plant and animal difference, he points to the fact that smell, ‘no lesse then certaine colours’, can be a racial signifier. Here he questions the opinion that a Jewish smell is either a function of their race (shared genealogical origin) or ‘nation’, a word which carries many of the same ambiguities as ‘race’ but which here seems to denote something slightly different. Given that Browne discusses why both Jewish genealogy and Jewish culture make foetor judicus doubtful, it is likely that here Browne uses ‘nation’ to refer to a cultural grouping (Figure 1.1). Although Browne disputes opinions about this supposed somatic characteristic of Jews, he nevertheless renders Jews not-quite-human outsiders. Before dismissing the concept, Browne explains that it might be plausible because both animals and plants have different smells and colours. That Jewish difference might be best understood vis-à-vis plants and animals rather than vis-à-vis another human group itself places them at the level of plant and animal. That Jews do not belong in Europe is also implied by Browne’s wish that they did smell. He writes, ‘there are at present many thousand Jewes in Spaine, France, and England, and some dispensed withall, even to the degree of Priesthood, it is a matter very considerable, and could they be smelled out, would much advantage, not onely the Church of Christ, but also the coffers of Princes’ (Browne 1646: 202). The desire to ‘smell out’ points to anxieties about the abilities of Jews to pass as non-Jews or Christians. Browne also notes that the foetor judicus would be economically advantageous, aligning race with both religious and financial interests. Browne is sceptical about what somatic features signify. Nevertheless, his discussions tell us that somatic features and how they might be determined by race were of great interest. In his discussions of Jews, moreover, we see that ideas about somatic race – fictive as they may be – are desirable fantasies. They provide the means for exclusion and the seizure of wealth. In discussions of somatic race more generally, we see that a variety of ‘unnatural’ bodily features become a sign of racial otherness; discussions of somatic difference played an important role in normalizing whiteness.

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FIGURE 1.1  Jews in medieval oriental clothes, detail from Giovanni Canavesio’s Jesus before Caiaphas, 1491, fresco. © De Agostini/Getty Images.

NATIONAL DIFFERENCE AND SOCIAL RANK That lineage determined one’s place in the social order is not a new concept. Nevertheless, scholars have begun interrogating exactly how racial and class discourses inform each other. Patricia Akhimie argues, for example, ‘the rigidity of social groupings is implicated as much in concepts of class as in concepts of race in the Early Modern period. Class and race intertwine and, together, posit the relative capacity of groups for social mobility or immobility’ (2018: 20).11 Indeed, one’s race determined one’s present and future within the social order, and understandings of how race-as-lineage determines social rank need to be aligned with somatic expressions of race, and with the racialization of religious and national identities as well. In this section I discuss the racialization of national identity and of the ruling class. England had national investments in the curse of Cham. In the first book of Raphael Holinshed’s The Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande (1577), we learn that ‘Albion the Gyaunt … repayred hither with a companye of his owne race procéeding from Cham, and not onely subued the same to his owne dominion, but brought all such in lyke sort as he found here of the lyne of Iaphet, into miserable seruitude and thraldome’ (Holinshed 1577: 9; emphasis in the original). Early in Chronicles, readers discover England’s racial history. This history is not neutrally delivered. Implied in Holinshed’s language is that Albion and his race’s rule was illegitimate, and Albion’s excessive size points to his racial difference. Cham indeed plays an important role in the Chronicles’ English mythology. Earlier Holinshed writes, ‘from Cham and his successours, procéeded

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at the first all sorcery, witchcraft, what doctrine Chã and his disciples taught and the execution of vnlawfull lust, without respect of Sexe, age, consanguinitie, or kinde: as braunches from an odious & abhominable roote, or streames deriued from most filthye and stinking puddles’ (7; emphases in the original). Cham becomes the source of not only spiritual evils but also a long list of sexual evils – sodomy, paedophilia and incest. And it is here that we might see how race is explicitly linked to sexuality: Loomba and Burton note that early modern texts frequently describe what were seen as the degenerate sexual practices of Asians, Africans, Turks and Indigenous peoples in the Americas (Loomba and Burton 2007: 18). But this marking of racial difference vis-à-vis sexual practices is also integral to early formations of the concept itself. Race is reproduced through sex, and thus gender expectations and sexuality fall within the purview of racial discourse and vice versa – the groundbreaking work by Ania Loomba (1989), Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (1994), Kim F. Hall (1995), Arthur L. Little Jr (2000) and Joyce Green MacDonald (2002) has explored many of the ways in which race is constructed along lines of gender and sexuality. Luckily, Trojan Brutus saves the descendants of Japhet from racialized tyrannical rule: ‘Brute with a great traine of the posteritie of the dispersed Troianes in 324. Britaines shyppes: who rendring the lyke curtesie vnto the Chemminites as they had done before vnto the séede of Iaphet, brought them also wholye vnder his rule and gouernaunce’ (Holinshed 1577: 9). To be sure, translatio imperii provided legitimacy to medieval and early modern European nations by indicating that they were genealogically connected to the Trojan race. Alan Shepard and Stephen D. Powell suggest that no set of stories other than biblical stories shaped European notions of social organization, national identity and empire (Shepard and Powell 2004: 3). Surrey’s translation and Holinshed’s Chronicles also suggest that the Troy legend should be understood as playing a significant role in understanding what race means and what race does. England’s mythic history links race with the right rule. Moreover, Englishness is defined in racial terms – not being like the descendants of Cham. In Holinshed race becomes an important concept for defining political legitimacy at large, but the text further delineates how race creates social hierarchies. In book three, chapter four of Chronicles, Holinshed describes English social division: ‘WE in Englande deuide our people commonlye into foure sortes, as Gentlemen, Citizens or Burgeses, Yeomẽ, and Artificerers or labourers’ (Holinshed 1577: 103). We learn later in the chapter that these divisions are determined by race and blood: Esquire (which we call commonly Squire) is a Frenche word, and so much in latine as Scutiger vel armiger, and such are all those which beare Armes, or Armoires, testimonies of their race from whence they be discended. They were at the first Costerelles or the bearers of the Armes of Barrons, or knightes, and therby being instructed in Armes, had that name for a dignitie giuen to distinguishe them from common souldiours, when they were togither in the fielde. Gentlemen be those whome their race and bloode doth make noble and knowne. The latines call them Nobiles & generosos, as the Frenche doe Nobles. The Etimologie of the name expoundeth the efficacie of the worde & for as Gens in latin betokeneth the race and surname. So the Romaines had Cornelios, Sergios, Appios, Fabios, Aemilios, Iulios, Brutos. &c. of which, who were agnati and therefore kept the name, were also called Gentiles, gentlemen of that or that house and race. (Holinshed 1577: 103; emphases in the original)

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In addition to making the connection between ‘race’ and gens explicit, Holinshed’s account suggests that the social order in England depends on race. We also learn that the distinctions race makes have French and ancient Roman origins: race establishes differences among the fighting class, it creates nobility, and it makes some worthy of being ‘knowne’. In Holinshed’s description of the gentry, moreover, we also see that race works alongside principles of blood to establish social difference among people of the same nation. Consequently, the nobility and gentry become a race apart, and their distinctness justifies their right to rule others. Race, lineage, behaviour and rank all come together in David Hume of Godscroft’s praise of Archibald II, seventh earl of Angus, in The History of the Houses of Douglas and Angus (1643): What particulars they are we shall see in his particular actions; viz. valour, and true courage, with love and kindnesse to his Countrey, hereditarie properties from the very root of which he is sprung. Also wisedome and magnanimity, truth and uprightnesse in words and actions, with others which will appear, as the occasion occurres. And so we have him by these testimonies thrice (that is every way) first, or chief and principall. 1. Chiefe in Nobility beyond all. 2. Chiefe in personage, beyond all. 3. Chiefe in vertue, and all good arts (for so is the word) or qualities, beyond all. Worthy of whom should descend that race of Kings so Noble, beyond all. Which as it honours him, so doth it not disgrace or disparage that Noble and Princely race, to be come of such an one in his person; of such stock in the whole race and descent of that whole Family, so noble, so worthy, and heroicall every way … And thus the honour of the house doth rise in his person, whom we see accounted by all every way honourable, honourable by bloud, honourable by vertue, honourable by marriage, honourable by affinitie and alliance, honourable by progenie and posteritie, honourable by all actions, by all valiant, and alwayes worthy acts. (Hume of Godscroft 1643: 240) The panegyric links the ‘particulars’ of Archibald’s virtues to his race and blood – and the heavy usage of the word ‘race’ alongside words such as ‘hereditary’, ‘stock’, ‘descent’, ‘family’, ‘progenie’ and ‘posteritie’ indeed shows how important these concepts are to the legitimization of power and authority. Blood and heredity, moreover, carry the very qualities that make individuals and families best fit to rule over others. Race determines Archibald’s devotion to country, wisdom and moral character, all of which make him ‘Chiefe’ in ‘Nobility’, ‘personage’ and ‘all good arts’. And as we saw in Best and Browne, race links the present to the past and to the future: Archibald’s present character is used as assurance that both his ancestors and progeny are honourable as well. To be sure, the praise seems excessive (the Anguses were Hume’s patrons), but its seemingly excessive nature points to just how strongly the legitimization of social rank and power rested upon notions of the racial superiority of the ruling class across time. The regicide of Charles I in England, however, threw opposition to such ideas into relief. Dethroning and killing the king required the disruption of the connection between race and the right to rule. Severall Speeches delivered at a Conference concerning the Power of Parliament, to proeeed [sic] against their King for Misgovernment (1648) demonstrates the type of ideological work needed to sever this connection. The title page provides the primary argument of each speech, and the first speech contends, ‘That Government by blood is not by Law of Nature, or Divine, but only by humane and positive Laws of

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every particular Common-wealth, and may upon just causes be altered.’ The subsequent speeches somewhat depend on this initial proposition: contrary to the political theology of the Stuarts, hereditary rule is not established by divine or natural law but rather is a human invention. The various speeches then point to historical examples of disruptions in royal lineages, uncertain genealogies and examples of kings who proved themselves unfit to rule: ‘namely in England, in the place of those five Kings before named, that were deprived, to wit, John, Edward the second, Richard the second, Henry the sixth, and Richard the third’ (Anonymous 1648: 21; emphases in the original). Arguments used to justify regicide undermined long-standing beliefs that race determined character, behaviour, spiritual state, the fitness and right to rule. Yet the radical politics of the Interregnum would not last. Much has been written about the possible reasons why, but perhaps the ancient institution of hereditary monarchy provided a useful corollary for emerging racial discourses. I am not suggesting that more explicit forms of racialization and the English involvement in the transatlantic slave trade would not have been pursued with increasing vigour had the English Commonwealth succeeded. Race-as-rank is not the sole progenitor of the more ‘scientific’ forms of racism that would be developed; the capture and selling of Africans continued during the Interregnum, and the English continued to stake their claim in the Caribbean. Nevertheless, in 1660 Charles II chartered the Company of Royal Adventurers of England trading with Africa. In 1662, the company issued The Several Declarations of the Company of Royal Adventurers of England trading into Africa, inviting all his majesties native subjects in general to subscribe, and become sharers in their joynt-stock together with his royal highness james duke of york and albany, &c. and the rest of the said royal company letter to the right honourable francis lord willough of parham, &c. intimating the said companies resolutions to furnish his majesties american plantations with negroes at certain and moderate rates. as also a list of the royal adventurers of england trading into africa. The magnanimous monarch invites ‘all his Native subjects’ to join a financially lucrative enterprise. The slave trade provided a means to unite the English nation and the newly established king and his subjects.

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CHAPTER TWO

Race, Environment, Culture ‘Custome into Nature’ in the Early Modern Atlantic World JEAN E. FEERICK

‘NATURE-CULTURE’ AND THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD Given the centrality of physical difference to accounts of racial difference today, inquiry into early modern pre-histories of race must begin with a rich and inflected understanding of how early moderns understood bodies to acquire and retain differences that we perceive as ‘racial’. Despite shifts between then and now in the perceived origin and durability of such racial markers, the perception of human differences in various periods – whether linked to skin colour, cultural practice, religious worship or other factors – has been used to justify violence, subjugation, dispossession and any number of other exploitative practices, including enslavement and genocide. Indicators of its growing hold today, in the rise of nationalist populism and other political movements, call us to renew attention to its modes, techniques and histories, concerns central to the work of this volume. In the last twenty years, eager to historicize embodiment and delve into the diachronic arc of race thinking, a group of critics have identified and excavated the importance of humoral theories in early modern accounts of human difference, noting how such theories yoked a people’s physical properties to their internal humoral composition (Schoenfeldt 1999; Floyd-Wilson 2003; Paster 2003, 2004). While humoralism is by no means the sole discourse early moderns drew upon to navigate physical difference, as a theory of the body’s physiological processes, it deserves close attention for offering a detailed account of how people and collectivities were thought to acquire and retain bodily difference. Everything from a people’s skin colour, eye and hair colour, size, level of activity, even governing forms and religious preferences could be explained with reference to a humoral disposition or ‘complexion’, as the individual’s unique balance of humours was often called (Dawson 2019). Critics attuned to this humoral economy further identify a widespread belief that individual and collective complexions were thought to be responsive to, indeed forged by, the surrounding world, subject to the imprinting force of climate, diet and other cultural practices (Floyd-Wilson and Sullivan 2007). People native to a region, therefore, shared broad humoral dispositions that connected them, as expressed in their skin colour, mental and emotional tendencies, and other physical features (Wear 1998). Culture and environment, then, were construed by early moderns both as producing and expressing physical difference, a view powerfully at odds with modern theories, which

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lodge difference in a (relatively) fixed genetic code deep within the body and transmitted from parent to child, rather than from an exchange with the outside world. If heredity played a part in forging a person’s physical contours for early modernity, physical identity was yet experienced as an ongoing production, continuing from birth until the death of the individual. For those native to the same region, migration to new environments or immersion in new cultural practices would extend this process further, potentially carrying across the generations in an anticipated slow morphing of the physical attributes of their descendants. While critics investigating humoral discourse have ably demonstrated the central role that early modernity granted the environment in shaping the physical body, a process named ‘geohumoralism’ by Floyd-Wilson, less attention has been given to the ways that ideas linking complexions to environment and cultural practice could become a Pandora’s box in the crucible of globalization and transmigration, since movement invited the possibility of profound physical alteration. Indeed, early modern writers expressed a growing concern with the implications of migration and transplantation on their physical bodies (Kupperman 1980, 1982, 1984; Chaplin 1997; Feerick 2010; Earle 2012). If short-term travel could be expected to provoke illness, due to sudden shifts in humoral balance, longer-term resettlement could evoke permanent bodily changes that would be externally legible. For humoralism did not, as has been proposed, cease to be an anchor for theories of embodied difference with the rise of the transatlantic slave trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Floyd-Wilson 2016: 794). On the contrary, critics working with English and American letters of the eighteenth century have powerfully demonstrated the sway of the humoralist paradigm on both sides of the Atlantic during that period, where it continued to serve as a foundation for new taxonomies of race (Wheeler 2000; Parrish 2006; Chiles 2014). I propose that this context of the wholesale resettlement of populations – whether Africans, Europeans or Indigenous Americans – makes visible some of the defining features of early modern race thinking. What such investigations reveal is how much effort early moderns believed they had to invest in sustaining features we align with race. First, having skin colour that was white, swarthy, tawny or black, along with an underpinning humoral complexion – whether phlegmatic, sanguine, choleric, melancholic – was not an indelible state but could, with varying speeds and degrees, change with exposure to new climates and new cultural milieus in the humoral model. Notably, people from the north – whether described as white, pale or ruddy – were among those believed to change most readily in different climes due to the preponderance of moisture in their bodies (Bodin [1566] 1945: 95; [1606] 1955: 147); early moderns believed the heat of a warmer climate would evaporate a northerner’s excessive internal moisture, causing illness and, if one survived this initial adjustment, a shift in bodily complexion. Those with darker skin, such as Moors and Ethiopians, by contrast, were believed to undergo a more gradual process of change in migrating to different lands. Native to hot and dry lands, they were thought to have ‘very hard bodies’, born of the drying and evaporating effects of the sun, making the absorption of moisture in a colder climate a slow process (Bodin [1566] 1945: 95). And yet, in a humoral economy, all bodies would eventually be renatured when subject to new physical conditions (Parrish 2006; Earle 2012: 187–200). Included among such conditions were cultural practices, such as eating unfamiliar food and appropriating foreign habits such as clothing and body paint. Early moderns granted such practices a power, like climate, to inscribe the body deeply (A. Jones and Stallybrass 2000; Poitevin 2011; Earle 2012). Hence, as populations began to settle in non-native lands, they expected that their bodies

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and those of their offspring would be subject to changes that, if unmanaged, could alter them profoundly. If these observations identify race formation in this period as potentially transformable, a move that critics have cautioned against for its potential to disavow the brutal reality of chattel slavery which seized on black bodies above all (Erickson and Hall 2016: 11; Chapman 2017), I suggest that the early modern tendency to see physical identity as alterable, both because subject to an external world and to cultural practices that could shape the body, implicitly granted early moderns an extremely agile, multifaceted and adaptable theory of difference that instructed them to heed not only the physical differences that modern theories of race privilege but also a host of practices derived from culture (Loomba and Burton 2007). Far from erasing markers of physical difference, then, the early modern tendency to understand bodies and the material world as a blend of natural and artificial forces – an epistemology that the theorist Bruno Latour describes through the hybrid term ‘nature-culture’ – allowed such markers to proliferate (Latour 1993: 5–8, 96; 2004: 42–52). Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere (Feerick 2017), to unpack Latour’s concept of ‘nature-culture’ requires that we recall that ‘culture’ in early modernity was most often used as a verb – ‘to cultivate’ – rather than a noun, as is typical today (Williams [1976] 2015: 49–50). Culture described, for a fallen world, the set of actions one should apply to physical nature – both human and non-human – in an effort to emend and restore nature to its prior, uncorrupted state. Culture, in this usage, participates with nature, entering into it so as to shape it in desired ways. Culture is not, then, a set of practices that early moderns understood as properly separate from nature, as exclusive to the human realm, as in its modern usage. If nature – whether human or non-human – went unsupported by culture, therefore, it could and did signal a depraved state for early modern writers. For this reason, natives who otherwise seem to have little in common, phenotypically or geographically – including Indigenous Americans, Irish and Africans – were often linked in the English imaginary for what was seen as a dangerous proximity to the natural world. English observers interpreted such proximity to nature as expressing a people’s inability to apply culture to order the natural world, including their own physical bodies. In the absence of culture’s ordering effects, such people degraded their humanity, even slipped beneath the identity of humanity altogether. Hence, English travellers paid careful attention to the cultural practices of the people they encountered in distant lands. They observed their diet, dress, bodily applications, agriculture and religious worship, granting these practices considerable agency in forging the alterity of the populations they encountered. Their confidence in culture’s power also encouraged a belief that foisting European cultural practices on these populations could and would transnature them into a new ‘kind’ of people, inviting an often violent application of such practices in the name of reform (Feerick 2017). As compared with early modern ‘naturecultures’, modern racial theories minimize the role that culture or environment play in the production of racial identity. What is at stake in this shift? I see the reorientation of race’s mechanisms and meanings as part of a much larger, diachronic project of reconfiguring the relation of humans to the material world, a process that forged an autonomous subject presumably unhindered by material things and forces construed as inert ‘objects’. A mostly impervious wall would be erected between humans and the material world as part of the project of modernity, with significant consequences for theories of race as well as treatment of the natural world (Merchant 1980; Latour 1993). People’s physical bodies, like the material world at large, would

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come to be seen as mostly fixed at birth, not dynamically changing in response to external factors. For early moderns, by contrast, the material world was animate and agential, such that what one did with that world or what it did to you was deeply constitutive of human identity. As historian Wear argues, early moderns posited a ‘close union between all the parts of the organic and inorganic worlds’ (1998: 145). Therefore, while I take heed of Erickson and Hall’s call to abandon the notion of ‘fluidity’ in discussing early modern race, given their important observation that all racial formations are fluid and adaptable, I yet perceive and seek to retain distinctive aspects of early modern race thinking, which I believe may contribute to the project of dislodging the violence of racism today. For early modernity makes more overt what modern racial paradigms seek to conceal: that assertions of physical difference arise as a defensive reaction to the felt absence of stable difference, to the belief that human bodies are fungible. Insecurity and a fear of one’s proximity to those perceived as different haunt its origins. Indeed, far from being secure in their ‘white’ skins, early modern English writers, along with their European neighbours, positioned racial difference on a continuum. Two things follow from this assumption: bodies marked as ‘other’ held the potential to be reclaimed by culture, though such efforts might also be dispensed with as futile or too difficult and could and did take violent forms; and bodies seen by English writers as ‘normative’ – whether described as white, ruddy or swarthy – could transform into something strange through changes to culture or milieu. As Gil Harris eloquently argues in his work on Indography, early modern discourses of race are ‘attempts to exorcise the specter of undifferentiated … bodies’ (2012: 15). It is this constant uncertainty of what one may become, or cease to be, that I excavate here, as an anchoring feature of racial ideologies. The material to follow can be subdivided into two parts. In the first section, I trace in a range of genres about transmigration – including travel accounts, natural histories and plays – a belief that English bodies – like all bodies – are transformable and that shifts in climate and culture can alter them profoundly. In establishing this point, I lean on one of the central metaphors early moderns used to think through these possible transformations: plantlife. Like humans, plants in this period were carried to new soils and climes, and like humans they were understood as humoral beings, in fact believed to impart their complexionate qualities (hot, cold, moist, dry) to people who consumed them as herbs or vegetables (Earle 2012; Test 2019). They were also beings understood as responsive to and dependent on culture – that is, to cultivating acts by humans – which could make or break their ability to flourish in a given soil or clime (Bushnell 2003). It is therefore not surprising that people trying to gauge what physical changes might befall them – in size, colour and reproductive ability – studied the shifts that plants underwent as they took root in new soils. Accustomed to thinking homologically, even naming England’s expansivist project ‘plantation’ and its human agents ‘planters’, early modern writers readily connected patterns of plantlife to human life to explore physical alteration in non-native climes, an idea I trace in the works of early modern scientists as well as in plays portraying contact with foreign lands, including Ireland, the New World and Africa. In the second section I explore a tendency among English writers to seize on cultural practices to describe Indigenous peoples, understanding such practices as intimately connected to physical difference but also as subject to reform. Here I focus in particular on English accounts of Indigenous Americans from the early exploration of the Northwest Passage up through the establishment of the colonies in Virginia and Massachusetts. I also consider the imprint of these ideas on the period’s drama, highlighting some new

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angles on the staging of Shakespeare’s most famous ‘Indian’. Here, too, I consider why humoral theories of a transformable nature may be less visible in accounts of Africans, as evidenced by the proverbial phrase borrowed from Aesop, ‘to wash an Ethiopian white’, commonly used to express the indelibility of an Ethiopian’s bodily features (Akhimie 2018). If Ethiopians’ resistance to complexionate change could be accounted for in a humoral model, these embodied theories intersect with other discourses, such as the theological notion of the curse of Ham, to position Africans as a special case (Braude 1997; Earle 2012: 187–216; Chapman 2017). Drawing on the natural histories as a guide, I identify a tradition that observes that some plants are too deeply inscribed by their native climes to respond to other cultivating agents. Such ways of thinking can be seen to inform representations of Africans by English writers and explorers, who do not hesitate to adopt the Spanish and Portuguese practice of enslaving Africans (A. Vaughan 1982: 919–20; Chapman 2017). Othello, a transmigrating Moor who readily assimilates to Europe, is made to believe his nature is alien to Venice, a view Iago advances in order to displant him. If the idea that some natures are resistant to cultivation is on the rise in Shakespeare’s moment, it anticipates racial theories to come. But what makes Shakespeare’s representation distinct is the fact that Othello’s difference is revealed to be the product of cultivation rather than his inalterable nature.

THE ‘TURNING’ POWER OF ‘STRANGE CLIMATE[S]’1 Botanical discourse may seem an unlikely place to launch an inquiry into race. And yet, as the life form defined by generation and growth (Aristotle 1984: 658) and one entirely dependent for its identity on factors such as quality of seed, environment and cultivation, it makes sense that Renaissance writers approached human difference through these kindred bodies (Feerick 2009, 2016). Man and plant shared a deep attachment to place, with both being susceptible to change by external factors. Indeed, in one of the earliest attempts to theorize where to draw the line between a plant’s physical nature and external forces, the Greek philosopher Theophrastus argued for a murky boundary, observing that the nature of many plants is ‘fulfilled when [its] nature obtains through human art what it happens to lack’. He compares such acts of husbandry, which he believes guide the ‘movements and arrangement within the plant itself’, to environmental conditions, such as ‘weather, wind, soil and food’, reasoning that such agents, though originating from outside the plant body, are integral to the plant’s nature. Indeed, in the absence of such cultivation, he notes some plants will become ‘strange and (as it were) unnatural’, undergoing ‘a complete mutation’ which he names ‘degeneration’ (Theophrastus 1976: 139–45). Culture, then, is necessary to sustain the plant’s physical nature. The idea that nature could morph if denied customary cultivation appealed to Renaissance naturalists, who sought to exaggerate such patterns in order to master them. In Sylva Sylvarum, Francis Bacon celebrated the possibility that man might seize control of nature to satisfy a growing appetite for exotic goods such as herbs, spices and fruits native to hotter climes. He marvelled at the possibility that scientists might transform a plant by withholding or shifting aspects of its cultivation, in effect ‘over-[ruling] the seed’ and making it grow ‘contrary to his nature’. As he observed, ‘plants for want of culture degenerate to be baser in the same kind; and sometimes so far as to change into another kind.’ By denying nutriment, for instance, he observed that water mint ‘turneth into field-mint’ and ‘colewort into rape’. Similarly, when exposed to too much sunlight, the basil plant ‘doth turn into’ wild thyme. In the realm of flowers, he reasoned, ‘it is

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probable that the white [flower] with much culture may turn colored’, particularly since white blooms were associated with a deficiency of nourishment (Bacon [1626] 1862: 401, 403, 398, 399, 393). The lexicon of ‘turning’ to describe deep physical changes to plants – transformations in kind and colour – is compelling, not least because it intersects with the language contemporaries used to describe human transformation in response to contact with foreign lands and cultures, captured in phrases such as ‘turned Turk’, ‘turned heathen’ or ‘turned Indian’. And yet, where as the prospect of human populations ‘turning’ typically evoked anxiety and alarm, for Bacon the prospect of a mouldable natural world was exhilarating, holding the promise that human culture might remake nature to meet man’s needs. While these debates may seem esoteric and removed from accounts of human difference, the homological patterns of thinking so typical of the Renaissance led many writers to work from such assessments of plant nature to human nature, reasoning that shifting climes and cultures might explain human differences. The French political theorist Jean Bodin, for instance, echoed classical writers in maintaining that people like plants would be physically altered by migration: ‘we see men as well as plants degenerate little by little when the soil has been changed’ ([1566] 1945: 87). Conceding some differences between the two life forms on the grounds that plants receive direct sustenance from soil whereas man’s contact with his environment is more distributed, he yet maintains, ‘if [people] be transplanted into another country … yet in the end they shall be altered’ (Bodin [1606] 1955: 566). Montaigne wove related themes about the renaturing power of climes into his highly popular Essays. In his essay on Raymond Seybond, translated into English by John Florio, he observes that ‘the forme of our being depends of the aire, of the climate, and of the soile, wherein we are borne, and not onely the hew, the stature, the complexion and the countenance, but also the soules faculties … and being removed from one soile to another (as plants are) [we] take a new complexion’ (Montaigne [1603] 1967: 2:297–8). His countryman Guillaume de Saluste du Bartas similarly introduced such ideas into his epic poem of creation, noting in the day and week devoted to ‘The Colonies’, that people native to a given climate share ‘stature, / Strength, haire, and color / … humours and … manners too’, speculating whether such resemblance derives from shared laws, the stars, or the means by which ‘custome into Nature [changes]’ ([1595] 1979: 1:458). In reasoning that custom might alter nature, du Bartas echoed the ancient horticultural idea that culture and physical nature braid together into a seamless unity. Given the cultural dissemination of these ideas, it is no surprise to find them surfacing in the literature surrounding England’s ventures to plant in the New World, where speculation on the impact of migration on English bodies was robust. Some deflected such worries by arguing that the new colonies had climates proximate to England, despite evidence to the contrary, a tactic particularly evident in sermons and publications celebrating the plantation in Virginia (Feerick 2010: 104–12; Hollis 2015). One minister emphasized the proximity of England’s and Virginia’s climes by suggesting God had all but conjoined the lands with a bridge to facilitate the movement of people between them (Crashaw 1610: sig. Ev). Those with first-hand experience of Virginia, on the other hand, were more forthcoming in noting striking differences, including summers much hotter than those in England and frigid winters. When a critical mass of settlers landed north of Virginia in the 1620s, many seized upon this angle, highlighting Virginia’s excessive heat as compared with the climate of New England, which they framed as proximate to their native land. Sir Ferdinando Gorges was one such proponent, arguing that the northern colony was ‘more sutable to the nature of our people, who neither finde content in the

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colder Climates, nor health in the hotter, but (as hearbs and plants) affect their natiue temperature, and prosper kindly no where else’ (1622: sig. D2). The phrase ‘prosper kindly’ suggests that unlike those in the south who might ‘turn’ in kind, like Bacon’s herbs, the cooler climate of New England would allow English settlers to retain their English features. William Wood concurred, pointing to the ‘changing … complexion’ of those who had settled in Virginia, noting not an increase in ‘swarthiness’, as might be expected due to the heat, but a noticeable increase in ‘paleness’, which indicated to him that the climate was ‘hotter than is suitable to an ordinary English constitution’ ([1634] 1977: 32). If, as Gavin Hollis has argued, Virginia is curiously under-represented on the early modern stage, the questions that settlement abroad catalyzed about physical alterability were a constant theme of early modern plays (2015: 1–30). Indeed, the Shakespearean canon registers an active interest in the effects transmigration has on people, as registered in small details and broad themes. In the history plays, for instance, Shakespeare evokes the physical challenges of fighting in a foreign climate by having a heroic English king blame his tendency to brag about his men’s unexpected victory at Harfleur on ‘This your air of France’, which ‘Hath blown that vice in me’ (King Henry V, 3.6.137–8). Henry here alludes to a sense that his northern humours, widely associated with English candour and ‘sinceritie’, have been altered by his sojourn through the warmer air of France, evoking haughtiness (Harrison 1587: 115). The playwright explores these ideas in greater detail when he tracks the southward migration of the Roman Antony. While a model of continence in the harsh climates of the north (Antony and Cleopatra, 1.4.55–71), his displacement to hot Egypt appears to melt his martial vigour, as registered by his sexual, sartorial and dietary incontinence. Writers of the day warned that northern men would be subject to rapid decline in southern climes and should avoid it at all costs (Barclay 1631). Antony’s defeat affirms this belief. Conversely, Shakespeare’s representation of the travels north of a man from a southern geography in his portrayal of Aaron the Moor may register more subtle signs of physical change born of movement in this direction. When Aaron asserts to his northern paramour that his ‘fleece of woolly hair …. now uncurls / Even as an adder when she doth unroll / To do some fatal execution’ (Titus Andronicus, 2.3.34–6), he seems to intimate that he is acclimatizing to the non-native land of Rome, a change that may inform his move to shape its political future. Plays of the day that sought to stage contemporary events, as compared with Shakespeare’s preference for temporally displaced plots, betray a similar interest, evident in a fascination with swashbuckling English heroes who traverse different climes and regions. Heywood, Greene, Rowley and Day were among those hitting on such themes in drama of the 1590s and early 1600s, but it is the anonymous play about Captain Thomas Stukeley, performed by the Admiral’s Men in 1596 and 1597 and published in 1605, which presents an opportunity to see in crisp form the anxiety of physical alteration that subtends the ideal of a heroic globetrotter who endures sustained contact with foreign lands. In this play, possibly authored by Thomas Heywood, we are introduced to the heroic figure Stukeley – famous for his rancorous relationship with Queen Elizabeth as well as for his (heretical) affiliations with the Irish arch-rebel Shane O’Neill, the Pope and King Phillip II – alongside an assortment of other English gentlemen who share his wanderlust (Edelman 2005). If the play presents Stukeley brandishing a temper that outmatches that of his kinsmen, rising to the challenge of contact with Irish rebels and Spanish royalty, the play yet shows his limits in the heat of the African desert, which taxes his strength and catalyzes his undoing.

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The play provides a frenzied tour of various foreign lands and climes traversed by the historical Stukeley – including Ireland, Spain and Africa – emphasizing in each context the spectre of alterability for this Englishman. Even Ireland, Stukeley’s first destination upon departing from England, presents challenges to his English complexion despite its relative proximity. Medical writers, such as William Vaughan, knew well the threat the damp Irish climate posed for Englishmen taking up residence there. Dedicating one of his most popular medical texts to the wife of the Lord Deputy of Ireland, Lord Chichester, Vaughan recommends that Englishmen planting in Ireland engage in fasting to neutralize the effects of superfluous humours which ‘the moysture of their Westerne Ayre [will breathe] into them’ (W. Vaughan [1600] 1617: 16). So, too, an early account of Ireland by Richard Stanihurst included in Holinshed’s Chronicles had warned that ‘Inhabitants especiallie new come, are subiect to distillations, rheumes and fluxes’, suggesting that the damp air’s ‘grosseness’ would overpower non-native bodies (1586: 2:13). Those leading the effort to subjugate Ireland in the 1590s, such as the Earl of Essex, who served as Lord Lieutenant from 1599, identified the ‘moist, rotten country’ and the ‘unwholsome and uncertaine clymate’ as among the factors that impeded his ‘bodies, minds, and fortunes abilitie’ and undermined the military effort of his English men (Moryson [1617] 1907–8: 4:243). Fynes Moryson, secretary to Lord Mountjoy, similarly observed how English soldiers were undone by ‘looseness of body, the natural sicknesses of the Country’ (Moryson in Canny 1976: 209), while another report of 1600 argued that it was ‘the verie contry [that] consumeth’ English soldiers (as quoted in Highley 1997: 152), indicating the dangerous power this damp climate held over them. Onstage, Stukeley, too, is warned away from Ireland by his peers who associate the land with ‘[rudeness]’ and ‘rebellious strife’ (4.59–60). But the play’s description of Ireland as a ‘dampish field’ (6.10) suggests the equally formidable obstacle he will encounter in the Irish elements. The character Harbert, temporarily placed in charge of the English fort at Dundalk in the north of Ireland, manages this threat only by avoiding it altogether, being accused of ‘mewing’ his men up ‘In walled townes’ (l1.7–8) and thereby allowing the Irish rebels to gather strength (Figure 2.1). The dramatist develops this inversion by writing an entire scene – two versions of which survive, in English and broken Gaelic – from the perspective of those Irish rebels, who call out the vulnerability of the English complexion. Without their customary diet of ‘powdered beef’, ‘bread’, ‘beer’ and ‘porridge’ (7.44), the English, so the rebels taunt, will become weak and ill. The Irish mock them for being too delicate, unable to live on ‘Shamrocks’, ‘bonny clabbo’ and ‘water cresses’, as well as Ireland’s ‘strong butter’ and ‘swelled oatmeal’, which threaten to invade English bodies with excessive moisture, bringing them to a form of dysentery known as the flux (7.45–8). Against such spectres of English alterability, the Stukeley character embodies an English fantasy of seeming impervious to the material agents of foreign foods and climes. In Ireland, he remains undaunted by the damp, venturing out to confront the rebels and capturing their cattle and hobbies, although Harbert’s defensive posture anatomizes the underlying fear of unmitigated contact with the rude, damp land. In Spain, where Stukeley heads next in search of payment for Irish horses he has seized, his English mettle seems ever-boundless, a match for the ‘hot bloods and temper of [the] clime’ (13.94), as evidenced by his readiness to brave the Governor who imprisons him and seizes his goods. Later, when he escapes to the Spanish court, Valdes, Marshal to King Philip, sums up Stukeley by observing: he ‘conquers the world, and casts it at his heels’ (18.28). But the king mocks Stukeley’s northern qualities behind his back, ridiculing him for being

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FIGURE 2.1  John Derricke, ‘Rorie Og, a wild kerne and a defeated rebel, in the forest with wolves for company’. © Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

‘Hardy but rash, witty but overweening’, an ‘English hot-brain’ (16.166–77). Indeed, the play seems to agree with King Philip’s assessment, as Stukeley becomes his pawn, first, running the Spanish king’s errand to the pope, and then being diverted by the Portuguese king to fight his war in Africa. The play intimates that Stukeley’s moist, northern heat is no match for the men of these more southerly climes, who display the cunning that humoral theories argued was a function of their dry and hot physiologies (Floyd-Wilson 2003: 67–74). In the end, it is ‘burnt Africa’ (19.49) with her ‘tawny sands’ (21.70) that vanquishes Stukeley’s temper altogether. Staging a scene from the Battle of Alcazar in the play’s final act, the play grants this alien climate the awesome power to resist most any man’s plans. Indeed, Muly Mahamet, a Moor native to the land, erroneously believes he can overpower the land’s features, addressing the desert landscape in Tamburlaine-style with ‘I’ll dye thy tawny sands in blood / And set a purple on thy sunburnt face’ (21.70–1). Here he boasts that the soil will take on the livery of his enemies’ red blood, rather than the burnt marks of the sun. But a few scenes later, we learn the hot climate is not so easily quelled. Muly’s enemy, Abdelmelec, soon finds himself ‘Overcome with heat’, marvelling at the fact that the ‘sands of Afric are so parching hot / That when our blood doth light upon the earth, / The drops do seethe like cauldrons as they stand’ (24.3–8). Far from being overcome by human inscriptions, the African soil ensnares these boisterous kings, boiling their blood, no less than that of the Spanish, Italian and English newcomers. Indeed, if Stukeley’s death is technically effected by his own men – Italian soldiers who turn on him – his constant references to the hot climate, the ‘parched earth of Barbary’, suggests that his defeat comes first at its hands (28.30). Indeed, minutes before his men strike him down, he expresses the sense of being overcome by the climate, noting how

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‘The sun so heats our armour with his beams / That it doth burn and sear our very flesh … Our parched sinews crack’ (25.1–4). In this compelling image, northern culture – as embodied by the armour he wears – is overpowered by the African climate, becoming a weapon of self-destruction. Far from supporting his English body, the armour magnifies the scorching sun’s power to burn flesh and parch the inner body, effecting profound physical alteration. As Stukeley surrenders his blood to African soil – making peace with Vernon in noting ‘our bodies we bequeath / To earth’ (28.40–1) – the audience is invited to contemplate his engulfment by a relentlessly hot and (for him) inhabitable clime that overpowers his English body. The earliest travel accounts of Africa by Englishmen indeed tended to construe the continent’s heat as a significant impediment to the people’s cultural development. Reporting on the travels of John Lok to the coast of Guinea in 1554, for instance, George Barne positions his observations about the people’s ‘beastly living, without a God, lawe, religion, or common wealth’ in the same sentence as commentary on the unbearable climate, noting how the Africans are ‘so scorched and vexed with the heat of the sunne, that in many places they curse it when it riseth’ (Hakluyt [1598–1600] 1927: 4:57). Indeed, he posits that the name ‘Africa’ might itself derive from the phrase ‘without cold’, comparing life in Africa to living ‘as it were in fornaces, and in maner already halfe way in Purgatorie or hell’ (4:60). In associating the land with proximity to hell, Barne was building on an emerging tradition of accounting for the black skin of Africans by associating it with a divine curse on Ham’s descendants (Braude 1997). And yet, as historian Rebecca Earle argues, this idea of a curse need not stand in tension with climate theory, as it does for George Best, often singled out by critics for denying climate’s role in determining skin colour (Hakluyt [1598–1600] 1927: 5:181–2), even though he was atypical in his time for disavowing its impact (Floyd-Wilson 2003: 8–10). For other writers, climate did not confute the idea of a divine curse so much as provide the means of fulfilling it (Earle 2012: 191–200). Barne’s description of the infernal climate of Africa appears to signify in this way, conflating a natural and theological explanation in accounting for African difference (K. Hall 1995: 44–61). If Africa’s heat takes a toll on those native to the land, it also posed a constant threat to English merchants seeking a foothold in the continent. Richard Eden describes Englishmen so unaccustomed to Africa’s ‘extreme heate’ and its ‘sudden and vehement alterations’ that many experienced ‘agues’ followed by death (Hakluyt [1598–1600] 1927: 4:43). Similarly, Barne reports the haunting effects of the infernal landscape on him and his countrymen, recalling the specter of ‘many strange fires and flames rising in maner as high as the Moone’ (4:40). In a journey to the River of Plate in 1583, Edward Cotton, too, recalled how the heat assaulted his men, whose ‘natures at this first time [were] not so well acquainted with that climate’ (4:299). Indeed, if Best, seeking to downplay the impact of climate on Englishmen, observes how readily ‘blacke Moores … [and] Aethiopians … can well endure the colde of our Countrey’ and concludes that Englishmen may ‘as well abide the heate of their Countrey’ (5:172), he was disavowing the received wisdom of his day which warned of profound physical effects. Indeed, the tendency of Englishmen in Africa to unravel in the heat – retaining ‘no rule of themselves’ (4:43) – suggests their embrace of postures similar to those of the Africans, whom Towerson criticizes for being ‘so wilde and idle, that they give themselves to seeke out nothing’ (4:74–5; K. Hall 1995: 53–5). For both groups, the oppressive African heat overcomes the ordering principles of culture, reducing them to ‘beastly’ passivity. Given that possibility, it is thus striking that these same English merchants mix considerable praise into their accounts of the peoples

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of central Africa, whom they describe as ‘friendly and tractable’ (Hakluyt [1598–1600] 1927: 5:47), ‘kindly and [courteous]’ (5:47), expressive of ‘love and goodwill towards us’ (5:51), ‘gentle and loving’ (4:297) and capable of ‘great reverence’ to their kings (4:42). If the hot climate is an obstacle to their acculturation, such comments, though aiming to attract more English investment in Africa, suggest the problem does not inhere in the nature of the people, who emerge as more honourable than the duplicitous Spanish and Portuguese traders the English there encounter.

SOWING CULTURE IN NATIVE SOILS AND BODIES The contrast of these representations of Africa to lands believed more ‘temperate’ for being proximate to England’s climate is striking, having profound consequences for how these populations were viewed by English writers and the role they believed English culture could play in ‘reforming’ them. I have already noted the tendency among promotional literature to emphasize how similar Virginia’s climate was to England’s, despite evidence to the contrary. Similar arguments were made about lands abutting the arctic north, in the vicinity of Newfoundland. Whereas English writers seemed unable to imagine Africa’s soil – burnt, scorched and sandy – as capable of sustaining most forms of cultivation, they had occasion to construe these colder regions as awaiting the cultivating effects of English presence. In these lands, the challenge was framed as one involving the native people’s lapsed cultures, rather than the overpowering climatic conditions and their harmful effects on the human body. Hence, attention to cultural difference far outweighs a sense of physical difference in English accounts of Indigenous Americans. Quick to draw on the elaborate trope of humans as plants informing English colonial literature, Robert Johnson, author of ‘The New Life of Virginea’ accounted for the presence of the Indians in the new world by noting that some races were scattered after Moses, and that, like ‘weeds in solitarie places’, this ‘barbarous and vnfruitfull race’ did ‘spring vp’ in this far distant soil (Figure 2.2). Contemplating the best mechanism of reform, he invited Englishmen settling in Virginia to ‘manage their crooked nature to your forme of ciuilitie’ (R. Johnson 1612: B1v, E4v). While seeming to associate Indigenous people with a depraved nature, his sermon embraces a belief that they can be reformed, like plants that have grown wild. In ‘A Good Speed to Virginia’, Robert Gray identified one method of reform, urging ‘It is not the nature of men, but the education of men, which make them barbarous and unciuill … therefore chaunge the education of men, and you shall see that their nature will be greatly … corrected’ (R. Gray 1609: sig. C2). Here, culture stands both as problem and solution to native difference. George Peckham, who accompanied Sir Humphrey Gilbert, echoed these ideas, urging that all natives in America ‘aswell those that dwell in the South, as those that dwell in the North, so soone as they shall begin but a little to taste of civility’ will be ‘easily reduced to civility both in maners and garments’ (Hakluyt [1598–1600] 1927: 6:61–2). Acculturating these ‘savages’ would therefore satisfy both a moral imperative and an economic interest by providing markets for English wool. Indeed, it is compelling that the English emphasize again and again the proximity of Indigenous American bodies to their own, lodging native alterity in cultural practices that have gone awry for allowing unmediated contact with the natural world. In early attempts to locate the Northwest passage by the likes of Gilbert and Frobisher, for instance, the English encountered Inuit people in the frigid lands surrounding Newfoundland, emphasizing cultural practice above physical difference as an explanation for indigenous

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FIGURE 2.2  Inigo Jones, Design for the Memorable Masque, an Indian as Torchbearer, c. 1600 (Chatsworth, Devonshire Collection).

alterity. Indigenous clothing, diet and agricultural practices are carefully recorded, with English balking at their habit of consuming raw flesh, wearing beasts’ skins and living in slovenly conditions (Figures 2.3 and 2.4). Frobisher captures English estrangement in a darkly comic key, noting, ‘They neither use table, stoole, or table cloth for comlines: but when they are imbrued with blood knuckle deepe, and their knives in like sort, they

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FIGURE 2.3  John White, An Eskimo Woman with Baby, c. 1577. © Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

use their tongues as apt instruments to lick them cleane’ (Hakluyt [1598–1600] 1927: 5:148). In a similar vein, he notes their proximity to beasts: ‘[T]he people will eate grasse and shrubs of the ground, even as our kine doe’ (5:274). Indeed, this tendency on the part of the Inuit to depend on what Edward Haie describes as the uncultivated, ‘first fruits’ of that ‘desolate and dishabited land’ (6:22) crystallizes the problem in the eyes of

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FIGURE 2.4  Lucas D’Heere, ‘Homme Sauvage amene des pais Septentrionaux par Frobisher’, in Theatre de tous Les Peuples Et Nations De La Terre, avec leurs habits et ornaments divers, tant anciens que modernes, c. 1576. © University of Ghent.

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the English: a failure to apply culture both to their bodies and their land. Indeed, Haie describes one incident when the Indigenous people beckoned him to witness a beautiful garden. Hastening to comply, he recalls rounding a bend with high hopes only to be met with disappointment in finding ‘nothing … [other] then Nature it selfe without art’ had made (6:17). In the absence of man’s ordering improvements, this green world is less a garden than a wild landscape, ‘dishabited’ for lacking any trace of human culture (Thomas 1983). If a failure of native culture elicits English disapproval, English planters had a high degree of confidence that the absence could be amended. Not only does the Indigenous people’s regard for values such as kinship and modesty ingratiate them to the English, but their lack of essential physical difference from the English is interpreted as meaning they will readily acculturate to English practices. Indeed, following one of the first journeys in search of the Northwest Passage in 1497, Robert Fabian, accompanying John Cabot, records that they returned to England with three ‘savages’. Remarkably, just two years later, when Fabian seeks them out at Westminster, he is unable to ‘discerne [them] from [other] Englishmen’ (Hakluyt [1598–1600] 1927: 5:91), since they now wear English apparel. Decades later, Frobisher expresses a similar faith in English culture to transform the Indigenous people, noting of a group of captured ‘savages’ how ‘They began to grow more civill, familiar, pleasant, and docible amongst us in very short time’ (5:273), in part because they have been re-dressed in English clothes. None of this is to claim that the English observed no forms of physical difference among the many Indigenous nations they encountered from Virginia up to the islands north of the mainland. Trained to see skin colour as a function of climate, Frobisher, for instance, wonders how the Indigenous people, whom he describes as ‘of the colour of a ripe Olive’, have received their tanned condition, ‘being borne in so cold a climate’ (Hakluyt [1598–1600] 1927: 5:271). Admiring the natives’ ‘large corporature, and good proportion’, traits typical of northern peoples, he reasons that their colour may yet be the effects of their lifestyle, speculating that their tawny skin is ‘not much unlike the Sunne burnt Countrey man, who laboureth daily in the Sunne for his living’ (5:148). As historians have long noted, Englishmen in Virginia reasoned similarly in accounting for the visibly darker skin of people who lived in a climate that did not seem much hotter than that of England. Early settlers in Jamestown and New England established an interpretation that would shape accounts for years to come, observing that although the Indigenous people appeared ‘swart, tawnie, or Chestnut [in] colour’ this was ‘not by nature but accidentally’ (Pringe 1603: 221), a function of their tendency to apply paints and dyes to their skin from the time of birth as protection from the sun and mosquitos (Hollis 2015: 164–73). William Wood summarized this view in noting, ‘Their smooth skins proceed from the often annointing of their bodies with the oil of fishes and the fat of eagles, with the grease of raccoons, which they hold … their best armor against the mosquitoes’, further observing how their hair, too, is ‘brought to a more jetty color by oiling, dyeing, and daily dressing’ ([1634] 1977: 83). To the extent that the Virginians marked or ‘raced’ their bodies by applying these dyes as well as other decorations, such as the ‘artificial knots of sundry liuely colors, very beautiful and pleasing to the eye’ that George Percy admires (Figure 2.5), they had altered their natural complexion (Percy [1607] 1969: 1:136). Indeed, John Smith and others claimed they are ‘borne white’ (Smith [1612] 1969: 354; K. Hall 1995), making their perceived physical difference a function entirely of cultural practice. Moreover, Englishmen who lived among them and adopted their lifestyle were believed to undergo a comparable transformation, as Ralph

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FIGURE 2.5  John White, The manner of their attire and painting themselves, c. 1585–93, watercolour of an Indigenous American man. © Henry Guttmann Collection/Stringer/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

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Hamor reported had happened to an Englishman living for many years in Virginia who had ‘growen so like both in complexion and habite to the Indians, that I onely knew him by his tongue to be an Englishman’ (as quoted in Hollis 2015: 58). Over time, that last marker of Englishness – language – might also surrender to a process of slow erasure, produced in this case not by a radically alien climate – as in Africa – but of a culture that, if alien, yet mirrored reports of the customs of ancient Picts and Britons. This was a comforting idea, for it suggested that just as Roman culture gradually transmuted British savagery into civility, so English culture would transform the Indigenous nations for the better. This view of the reformable Indigenous American, I suggest, is visible in the fleeting glimpses of them on the English stage. Arguably the most famous of this relatively small group is Shakespeare’s Caliban – whose name, tendency to worship a god named Setebos and familiarity with the use of weirs to fish evoke Indigenous American analogues – even as his mother’s history aligns him with an African genealogy. And yet, regardless of his family’s origin, Caliban is the one character in The Tempest who is native to the island, born and bred there, never having known his father and having but limited access to his mother. As such, the island’s clime and topography – personified by the spirits he senses around him – are the primary shaping forces on this Indigenous boy until Prospero and Miranda arrive on the island. That they and the subsequent round of Italians who arrive under the force of Prospero’s magic perceive him as fishlike (2.2.23–6) only reinforces this sense of his proximity to the natural world, evoking echoes of the Inuit, as described by Frobisher (Figure 2.4), who reported how ‘disguised with their coates of Seales skinnes, they deceive the fish, who take them rather for their fellow Seales, then for deceiving men’ (Hakluyt [1598–1600] 1927: 5:273). Those northern nations, like Caliban, are close kin to the fish world. The play, then, intersects with contemporary colonial theories in portraying the confrontation of indigenous nature with European culture in the form of Prospero’s arts and letters, including language, natural philosophy or magic, and agricultural practices, as conjured by the masque he stages for Miranda and Ferdinand. Before the play opens, both father and daughter believe their civilizing project has failed, that the ‘print of goodness’ (Tempest 1.2.355) bestowed by European culture has not taken to Caliban’s nature. Though they have taught him their language and imparted some rudimentary knowledge to him, his attempted rape of Miranda, as described by Prospero, seems to express his ‘vile’ (1.2.361) nature on which ‘Nurture can never stick’ (4.1.189). And yet, if Prospero and Miranda surrender their project of reform, it is possible to read the play as suggesting they do so because it has been too successful, catalyzing a defensive reaction against an Indigenous character who has grown, through access to their culture, too proximate to them. Although some might point to Caliban’s savage attire – the gabardine that barely covers him – and the curses he spews as evidence of his degraded nature, I propose that far from being unable to receive the imprint of culture, Caliban has readily absorbed it. Indeed Shakespeare shows this first and foremost through the linguistic ability he gives this character, who consistently speaks in pentameter verse. It is noteworthy that Shakespeare withholds this form of speech from the lowborn Europeans who accompany the native for much of the play – Stefano and Trinculo – which makes the difference fully audible. Indeed, where critics have argued for the attempted rape of Miranda as an expression of Caliban’s licentiousness, Caliban’s retort – ‘O ho, O ho! Would’t have been done! / … I had peopled else / This isle with Calibans’ (1.2.352–4) – instead expresses his growing political awareness, even his entry into

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European propertied arrangements (Goldberg 2003). Indeed, that Prospero perceives his relationship to Caliban as ensnared in a power struggle is evident when he confronts Ferdinand, posing as himself the sole native of the island, and accuses the young prince of usurping him (1.2.457–460). Just as he puts Ferdinand on the defensive, so Caliban has come to articulate his own rightful claim to the island – ‘This island’s mine’ (1.2.334) – identifying Prospero’s possession of it as theft. Alarmed by this rising political sensibility in a character he defines as his subject, Prospero halts the civilizing project. In fact, he begins to invert it altogether, employing an aggressive mode of anti-culture in the form of physical abuse to transform Caliban once more into a mere ‘natural’. He denies him a proper house, confining him instead to a rock; he withholds European clothes from him, though he has a large wardrobe as displayed in Ariel’s ‘frippery’ trap (4.1.424); he reduces him to forcible labour in making him hew wood and carry water, even when there is ‘wood enough within’ (1.2.318); and he halts his educational project. Indeed, he directs his efforts instead to assailing Caliban’s body in an effort to abject him, creating mental and emotional turmoil a regular feature of his days. It is, therefore, hardly surprising to see Caliban seize upon Trinculo and Stefano as a means of continuing his cultivation, hoping the latter will uphold his promise to receive him as a full member of the polity when he assures him, ‘Trinculo and thyself shall be viceroys’ (3.2.103).

‘[REFUSING] TO BE NATURALIZED IN STRANGE COUNTRIES’2 If I have argued that the failure of cultivation embodied by Caliban was born of Prospero’s will rather than this character’s nature, early moderns did have access to a concept, borrowed from antiquity, of life forms so acclimated to a given soil and clime that no form of cultivation could match, stand in for or improve upon its native conditions. Such creatures Pliny named ‘exotics’ in the thirteenth book of his Natural History in which he discusses strange and foreign trees. Resistant to cultivation, the trees he describes here ‘[disdain] to grow elsewhere’, since they have so ‘strong an affection for certain localities … and cannot be transplanted elsewhere in their full vigour’ (Pliny 1961: 4:203, 407). Included in this category of plant is the ‘Balm of Gilead’, the ‘Eugenia vine’ native to Alba, the ‘citron or Assyrian apple tree’ native to Media and Persia, and the Frankincense tree that only grows in Arabia. Following the discovery of the New World, scientists such as Juan de Acosta sought to update Pliny’s history (Figure 2.6). Attentive to the effects of moving plants to and from the ‘new’ continent, Acosta recorded in his Natural and Moral History of the Indies a general pattern whereby Old World plants prosper better in the Indies than ‘Indian plants’ do in Europe (Acosta [1604] 1969: 235). Noting that the Indies produces an ‘infinite number of wild plants’, more numerous by far than all those in ‘Europe, Asia, or Affrike’, it appears that the most desirable of these exotic plants yield ‘no account’ in the Old World no matter what culture they receive. He notes: ‘those few which are carried from the Indies into Spaine, growe little there, and multiply not’ (262, 265). Included in this list is the Indian platanos tree which ‘growe[s] neither in Italy nor in Spaine … for although we have seene some at Seville in the Kings gardens, yet they prosper not, nor are of any account’, as well as the coco or Indian palm, which grows well in Peru but is ‘the onely country … where these trees doe growe’ (242, 254). As such, a recurring theme of his natural history is that plants move well from Europe to the Indies – affirming a latent hope that European bodies will adapt readily in this direction

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FIGURE 2.6  Philips Galle after Marcus Gheeraerts, America, late sixteenth century. © Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

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as well – but that Indian plants decline in the non-native soil of Europe. This type of plant is variously translated as exotic, strange or foreign, resistant to attempts to naturalize, civilize or domesticate it. These competing theories of nature – as subject to culture or resistant to it – collide in Othello, where Iago applies a horticultural idea that echoes Bacon’s confidence in the power of human culture to transform nature so as to position Othello as an ‘exotic’ unable to flourish in Europe. Early in the play, in dialogue with Roderigo, Iago embraces a horticultural trope to convince his ‘friend’ that he is gardener of his own nature, celebrating the power of human reason to master passions, which he construes as plants growing in the mind. He insists it is in man’s ‘power and corrigible authority’ to ‘supply [the mind] with one gender of herbs or distract it with many’ (Othello, 1.3.319–21), suggesting that men choose to let weeds grow or to root them up. Later, he applies this theory to Othello, who, at the play’s start, has already successfully managed his transmigration to Venice. Though new to the city-state, Othello rests comfortably in a seat of power, honoured by the Duke. Iago’s project is to practice a form of antihusbandry on Othello that will incite his degenerative decline. He proceeds like a practiced horticulturalist, sowing sundry poisonous suspicions while denying his victim needed nutrients. We see this method unfold in the temptation scene of Act 3, scene 3, when Iago responds to Othello’s requests for a direct statement of his suspicions by withholding it: he denies him the nourishment of light, the truth he seeks. Instead he echoes, mirrors and mimes Othello, allowing questions to grow like weeds in the dark, as he speculates what the ‘horrible conceit’ might be (3.3.119). Viewed through the horticultural tropes that the play encourages, Iago’s actions seek to ‘turn’ a civil plant into a wild one by sowing the stinging ‘nettles’ (1.3.318) of rumour and neglecting the work of pruning overgrowth that he earlier recommended to Roderigo. He thereby reverses Othello’s naturalization, a condition he visually embodies when he falls from the height of rule to an epileptic frenzy. Early in this process, Desdemona already perceives a profound shift in Othello’s humoral complexion, telling Cassio: ‘My lord is not my lord, nor should I know him / Were he in favour as in humour altered’ (3.4.120–1). Under Iago’s programme, her husband has become almost unrecognizable to her, as to Venetians such as Lodovico who responds to the change with astonishment: ‘Is this the noble Moor?’ (4.1.261). Such reactions speak to the success of Iago’s project, which aims to uproot the general, cutting his ties to Venice and binding him more decisively to his native space. Indeed, when he learns that Othello has been recalled to Venice, Iago fantasizes a still further return to Africa, to a possible origin in Mauretania. He implies his presence in Venice, as in Desdemona’s bed, is ‘unnatural’ (3.3.238), suggesting his visage is incommensurate with Venice’s ‘country forms’ (3.3.242). In the final moments of the play, as Othello pieces together the strands of the plot against him, he yet persists in seeing himself through Iago’s eyes as the consummate alien in Venice. Presenting his defense to the gathering of Venetians in his bedroom, he emphasizes his exotic nature, figuring himself both as ‘turbaned Turk’ (5.2.362) and ‘Arabian [tree]’ (5.2.359) (Figure 2.7). As he turns the knife on himself, in a gesture that effects the violent tapping of the exotic tree’s ‘medicinable gum’ (5.2.360), Othello defines himself as a failed transplant to Venice, unable to ascend in its civil centre. Receptive to the perverse form of cultivation he has received at Iago’s hands, he has become ‘strange … passing strange’ (1.3.159) to himself and the Venetians who conclude they have been ‘deceived in him’ (4.1.279). If by the play’s end Othello has come to embody stereotypes of a barbarous Moor – cruel, violent, jealous and licentious – it is yet important to see how the play traces this

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FIGURE 2.7  Asphalatus Acacia altera Mauk. Copy from De Materia Medica by the Greek physician Dioscorides. The Acacia tree was described by English herbalist John Gerard as flowing with the gum of Arabia. © The Natural History Museum/Alamy Stock Photo.

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new condition to the withholding of culture by an insider who wants nothing better than to reverse the ascendancy of a man whose beauty offends him. Shakespeare’s plays, and the other early modern materials I have briefly surveyed in this chapter, thereby crystallize the powerful role that early moderns granted culture in the project of shaping nature, including that form of human nature we now call ‘race’. If I have shown that all climates were not equal in the eyes of the English – given their preference for those proximate to England and their fear of the torrid zone – yet early modern writers display an abiding belief that mixing their culture – in the form of language, dress, religion and agriculture – with the physical nature of non-European peoples had the power, together with a native or adopted climate, to transform them. How could they believe otherwise, when their own history had schooled them to believe that their own ancestors had also once been ‘savage’ until contact with a superior culture had given them the tools to grow more civil?

CHAPTER THREE

Race and Religion ROBERT BERNASCONI

TRUE RELIGION, FALSE RELIGIONS That races and religions belong to very different orders seems obvious today, at least in the West. That was not the case during the period from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. We tend to think of racial and religious identities as radically distinct from each other. During the course of the twentieth century race was assigned to nature: racial characteristics were not only thought of as inherited and constant, but also confined exclusively to the realm of biology in such a way that the biologists could in time renounce the concept of race and proceed to tell everyone else that they should do the same (Bernasconi 2010: 11–36). By contrast, religion has come to be thought of as both cultural and a matter of choice: as a result, it is believed that one can always change one’s religion or refuse religion altogether. But the distinction between nature and culture is not to be found in the earlier period, at least not in anything like the way it is understood today. Indeed, there was as yet no biological conception of heredity to which one could appeal in order to give an explanation of the inheritance of physical characteristics (Müller-Wille and Rheinberger 2007: 13–23). There was only a clear sense of constancy across generations that extended to include customs and even one’s religion. Like begat like. As one English Puritan minister, Reverend Thomas Blake, expressed it: ‘the child of a Turke is a Turke, the child of a Pagan is a Pagan, the child of a Jew is a Jew, the Child of a Christian is a Christian’ (1644: 5–6; emphases in the original). One’s race and one’s religion were in many ways as permanent or as temporary as each other. More to the point, they were so intertwined, or – from a twentieth-century perspective – so conflated, that it is only in certain contexts that one can clearly see the seeds of their subsequent separation. One indication of the proximity between these two terms can be found in the fact that the Spanish word raza, which we would translate as ‘race’, after having initially been used to differentiate breeds of animals and lineages of nobles, was increasingly used in the sixteenth century to differentiate between religions: it came to refer to ‘descent from Jews, Muslims, and eventually other religious categories’ (Martínez 2008: 53). But at this time, while the word ‘race’ could be used to describe the heritage of non-Christians, Christianity was not thought of as a race. By contrast, Christianity was a religion. Indeed, among Christians it alone had the full right to have that word said of it, because it was the true religion. So when in 1613 Samuel Purchas gave his account of the religions to be found in Asia, Africa and America, he nevertheless prefaced it with the acknowledgement

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that ‘the true Religion can be but one, and that which God himselfe teacheth, as the onely true way to himselfe; all other religions being but strayings from him, whereby men wander in the darke, and in labyrinthine errour’ (1613: 27). There was the true religion, and outside of it there were only false religions. What was meant by the phrase ‘true religion’ was disputed still at the end of the eighteenth century. Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier, Archbishop of Paris and a strong opponent of deism, in his three-volume work on Théologie had one entry on religion, which was largely a polemic against atheism and the idea of natural religion (1790: 339–47), and another on false religion (347–49). However, when in 1795, Immanuel Kant insisted that ‘there can be only one single religion holding for all human beings and in all times’, he was not saying the same as Bergier ([1794] 1996: n336; emphasis in the original). Bergier followed revelation, whereas Kant believed that religion was based on reason and that all appeals to revelation compromised religion: ‘a church sacrifices the most important mark of its truth, namely the legitimate claim to universality, whenever it bases itself upon a faith of revelation’. What looked like multiple religions were simply ‘historically different creeds’ ([1793] 1996: 142; emphasis in the original) and the phrase ‘Religious Differences’ was to Kant as odd an expression as ‘different morals’ ([1794] 1996: n336; emphasis in the original). However, when around 1600 people such as Purchas hesitantly began to pluralize religion, they included beliefs but were primarily thinking of what Richard Hooker called its ‘effects’, the customs and practices that defined a people even more definitively than did their physical appearance, whether they be Christians, ‘heathens, Turks, and infidels’ (Hooker [1597] 1617: 186). If one understands religion in that sense, then one can indeed say that at this time ‘religious classifications were taken more seriously than civil or racial ones’ (Rubies 2000: 173), albeit one would need to be clear that insofar as one can attribute an idea of race to that period, it too would have more to do with how people thought and acted than with what they looked like. As another scholar has observed: ‘Renaissance geographers and readers considered mental characteristics to be even more fundamental for classifying humans than physical ones’ (S. Davies 2016: 217). In presenting a genealogy of the way the current distinction between race and religion was shaped during the period from the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-eighteenth century, this chapter will focus, first, on the use of the term ‘religion’ by Europeans to characterize the customs of various peoples. The chief context in which this took place was in the reports of missionaries and the attempts by the reading public to make sense, and to a certain extent resist, the diversity to which they were thereby introduced. I will next turn to the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century controversies surrounding the missions, and specifically the Chinese Rites controversy, to illustrate some of these same issues in a concrete case, before turning to some of the attempts made in the early eighteenth century to survey all the religions of the world. I will then look at the way the term race began to emerge in Europe during this period as one of a number of terms used when differentiating peoples on the basis of both their appearance and their customs. Broad divisions within humanity were beginning to be drawn, but there was as yet no attempt to make these into a comprehensive system. Finally, I will examine the laws governing slavery and blood purity to show that the contexts in which race and religion came to be most clearly separated were organized around the possibility of conversion. It was a context that pitted the missionaries against the colonizers, a fact that helps to explain the fervour with which the questions were debated.

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THE RELIGION OF GENTILES From the early sixteenth century onwards, the reading public in Europe were drawn to travel writings and the reports of missionaries about peoples whose customs and practices were vastly different from those of the Christians, Jews and Muslims with whom they were already somewhat familiar. At the same time scholars were investigating classical texts for knowledge of the ancient customs and religions of peoples who had apparently disappeared from the world and who were thought by many, especially in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, to have been in possession of a superior form of knowledge. Jean Bodin in his Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (Method for the Easy Comprehension of History), first published in 1566, provided an extensive account of the origins and histories of peoples that anticipated later general histories of the races. He dismissed those ‘historians who attack the superstition, impiety, magic, infamous lusts, and cruelties of the Greeks, Egyptians, Arabs, and Chaldeans, yet omit the qualities which are praiseworthy’, adding that it was from them that ‘letters, useful arts, virtues, training, philosophy, religion, and lastly humanitas itself flowed upon earth as from a fountain’ (Bodin [1566] 1945: 110). The philosophy of progress that denigrated earlier times as primitive had not yet taken over. It was by no means inevitable that the flood of information that became available in this period about the customs and practices of ancient and distant peoples would be processed in terms of specifically religious practices. However, one consideration that helps to explain why it proved so compelling to writers at that time to impose the category of religion on those customs and practices was expressed with particular clarity by Edward Herbert of Cherbury in his De religione gentilium (On the Religion of Gentiles), published posthumously in 1663. He was concerned with the long-standing problem of whether eternal salvation was in principle attainable for all members of the human race, a problem that had become more acute with the recognition that the world was larger and more varied than had previously been realized. Instead of condemning pagans, he called for more consideration for their souls (Herbert 1663: 1–2). The basis he gave for this tolerance was his claim that behind the errors and superstitions of the pagan religions lay a common core that included belief in a Supreme God who is owed worship and who rewards virtue and piety, while punishing their absence if one fails to repent. This core of gentile religion could be understood as a kind of natural religion implanted by God by a kind of original revelation. Scholars in Europe scrutinized the writings of travellers and missionaries looking for evidence of monotheism and even of the idea of the Trinity to the extent that they might be found lurking among the superstitions and idolatry. There were thus four religions – Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Gentile – as there would later, for example in Kant, be four races: white, Negro, Hun and Hindu ([1777] 2000: 11). The idea that everyone, or at least every people, was religious by nature was attractive because it showed how God had given to all nations the means by which they could bring themselves closer to Him. As Pierre Charron, the Catholic theologian and follower of Montaigne, observed, the multiplicity of religions was ‘dismal and deplorable’, but some consolation could be found by locating the ‘general Point in common’ in most, if not all, of them ([1604] 1729: 722–3). David Hume in the middle of the eighteenth century launched a frontal attack on this approach in A Natural History of Religions when he rejected both the assumption that religion was ‘an original instinct’ and the assumption that religious sentiments are everywhere the same ([1757] 2007: 33). However, even before that, the claim that, because everybody is religious by nature, everybody could

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access the truths of religion through reason was being turned against Christian authors. These claims could easily be subverted into the deist argument that the superstition and idolatry evident in gentile religions also pervaded Christianity. Some Protestant authors made precisely this complaint against Roman Catholicism, but it could also be turned back against them. Charles Blount defined religion as ‘Sacrifices, Rites, Ceremonies, pretended Revelations and the like’ (1695: 3). If the superstitions could not be divorced from religion, or if the superstitions constituted religion, then, as Blount sought to demonstrate through discussions of the Egyptians, Etruscans, Druids, Turks, Mexicans and Japanese, there was arguably no place for religion at all. In response Christian authors highlighted the beliefs that the Gentiles lacked and that made it all the more necessary for missionaries to convert them so as to secure their salvation.1

MISSIONARIES IN CHINA AND INDIA In the seventeenth century the question of what constituted a religion was debated in the context of the Chinese Rites controversy. It was a test case of how European Christians should view the customs of peoples that were very different from their own. Matteo Ricci, who had arrived in China in 1582 and was in 1597 appointed Major Superior of the Jesuits there, directed his fellow Jesuits to respect Chinese customs when converting them. On his view it was unnecessary for the followers of Confucius to abandon such practices as ancestor worship as a prerequisite of conversion to Christianity: that would only be necessary if ancestor worship amounted to a religion. This approach was challenged especially by the Dominicans and the conflict between the two parties was only finally resolved in 1939 when Pope Pius XII issued the decree Plane Compertum Est, which acknowledged Confucianism as a philosophy rather than a religion (Pius XII 1940). The terms of the debate were set in 1687 when Philippe Couplet published Confucius Sinarum Philosophus sive Scientia Sinesis (Confucius, Philosopher of the Chinese, or Chinese Wisdom). The volume consisted of translations of some Confucian classics together with a long introduction that sought to show that, insofar as the teachings of Confucius amounted to a philosophy, those teachings did not amount to a challenge to Christianity’s claim to be the true religion. However, because that might suggest that Confucius was an atheist, the Jesuits argued that Confucius had anticipated the ‘true religion’. Proof of this could be found in the moral virtues, the rules for good life and the fair government of the nation (Meynard [1687] 2011: 195). Some Jesuits even suggested that Confucius could be considered a saint who had a premonition of the coming of Jesus (Meynard [1687] 2015: 60–4). That the Chinese Rites controversy helped to shape the concept of religion for the following century is suggested by the fact that the same dispute was repeated when some Pietists attacked Christian Wolff’s 1721 lecture ‘Practical Philosophy of the Chinese’. Wolff claimed that the rationality of his own ethics was confirmed by its similarity to the ethics of the Chinese. The argument relied on the premise that the Chinese had arrived at their conception of virtue through reason not religion. Wolff primarily understood ‘religion’ to be a matter of the way in which one honoured God through external observances (Feil 2007: 68–88). But in his treatment of the Chinese he had not taken the same precautions that the Jesuits had done to avoid the conclusion that Confucius was an atheist. And if Confucius was an atheist, then by implication Wolff was at very least complicit with atheism. When, in the wake of the controversy that the lecture had provoked and that had led to his expulsion from the University of Halle, he finally

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published his lecture in 1726, it was accompanied by copious notes in which he sought to defend himself. He broke with the growing tendency to seek to ascribe a religious instinct to everyone by arguing that having no religion was better than having a false religion. He could sustain this argument only by insisting that having no religion did not amount to atheism. Confucius was not an atheist because to be an atheist one had to deny God and the Chinese did not have a clear idea of God. At the same time Wolff announced his dedication to the teachings of Christ ([1726] 1992: 156n24) and his reverence for the theologians (159n52). Although for a while Chinese morality and Chinese statecraft retained a high status, in trying to save himself, Wolff had made the study of Chinese philosophy a risky undertaking so that Wolffian historians of philosophy did little to promote it. The Pietists in Halle were motivated in their opposition to Wolff in large part because of their missionary activity in East Asia (Purdy 2018: 126–30). But, within the context of the conviction that everyone has a religion by nature, such that God had provided everyone with some access to some truths of religion, albeit not the true religion, the activities and impact of the missionaries was increasingly under scrutiny. Protestants used the writings of Bartolomé de las Casas to highlight the cruelty of the Spanish in the Americas and their subordination of religion to trade and the ‘insatiable Covetousness’ of the colonizers (Kennet 1712: 16). Matthew Tindal in Christianity as Old as the Creation not only allowed that ‘God at all Times, has given Mankind sufficient Means of knowing what he requires of them’ (1730: 1) but also presented natural religion as more reliable than revealed religion (133). Revealed religion was open to distortion by the clergy and led to persecutions, inquisitions, crusades and massacres, as he demonstrated by reference to the behaviour of missionaries in the East and West Indies (166–7). The foremost of the Protestant missionaries, Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg, meticulously recorded the criticisms of the Christian religion made by Tamil Brahmins. They objected that the funeral rites of the Christians were inadequate. In addition, they ate cows, lacked cleanliness and used alcohol. ‘The law of the Christians abstractedly consider’d in itself, ’tis a holy Law, but is not accompany’d with good Works’ (Ziegenbalg 1717: 8). In other words, the debate between the two parties seems to have been about customs and practices rather than doctrine, even though Ziegenbalg insisted on faith in Christ as a prerequisite for salvation (1719: 16): ‘whether they be White or Black Men, Heathen or Christians, they must believe in Christ, and repent heartily of all their Sins’ (137). At one point he suggested that they had no religion as they had no law (Singh 1999: 140), but he elsewhere attributed a religion to them (Ziegenbalg 1717: 34). Indeed, he used the words ‘religion’ and ‘sect’ interchangeably and with some flexibility, so that one cannot attribute to him the Orientalist construction of Hinduism as a single religion (Sweetman 2003: 125–6). He acknowledged that the heathens of Malabar knew from the light of nature that there is a God and did not need to be taught that by Christians: ‘they would consider it an act of the greatest atheism if they should hear that there are some people in the world who believe that there is no god from whom everything comes and who is to sustain and to rule everything’. But this led him to reflect that ‘such atheism is even found among the Christians and especially among some learned people’ (Ziegenbalg [1713] 2005: 48). The fact that, even in the early eighteenth century, a Protestant missionary writing in 1713 would use the word ‘Christian’, instead of the word ‘European’ or ‘White’, to describe an atheist is an indication of how at that time what to our ears is clearly a religious identity served in places where we would think a racial identity would have been more appropriate.

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The hierarchical sense of superiority that came to be attached to whiteness derived in part from the superiority that was attached to being Christian. One can see this in the writings of François Bernier, who spent some twelve years in India. His account of his efforts to convert people in India included a telling anecdote. Having observed the bathing practices in India that had to be performed in running water, he told his Brahmin interlocutors that such behaviour would not be advisable in the cold climate from which he came because it would put one’s life in danger. He explained that this was proof that their law could not have had a divine origin but must have had a human invention. In response they told him that they would not call Christianity a false religion because it might indeed be good for Europeans. They explained that God had not intended their religion to be for everyone, but for them alone, and for that reason they could not receive foreigners into their religion (Bernier [1651] 1914: 328). This story has a sequel. Over a century later Kant took Bernier and his story at face value when, in his lectures on anthropology in 1791–2, he seems to have relied on a memory of Bernier’s anecdote to dismiss the Indians for their failure to follow the maxim that one should ‘think from the standpoint of everyone else’, by which he understood adopting a universal standpoint (2000: 277–8). Kant could not acknowledge a religion that did not seek to be universal. But if a religion can be considered the true religion only to the extent that it asserts its universality, then that commits its adherents to missionary activity and the promotion of conversion and assimilation.

FROM RELIGION TO RELIGIONS The Jesuits had a reason to promote the idea that there was something called a Confucian school (Schola Confuciana) (Meynard [1687] 2015: 607), but the terms ‘Confucianism’, ‘Taoism’, ‘Buddhism’ and ‘Hinduism’, at least in English, were largely a product of the nineteenth century, and, with the exception of ‘Buddhism’, none of them were common until the twentieth century (Harrison 2015: 101–2). To be sure, the impact of giving them names should not be overstated. It is sometimes said that Hinduism is an imaginary entity invented by Christian missionaries so they could attack it as a false religion (Balagangadbara 2005: 102–3), but they were already doing that long before certain practices were given that name. When in 1631 Johannes De Laet, one of the founding directors of the Dutch West Indies Company, compiled from a variety of sources a discussion of that part of the world, Hindus (Hindoi) were the inhabitants of Hindustan, rather than the name for the adherents of a religion. Indeed, in his chapter on ‘The Character, Customs, Institutions and Superstitions of the Inhabitants’, he used the word religion only once and then it might well have been to refer to the Muslims in India, rather than to the rest of the population whom he called simply Gentiles (De Laet 1631: 115). Something similar can be seen in Bernier’s 1667 account of ‘the superstitions, strange customs and Doctrines of the Indous or Gentiles of Hindustan’. It is not clear how much direct contact he had with the inhabitants outside of a small privileged circle, but in this account he referred only once to ‘religion’ as such and he did so in the context of the indecent and extravagant dancing of the women (Bernier [1651] 1914: 306). In fact, the word Indous appears only in the title of the letter suggesting that, as will be shown later, characterizing and categorizing peoples as such was not his interest, any more than the category of religion was. In the seventeenth century natural historians were beginning the task of making inventories and catalogues, but the age of classification, the age of Linnaeus, had not yet come to fruition.

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Surveys of religion from the mid-seventeenth century to the middle of the eighteenth century were more concerned with establishing both the superiority of Christianity and the unity or commonality of the religion of the Gentiles than with multiplying religions on the basis of the different customs and practices they displayed. This can be seen in Alexander Ross’s Pansebeia, or, a View of all Religions in the World from the Creation to these Times from 1653. When it came to the religion of the ancient Europeans, his strategy was to assimilate their religion to that found in other parts of the world: ‘the same Paganism was professed among them, that was in the other parts of the world and which is yet professed in Lapland, Finland and some parts of Norway’ (Ross 1653: 95). Ross was well aware that there would be those who would object that ‘seeing the world is pestered with too many Religions, it were better their names and Tenets were obliterated then [sic] published’ (ix). This shows the suspicion under which such surveys of religion were held at this time. Ross’s response was to attack heathenism while supporting the idea of natural religion. This was still the case with Thomas Broughton’s Bibliotheca historico-sacra, which consisted of some 1,100 pages published in two volumes between 1737 and 1739, with subsequent editions appearing under the title An Historical Dictionary of All Religions from the Creation of the World to this Present Time. There is a brief discussion of ‘Brachmins or Bramins’, who were described as ‘a sect of Indian philosophers’, but the word Hinduism does not appear (Broughton 1737–9: 172–4). And somewhat unusually, albeit in a discussion that lasted barely a page, there was an entry on Budsdo that described the religion of ‘Budsdoism’ whose followers were Budsdoists and whose founder was Budha (179–80). Broughton retained the framework of only four grand religions – Jewish, Christian, Mahommedan and pagan – and remained attached to the idea that there could be only one true religion and that the others were ‘falsely so called’ and ‘consequently takes in superstition’ (i). Hannah Adams is sometimes credited with being, in 1784, the first of the major classifiers to break with the division of religions into true and false. However, as late as 1817, in A Dictionary of All Religions and Religious Denominations, which was the fourth version of her ever more expansive account of the religions of the world, she was still organizing religions, other than the Jews, Christians and Mahometans, geographically by countries and their inhabitants. These were the so-called pagan or heathen religions. So there was an entry on the great variety of sects of ‘the Hindoo religionists’, but in her mind ‘the Hindoos’ were first and foremost the original inhabitants of Hindoostan (Adams 1817: 107, 110). There was no separate entry on the Buddha or on Buddhism, although there was one on the Birmans, who were the worshippers of ‘Boodh’ in the Birman country of India, and one on Budso, a form of pagan worship in Japan whose author was the Buddha (46, 49). With Adams the process of differentiating religions was underway, but there was still no attempt even in her exhaustive surveys to give to each religion encountered a specific name for the purpose of classification. One commentator has suggested that ‘the early modern taxonomic system does not identify religions as such – that is, its aim apparently is not to sort out the plurality of “belief systems” as we understand the term today; instead it recognizes and categorizes different “nations,” or in our terms, different “peoples”’ (Masuzawa 2005: 61; emphasis in the original). In support of this claim, one can still find as late as the fourth edition of Adams’s Dictionary entries on the Chinese, the Japanese and on Negroes. If there is a book that transcends the limits that are on display in Ross and Broughton it is Jean-Frédéric Bernard’s The Ceremonies and Religious Customs of the Various Nations of

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the Known World. It began publication in 1727 and was celebrated not least because of the quality of the illustrations supplied by Bernard Picart (Wyss-Giacosa 2006). These volumes included extracts from important studies of Jews, Roman Catholics, Greeks, Protestants (expanded to include Anglicans, Puritans, Quakers, Pre-Adamites and so on) as well as Mahometism. There were also two volumes devoted to the ‘Ceremonies of the Idolatrous Nations’ that addressed the Americans, East Indians, Banians, Chinese, Japanese, Persians, Laplanders and Africans, among others, in each case highlighting their particular customs of each of them. In a General Preface to the whole work, which was not included in the English translation, Bernard, intentionally echoing Charron, wrote of ‘the extraordinary practices that men have put to work in the service of God’ and in keeping with the general tendency of the time remarked that ‘they agree on many things, have the same principles and foundations in the spirit of a good part of mankind, and generally accord with the same thesis, hold the same progress and walk together, except for the characters of revelation that even methodological libertines have been forced to recognize in some religions’ ([1723] 1739: 1–2). In the introductory ‘Dissertation on Religious Worship’, which was also not included in the English translation, he gave an explanation of ‘the origin of the extraordinary ceremonies, multiple extravagant devotions, and the infinite number of formulae used in prayer’ (8). Although he acknowledged that these would seem bizarre to anybody who had not previously heard about them, they arose from the same impulse: all human beings ask God for the same things. The similarity of their needs lies behind the similarity of their prayers, but over time humanity became perverted and lost the true idea of divinity. As a result superstition was added to worship (Figure 3.1).

FIGURE 3.1  Bernard Picart, Idoles de Tabasco, 1723. © Print Collector/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

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It has been argued that the book marked a significant step towards religious tolerance and cultural relativism, but even if Bernard and Picart were not as judgemental as some of their contemporaries and so can be given some credit for that in the long run (Hunt, Jacob and Mijnhardt 2010: 307–8), this salutary impact was by no means immediate (Figure 3.2). Although Bernard’s emphasis was on treating differences as superficial, it was inevitable that the differences would attract attention, something that Picart’s engravings did not fail to highlight. Nor should one underestimate Bernard’s hostility towards what he saw as the idolatrous character of Roman Catholicism (Figure 3.3). In this he was like John Toland with whose views Bernard expressed some sympathy (Bernard and Picart 1737: 217). Toland was another of those thinkers who used the practices of the heathens to expose absurdities in the Christian churches of his age. Whether it be music, feasts, incense, pilgrimages or sacrifices, ‘almost every Point of those superstitious and idolatrous Religions are by these or grosser Circumstances reviv’d by many Christians in our Western Part of the Word [sic], and by all the Oriental Sects’ (Toland 1704: 127) (Figure 3.4). But if one is looking in the mid-eighteenth century for the new conception of religion that will come to dominate for the next two hundred years, one could do no better than turn to Johann Christian Edelmann who promoted what he called ‘the equal validity of the religions (Gleichgültigkeit der Religionen)’ and separated beliefs from religion because beliefs differentiated people from each other (1735: 63) (Figure 3.5).

FIGURE 3.2  Bernard Picart, Captif Sacrifie par les Antis, 1723. © Print Collector/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

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FIGURE 3.3  Bernard Picart, Incas Consecrating their Offerings to the Sun. © Historical Picture Archive/Corbis Historical/Getty Images.

FIGURE 3.4  Bernard Picart, Widow Burning in India, 1728. © Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

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FIGURE 3.5  Bernard Picart, Moon Worship, 1741, African nocturnal ceremony. © DEA Picture Library/De Agostini/Getty Images.

RACE AND MONOGENESIS Just as the tendency in the West was to see differing customs and practices through the lens of a conception of natural religion that supported monotheism, so the biblical commitment to monogenesis meant there was also a tendency to want to see the unity of the human species behind the visible differences. To be sure, there were exceptions. In the late seventeenth century Isaac la Peyrère engaged in a debate about the origins of Indigenous Americans (Popkin 1987: 11). It led him, in the light of the limited time span allowed by biblical history, compared to the longer time frame that the Chaldeans, Egyptians and Chinese ascribed to their histories, to advocate an early form of polygenesis (La Peyrère [1655] 1656: 22). Some planters appealed to polygenesis to justify slavery (Godwyn 1680: 15–18) as did Edward Long in the eighteenth century (1774: 2:356). However, the main impetus towards polygenesis in the second half of the eighteenth century was the recognition that characteristics such as skin colour and hair texture were more permanent than had previously been recognized. Prior to that, environmental theories dominated. These were deployed to explain differences in customs and forms of worship as well as physical differences. We have seen how Bernier explained what to him were the strange bathing customs of the Gentiles of Hindustan by the need to cope with the extreme heat in India. The third Earl of Shaftesbury in his account of Egypt had similarly pointed to environmental factors, specifically floods and meteors, when trying to explain what he called ‘the natural Causes of Superstition’ that created conditions ‘of which their Priesthood cou’d make good

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Advantages’ (1711: 3:45–6). The best-known example of an environmental account was set out by Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws in 1748. Montesquieu believed that the climate not only impacted the laws of people but also was reflected in their religions. So, for example, in considering how the legislators of China ‘made their religion, philosophy, and laws all practical’, he understood that it was because they opposed the vices favoured by the climate (Montesquieu [1748] 1989: 236). It was widely thought, even in the middle of the eighteenth century, that skin colour and other distinctive physical aspects change as a result of variations in climate and diet, even if it took a few generations for such changes to occur. Indeed, Buffon in 1749 in the third volume of his Histoire naturelle insisted in his essay on human varieties that if a colony of Africans were brought north after eight, ten or twelve generations they would be less black than their ancestors and perhaps as white as the local inhabitants (1749: 523–4). Given his conviction that these visible markers changed over time, he sometimes appealed to dispositions, manners and customs to establish that varieties that looked alike, such as the Chinese and the Tartars, were different (385).2 Buffon also singled out those races or peoples that he believed had no religion, such as the Laplanders, Tartars and Tongusians. So, for example, the Laplanders ‘have no idea of religion, nor of a Supreme Being. They are mostly idolaters and they are all very superstitious’ (375). When Buffon returned to the question of human varieties in 1777, he again emphasized their superstitions, but with the added observation that even those Laplanders who converted to Christianity persisted with their idols (1777: 471–2). A lack of (true) religion was in this context seen as evidence of inferiority. Buffon’s chapter on human varieties contributed to the long process by which ‘race’ eventually, at some time in the mid-nineteenth century, became the decisive word for the discussion of human differences. Prior to that, the term ‘variety’, which Buffon also favoured, seemed more likely to serve in its place, given the preference that Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and James Cowles Prichard also showed for this word. However, in this same chapter Buffon deployed the word ‘race’ albeit he left it undefined, and indeed for much of the essay he deployed ‘species’ as a synonym for it. It was only in the final paragraph that he declared that humankind is not composed of essentially different species and that there was originally only one human species, which, having spread itself out across the surface of the earth, subsequently underwent changes under the influence of climate, differences of nutrition, the manner of existence, epidemic diseases and from mixing (Buffon 1749: 529–30). It was Kant who in 1775 offered the first definition of race to signal radical, even permanent, diversity, without compromising the idea of humanity as a single species against the proponents of polygenesis. Races were understood to be ‘deviations that are constantly preserved over many generations and come about as a consequence of migration (dislocation to other regions) or through interbreeding with other deviations of the same line of descent, which always produces half-breed off-spring’ (Kant [1777] 2000: 9). With this definition he succeeded in reconciling monogenesis with an account of hereditary differences similar to that promoted by the polygenists. Beyond any impact that the environment might have, the differences between races were permanent and could be changed only by race mixing (Bernasconi 2001). Buffon’s descriptive histoire naturelle was in this way transformed by Kant into a natural history that was teleological. The way was opened to a progressive history where what previously had been seen as inferiority was transformed into a permanent condition of primitivity. There could be races outside history altogether, as there had earlier been peoples without religion.

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But, before being a historical category, as it was in the nineteenth century, even more than a biological category, ‘race’ was a geographical category. Bernier seems to have been the first to have used the word as part of an attempt to give an exhaustive list of the different varieties of people in the world. He did not clearly distinguish ‘race’ from ‘species’, a distinction that would not be made with any clarity until the 1770s. That he used the two words as synonyms is clear from the title of his 1684 essay, ‘A New Division of the Earth According to the Different Species or Races of Men’ (Bernier [1684] 2000). But the title also makes clear that his own interest was not primarily in dividing the peoples of the earth into groups, but redrawing geographical boundaries. For this reason he did not even bother to name the different races or species, although they seem to correspond roughly to what would later be called the white, Black, Mongol and Lapp races with the possibility that Indigenous Americans and Hottentots would constitute additional races. Strikingly, he understood many of the inhabitants of Asia to belong to the same group as the Europeans, which suggests that in his eyes the gulf that separated him from the inhabitants of India was, to use terms that were only then beginning to take on their modern meaning, not a racial division but a religious one. But it should be remembered that religions were also seen geographically. According to Thomas Browne, there was ‘a Geography of Religions as well as Lands, and every Clime distinguished not only by their Laws and Limits, but circumscribed by their Doctrines and Rules of Faith’ ([1642] 1672: 1).

THE CONVERSION OF SLAVES The dominant interest in the case of the missionaries was conversion and thus a form of religious assimilation, but the maintenance and future prosperity of the existing order was dependent on maintaining existing differences, even after conversion. To illustrate the significance of conversion in the genealogy of the distinction between race and religion I will examine, first, the introduction of laws in the North American colonies that determined that African slaves would still be slaves even after baptism and then, in the following section, the Purity of Blood Statutes in Spain in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and their subsequent transfer to Spanish America. Within histories of racism these laws are sometimes presented one-sidedly in terms of race replacing religion as the decisive category, a move from a world governed by religious differences to one governed by racial differences, but this is to suppose that religion and race were already by then established and separate categories of classification. Rather, what is most striking is how in these two instruments the interweaving of what became race and religion is clearly visible. At the beginning of the seventeenth century there was a convention that Christians would not enslave their fellow Christians (Gentili [1612] 1933: 328–32), but it was put under pressure in the colonial context because the missionaries believed it was their duty to convert the slaves in order to save their souls. The resistance of the slaveowners to this proposal was documented by Richard Ligon who described how a slave called Sambo, who desired to be a Christian, was refused that possibility because his master judged that ‘being once a Christian, he could no more account him a Slave’ ([1657] 1673: 50). By contrast, some religious leaders saw slavery as a path to baptism. Richard Baxter, who was a relatively lonely voice in the seventeenth century to announce in print a principled opposition to the enslavement of Africans, insisted on Christian baptism as the only legitimate basis for the practice: ‘Make it your chief end in buying and using slaves, to win them to Christ, and save their souls’ (1677: 74). The eventual solution to the quandary

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was to introduce laws that allowed for the baptism of slaves without a change in status so long as the slaves were Black. The most egregious example of such a law can be found in the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, first promulgated in 1669. It read: ‘Every Freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his Negro slaves, of what opinion or Religion so ever’ (Parker 1963: 164). The phrase ‘of what opinion or Religion so ever’ shows an uncertainty as to whether the practices and superstitions of Africans should be seen as a religion or not; the phrase ‘absolute power and authority’ meant that African slaves were under a perpetual death sentence. Notwithstanding the fact that there were also free Blacks in the colonies, it was because they were of African descent that these slaves were treated differently from other slaves or from indentured servants, but the colonists themselves were not yet ready to embrace a fully racialized identity for themselves. They preferred to think of themselves primarily as Christians. This can be seen in the strained vocabulary of the colonists, as emerges in an analysis of legal documents. Within the Barbados Assembly up until 1690 the term ‘Christian’ still dominated and it was only later that the term ‘White’ took over (Gerber 2018: 84). A similar process can be seen in the Acts of the Virginia Assembly. Initially the term ‘Christian’ was juxtaposed with the term ‘Negro’. If the word ‘Christian’ was not used, ‘Englishman’ served as a synonym, as can be seen in a 1662 Act that ordered that the child of an Englishman and Negro woman would be a slave if the woman was a slave (Hening 1823: 2:170). But when ‘An Act concerning Servants and Slaves’ was passed in October 1705, in part to reaffirm with a few minor exceptions the principle that all servants who were not Christians in their native country ‘shall be accounted and be slaves, and as such be here bought and sold notwithstanding a conversion to Christianity afterwards’, the language quickly became convoluted (3:447–8). So, for example, the Act read in part that ‘no negros, mullatos, or Indians, although Christians, or Jews, Moors, Mahamotans or other infidels’ could purchase ‘any christian white servant, nor any other, except of their own complexion’ (3:449–50). The final phrase not only makes use of a racial label alongside a religious one, but it is accompanied by an explicit reference to skin colour. Furthermore, in another place in the same Act the term ‘Christian’ is also accompanied by the qualification ‘not being negro, mulatto or Indian’, when it would seem that it might have been easier to write simply ‘White’ (3:459). This illustrates the extent to which the Virginian colonists were still committed to thinking of themselves as Christians first and only secondarily as white. One can say that ‘Anglo-Virginians created whiteness during the seventeenth century and redefined Christianity as a religion of white people’ (Goetz 2012: 6), so long as this is not taken to mean that there was already then a shift from a system of discrimination based on religion to one based on race. It is closer to the truth to say that, at least from a twenty-first-century perspective, there is still in this context, among others, a ‘conflation of religion and race’ (83). It seems that the Virginians did not mean to create anything new with this law, but, if so, then in spite of themselves they had taken a step towards racialization by trying to retain a not yet fully racialized order under circumstances that had changed as a result of the decision to promote the baptism of slaves.

THE CONVERSION OF INDIGENOUS AMERICANS The Purity of Blood Statutes (estatutos de limpieza de sangre) were formulated by various towns and organizations in Spain beginning with Toledo in 1449, although it was not until the middle of the sixteenth century that they had the support of the Spanish king, by

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which time they had been extended to apply not only to Jewish converts to Christianity but also to Muslim converts (Sicroff 1960). The statutes barred all such converts together with their descendants from certain secular offices, guilds, monasteries and other religious organizations, as well as from marriage with the so-called old Christians (Cristianos viejos) or Christians by nature (Cristianos de natura). It seems that the initial motivation for these statutes was doubt about the sincerity of those who claimed to have been converted, but the fact that they led to an industry dedicated to the construction of genealogies supports the claim that soon ‘purity of blood came to overshadow purity of faith’ (Yerushalmi 1982: 12). Nevertheless, one should beware of projecting a biological racism onto this discourse. Fifteenth-century ideas of heredity and race are distant from twentieth-century biology or even from eighteenth-century natural history: Jewishness was not understood as being inherited on a strictly biological basis. It was transmitted like an infection or a form of pollution. For example, it was believed that people ‘of the purest lineage (de limpissima generación)’ developed ‘perverse inclinations’ because they had been fed the milk of Jewish wet nurses (Torrejoncillo [1674] 1731: 214; Soyer 2014: 34–8). When the purity of blood statutes were imported by the Spanish into their American colonies, their application gave rise to controversy. Alfonso Perez de Lara insisted that the same principles that had been used to exclude Jews and Muslims or Moors (Maures) in Spain should be applied to Indians and Blacks (Æthiopes) to produce similar effects ([1608] 1672: 281–3). This view was challenged by Juan Escobar del Corro, who argued that the Indians and Blacks were a different case from the Jews and Muslims. On his account, ‘purity of blood had its source in the main from gentile people who, after having received in baptism our true Catholic faith of Christ the Lord, observed it constantly and intrepidly without ever departing from it’ (Escobar del Corro [1637] 1733: 9). He recognized that the families of the old Christians must themselves have converted to Christianity at one time and that the conversion of the Indigenous Americans could be understood on this model. In other words, their conversion was more like the conversion of the Confucians from heathenism than a conversion from Judaism or Islam. In his defence of colonialism, Política Indiana, Juan de Solórzano Pereira sided with Escobar del Corro against Perez de Lara ([1648] 1739: 214). The meeting of the Supreme Council of the Inquisition held some time towards the end of the seventeenth century followed his assessment (Martínez 2008: 201–6). By the late eighteenth century, ascription of blood purity was confined to those who were ‘known, held and commonly reputed to be white persons, Old Christians of the nobility, clean of all bad blood and without any mixture of commoner, Jew, Moor, mulatto, or converso in any degree, no matter how remote’ (Twinam 2005: 253–4). And yet for those of mixed race who did not qualify in this way, one could at the end of the eighteenth century petition, and if approved, buy a certification of whiteness (249–50). The same welcome and the same opportunities were not shown to the Black population of Spanish America, whether free or slave, pure or mixed. However, as with so much else, the picture was not uniform. So, for example, the University of Mexico and the University of Lima were both founded in 1551, but whereas the former stipulated from the beginning that Negroes, mulattoes and former slaves could not receive degrees, the latter did not show any concern about this issue until after 1750 and then primarily because the number of mulatto graduates in medicine was threatening the livelihood of white doctors (Lanning 1967: 47–8). It was only in 1774 that the Inquisition specifically added Black ancestry to its categories of impurity, but it seems that this delay was because it could handle the issues without specifying race as a category (Martínez 2008: 245–7).

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CONCLUSION ‘Religion’ is as much of a social construction as ‘race’ is. Both terms are, especially when applied to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, distorting lenses and they both had very different meanings at the end of the sixteenth century than they did two centuries later. In Europe around 1600, if the term ‘race’ was used at all, it implied a plurality of races, whereas religion was most properly used in the singular. Christians believed themselves in possession of the (true) religion; it was the others who might share a race. Two centuries later everyone had a race and, except in the case of atheists or people at the very bottom of the hierarchically organized racial ladder, everybody had a religion. Furthermore, the accounts of both races and religions in their plurality were being increasingly turned into a taxonomy, even if, as yet, there was no science of religion and no racial science as such. What constituted a race or a religion in 1760 was still vague, but through the effects of race mixing and conversion, which brought a fluidity to the categories used to designate races and religions, it was thought necessary for the purpose of establishing social control to legislate the proper usage of both terms and, more decisively, the boundaries that determined to which race and which religion everyone belonged.

CHAPTER FOUR

Race and Science Skin, Slavery and Naturalism, 1550–1750 SUMAN SETH

In 1744, the Virginia-born physician John Mitchell published ‘An Essay upon the Causes of the different Colors of People in different Climates’. The paper drew upon Mitchell’s own observations and experiments to argue that there was no fundamental difference between black and white bodies. ‘[T]here is not so great, unnatural, and unaccountable a Difference between Negroes and white people, on account of their Colors’, he wrote, ‘as to make it impossible for both ever to have been descended from the same Stock, as some People, unskilled in the Doctrine of Light and Colors, are very apt too positively to affirm, and Without any Scruple, to believe, contrary to the Doctrine (as it seems to be) of the Sacred Pages’ (Mitchell 1744: 131). Indeed, as someone skilled in a Newtonian ‘doctrine of light and colors’ it was something of a misnomer to speak of black skin, for there was no pigment or dark humoral fluid that caused the variety of human colouration. The issue concerned the thickness, rather than the hue, of the outermost layers of skin. All humans, Mitchell insisted, possessed the same white lower layers of skin. That whiteness was transmitted, largely unchanged, through the thinner upper layers of skin of those who appeared to be pale. In those who were tawny, however, a thicker epidermis reflected and trapped a portion of this light, resulting in a darker tone, with duskiest hues belonging to those with the thickest skin. The inspiration for this argument, Mitchell claimed, was Newton’s Opticks, which ‘shews, that the Opacity of Bodies depends upon the Multitude of Reflexions that are made in their internal Parts; but it is very plain, that the thicker the Skin is, the more Reflexions the Rays of Light must suffer in passing thro’ it’. White skin, then, differed from that of ‘Negroes … in nothing, but in degree of Thickness and Density, and in Color; which different Density may therefore probably be one, if not the only Cause of this Difference of Color’ (123–4). To answer why some people had thicker skin than others, Mitchell pointed – as had countless others since the classical age – to the effects of the climate. Skin changed as a protective response to the harshness of the sun and, for those in the far North, the brutal cold. It thinned when protected from the elements by ‘luxurious Customs’ (Mitchell 1744: 140). In Mitchell’s telling, then, both northern Europeans and Africans had skin colours that differed from that of the original humans, for Noah and his sons would have possessed a ‘dark swarthy’ complexion ‘suitable to the Climate in which they resided’ (146). In Mitchell’s New World Creole version of human natural history,

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all peoples were related, having been founded in a single creation, but it was Europeans who were degenerate, compared to Americans, who retained ‘the primitive and original Complexion’ (Mitchell 1744: 147; Delbourgo 2012). Although both Mitchell’s willingness to demote white Europeans from their position as those closest to the beauty of original creation and his use of Newtonian theory to solve the puzzle of human colouration were unusual for the time, his scientific interest in the puzzle was not. He had a number of contemporaries with whom he shared a technical, naturalistic interest in the classification and description of human groups in terms of their physical features. In 1734, the iconoclastic French philosophe Voltaire, for example, described the differences between ‘Negroes’ and other human races, beginning with the skin. As important as his insistence that ‘this membrane is black, and communicates to negroes that inherent blackness, which they do not lose’, was his observation that studying such skin was now a commonplace. ‘No curious traveler ever passed through Leyden’, he wrote, ‘without seeing part of the reticulum mucosum of a negro dissected by the celebrated Ruish’ (Voltaire 1766: 6).1 In the first edition of his Systema Naturae (1735), the Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus divided humanity into four varieties by skin colour: Europaeus Albus (white Europeans); Americanus Rubescens (red Americans); Asiaticus fuscus (yellow Asians); and Africanus Niger (black Africans) (Linné 1735). Linnaeus’s contemporary, the French natural historian Buffon was sceptical of any attempt to cast the differences between humans as rigid or static, yet it is he who is often credited with introducing the term ‘race’ in 1749 to describe the changes wrought by the environment and changing habits on the human frame, such that one could observe large-scale ‘family resemblances’ among ‘Negroes’, ‘Lapps’, ‘Europeans’, ‘Americans’ and others (Buffon 1749). Five years after the first publication of his essay ‘On National Characters’ in 1748, David Hume would add a now notorious footnote, in which he declared quite simply that there were ‘four or five different kinds’ of men, and that ‘in general, all the other species [were] … naturally inferior to the whites’ (Hume 1987). This chapter is concerned with tracking both changes and continuities in naturalistic understandings of human physical difference in the early modern period. The most striking shift is a movement from an interest in genealogy (what was the relationship between present-day peoples and those whose origins were described in the Old Testament?) to a concern with anatomy (what, precisely, was the cause of the colour of African skin, and how easily changeable were human hues?). One might characterize the epistemic change as that from a question concerning fundamental (and familial) unities to one involving basic and physical diversities. The causes of shifts in both questions and answers are obviously manifold. Here I have divided the discussion into five roughly chronologically ordered sections. The first briefly looks at the impact of the European discovery of the New World on ideas concerning human origins. The second lays out the importance of the African slave trade, in particular, in motivating challenges to climatic and environmental explanations for human physical diversity. Section three turns our attention away from the previous focus on the large-scale social and cultural contexts in which race emerged to related intellectual arenas, particularly those concerned with human anatomy. The fourth section explores the emergence of racial taxonomies in the late seventeenth century, while the fifth – by way of conclusion and summary – delineates the debts that Enlightenment race science would owe to the centuries that preceded it.

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GENEALOGY AND THE NEW WORLD At the time of the European discovery of the New World, the most common explanation for the origin of human populations derived from the biblical book of Genesis. Humans made up a family, all of us having descended from Adam and Eve. Were more specificity required, peoples found in the three regions of the world were each related to one of the three sons of Noah (Ham, Shem and Japhet) who had spread out from the settling point of the Ark on Mount Ararat. Given the assumption of an original unity and eventual diffusion, then, perhaps the most pressing questions regarding the newly found peoples of the Americas concerned the means by which they had made their way across the oceans and the reason that they had never been mentioned in otherwise authoritative ancient texts. For the incendiary medical reformer who styled himself as Paracelsus, known in his own lifetime as the Martin Luther of medicine, the puzzle presented by Indigenous Americans was too much to handle through established means. Given biblical chronologies, he argued, Adam’s children would not have had time to make their way from western Asia to the lands they now inhabited. ‘[S]ome hidden countries’, he wrote, ‘have not been populated by Adam’s children, but through another creature, created like men outside of Adam’s creation … [O]ne would well consider that these people are from a different Adam’ (J. E. H. Smith 2015: 94). The assumption of special creations for different peoples (termed polygenism in the nineteenth century and opposed therefore to monogenism) was highly unorthodox. Giordano Bruno is perhaps best known today for his support of the Copernican theory, yet his denial of the logics of Genesis presented a far greater heresy. There were three original Patriarchs, he asserted, only one of whom was Adam, who was not the father of Ethiopians or Americans, and was alone the father of the Jewish peoples. A profound iconoclast, who questioned multiple other doctrines, including the divinity of Christ and the doctrine of eternal damnation, Bruno was burned at the stake by the Inquisition in 1600 (Livingstone 2008). Both more orthodox and more common than these polygenetic heresies were attempts to trace Indigenous American ancestry back to peoples of the Old World. Some connected them to the lost tribes of Israel, others insisted they could be derived from Tartarian stock. The Dutch humanist Hugo Grotius put forward a particularly complicated explanation in 1643, asserting that northern peoples were derived from ‘Germans’, most South Americans from Southeast Asia, Peruvians from China, and those from the Yucatan Peninsula from Ethiopia (Grafton 1992: 210–11). What was at stake in early modern discussions about these newly discovered peoples was the veracity of biblical narratives and hence the strength of biblical authority. If the Bible and other ancient sources were wrong about our origins, about what else might they be mistaken or poorly informed? Physical differences between Europeans and the inhabitants of the New World were of decidedly secondary importance. ‘[T]he problem of racial Otherness’, as Colin Kidd has noted, ‘tended to be overshadowed by a more pressing concern about pagan Otherness’ (Kidd 2006: 73). Although they would write in naturalistic registers both here and on other subjects, neither Paracelsus nor Bruno invoked ‘racial’ features as evidence for their claims. The most infamous polygenist of the seventeenth century, Isaac La Peyrère, who would be forced to recant his views concerning the existence of men before Adam, relied more on scriptural than ethnological evidence for his arguments. It was not, of course, that travellers to the New World failed to notice physical differences between themselves and those they encountered. It was, rather, that such

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differences tended not to matter a great deal. More important than skin or noses were rituals and pagan rites. For Jean de Léry, who wrote of his travels among the Tupinamba Indians in Brazil in 1578, the reason for dwelling on physical features was to dismiss the outlandish tales of earlier writers. ‘[T]heir bodies’, de Léry wrote, ‘are neither monstrous nor prodigious with respect to ours’. ‘Contrary to what some people think’, he insisted sniffily, ‘they are by no means covered with hair’. Indeed, their bodies were, in general, stronger and nimbler, their minds calmer and less vexed than de Lery’s countrymen. As for their skin, it was ‘not particularly dark’, given the climate of their home. De Lery’s remarks drew similarities rather than differences: they were ‘of a tawny shade, like the Spanish or Provencals’ (De Léry 1992: 56–7). What was far more remarkable was their lack of bashfulness at their customary nudity, a point with theological significance. De Léry knew he was on shaky ground: ‘I do not mean, however, to contradict what the Holy Scripture says about Adam and Eve, who, after their sin, were ashamed after they recognized they were naked, nor do I wish in any way that this nakedness be approved’ (68). The conundrum was a common one in the sixteenth century. Was it better to assume that New World peoples had somehow lost or forgotten God’s punishment upon us all, perhaps through the same process that led them to forget the one true faith, or – the alternative perhaps more consistent but more dangerous – had they perhaps never known Adam’s truth in the first place?

CLIMATE AND THE SLAVE TRADE De Léry’s climatic explanation for the ‘tawny’ colour of Brazilian skin was the standard one during the Renaissance, having been inherited from the ancient world. The word ‘Ethiopian’, for example, is derived from the Greek for ‘burnt face’, a climatic explanation for observed skin colour. Perhaps the most famous text in which the theory is laid out was Hippocrates’ On Airs, Waters, and Places. We are told, for example, that in the warm, wooded and humid land of Phasis, the inhabitants spend their life in the fens, sailing rather than boating and drinking water rendered hot and stagnant. ‘For these reasons’, he claimed, ‘the Phasians have shapes different from those of all other men; for they are large in stature, and of a very gross habit of body, so that not a joint nor vein is visible; in color they are sallow, as if affected with jaundice’ (Hippocrates 1849). Hair type as well as forms of behaviour and morality were similarly determined by geographic location and therefore climate. In late antiquity and the Middle Ages, questions about human physical diversity tended to be answered in terms of an underlying unity. The ‘prodigious and monstrous’ men whom de Léry refused to equate with Indigenous Americans were nonetheless men, according to Augustine, and thus descended from a single Patriarch. ‘Profane histories’ spoke of those with only a single eye in the middle of their forehead, of men with a single giant foot under which they slept, those with dog’s heads who barked like dogs. If such stories were not lies, Augustine insisted, then only one conclusion was possible: whether ‘nations soever have shapes different from that which is in most men and seem to be exorbitant from the common form, if they be definable as reasonable creatures and mortal, they must be acknowledged for Adam’s issue’ (Loomba and Burton 2007: 59– 60). In the Renaissance, as was typical, such medieval and classical understandings were merged. Physical diversity among the peoples of the world re-emerged as an explanandum, now with the added requirement that solutions to the puzzle began with all of humanity starting at a common point (usually wherever Noah’s Ark was imagined to settle) and

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then diffusing throughout the globe, physical and moral features changing according to the environments of the lands in which they settled. The French historian Jean Bodin offered an influential and numerically precise formulation in the later sixteenth century. ‘Under the tropics’, he wrote, ‘people are unusually black; under the pole, for the opposite reason, they are tawny in color … down to the 6oth parallel, they become ruddy; thence to the 45th they are white … to the 30th they become yellow’ (Groebner 2010: 379). It followed from such explanations that race could be neither essential nor fixed. Physical features were profoundly and rapidly malleable. Common calculations in the early modern period placed the date of Noah’s ark roughly four millennia in the past. In that short time, people’s skin (to take one example) must have changed from the lighter hues assumed characteristic of Noah’s sons to the darkest colour of ‘Ethiopians’. And as Bodin’s remarks suggest, Renaissance thinkers tended to assume that there was a fairly consistent mapping between skin colour and latitudinal location. We might term this a ‘static’ implication of the climatic explanation for human differences. A corollary ‘dynamic’ assumption – one that seems to have been less commonly expressed in the classical world than in the more mobile and global European imperial world after 1492 – was that a person who moved from the warm climate that had rendered their skin dusky to the cooler climates of paler denizens (and vice versa) would adapt, in only a few generations, to their new environs. Challenges to both of these inferences from the climate theory emerged by at least the end of the sixteenth century and multiplied rapidly thereafter. Thus, for example, George Best published a tract in 1587 seeking, among other things, to make the case for English settlement in the northern Americas. As part of this argument, he found it necessary to refute the idea that the Tropics were exceedingly hot, and hence unsuitable for those accustomed to colder temperatures. Those who believed the region was ‘extreme hot’, he claimed, based their argument on the blackness of the skin and the curliness of the hair of inhabitants of the zone, particularly Ethiopians, ‘which blackness and curled hair they suppose to come only by the parching heat of the Sun’. Yet, as he noted, all peoples from the same latitudinal band were not the same colour: ‘if the Ethiopians’ blackness came by the heat of the Sun, why should not those Americans and Indians also be as black as they, seeing the Sun is equally distant from them both, they abiding in one Parallel?’ (Jehlen and Warner 1997: 55). Roughly sixty years later, in 1646, the English polymath Thomas Browne offered no fewer than seven objections to the idea that the colour of ‘Negro’ skin was caused by ‘the heat and scorch of the sun’, the majority of which took on the presumed mapping between skin colour and location (Browne 1852: 182). He observed, for example, that Africans separated only by the river Senegal – and hence in practically the same climatic region – were of different colours. He asked why, if the sun were the cause of the darkening of human skin, such an effect was not seen in the colouring of the animals found in the same regions? Why were ‘lions, elephants, camels, swans, tigers, ostriches’ not also dusky, or at least duskier than their counterparts in more temperate places? He offered an inversion of Best’s critique, since Best had noted that people from very different latitudes (the far north and the equator) were the same colour. Browne noted that those from the same latitudes were not the same colour, as could be seen by comparing the inhabitants of ‘Cambogia’ and Java. Symmetry arguments provided two further objections. If the only issue that mattered was the relative position of sun and earth, one would expect peoples to be the same hue at positions mirrored across the equator, yet ‘they be Negroes under the southern tropic, but are not all of this hue either under or near the northern’. Even more striking – Browne declared it ‘very

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considerable’ – ‘Negroes’ could be found far south of the equator, in temperate lands such as the Cape of Good Hope, ‘in 36 of the southern latitude’. Travel that far north, and Americans were comparatively fair, ‘and they of Europe in Candy, Sicily, and some other parts of Spain, deserve not properly so low a name as tawny’. Finally, the phenomena could not be saved by suggesting that some combination of heat and dryness was the true cause of the blackening of skin. Africa was not nearly so dry as many presumed, and the part that was so devoid of water that travellers ‘are fain to carry water on their camels’, was populated by peoples that Ptolemy had termed Leuco-Aethiopes, or ‘pale and tawny Moors’ (Browne 1852: 185). Robert Boyle would borrow many of these examples in a chapter of his 1664 book Experiments and Considerations Touching Colors, concerning the skin of those ‘we are wont to call Negroes’ as he turned his readings of more recent travellers accounts against ‘the notions of the most classic authors’. Among his more novel contributions was a parallel example, this time for paler northern people, of the case of different coloured African people separated by only a small distance: ‘not only the Swedes, and other inhabitants of those cold countries, are not usually so white as the Danes, nor whiter than other nations in proportion to their vicinity to the pole’ (Boyle 1772: 1:715). By the end of the seventeenth century the fundamental point could be put very succinctly. Thus, Ovington, who voyaged to India in 1689 and published an account of his travels in 1696: ‘[U]nder the same parallels are people of quite different colors’ (Ovington 1976: 219). Where one might see the impact of the slave trade most clearly was in objections to the dynamical inferences of the climate theory, objections that began with the assumption that people were moving – or being moved – between latitudes. Best, for example, related the story of ‘an Ethiopian as black as a coal brought into England’, who married a white English woman and had a child with her. The child was as dark as the father, which led Best to conclude that blackness was due to some kind of ‘natural infection’ passed from father to progeny, rather than any effect of the environment. Best also described the case of Inuit peoples from what is now known as Baffin Island, Canada, who had been recently brought to England. Their skin, even that shielded from the sun by clothing, was dark, as was that of a ‘sucking child of twelve months’. Yet, such an infant could hardly have been persistently exposed to the elements. In any case, Best noted, the place of origin of such peoples was ten degrees to the north latitudinally of England. If people from the cold North were the same colour as people from the torrid zone, climate could hardly be invoked to explain their dark skin (Jehlen and Warner 1997: 55). Browne much more explicitly had in mind a mass of Africans transported from their homes in his essay: ‘For Negroes transplanted, although into cold and phlegmatic habitations, continue their hue both in themselves, and also their generations, except they mix with different complexions’ (1852: 183). Boyle would make the case that ‘the blackness of Negroes is some peculiar and seminal impression’ on the grounds that ‘Blackamoor boys, brought over into these colder climates, lose not their color; but good authors inform us, that the offspring of Negroes transplanted out of Africa, above a hundred years ago, retain still the complexion of their progenitors’ (Boyle 1772: 1:717). As the critiques became more familiar, they again became pithier, and this single objection to the climate theory would often serve to reject the whole. Hence the remarks of the French traveller to the Mughal Empire, François Bernier, who in 1684 argued that the blackness of most Africans was ‘peculiar to them’ and not caused by the action of the sun: ‘for if a black African pair be transported to a cold country, their children are just as black, and so are all their descendants’ (Bernasconi and Lott 2000: 2). Or Voltaire, who followed his 1734

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comments about the distinctive membrane to be found in the skin of a dissected ‘Negro’ by listing multiple other putatively characteristic features of such peoples and then declaring that ‘what demonstrates they are not indebted for his difference to their climates, is that negro men and women, being transported into the coldest countries, constantly produce animals of their own species’ (Voltaire 1766: 7). Observations of African slaves, one can see, thus seemed to provide empirical bases for a critique of the climate theory and a concomitantly growing faith in the racial peculiarity of black bodies.2

ANATOMY AND THE SKIN For all the many available critiques of the climate theory by the seventeenth century, it remained the standard scholarly explanation for differences in skin colour among peoples in different places. One suspects that part of the reason for this was the simple unpalatability of alternative explanations. Boswell, in his Life of Johnson (1791), related the story of Samuel Johnson’s conversation with ‘an Irish Gentleman’ on the topic in 1763. Johnson explained that ‘it has been accounted for in three ways: either by supposing that they were the posterity of Ham, who was cursed; or that God at first created two kinds of men, and black and another white; or that by the heat of the sun the skin is scorched, and acquires a sooty hue’ (Boswell 1791: 216). The second of these involved a contradiction of the story in Genesis. The first may have been somewhat more orthodox (and was likely a common lay explanation, Boyle haughtily observed that it was ‘embraced by many of the more vulgar writers’), but was rejected by Browne and Boyle on both theological and (more importantly for this chapter) methodological grounds (Boyle 1772: 1:717). ‘[I]t is a very injurious method unto philosophy’, wrote Browne, ‘and a perpetual promotion of ignorance, in points of obscurity … to fall upon a present refuge into miracles; or recur unto immediate contrivance from the unsearchable hands of God’ (1852: 197). For those who were simultaneously unwilling to countenance polygenism and who were also committed to some form of naturalistic explanation, the climate theory remained a kind of default position. The alternative was a different – and usually equally speculative – set of physical causes. Browne offered four, but with no great confidence in any of them. The colour might have arisen by drinking ‘certain waters or fountains of peculiar operations’. It may have come about through ‘the power and efficacy of imagination’, with a white progenitor, for example, having seen or thought of something dark at conception. Boyle, who suggested a similar possibility, gave the example of a woman who had gazed for a long time at red pebbles on the floor of a healing well, who then gave birth to a child whose skin was speckled with spots of the size and colour of the stones. Browne posited, thirdly, that darker skin may have emerged gradually, via the operation of a form of illness like the black jaundice, which over generations may have added a few shades of colour to eventually reach the hue of Africans. Or, finally, blackness might have emerged as a sudden mutation. Boyle seemed particularly taken with this option, and offered an example taken from the writing of an Englishman, Andrew Battel, who had spent almost eighteen years in and around Angola. Battel told of white children born to Black parents, who were presented to the king of Longo as his witches. ‘I see not’, wrote Boyle, ‘why it should not be at least as possible, that white parents may sometimes have black children, as that African Negroes should sometimes have lastingly white ones’ (Boyle 1772: 1:719). No doubt Boyle had a naturalistic interest in the origins of human skin colouration, but in putting forward alternatives to the climate theory, he also had important theological

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stakes in mind. As Kidd has argued, ‘Insofar as the intelligentsia of Early Modern Europe marshalled forces to tackle the issue of race, it was primarily to defuse the explosive potential of racial difference as a weapon in the hands of religious heterodoxy’ (2006: 55). Voltaire’s case would eventually show that criticisms of the climate theory could be used to advocate for polygenism. For the orthodox, if one could not defend the climate theory, one required a monogenetic substitute, which is precisely what Browne and Boyle were seeking to provide. Kidd is surely right to claim that ‘racial questions belonged within the empire of theology’ during the seventeenth century (Kidd 2006: 69). Yet across that period race also began to take on an intellectual interest in its own right, due in no small part to the investigations of anatomists into the structure of human skin. Vesalius had studied the skin of a living subject in 1543 by blistering it with a burning candle and observing that it split into two distinct layers, but he had not paid attention to colouration. The Parisian anatomist Jean Riolan would reproduce the double-layered effect in 1618 using a chemical blistering agent and a Black subject, now with a particular focus on the seat of pigmentation. Riolan demonstrated that only the top layer was tinted, while the lower remained pale, confirming for him the climate theory, since it would seem to follow that the layer of skin exposed to the sun should be the darkest (Klaus 2006: 5). In his 1664 treatise on colours, Boyle would offer two pieces of evidence to confirm the notion that it was the outermost layer – and only that – which contained pigment. The first came from a ‘young Negro’ whom he himself knew, who had suffered from a disease that produced small tumours, which had broken through the skin. When they were gone, ‘whitish specks’ were observable in their place. Presumably, Boyle imagined that some of the white lower skin had been pushed to the surface, and traces were left behind. His second example was derived from studies conducted by the Dutch physician Willem Piso, who, as Boyle would phrase it, had ‘the opportunity in Brasil to dissect many Negroes’. Piso, too, had found that when the epidermis was removed, what remained of the skin ‘appeared just as white as that of European bodies’ (Boyle 1772: 1:718). It is true that the seventeenth century saw what Craig Koslofsky has termed ‘an intense interest in skin color’ (2014). But that interest, at first, was not focused on skin colour as a means of taxonomically distinguishing between races. Riolan distinguished, for example, between the colour of the uppermost layer of the skin (the surpeau) and that of what he termed the ‘true skin’ (Fend 2017: 146). In doing so, he was drawing on a tradition dating back to the classical age, which understood the colour of the skin as an indication of the humoral balance – or complexion – of the body it surrounded. What mattered, in fact, to both physicians and painters was the body’s colour, of which the skin’s colour was only a marker. In the Middle Ages, according to Valentin Groebner, ‘The exterior and the interior of a person were held to be identical: colors not only denoted skin pigmentation, but were categories of the medieval doctrine of signatures’ (2007: 119). The body was coloured, then, from the inside out. For black skin, Riolan’s observations would seem to suggest, one could not read the body from surface to core, for the action of the sun produced an outermost layer that was no longer revealing of the state of the true colour beneath it. Not all were willing to abandon this mapping between the outermost layer and the body’s innermost recesses, however. For Alexander Read, who repeated Riolan’s experiments in 1642 and obtained similar results, blackness could not be explained solely in terms of climatic action. The tinting of all skin, he argued, was a direct humoral colouration. Trace amounts of the humors left the body during perspiration and some small portion remained on the skin. The difference between Negro and white bodies was

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not the colour per se, but the fact – according to Read – that Negroes had larger pores, which allowed more humoral matter to escape, and hence more to be deposited (Klaus 2006: 6). Boyle, one can see, was jettisoning two notions of the ‘most classic authors’ – both the climatic and the humoral understanding of colouration – with his insistence on blackness as a heritable accident. At the same time, Boyle, Browne and others were participating in a profound shift in the meaning of the word complexion. No longer a term for the shifting and flexible balance between the humours of an individual body, it had become a word for the fixed external characteristics of groups of people (Groebner 2007: 2010). If the seventeenth century saw a broad and significant interest in the nature of human skin, that interest would redouble after the mid-1660s, when the Italian physician Marcello Malpighi published results evidencing a micro-anatomical distinction between black and white bodies. Malpighi had discovered a different layer of skin between the two previously known ones, terming this additional layer the rete mucosum or mucosal net. In one of his experiments, on a non-European subject, he observed that the mucosal layer was darkly coloured, while the two surrounding layers were not. He would later conclude: ‘It is certain that the cutis [of the Ethiopian] is white, as is the cuticula too; hence all their blackness arises from the underlying mucous and netlike body’ (Klaus 2006: 6). It would be precisely this result, of course, that Voltaire would cite as evidence that black and white humans were of different species. Andrew Curran has termed it ‘undoubtedly the most important skin related discovery of the early modern era’, and it produced near-immediate interest and elaboration (2011: 121). Riolan’s location of the skin’s pigmentation in the outermost layer had, after all, appeared to support the climate theory. The realization that colouration was to be found neither in the layer that faced the sun nor in the layer that faced the body’s humoral interior, but in a new intermediate zone seemed to support a vision of essential – racial – difference. Certainly, Thomas Browne became much more emphatic in his beliefs about the significance of skin colour since his first writing on the subject in 1646. Then he had merely asked ‘why some men, yea and they a mighty and considerable part of mankind, should first acquire and still retain the gloss and tincture of blackness?’ (Browne 1852: 181). Thirty years later – and roughly a decade after Malpighi’s first publications on the rete – he wrote to his son, insisting that ‘A greater division of Mankind is made by the skinne than by any other part of the body; that is, into white-skinned men and negros, which are [a] very considerable part of mankind, and differ also from others, not only in the color, but in the coolness, softness, and smoothness, of the skin, as though it had been oiled’ (Browne 1835: 1:213). New techniques and tools that we associate with the scientific revolution were pressed into service in exploring novel forms of difference. In 1677, the Dutch microscopist Leeuwenhoek was asked by the English Royal Society to ‘closely examine the skin of Moors, also called negroes’. In 1684, he reported his results, which refuted a lay explanation which held that dark skin was achieved by rubbing the flesh ‘with a certain oil’. It was impossible to permanently dye the skin in this way, Leeuwenhoek reported. Under the microscope, the skin of a ‘black Moorish girl, about thirteen years old’, was revealed to be made up of ‘little scales’, just as Leeuwenhoek’s own was, only ‘Moorish’ skin was less transparent (Feuer 1995: 256). In the last decades of the century, a profound shift had occurred. As Cristina Malcolmson has observed, in 1675 it had not been acceptable to make claims, within the Royal Society, about whether any given group constituted a ‘Distinct race of Men’. By 1690 one finds an explosion of interest in racial difference and in the skin as the most important marker of such difference, so that

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one could ask without disapprobation about whether a ‘Negro race of Mankind’ existed (Malcolmson 2013: 86). One did not, of course, have to move from an acceptance of innate physical differences between black and white skin to either a rejection of the climate theory or – even further – an adoption of polygenism, as Voltaire did. Buffon, for example, cited research that showed that ‘the scarf-skin of Negroes is black’, while still insisting that ‘it has always appeared to me, that the same cause which makes our complexions brown, after being exposed to the action of the air, and to the rays of the sun, which renders the Spaniards more brown than the French, and the Moors than the Spaniards, also renders the Negroes blacker than the Moors’ (Buffon 1791: 3:203). But Voltaire was also not alone in making the connection between bodily difference and the theory of multiple creations. In 1729, for example, the navy-surgeon John Atkins devoted a chapter of a treatise on surgery to ‘some African Distempers’ (emphasis in the original), within which he included a discussion of the cause of the dark skin and ‘woolly’ hair of the inhabitants of much of the continent. That cause, he declared, ‘must ever perplex Philosophers to assign’. It was true, he noted, that Malpighi had located the colour in a subcuticular mucus, but that merely pushed the question back a step: whence came the pigmentation? Rejecting the climate theory on grounds now familiar, Atkins concluded that ‘White and Black must have descended of different Protoplasts [i.e. progenitors], and there is no other way of accounting for it’ (Atkins 1729; Seth 2018: 200). We might note, however, that here anatomical and medical knowledge moved in opposite directions, for Atkins did not cite original bodily differences as the reason that Africans suffered from diseases peculiar to them. In general, even as anatomical studies of the differences between black and white bodies – what has been termed ‘race science’ – tended to provide new supports for critics of climatic and monogenetic explanations, and for emergent innatist conceptions of race, studies of physiology and pathology – ‘race medicine’ – tended to downplay such physical differences as causal elements, focusing instead on environmental, dietary and social forms of explanation (Seth 2018).

TAXONOMY The first attempt to divide the entirety of the world’s population into a small number of distinct races exclusively on the basis of their physical appearance was published, anonymously, in 1684 under the title ‘A New Division of the Earth’. Its author, later revealed to be François Bernier, had received medical training at the University of Montpellier, defending his doctoral dissertation there in 1652. Four years later he embarked on a journey to Egypt, India and Persia, which lasted twelve years, and in 1670 he published an account of his travels, Voyages de François Bernier, which was well known at the time. His short essay from 1684, which appeared first in the Journal des Scavans, cited as its inspiration ‘remarks which I have made during all my long and numerous travels’. Of course, he acknowledged, many travellers had noted that men from various nations appeared different ‘in the exterior forms of their bodies, and especially in their faces’, yet ‘there are four or five species or races of men in particular whose difference is so remarkable that it may be properly made use of as the foundation for a new division of the earth’ (Bernier [1684] 2000: 1–2). To our modern eyes, Bernier’s ‘four or five species or races’ seem oddly configured. In the first he placed ‘generally all Europe, except a part of Muscovy’, a part of northern, coastal Africa, much of what we would consider South and Southeast Asia, Arabia and

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Persia. Noting that the inhabitants of these vast regions did not superficially look the same, with Egyptians and Indians, for example, being ‘very black, or rather coppercolored’, Bernier invoked the climate theory, insisting that this ‘color was only an accident in them, and comes because they are constantly exposed to the sun’. Upperclass individuals, he claimed on the basis of his personal experience, who could avoid the harsh sun, ‘are not darker than many Spaniards’. Indians might have somewhat different faces than Europeans, and be almost yellow coloured, but that was not enough for them to be adjudged a ‘species apart, or else it would be necessary to make one of the Spaniards, another of the Germans’ and so on. For Bernier’s first race, then, physical differences seemed to be explained away, rather than used as the basis for a grouping. Indeed, no common physical traits are offered to define this first group. Instead, they are largely taken as the unmarked reference against which other races are to be compared. Thus, the second species – comprised of all the people of Africa not included in the first group – are defined by five enumerated physical characteristics. First, ‘Their thick lips and squab noses’; second, ‘The blackness which is peculiar to them’, a colouration that Bernier insisted could not – unlike that of Indians or Egyptians – be explained in terms of the climate and the cause for which must be sought ‘in the peculiar texture of their bodies, or in the seed, or in the blood’, although the latter was the same colour as that of all other peoples; third, the texture of their skin, ‘which is oily, smooth, and polished’; fourth, their scanty beard; and fifth, ‘Their hair, which is not properly hair, but rather a species of wool, which comes near the hair of some of our dogs’, their bright white teeth and their tongue, lips and mouth ‘as red as coral’. The third race was made up largely of what we would consider eastern, northern and central Asia. Such people, Bernier declared, ‘are truly white’ (a claim that signified, then, that the first species, which included most Europeans, could not be considered ‘true’ in their whiteness) ‘but they have broad shoulders, a flat face, a small squab nose, little pig’s-eyes long and deep set, and three hairs of beard’. Of the fourth group, the ‘Lapps’, Bernier confessed that he had only seen two in person. He described them as ‘little stunted creatures with thick legs, large shoulders, short neck, and a face elongated immensely’, and claimed on the basis of pictures and travellers’ reports that they were ‘wretched animals’. Of a fifth grouping – Indigenous Americans – Bernier admitted both that their olive colouring was not that of Europeans and that their facial features ‘are modelled in a different way from ours’, but did not deem the differences great enough to make of them a distinct species. He was, however, quite scathing about their dietetic practices, comparing them to butchers’ dogs and declaring their language ‘strange, and almost inimitable by Europeans’. Of what one might do with such a division of the peoples of the earth, what it might explain and by what it might have been caused, Bernier was essentially silent, except for the brief suggestion that the beauty of different women around the world was due to ‘the seed which must be peculiar to certain races and species’, as well as the climate and forms of diet (Bernier [1684] 2000: 2–3). On the question of Bernier’s immediate significance, scholars are somewhat divided. One assessment argues that Bernier ‘remained a man of the salons. He was not a maître à penser and founded no school of thought’ (Boulle 2003: 20). On the other hand, Malcolmson suggests that Bernier may well have had an important effect on British thinking about race. He was friends with John Locke, presented Boyle with a book and attended a meeting of the Royal Society in 1685, a year after his essay was published. Indeed, Malcolmson proposes that one important spur for the Society’s interest in racial difference in the 1690s was Bernier’s ‘New Division’ (Malcolmson 2013: 69–70). It is also

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true that Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s own division of the world into language-regions was composed in part as a response to Bernier. In 1775, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach would credit Bernier – described as ‘a certain anonymous writer’ – with having been the first person to have attempted the division of mankind into varieties. By Blumenbach’s accounting, however, other than Leibniz, no scholar would follow Bernier’s lead for a full half century. Voltaire’s polygenetic arguments were published in 1734 and declared that there were seven races. Each had been created separately, in the places where they were now found. In a characteristically iconoclastic fashion, in other words, Voltaire dismissed standard biblical accounts and the climate theory that tended to support them. Linnaeus’s division, published the next year, was both considerably more orthodox and more scientifically serious than Voltaire’s. Blumenbach would refer to the latter as ‘witty, but badly instructed in physiology’ (2000: 32). Linnaeus grouped humans with the apes and – somewhat oddly – the sloth, as anthropomorphic (literally, human-shaped) quadrupeds, and further subdivided humankind into four varieties, by location and colour. These were not, however, to be understood as fixed and distinct races. Linnaeus was a firm monogenist with a commitment to the climate theory. His four human subtypes, each occupying its corner of the earth, are best conceived of as a straightforward and schematic division. The schema has, as Staffan Müller-Wille phrases it, ‘more similarity with the abstract grid of parallels and meridians that underlies geographical maps, and thus serves as a tool for ordering knowledge, rather than depicting some reality “out there”’ (2014: 601; my emphasis). In later versions, Linnaeus would append humoral and attitudinal tags to this fourfold division, writing of Americans as choleric, Europeans as sanguine, Asians as melancholic and Africans as phlegmatic. Precisely such arbitrary and artificial aspects of Linnaeus’s system (as he saw it) would be scorned by the Swedish naturalist’s great French rival Georges-Louis Le Clerc, Comte de Buffon (Figure 4.1). Buffon compared Linnaeus’s taxonomic endeavours to those ‘dictionaries, where one finds nouns sorted in an order relative to an idea and, consequently, as arbitrary as the alphabetic order’ (Doron 2012: 98). On the more specific question of human taxonomy, Buffon diverged from Linnaeus in at least three important ways. First and most fundamentally, on whether ‘varieties’ (Linnaeus’s term) or ‘races’ (Buffon’s) were stable or not. For Buffon they were not, and hence it did not make sense to label them as permanent features of the natural world, as Linnaeus appeared to be doing. Since humans had once all looked roughly similar, whatever differences one now found were the result of ‘a train of external and accidental causes’. Such differences would last as long as such causes were in operation, but ‘it is probable that they will gradually disappear, or, at least, that they will differ from what they are at present, if the causes which produced them should cease, or if their operation should be varied by other circumstances and combinations’ (Buffon 1797: 352). What taxonomic meaning could be ascribed to such changeable and accidental categories? His second and third points of divergence can be imagined as inverses of one another, for he found Linnaeus’s groupings at once too broad and too narrow. The four varieties, he suggested, lumped together peoples who differed within each group. All Africans, for example, were not equally Black. Indeed, there was as much diversity among Black peoples as among white ones: ‘When we come particularly to examine the different people of which these races are composed’, Buffon wrote, ‘we shall perceive as many varieties among the blacks as the whites; and all the shades from brown to black, as we have already remarked from brown to fair in the white races’. On the other hand, all Africans who were equally Black were not correctly ascribed to the same groupings. One could not speak meaningfully of a single population of ‘black Africans’, because at least two ‘races’ – similar only in

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FIGURE 4.1  George Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–88): French naturalist. © Photo 12/Universal Images Group/Getty Images.

colour – existed on the continent. ‘Negroes’ and ‘Caffres’, Buffon claimed, ‘resemble each other more in color, than in their features, hair, skin, or smell. In their manners and disposition there is also a prodigious difference.’ Most basically, the association of colours and places could be misleading. ‘The Hottentots’, Buffon wrote, ‘are not real Negroes, but a people of a black race, approaching to the whites, as the Moors of the white race do to the black’ (Buffon 1797: 296–7). In a world where variety and difference

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were everywhere, and where distinctions merged into one another on a spectrum, it was impossible to cut the human family at only four joints.

CONCLUSION: BUFFON AND THE NATURE OF RACE C. 1750 Buffon’s views on race and human diversity, published in 1749, would effectively define the orthodox position on the subject for the remainder of the eighteenth century. His Histoire Naturelle was a remarkably significant and widely known scientific publication. In private libraries in Enlightenment France, it has been shown, the text was the third most commonly held item (Sloan 1973: 321). And those who wished to promulgate heterodox positions understood that Buffon constituted their most significant opponent. Thus, for example, the West-Indian planter and notorious racist Edward Long, who put forward his polygenetic views in his History of Jamaica in 1774, made Buffon the target of most of his scientific disagreements on the subject of race. To take merely one of many examples, Long insisted that orangutans and Africans were closely related species: ‘That the oran-outang and some races of black men are very nearly allied’, he wrote, ‘is, I think, more than probable; Mr Buffon supports his deductions, tending to the contrary, by no decisive proofs’ (Long 1774: 2:364–5). Whatever one believed about human races in the latter half of the century, Buffon was an inescapable and authoritative referent. As both a monogenist and a defender of the climate theory, we might regard Buffon as a proponent of long-held and traditional views as these had been refined in response to empirical critique over the preceding two centuries. Indeed, since the majority of this chapter has been structured in terms of the challenges posed to established classical and early Christian explanations of human diversity from the sixteenth century onwards, it should prove useful to describe a dominant position on those challenges in the eighteenth century. We began by exploring the conceptual difficulties imposed by the discovery of the New World and the attempt to slot Indigenous Americans into an established biblical schema. Buffon had no time for the polygenetic heresies that had been floated after 1492. Humankind, he maintained, was made up of only a single species that had multiplied and spread across the globe. Proofs were multiple, but the most personally convincing seems to have been Buffon’s inter-breeding criterion. What made seemingly disparate individuals members of a common species was the fact that they could produce fertile offspring. Horses and donkeys were distinct species because their progeny, the mule, was sterile. So-called ‘mulattos’ were poorly named, for – whatever the differences among Black and white humans – their children were perfectly fertile. With regard to the origin of the peoples of the various American nations, he would write, it ‘is the same as our own, I doubt not, independent of theological considerations’ (Buffon 1797: 337). This was traditional monogenism with what might be regarded as an Enlightenment edge. Buffon had a clear ranking for the peoples within his single human family. All deviations from what he regarded as the original, white European type were to be regarded as degenerations. Indigenous Americans, for example, were as degenerate and inferior as all the fauna to be found on the American continent. Buffon’s defences of the climate theory made him perhaps the most emblematic representative of that position in the second half of the century. ‘Of the blackness of the skin’, he wrote simply, ‘the principal cause is the heat of the climate’ (Buffon 1797: 348). To the accumulated objections to climatic explanations, Buffon’s would offer detailed rebuttals. It did indeed appear to present a challenge to the idea that darker skin was due

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to exposure to more and harsher sunlight when it was realized that those who lived at the equator were, in fact, ‘not black, but only very tawny’. Buffon also acknowledged – and the climatic explanation was also weakened by – facts that had come to the fore through the slave trade, namely that ‘black men, if transported into more temperate regions, lost nothing of their color, but communicated it to their descendants’ (305). But Buffon put his finger on a central supposition of the critics of the climate theory: they were imagining a very short time span in which humans had been travelling across the earth. Extend that time and seemingly devastating objections became less trenchant. ‘Many ages’, he mused, ‘might perhaps elapse before a white race would become altogether black; but there is a probability that in time a white people, transferred from the north to the equator, would experience that change, especially if they were to change their manners, and to feed solely on the productions of the warm climate’ (306). The latter part of this quotation also points to two other significant aspects of Buffon’s logic. The sun’s rays were responsible for a majority of a human group’s colouration, but other factors were also significant. Diet made a difference (particularly to the body’s shape and form) as did levels of refinement. The Chinese were fairer than the Tartars, for example, in spite of resembling them in all other ways, because the latter are ‘always exposed to the air; having no towns nor fixed habitations; sleeping upon the earth, and living coarsely and savagely’. Finally, Buffon swept away the critique that noted that humans in the far north (where the sun was weak) and the equator (where it was strong) were both ‘very tawny’ (and hence that the sun could hardly be the cause of darkness) by arguing that extremes of cold and heat both produced duskier skin. In this case, Buffon argued, the common cause, which was what imparted to the Laplander’s skin his characteristic darkened hue, was dryness (349). The new anatomical discoveries were unsurprisingly important to the French naturalist, but what they actually signified in terms of difference and its causes was not obvious. The ‘scarf-skin’ of Negroes might be black, but for Buffon it had probably become so over time via the action of the sun. It was possible, as the French physician Pierre Barréré claimed in 1741, that the characteristic black bile of Negroes was the cause of their dark skin. If, in white patients, an abundance of bile in the blood produced the yellow-tinged skin characteristic of jaundice, and if this bile, when it turned black, produced the darkerhued skin that medical practitioners, according to Barréré, associated with the so-called ‘black jaundice’, ‘why then, might it not be possible that there is a humor resembling the bile in Moors, that is always black’, so that ‘in some fashion the color of the negro is like a natural black jaundice?’ (Barréré 1741: 4–6; Curran 2011: 122). Yet for Buffon this seemed ultimately unsatisfying. ‘If one asserts that it is the blackness of the blood or the bile that gives color to the skin, then instead of asking why the nègres have black skin, one will ask why they have black bile or black blood’ (Curran 2011: 123–4). For this point, too, the climate theory seemed to provide a perfectly plausible answer. What was both novel and profoundly important in Buffon’s explanations came down to a word: race. Of course the word itself was not new, but Buffon deployed it with a consistency and meaning that was largely unprecedented. Solely in terms of numbers, the term may be found more than fifty times in his chapter on human variety. But much more important was the new work that it did, and the centrality of the concept of race for the defense of the climate theory and the development of what we might call Enlightenment monogenism. Naturalistic polygenism of the kind professed by Voltaire or Atkins, it should be recalled, was predicated on the idea of the fixity of physical differences, the notion that skin colour, for example, did not and would not change in different climates. Naturalistic monogenism, by contrast – especially that which worked with a short biblical

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time span – had assumed that physical features changed extremely rapidly, producing the variety of the human population in a few hundred generations. Buffon’s notion of race was placed squarely between these two poles. Drawing upon its traditional meaning as a lineage, Buffon used race to define groupings of people, bound by common descent over periods of time shorter than that since creation, but long enough for certain characteristic and fairly sticky group similarities to emerge. Peoples could be adjudged members of the same race, Buffon stated, if they ‘resemble one another in shape, in stature, in color, in manners, and even in oddity of customs’ (Buffon 1797: 197–8). This combination of what we would consider biological and cultural characteristics was important for a number of reasons. Most obviously, Buffon was making clear that colour alone could not make a race and was, contra Linnaeus, an inadequate way to divide up the human species. But more significantly, he was transferring key characteristics from the social to the natural realm. It was a trope known since the classical age and re-invoked most famously by Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws that manners and customs were shaped by climate. Those members of a group who moved from one climate to another took their mores with them and transferred them to subsequent generations, even as their new environments began to effect certain slow changes. Buffon was making the same argument for physical characteristics such as skin colour. These, too, were produced within a certain climate over a long period of time, but they were carried into new climates where they could persist for generations: ‘perpetuated from generation to generation, in the same manner as deformities and diseases pass from parents to their children’ (Buffon 1797: 352). But traits such as skin colour were not – contra Boyle, for example – mere sports produced randomly and nor were they permanent. They were produced by the climate and could – eventually – be altered by it. With race, then, Buffon had a weapon against what had emerged as perhaps the most powerful conceptual weapon against the climate theory: the problem of movement. Many climate theories had been effectively static: people in a given place were assumed to be a given colour because of their location. Where motion had been assumed, it tended to be unidirectional. People had diffused from a common centre to the four corners of the earth, their colours now a marker of the homes in which they had eventually found themselves and settled. The slave trade, among the other forms of movement that characterized the period after 1492, had troubled this static model. But Buffon’s new racial conception offered a response to criticisms. In his imagining, African slaves taken from their climate to a colder one would not be expected to change colour in the time spans witnessed so far, but their colour was not permanent, and hence not an absolute distinction between peoples. Even further, where movement had been a problem for earlier climatic explanations, Buffon now made it central to his own logic. The case of two very different looking peoples separated only by the river Senegal had long been cited as an argument against the idea that the sun was responsible for the colour of skin. For Buffon this was no problem at all. The river merely separated two different races, two peoples with their own distinct customs and manners and paths to their current location. Where Hippocrates had envisioned peoples in places, where Christian logics added to this an original diffusion from a central location, Buffon imagined an original diffusion and an ongoing set of movements. To understand the natural history of humans one needed to understand the history of races, groupings both malleable and persistent, both physical and social. It was this vision and this concept – shaped by two centuries of colonialism and slavery, empiricism and debate – that Buffon would bequeath to the centuries that followed.

CHAPTER FIVE

Race and Politics Empire, Diaspora and Law MATTHEW BENNETT

In 1550, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V paused Spanish conquest in the Americas to resolve legal and moral questions regarding the empire’s treatment of its Indigenous peoples (Hanke 1959: 36). In a momentous debate held that same year over the justice of enslaving and waging war against Indigenous Americans, however, the term race and the topic of skin colour were absent from the disputants’ arguments. The debaters, Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, met in Valladolid, Spain to argue the rights of Indigenous Americans before the Council of the Indies. Catholic evangelism contended here with state-sponsored conquest and the encomienda system, an economic ascendency by which Spanish and Creole colonists held dominion over Indigenous labour. To determine the legal and moral status of the Indigenous peoples was urgent for the Catholic empire, for their fundamental nature would govern their fate. The question set before the disputants was, ‘How can conquests, discoveries, and settlements be made to accord with justice and reason?’ (Hanke 1959: 41). At the outset of the Reformation period, then, the demand to conceptualize the nature of colonized subjects and the imperial project resulted in a temporary halt of bloody conquest and the elaboration of a taxonomy of barbarism. Although the term race was not consistently used during the Reformation, the racialization of colonized populations under European empires produced a social context in which the later Enlightenment concept of biological racism becomes coherent (Turda and Quine 2018: 22). To mark the Other in the sixteenth century, colonists deployed a congeries of difference based on pre-contact European categories, such as barbarian, wild man, Jew, Moor, animal and monster. A new term for the people-eating anthropophage, the cannibal, emerged from forays into the Caribbean and marked diverse peoples (Hulme 1992: 69–70). The Atlantic basin played an essential role in the elaboration of the concept of race, for it is there that empires such as the Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch and English first developed racializing methods of social control and the theories to justify them. With wooden ships hauling colonizers, slaves, European traditions and imperial ideologies across the ocean, and with the consequent and violent sorting of peoples, scholar Joyce Chaplin declares, ‘race was Atlantic’ (2002: 154). The social and legal processes of separating, devaluing and essentializing colonized peoples allowed for race to congeal around those populations in the late eighteenth century, but race was not yet fundamental to the characterization of the colonial Other in the sixteenth century.

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As the Valladolid controversy indicates, the use of the term race was not systematic in the sixteenth century, most often used to refer to animal breeding or the lineage of nobles (Hendricks 2010: 535; Morris-Reich and Rupnow 2017: 2). In imperial Spain – at the forefront of colonial expansion and racializing legal structures – the term raza only grew to prominence in the 1500s, to be defined in Sebastián de Covarrubias’s Tesoro de la lengua castellana (Treasure of the Castilian Tongue) (1611) as religious lineage, ‘like having some Moorish or Jewish race’ (Greer, Mignolo and Quilligan 2007: 79). One did not speak of a Christian raza in sixteenth-century Spain (Martínez 2008: 53). Similarly, in seventeenth-century England, William Jones would write abundantly of the ‘race of Christianity’ (meaning the fleeting trials of a moral life), but also of the ‘race of Abraham’ (meaning the Jews, Abraham’s lineage) (1635: 210, 462). The designation was usually for other people. Dictionaries followed the ambiguous meaning of race by also defining ethnic religiously.1 Not only are these definitions unmarked by a discussion of race or skin colour, they coordinate different peoples by the all-embracing discourse of religion (Kidd 2006: 22). Subsequent eighteenth-century French dictionaries continued to articulate race through lineage and animal breeding, with the first modern definition appearing as late as 1835 in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française (Hudson 1996: 247).

EXPANSION LITERATURE AND THE IMPERIAL VIEW Before the colonial Other was racially defined, however, European explorers, colonists, missionaries and slave traders presented fragmented views of Indigenous Americans and Africans in what Mary Louise Pratt termed the ‘colonial contact zone’ (1992). Scholarly investigations into the development of the concept of race in the Reformation typically hove into the first textual port of travel literature. In Imperial Eyes, Pratt demonstrates how travel writing produced the colonized subject for European readers in the imperial seat, readers who would then conceptually sort and rank the distant colonized peoples. Making the argument for travel literature’s implication in racialization, Ibram X. Kendi locates the first construction of race in Chrónica do descubrimento e conquista de Guiné (The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea) (1450). Purchased from Muslims who are ‘a race both barbarous and bestial’, the Portuguese sold in the slave market Africans (also ‘beasts’), who ‘despite their different ethnicities and skin colors’, Zurara viewed ‘as one people – one inferior people’ ([1450] 1896: 49, 84; Kendi 2016: 24).2 While this valuation predates many scholars’ understanding of the invention of race, a few things should be considered. First, travel literature was from the beginning political. It was written on commission for monarchs, for the promotion of colonial expansion, and to defend legally the reputations of colonizers and slave traders. Second, the construction of race that Kendi details is located in the act of sorting people by ignoring the cultural, linguistic and physiological differences between them. Race, in this interpretation, is a literary product that is deficient in cultural, linguistic and physiological exactitude and posterior to enslavement. The process of constructing the colonial Other was necessary for the promotion of imperial expansion itself and often began sight-unseen. Cartographers in the metropolises embellished maps of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with images of wild men and monsters on the margins (S. Davies 2016: 4–5).3 Visual representations of the colonial Other emerged from sketchy textual representations. In Thomas Hariot’s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588), engraver Theodor de Bry’s representations of Algonquians, based on John White’s watercolours, sat comfortably next to his imagining of the ancient and wild Picts.4 Walter Raleigh offered first- and

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second-hand reports in The Discovery of Guiana (1599) of monsters near the Orinoco, a cannibal and headless people called the ‘Ewaipanoma’ ([1599] 1887: 108, 135) (Figure 5.1).5 From this travel writing an embarrassing genre confusion even served to bolster le Comte de Buffon’s arguments for degeneration. Evidence shows that Buffon, in his Histoire naturelle (1749), used Abbé Prévost’s fictional travelogue to support his claim

FIGURE 5.1  Frontispiece of John White’s A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia, 1588. © Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

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that the African environment caused the people to degrade to darker complexion from the original whiteness of Adam and Eve (Curran 2011: 7). The origins of monsters and variation in skin colour was sometimes attributed to the dangerous imagination of the mother. In explaining why a white mother might give birth to a Black baby, a Black mother to a white baby, or a human mother to a monster, Ambroise Paré writes in Des monstres et prodiges (Of Monsters and Wonders) (1573) that, because of the ‘extraordinary power of the female imagination’, ‘it is necessary that women … not be forced to look at or to imagine monstrous things’ during or after conception (quoted in Hendricks 2010: 540). The presence of monsters on the margins of empire encouraged speculation about the nature of the human and the moral treatment of the colonized Other (Figure 5.2). An early promoter, Richard Hakluyt the Elder, represented Indigenous Americans as ‘idolaters’ and envisioned England’s colonial expansion as a pious act of necessity for the ‘Defendours of the Faithe’ (Hakluyt [1584] 1877: 8), a common rhetorical strategy to promote empire (Axtell 1981: 43). His cousin, Richard Hakluyt the Younger, would go on to publish the The Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589) to encourage colonial expansion, a project continued after his death by Samuel Purchas in Hakluytus Posthumus (1625). When extolling the ‘litterral advantage’ that Europeans held over Indigenous Americans (by which he meant the colonists’ alphabetic writing system), Purchas declares that ‘so much did the Americans admire the Spaniards, seeming in comparison of the other as speaking Apes’ ([1625] 1905: 1:485). We also find here George Percy’s insulting description of the Caribs, who ‘will lap up mans spittle, whilst one spits in their mouthes in a barbarous fashion like Dogges’, and likewise ‘eate mans flesh’ and ‘worship the Devill for their God’ (404). Here it is the European who

FIGURE 5.2  Conrad Gesner and Edward Topsell’s ‘The Mantichora’, in The Historie of fourefooted beastes, 1607. © SSPL/Getty Images.

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FIGURE 5.3  Jan van Kessel, Scene of cannibalism in Brazil, 1644. © Photo Josse/Leemage/ Getty Images.

spits in ‘barbarous fashion’, yet the description condemns the colonized subject – an Other who is animal-like, cannibalistic and Satanic (Figure 5.3).6 It is because of these characterizations that scholars often address travel literature first in historical accounts of racial formation. Studies of these first impressions by and large reflect on travelling Europeans’ reactions to physical difference. These portrayals of non-European bodies are not, however, exclusively negative. Christopher Columbus’s first description of the Taínos is even laudatory, in part because they would labour as slaves: ‘They are very well formed, with handsome bodies and good faces’, adding, ‘it seemed to me that they had no religion’ and ‘they should be good and intelligent servants’ (1989: 67) (Figure 5.4). In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century explorations of Africa, such was the disgust levelled at the Khoikhoi (known as the Hottentots) for purportedly wearing and eating raw animal parts that one Lady Barnard states in surprise, ‘I was told the Hottentots were uncommonly ugly and disgusting, but I do not think them so bad’ (quoted in Merians 2001: 208). A case in point: in Dutch astronomer Peter Kolb’s The Present State of the Cape of Good-Hope (first published in Latin in 1727), the chapter ‘A General Character and Description of the Hottentots’ is neatly divided into two major parts, one individually laudatory and another collectively defamatory. After a tragic love story about a Khoikhoi man named Caan, the narrative transitions from the former to the latter. Kolb writes, ‘I now return to the Character of his [Caan’s] Countrymen; and having already shewn the best Side of it, I shall now exhibit it on the worst’ (1738: 46). As good or bad as portrayals went, historical inquiries that take skin colour or phenotype as the inciting element in racism prior to the eighteenth century often miss the mark. ‘Blackness was only one of the many topics English men turned to in delineating the ways Africans differed from themselves’ (K. Brown 1999: 81). The calculation of

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FIGURE 5.4  Theodore de Bry, Battle in Jamaica between Christopher Columbus and Francisco Poraz, 1504. © Heritage Images/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

difference was rarely singularly focused on bodies, and as the descriptions of the Taíno and Khoikhoi above indicate, a congeries of attributes framed the Other. Europeans marshalled portrayals of religious practices, lifeways (food production and economy), dress, ornamentation and language all in a general mess of imprecise thought. It is for this reason, among others, that Smedley and Smedley designate race from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century a ‘folk classification’ (2012: 24). Nicholas Hudson concludes that early representations of the Khoikhoi as beasts, wild men and monsters gave way to more balanced evaluations. As contact in Africa increased through colonial expansion, this too gave way to an anxiety about how much the Khoikhoi resembled Europeans in the particularity of their beliefs and lifeways, an anxiety blossoming into racism (2004: 328). A similar process occurred in the evolution of European attitudes towards the languages of non-Europeans.7 Initial contact resulted in a language encounter of utter confusion, to which Europeans responded by forcing colonial Others to become interpreters, such as the four Inuit whom Martin Frobisher kidnapped in 1577 (Weaver 2014: 140). Colonists, explorers and slave traders first describe the languages of Indigenous Americans and Africans as gibberish or mere noise (‘barbarous vocabulary’), animal sounds (‘turkeys clucking’) or bodily functions (‘farting with their tongues’) (Martyr [1530] 1964–5: 137, quoted in Raven-Hart 1971: 63, 67; see Greenblatt 1990: 19). Once colonists learned these foreign languages, their descriptions became more evenhanded. The missionary linguists of Spanish and Anglo America

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inevitably grew to admire their study, leading friar Rodrigo de la Cruz to call Nahuatl ‘an extremely elegant language, as elegant as any in the world’ (quoted in Ricard [1933] 1966: 50). But similarity threatened sameness. During the Reformation, it was a generally held belief that the further a language was from Latin, Greek or Hebrew the lower its imperial and religious prestige (Las Casas [1550] 1967: 650). Yet Thomas Lechford optimistically writes of the American tongues, ‘their language may be perfected’ (1642: 52). It was not until the Enlightenment that non-European languages were discussed not just in terms of a hierarchy, but in terms of an innate character or nature (E. Gray 1999: 3). What travel literature represents for the history of the concept of race, it does so in parallel with the history of European views on the languages of non-Europeans. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, like other Enlightenment thinkers, pillaged travel literature for his philosophy, especially his speculative history of the origins of language, Essai sur l’origine des langues (Essay on the Origin of Languages) (1754). After declaring that different writing systems represent societies evolving through savagery, barbarism and civilization, Rousseau writes of Indigenous Americans, ‘The American savages hardly speak at all except outside their homes. Each keeps silent in his hut, speaking to his family by signs’ ([1781] 1966: 17, 31).8 Long before the Reformation, this question of language use tested the possibility for salvation and the very humanity of foreign peoples. Can monsters speak? The moral status of monsters was already resolved in Augustine’s City of God (426 ce), where he addressed the cynocephaly, ‘whose doglike head and barking proclaim them beasts rather than men’. Augustine declares that the cynocephaly are descended from Adam and Eve and the sons of Noah, rational and mortal, and therefore open to conversion and salvation (Augustine 1871: 116–17). If monsters speak, they are rational and therefore human. In a similar way, barbarism was initially defined by the Greeks as the incapacity for language use (Pagden 1982: 16). According to Augustine, regardless of the physiognomy, regardless of whether they were ferocious or rude, monsters demanded salvation. And yet colonial history demonstrates that conversion does not resolve conflict. We need only turn to the Jews and Moors, whom, even after they converted, the Spanish Catholics regarded with suspicion that boiled over into forced exile and legal discriminations. Of the early modern era and the Reformation, María Elena Martínez states, ‘Jewish people were increasingly depicted as a hybrid and corrupted lineage, sometimes even as the outcome of monstrous mixtures – of crosses with monsters, demons, and animals – and their supposed traits were being projected onto the conversos’ (2008: 29). Travel literature contributed to the formation of ideas about racial difference, and the representations of non-European, non-Christian peoples filtered into the legal and moral debates and philosophical speculations. These representations were quite often constructed to further develop systems of human subjugation. Travel literature functioned therefore to encourage expansion and justify social control through a Eurocentrism that resolved itself into race thinking (Quijano 2000: 246). But this resolution would not come until over a hundred years of sorting, subjugation and conceptualization passed in the Atlantic.

A POLITICS OF BLOOD, THE CROSS AND THE TWO REPUBLICS To return to the Valladolid controversy, the positions of Sepúlveda and Las Casas hinged on interpretations of Aristotle’s theory of natural slaves, Thomas Aquinas’s theory of just war, and theological demands for Christian conversion. Sepúlveda argued that war against the Indigenous Americans and their enslavement were just because they sinned against nature

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(especially as cannibals), could be more easily converted to Christianity, needed Spanish protection and were natural slaves (Hanke 1953: 146). Las Casas rebutted Sepúlveda’s notion of the Americans’ ‘unimproved nature’, creating a taxonomy of barbarians: those displaying animal-like ferociousness or lack of reason, those lacking a writing system and a language derived from Latin, those lacking basic forms of governance, and those lacking true religion ([1550] 1967: 645–54; see also Cañizares-Esguerra 2001: 68). In his hierarchy of barbarism, Las Casas demonstrated that most Indigenous Americans were

FIGURE 5.5  Louis Feuillee, A Traveler’s Representation of a One-Eyed Monster from South America, 1714. © Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images.

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not by nature rude but that – like Greeks, Romans and Egyptians – they displayed refined, if pagan, characteristics. Las Casas granted that there might be natural slaves, but that these would be mistakes of nature, such as men born with one eye, similar to monsters (Figure 5.5). Importantly, these coordinates for barbarism (rationality, language, social structure and religion) would feature prominently in arguments for inferiority and guide the forced, legal sorting of the colonial Other. This taxonomic approach to human difference developed out of the process of imperial expansion and the legal negotiation between the Spanish Crown, colonists and Catholic friars. ‘Spain’s colonial efforts’, writes Irene Silverblatt, ‘spearheaded the mix of “civilizing,” bureaucracy, and race thinking at the heart of modern experience’ (2007: 100). The debate, for all the noise, did not result in any legal conclusion nor any categorical judgement on the nature of Indgenous Americans. This lack of resolution is somewhat indicative of racial understanding for the next two centuries – terms were unsettled, concepts built on a prioris and contradictory reports from the colonies, their theorization legally, economically and religiously motivated. Christian theology advanced against and retreated from humanist theories of natural law and natural slaves, core imperial justifications in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Pagden 1982: 3, 45). Although the Church sometimes played the role of political opponent for conquistadors, missionaries participated in the segregation and cultural degradation of the colonial Other anywhere empire touched, creating ‘praying towns’ in Anglo America and reducciones in Spanish America (Andrews 2013: 27; see also Kawashima 1969). What is more, the arguments in Valladolid left many, many animas unsorted. It examined only the moral treatment of Indigenous Ameicans and ignored the already significant population of African slaves shipped to the Americas to labour in mines and on plantations. Unique in its concern for the validity of conquest, Spain is representative in the way that it showed conquest and legal designations enmeshed with theories of race, and that this conceptualization involved, in an ad hoc way, a congeries of pre-contact European concepts. In New Spain, not five years after the debate, the First Council of Mexico (1555) would bar Indigenous Americans, Africans and mestizos (mixed-race peoples) from ordination in the Church (Ricard [1933] 1966: 230; Andrews 2013: 17). This effectively sorted the new Catholic converts into a rigid and inferior rank. Even after religious conversion and assimilation into hegemonic languages and customs, questions lingered about sincerity of belief, about the true nature of converts and the colonial Other. Diego de Valadés, a mestizo in New Spain, published his optimistic account of the progress of Christianity in the New World, Rhetorica cristiana (1579), and there included an elaborate illustration of the Great Chain of Being (Figure 5.6). This universal hierarchy descending from God to humans and further down to the animals would later represent certain peoples, like Valadés himself, beneath the more God-proximate. ‘It was virtually impossible’, Winthrop Jordan notes of the Great Chain of Being, ‘to discuss gradations of men without stressing the closeness of the lowest men to the highest animals’ (1968: 228). Conversion was no panacea, yet the religious structuring of colonization proved ideologically imperative. In 1493, the papal bull Inter Caetera divided the globe into Spanish and Portuguese hemispheres for the sake of Christian conversion of the pagan masses. Later, as the Spanish threw the weight of their military and evangelical might against the Americas, the Laws of Burgos (1512) refined Spanish conduct towards Indigenous peoples, requiring conversion efforts and prohibiting mistreatment (Figure 5.7). Building from this, Pope Paul III released the encyclical Sublimis Deus (1536), which argued ‘the Indians are true men’, rational, desiring of conversion and therefore not suitable for

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FIGURE 5.6  The Great Chain of Being. © Universal Art Archive/Alamy Stock Photo.

enslavement (Elliott 2009: 194). The New Laws (1542), promoted by Bartolomé de Las Casas himself, outlawed the enslavement of Indigenous Americans, except at the colonial frontier (Elliott 2009: 165). Nevertheless, Crown law often contended against lax enforcement, belligerent Creoles and distance itself. Spain’s attempt to formalize the Church’s position regarding the nature of empire and the colonial Other found solutions in half-measures and separate but parallel legal systems.

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FIGURE 5.7  Diego de Valadés, Friar Preaching to Natives, 1579. © Album/Alamy Stock Photo.

Before this development in imperial law, however, internal colonization divided peoples with similar hair, pigmentation and facial features within Europe. How could skin colour determine one’s legal status when populations resembled each other and had intermingled for millennia? The internal colonization of Europe (such as the pogroms and waves of exile of Jews and Muslims) was an ongoing process that spilled across the Atlantic, transforming Mexican temples into Muslim mosques (Cortés [1928] 2005: 23).

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But as sixteenth-century writer Juan Gutiérrez states, ‘These descendants of the Mohammedan and Judaic races, cannot be distinguished by any visible extrinsic act, by any ocular external note or sign, from authentic Spaniards’ (quoted in Domínguez Ortiz 1955: 142). Later, in 1646, the Jesuit Alonso de Ovalle would make a similar observation about the difference between mestizos and Spaniards, writing, ‘There is no difference, not in the features of the face, nor in the form of the body or in the way of speaking and of pronunciation’ (quoted in Mörner 1967: 68). To distinguish between a modern understanding of biological race and the history from which it emerges, then, we should engage with the Spanish colonial casta system and blood laws. It is not the case that scientific racism appeared from the void with no antecedents. In fact, elements of pre-scientific biological racism emerged and expired throughout the colonial history of the Atlantic. Differences meandered and sputtered towards essences. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra makes the strong claim that ‘the science of race, with its emphasis on biological determinism … was first articulated in colonial Spanish America in the seventeenth century, not in nineteenth-century Europe’ (1999: 35). He adds, however, that the position of colonial intellectuals ‘doomed the first modern views of the racialized body to become invisible in European consciousness’ (1999: 68; see also Elliott 2009: 205). A key feature of these early arguments is a focus on the nature of the Other, an essence that is passed down from one generation to the next, like blood. Spain’s late medieval and early modern obsession with blood inheritance and pureza de sangre (blood purity) strikes one as an imminently recognizable form of modern racism. Andrew Fisher and Matthew O’Hara nevertheless warn us to not ‘equate Iberian obsession over blood purity with nineteenth- and twentieth-century theories of race’, because it might ‘risk obscuring more than it illuminates’ (2009: 6). María Elena Martínez agrees that the line between blood purity and biological racism is not a straight one, writing, ‘there was no neat transition from early modern notions of lineage to race’ (2008: 12). This admonishment appears as a reaction to earlier scholars, especially those with a focus on Europe’s internal colonization, who were more likely to trace the concept of race to noble lineage and class. Of singular importance for European aristocrats with noble titles, large estates and special privileges was blood. It was tantamount to inheritance. Benedict Anderson, for example, locates the origins of a class-based racial ideology in the European landed nobility, who imagined themselves superior by nature (1991: 149). Such was the insularity of nobles in the Reformation that a handful of dynasties dominated the whole of Europe, sometimes resulting in incestuous blood ties. Emerging from a period of rigid social hierarchy, some scholars locate the rise of class-based racism in the social control of noble matrimony and reproduction. Lower classes adopted many of the protective views on family blood, Michel Foucault claims, and this defence of heredity attests ‘to the correlation of this concern with the body and sex to a type of “racism”’ (1990: 124). Diarmaid MacCulloch observes that the Szlachta of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth derived their name from a Low German word related to family and race. This elite military caste was ‘prepared to claim a unique racial or biological status’ (2005: 192). Hannah Arendt likewise discovers in the seventeenth-century writing of Count Henri de Boulainvilliers ‘the germs of what later proved to become the nation-destroying and humanity-annihilating power of racism’ ([1951] 1968: 42). Writing in the seventeenth century, Boulainvilliers described the Franks conquering the Gauls and ruling as a caste apart and above by the ‘right of might’ (Smedley and Smedley 2012: 174). Although the

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influence of aristocratic norms in the formation of the concept of race is important, more recent scholarship has located much of its source in the forge of empire. The one-drop rule would determine one’s race and rights in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States, yet the concept of race that we derive from pureza de sangre differs in several regards. Blood purity was first and foremost a religious consideration. Jews and Muslims had impure blood not because of their bodies but because of their religious differences. Social control is slippery, however, when the mark of difference is subject to change. People convert, learn new languages and writing systems, adopt new ways of dress and modes of production. Christian conversion for the Atlantic empires cut both ways; it subdued and assimilated the colonial Other, but in so doing, threatened to extend rights to converts and upset the colonial hierarchy. When Jews, Moors, Indigenous Americans and Africans convert to Christianity in sufficient numbers, we discover a series of legal adjustments that reassert social control over these communities. The legal treatment of colonized subjects often operated under this type of social hydrology: a legal valve would open for colonized subjects, leading to oppressed peoples flooding into the upper reaches of the colonial hierarchy, causing a panic among colonizers, who would close the legal valve by some other means. María Elena Martínez documents the early process well when illustrating the ‘genealogical fictions’ that developed in Catholic Spain after the forced conversion of Jews and Moors in the fifteenth century. The type of racism exhibited there is referred to as ‘religious racism’ (Sicroff 2000: 592). This religious racism of the sixteenth century erupts in a series of laws passed by Catholic conquerors to limit the social mobility and political power of non-Christian or New Christian peoples. On the heels of the Reconquista, for example, the Catholics of Seville and Córdoba passed laws called the Sentencia-Estatuto (Royal Decree) (1499) that prohibited conversos (Christianized Jews) from holding political or ecclesiastical offices. These New Christians were suspected of retaining Jewish culture, religion and language, and their willing conversion threatened the dominance of Spanish Catholics. Anticipating legal bifurcations in the Americas, the anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim laws created an intense level of bureaucratic activity, resulting in the development of professional genealogists (linajudos) who would certify descent, proving to the court that a family was from old Christian stock, their blood untainted by the presence of Jewish or Muslim ancestors (Martínez 2008: 75). Scholars of Spanish colonial history contrast identity as it was constructed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century from the modern understanding, noting that it typically comprised two major elements: calidad and raza. Calidad (quality) was a broad assessment of one’s social status that included reputation, religious descent, occupation, wealth, honour, integrity as well as skin colour (McCaa 1984: 477). Raza, as described above, most often referred to one’s family lineage, although it increasingly took on negative and religious connotations. Struggles between Crown, Church, conquistadors and the colonized quickly resolved into separate legal systems in the Spanish colonies, referred to as the Two Republics. This political system represents the sorting of colonized peoples into a legal hierarchy with distinct rights and privileges. The Crown held direct control over the república de españoles (Republic of Spaniards) through laws and taxation, while caciques (indigenous nobility) maintained some authority over the república de indios (Republic of Indians). Africans who were brought to the Americas as slaves fell under the rule of the Spanish republic, but given that slave cohorts were often largely male and that Indigenous

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Americans were not subject to direct taxation from Spain, social and economic pressures resulted in many Africans marrying Indigenous people. Their children, termed zambos, might avoid taxation from the Crown, but their names would need to appear in the baptismal record book known as the libro de castas (book of mix-blooded people), not the libro de españoles. Which book one’s name appeared in determined one’s rights. The rights of mestizos and other casta peoples were, by the end of the sixteenth century, curtailed: they could not employ Indigenous labour, bear arms without special permission, work as public officials or become ordained priests (Katzew 2004: 40). In one late eighteenth-century example from Magali Marie Carrera, a woman named Doña Margarita declared that her name was recorded in the wrong baptismal record book, which resulted in a legal investigation concerned with her ‘passing’ as Spanish. Interestingly, this investigation did not regard the physical body of Doña Margarita, but instead considered her ‘social body’, which is to say, her calidad (Carrera 2003: 6). In an earlier seventeenth-century case, the Spaniard Gonzales Monjarrés slogged through a lengthy legal assessment to clear his family’s name of blood relation to an alleged New Christian. To maintain blood purity, Monjarrés advised his descendants to marry Old Christians, ‘because only on that foundation can one aspire to make more money and not lose one’s entire estate’ (quoted in Martínez 2008: 73). The possession of ‘tainted’ blood purportedly gave one a predilection to heresy and moral corruption, but losing one’s estate was not the only threat to New Christians and those suspected of being crypto-Jews (Nirenberg 2007: 75). Irene Silverblatt documents a case in which one colonist in Cochabamba, Doña María de Aguilar, was condemned by the Inquisition on two ‘Indian related’ counts connected to language use and religion – she was said to ‘speak in Indian’ and to seek out council from witches (Silverblatt 2007: 104). The paranoia surrounding blood purity extended to all ‘treacherous’ castas and New Christians, who were believed to conspire with foreign enemies and among themselves ‘in secret languages’ (110). Such was the level of fear surrounding a conspiracy of Jews in the colonies, that ten people were burned in an auto-da-fe in Lima in 1639. ‘The Lima tribunal justified their severity by appealing to the dangers crypto-Jews posed, not only to the ethical foundation of the colony but to its very political security’ (110). To be sure, mestizos, Indigenous Americans and Africans did reject colonial authority in mass protests, revolts and even in writing.9 Such was the case in 1611 when a slave woman was flogged to death in Mexico City, inciting 1,500 Black Africans to gather in vehement protest. In response to this, African guilds were dissolved and curfews restricted Africans to their homes after sunset (Katzew 2004: 41). Executions, public lashings, curfews and the prohibition of slaves from gathering together in groups of three or more – a prophylactic against resistance politics – were similarly deployed elsewhere, such as in New York after a series of revolts in 1721, 1732 and 1741 (Berlin 1998: 156). As Carl Nightingale notes, ‘authorities from Mexico City to Charles Town and from New Orleans to Rio de Janeiro passed draconian black codes that limited slaves’ movements and actions and kept any independent social or political life to an absolute minimum’ (2008: 58). Not only were colonized peoples sorted into separate legal systems with inferior protections, they were likewise restricted from participating fully in public life. Nevertheless, the peoples of the Spanish colonies intermarried and interbred to such an extent that a cavalcade of racial appellations were born, each ascribed a particular nature by folk tradition. The varied combinations reflect both the propensity for miscegenation and the fact that lineage played an essential role in defining one’s cultural status. At the outset of the eighteenth century, a secular art form termed ‘casta paintings’ gained prominence in New Spain. Attributed in part to the Enlightenment mania for

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taxonomy and categorization, the casta paintings typically represent a father, mother and child (each a specific caste) in a domestic moment that summarized the arithmetic of interbreeding, x + y = z. Often many families appeared in a grid organized into a hierarchy that ran, like text, from top left to bottom right. Thus, we find in the primary position, ‘From Spanish man with Indian woman comes mestizo’, moving across and down through castizo, mulato, cuarterón, torna atrás, chino, lobo, zambaigo, cambujado, no te entiendo (I don’t understand you), calpamulato and tente en el aire (suspend yourself in air) (Katzew 2004: 36) (Figure 5.8). Much is revealed in these paintings. Ilona Katzew argues that they presented to Creoles and Spanish officials a heterogenous yet ordered society in which the Spanish patriarch dominated. We might also note the total absence of Jews and Muslims, converted or otherwise. The clothing, occupation and social status of the mixed-blood peoples reflect their relative position within the racial hierarchy, the Spanish wearing the most sumptuous and bureaucratic apparel (A. Fisher 1992: 143). It is from Spanish preoccupation with purity of blood that casta categories became increasingly salient, represented in a didactic and sociological art as well as separate legal systems and disparities in rights. And yet this legal, cultural and religious racialization proceeded in Europe and the Americas without the need for a modern, biological concept of race.

RACIALIZING POLICIES CROSS THE ATLANTIC Catholic Spaniards used the conquest, conversion and expulsion of Jews and Muslims in Iberia as a model for the social control of Indigenous Americans and Africans in the New World. Analogously, scholars have likewise recently emphasized the role of Ireland in the formation of English imperial ideology (Pagden 1995; Elliott 1998; Armitage 2000). Ireland was an incubator for English colonialism and racializing politics, for the English used against the Irish the ‘same indictments’ imposed on Indigenous Americans and Africans (Canny 1973: 596). The ‘wild Irish’ were not originally regarded by the English as pagan or heretical, for the English colonization of Ireland involved Catholics on both sides for hundreds of years. Before the English condemned the Irish as ‘papists’, English colonizers instead focused on nation, customs and language in order to represent the Irish as wild men. While the Spanish were in the long process of the Reconquista, the English were ‘planting’ in Ireland, and in 1366 we find an example of social control in The Statutes of Kilkenny, which contain policies of language use, segregation and prohibition of marriage between English and Irish (Ostler 2005: 464–5; Elliott 2009: 156). Article III holds that any Englishman who uses the Irish language may have his estate seized until he learns to speak English (O’Brien 1998). The later Act for the English Order, Habite, and Language (1537) likewise made protection under the law depend on knowledge of the English language (Butler 1786: 119). Policies such as this attempted to eliminate differences by discriminating against the cultures and customs of the colonized, yet religion would play a role in the English oppression of the Irish only after Henry VIII separated from the Catholic Church with the Act of Supremacy (1534). The first English empire did not transfer whole institutions to the Americas because of the social upheaval of the Reformation (Lang 1975: 110). Such laws as the Acts of Dissolution (1536 and 1539) entirely disbanded monasteries and crippled English evangelical missions (Doran and Durston 1991: 163–4). It is for this reason that scholars refer to the English as a post-Reformation empire (Armitage 2000: 65). On the one hand, England condemned Spain’s Catholic empire and treatment of Indigenous Americans, giving rise to the Black Legend of Spaniards as naturally cruel and despotic. On the

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FIGURE 5.8  Andrés de Islas, De Tente en el aire, y Mulata; nace Albarasado (From Tente en el aire, and Mulatto, Albarazado is born), 1774. © PHAS/Universal Images Group/Getty Images.

other hand, England deployed so many of Spain’s justifications for colonization – such as bringing salvation to the indigenous Americans and interpreting national expansion as divine Providence – that Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra proposes an iberianization of early American studies (2006: 71). For example, the position of Jews vis-à-vis colonization was

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a shared obsession for the Spanish and English, evidenced in a series of colonial tracts that argued for the Jewish origins of Indigenous Americans based on erroneous linguistic data, such as Diego Durán’s Relación del origen de los indios que habitan esta Nueva España según sus historias (Account of the Origin of the Indians who inhabit this New Spain, According to its Histories) (1570) and Thomas Thorowgood’s Jews in America (1650) (Huddleston 1967: 39; see Crome 2016: 112). During the ‘plantation of Ulster’ in 1609, the English urged Spain not to interfere with their colonial designs by aiding the Catholic Irish. In an address to the Spanish Lords of Council, Charles Cornwallis justified the English imperial project by stating that the Irish were so savage they merited the same treatment ‘used by the Kings of Spain in the Indies, or those employed with the Moors … scattering them into other parts’ (quoted in T. Allen 1994: 31). John Davies used the same tack when, in a letter to Robert Cecil in 1610, he noted that the Roman Empire practiced mass expulsions and added, ‘the Spaniards lately removed all the Moors out of Grenada into Barbary’ (quoted in Elliott 2009: 37). A mass expulsion of Irish bookended the military conflict in Ulster, with up to forty thousand Irish, including tribal lords, sold into exile (T. Allen 1994: 50). Yet, while Spanish Jews became known as the mala casta blanca (bad white caste) (Burns 2007: 189), the Irish – likewise indistinguishable in skin colour from the English – transformed under racializing politics. Representations of ‘swarthy’ or ‘black Irish’ would appear in such nineteenthcentury works as John Beddoe’s Races of Britain (1885), where the ‘Index of Nigrescence’ presents the Irish as black haired and dark complexioned (Painter 2010: 212–27). Such a transformation could only occur, however, when nations were racialized by skin colour and a politics of phenotype fully formed. Well into the seventeenth century and beyond, the English referred to the Irish as barbarians and wild men, terms loaded with criticism of Irish legal systems, language and customs. In a nakedly colonial tract, A Discoverie of the True Causes why Ireland was neuer entirely Subdued (1612), John Davies declares that the Irish rejected civilization and spread ‘Barbarisme and desolation upon the richest and most fruitfull Land of the world’ ([1612] 1747: 167). Prior to English colonization, the Irish practiced extensive cattleherding with shared pasturage, a practice often termed communalism (Federici 2014: 171). Enclosure and discrimination against alternative customs in Europe hardened, shaping the colonists’ views of other peoples, such as when Peter Martyr declares (incorrectly) that the Taínos have no word for ‘yours’ or ‘mine’ ([1530] 1964–5: 141). This preference for shared ownership placed the Irish and other herding and nomadic peoples within the category of barbarian. Reason and civilization found their classic expression during the Reformation and Enlightenment in the polis (city), a sedentary lifestyle that demanded intensive agriculture. According to Thomas Wilson’s popular The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), based on Cicero’s De Inventione, for human societies to advance out of wildness required the ‘gift of vtteraunce’ ([1560] 1909: Preface). Cicero argued that it is through rhetoric and reason that men are ‘transformed from wild savages into a kind and gentle folk’ (quoted in Shrank 2003: 19; see also Pagden 1982: 70). Prohibiting English planters from speaking Irish was, then, an attempt to keep colonists from regressing to barbarism.10 As with other racializing policies, those who could not speak the hegemonic language were seldom protected by laws, so when the English planters became ‘meere Irish in their Language, Names, Apparrell, and all their maner of liuing’, they lost their property rights and became outlaws (J. Davies [1612] 1747: 211). As Edmund Spenser in A View of the State of Ireland (1596) asserts, ‘The speech being Irish, the heart must needs be’ ([1596] 1966: 119).

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Barbarism, wildness, savage tongues. Empire encountered elsewhere the passionate, the unrooted, the heathen speaking mere babel. Anti-Irish politics honed imperial ideology and racializing methods, and the English perfected this social control to apply similar policies later against Indigenous people and Africans in the Americas. Within the long history of English plantations, the Irish were prohibited from bearing arms or becoming priests or lawyers. They required letters patent attesting to their freedom in order to move and were denied a jury of peers, reducing them to ‘foreigners in their own land’ (T. Allen 1994: 59, 55, 46, 47; see also Smedley and Smedley 2012: 100–1). As with the mestizos in New Spain, the rigours of social control waxed and waned such that the Irish were finally admitted into English law in 1613 only to be outlawed once again as ‘papists’ in 1641 (T. Allen 1994: 51). It is because of these uniformities in colonial policies for the social control of the Irish, Jews, Africans and Indigenous Americans that Allen writes, ‘[what] gave these respective regimes the character of racial oppression, were those elements that destroyed the original forms of social identity, and then excluded the oppressed groups from admittance into the forms of social identity normal to the colonizing power’ (81–2). We have considered the same practice in Spain’s treatment of mestizo and Indigenous priests. Like the forced incorporation and legal discrimination practiced by Spain, England passed a dozen laws between 1700 and 1760 to ‘prevent the growth of Popery’ in Ireland but none to promote Protestantism (78). Commerce in the Americas thrived on bonded labour, with Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands and England all exploiting indentured servants and slave labour for the production of indigo, sugar, tobacco and cotton (Figure 5.9). Virginia formalized the headright system in 1619, which granted bonded servants property after seven years of labour (Lang 1975: 114), before laws transitioned to institutionalized slavery after 1660. Whether slaves were taken as captives in just war or purchased from intermediaries in the Americas or Africa, slavery preceded biological racism. As many scholars agree, racial slavery developed as a landed class response against labour solidarity (L. Bennett 1975: 76) (Figure 5.10). England’s clearing the land in Ireland included the capture and exile of thousands of Irish as bonded labourers to the colonies, including the West Indies. The enslavement of Indigenous Americans accelerated in the Massachusetts’s Bay Colony after King Philip’s War (1675), when thousands of surrendering Indigenous Americans from ‘praying towns’ were shipped off as slaves (L. Fisher 2014: 99). The transition in 1682 to institutional slavery in Virginia demonstrates the faltering movement towards race thinking. As Winthrop Jordan notes, law makers ‘awkwardly attempted to rest enslavement on religious difference while excluding from possible enslavement all heathens who were not Indian or Negro’ (1968: 92). The numbers of enslaved peoples during the Reformation and into the Enlightenment are staggering, with estimates of two to five million Indigenous Americans sold into bondage from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century (L. Fisher 2017: 91).11 Europeans forced upwards of ten to twelve million Africans into slave labour during the same period (Walvin 1994: 29). Regarded as savages, pagans and brute labour, these peoples arrived on plantations in the West Indies in a state of utter linguistic confusion. Slaves were ‘seasoned’ in the islands, made docile through extreme violence; to prevent conspiracy and revolt, slave masters intentionally stocked plantations with labourers of diverse nations and languages. It is on this confusion of tongues that planters depended for security (Harlow 1926: 325), and like the problem of religious oppression, there was scarce effort to teach slaves the languages of command, resulting in the many pidgins and creoles of the Caribbean and African coast (Ostler 2005: 390). Despite Antonio de Nebrija’s declaration in 1492 that

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FIGURE 5.9  Theodore de Bry, Slaves process sugar cane and make sugar, 1595. © Heritage Images/Getty Images.

‘language was always the companion of empire’ (2011: 3), there was little concerted effort to instruct colonized peoples in the languages of empire until well into the Enlightenment (M. Bennett 2015: 149). The result of this was to stifle resistance politics among colonized peoples, to eradicate many Indigenous languages, to debilitate cultural transmission and to sort the separate nations into broader and broader racial categories – Algonquians and Pequots into Indian, or Ashanti and Yoruba into Black or ‘negro’. We discover the transition from nation to race also in the suppression of colonized languages. This dependence on linguistic confusion proved insufficient and temporary, as slave revolts (often blamed on freed Africans) continued to threaten European ascendancy. The missionary Morgan Godwyn comments on language learning in the pamphlet The Negro’s and Indians Advocate (1680), where he writes, ‘’Tis true, the Negro’s ignorance of our Language was … so long a tolerable plea for the Omission; but none afterward, when they had arrived to an ability of Understanding, and discoursing in English’ (2; emphases in the original). Godwyn was treated with disdain by Barbados planters, who had established permanent slavery for Indigenous Americans and Africans in 1636 and saw missionaries as a threat to social hierarchy (A. Vaughan 1995: 157). The Barbados Act (1676), which came on the heels of a slave revolt in 1675, banned the importation of more Indigenous American slaves to the island to prevent further mixing and unrest

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FIGURE 5.10  Theodore de Bry, Spanish soldiers observe and carry out the punishment of a slave who is flogged and has pitch poured on his wounds, 1595. © Heritage Images/Hulton Archives/Getty Images.

(L. Fisher 2014: 100). Demographic pressures resulted in African slaves and freemen outnumbering white European plantation owners in all the West Indies, at a rate of ten to one in Jamaica (Jordan 1968: 141). In 1710, Alexander Spotswood, the governor of Virginia, warned the assembly there that ‘we are not to Depend on Either their Stupidity, or that Babel of Language among ’em; freedom Wears a Cap which Can Without a Tongue, Call Togather [sic] all Those who Long to Shake of [sic] the fetters of Slavery’ (quoted in Jordan 1968: 111). Another solution for the problem of coordinated resistance among runaways, bonded labourers, slaves and freemen needed to be devised.

WHITE MEANS FREE AND BLACK MEANS SLAVE A discourse of skin colour emerged in the mid-seventeenth century with works such as Robert Boyle’s Of the Nature of Whiteness and Blackness (1665) reflecting scholarly interest in phenotype. Treatises that formalized the biological concept of race would appear in the mid- to late eighteenth century, with Linnaeus’s Systema naturae (1735), Buffon’s Histoire naturelle (1749) and Blumenbach’s De generis humani varietate nativa (1775) forming the three pillars of Enlightenment race science. Linnaean human taxonomy, based in

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large part on travel writing, would classify the Khoikhoi as Homo monstrosis monochidei (Hudson 2004: 329; Smedley and Smedley 2012: 218–19) and African ‘pygmy’ peoples (such as the Bambenga, Bambuti and Batwa) as Homo troglodytes (Pratt 1992: 33). Before this maturing of race science, however, the legal treatment of colonized peoples diverged in the colonies, with such earlier discriminations as religion, civil organization or nation giving way to designations based on skin colour. The emergence of racist laws, writes Andrew Curran, ‘had the effect of codifying and normalizing a series of white beliefs and behaviors toward the Africans’ (2011: 55). One of the major texts that aided in the conceptual shift was a French legal code designed to better control the societies emerging in the West Indies, the Code noir (Black Code) (1685), which evolved and was adopted in Louisiana (1724) (Aubert 2013: 22). As with most policies in the late seventeenth century, the Code noir was concerned with religious uniformity, which it used for the sorting of colonized peoples and the formation of a society culturally homogenous with the imperial centre. The French Empire threaded the needle of Catholic evangelism and the problem of enslaving Christians on racial grounds (Aubert 2013: 24). Again, the Jewish people were subject to exile. Article I banishes Jews from the West Indies as ‘enemies of Christianity’, and threatens to confiscate their ‘person and possessions’ if they did not flee the islands (France 2006: 11). Articles II and III require planters to baptize their slaves and forbid any religion but Catholicism. Non-Catholic religious gatherings are regarded as seditious, non-Catholics denied slave purchase and ownership, and slaves – like the Irish in Ireland and Africans in Brazil – are again outlawed from carrying weapons.12 As with colonial laws elsewhere, Article XIII determines that the status of a child depends on the mother rather than the father, and thus, a child born to a free father and slave mother is a slave, while a child born to a slave father and free mother is free (11–38). In little time, New York would follow as ‘the colonial legislature more explicitly linked slavery to the small galaxy of categories “Negro, Indian, Mullato, and Mestee [mestizo] Bastard Child or Children” as a way of establishing that slave status would follow “ye state of the Mother”’ (Nightingale 2008: 69). The term black is used as a synonym for slave increasingly over the seventeenth century, as noted by the missionary Morgan Godwyn, who also drew attention to the term ‘White’, what he called ‘the general name for Europeans’ (1680: 83). The invention of the white race was a necessary component of scientific racism, and before Godwyn used the shorthand of skin colour to refer to white Europeans, red Indigenous Americans and Black Africans, the Virginia General Assembly passed a number of laws to control and degrade slaves (Kendi 2016: 49; see also Nash 1972). Virginia resolved the contradiction that Christian slaves represented to tradition and English common law by declaring in 1667 that ‘conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or Freedom’ (Billings 2007: 204) (Figure 5.11). Likewise, against tradition and common law, the colonial assembly passed an act in 1662 that affirmed ‘all children borne in this country shalbe [sic] held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother’ (204). Other scholars have treated the gendered formation of race (Stepan 1986: 262; Cañizares-Esguerra 1999: 39; Martínez 2008: 42; Curran 2011: 10), but it should be emphasized here that long-standing English common law, where property and status devolved from the father, saw a massive reversal under slavery in the colonies (Kendi 2016: 41). In the early seventeenth century, Irish, Scottish and African people arrived in the Virginia colony as bonded labourers who might expect freedom and land after their term of service. But by 1640, again against English common law, a runaway indentured

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FIGURE 5.11  Anonymous, Baptism of Black Slaves, 1757. © Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

servant, the African John Punch, is punished with perpetual servitude (Finkelman 1985: 3). This punishment contrasted with the much lighter sentences of his runaway compatriots, two white Europeans. The legal system both defended certain classes in a narrowing trajectory (male, English, Christian) and sorted peoples into new categories (white and Black). Bacon’s Rebellion (1676) is regarded as one of the sparks to ignite early reactionary laws that first codified race distinctions. In the Chesapeake Bay colonies, Anglo- and African-American bond labourers united to demand protection and the end of servitude, but when the revolt withered on Nathaniel Bacon’s death, the assembly in Jamestown responded with a series of laws that drove a wedge between the two disenfranchised peoples (L. Bennett 1975: 77). New racial divisions in law responded to the problem of class solidarity. Not only did these laws diminish class unity by encouraging freed servants and landless Europeans to identify with European plantation owners, it also extended privileges to the landless Europeans, or at least the hope thereof (T. Allen 1994: 19). We find in this series of laws a shift to a discourse of race. In one law prohibiting miscegenation in Maryland, revised in 1692, the assembly dropped the term Christian in favour of white, what Winthrop Jordan calls ‘a symptomatic modification’ (1968: 96). The construction of biological race in the colonial contact zone was not the inevitable unfolding of empire, although it did resolve the long-standing tension between Christian universality and conquest built upon a slave-based economy (Goetz 2012). The congeries of differences at the outset of the Reformation included aspects that were fundamentally mutable, such as language, religion, nation and lifeways, all designations that had

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functioned to divide and subjugate communities that were physically indistinguishable. Political phantasmagoria did allow colonists to produce physical difference, however, such as when Benjamin Franklin complained of the ‘swarthy’ Palatine Boers (Germans) who threatened to overawe the Anglo American settlers because they ‘will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion’ (1959: 4:234). So, the discourse of difference settled on physical traits, even when they had to be invented, and religious theories that justified slavery, such as the Curse of Ham (Braude 1997: 104), would be modified by political theorists to include only the physical ‘mark’ or ‘stain’ on the body. With the Enlightenment, colonial law reflected the demands of both missionary and slave owner, which resulted in edicts that contradicted enduring legal traditions such as the prohibition against Christian slaves. After the invention of whiteness, however, the logic of the division of humanity into ranked groups resulted in men like Franklin declaring ‘all Africa is black or tawny’ and ‘the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small’ (1755: 10; emphasis in the original). Franklin deployed a discourse of racial difference, and yet the term race is still absent from his Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind (1755), while in Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748) – an influential work for revolutionaries such as Thomas Jefferson – the political philosopher rejects the idea of a racial nature but uses the term race to mean noble lineage (Turda and Quine 2018: 2).13 Later, Jefferson is still imprecise in his use of race in Notes on the State of Virginia (1781) using it to mean lineage, humankind and biological difference, although his more profound statements on race tend towards the scientific (Jefferson [1781] 1955: 63, 163, 138, 143). While the social control of empires would produce and sort groups of oppressed peoples through racializing policies, it is the work of natural philosophers in the late eighteenth century that would settle, in the modern sense, the concept of race.

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CHAPTER SIX

Race and Ethnicity Conceptual Knots in Early Modern Culture NOÉMIE NDIAYE

In The Merchant of Venice, the racism that fuels Portia’s rejection of the Prince of Morocco often gets diluted when read in the wake of her rejection of a series of foreign suitors that includes the Prince of Aragon, the Neapolitan Prince, the County Palatine, the French Lord, the Duke of Saxony’s nephew and – last but not least – the young Baron of England and the Scottish Lord, his neighbour. Read as one item in that list, the Prince of Morocco, an early modern avatar of the adoring magus Balthasar represented as Black in European iconography since the fifteenth century, could be construed as the embodiment of one Euro-Mediterranean ethnicity among many others, all of which are unsuited to the tastes of the Italian Portia (Figure 6.1). In her burlesque series of national stereotypes, Germans are drunkards, Iberian Neapolitans are obsessed with horsemanship, Frenchmen are hyperactive and affected, Englishmen know no languages and they ape other nations. And yet, the Prince of Morocco does not feature in Portia’s catalogue of national characters; rather, he is rejected on the basis of his physical appearance: ‘if he have the condition of a saint and the complexion of a devil, I had rather he should shrive me than wive me’ (1.2.111–13). After Morocco fails to pick the right casket and thereby win her hand, she rejoices and reiterates: ‘Let all of his complexion choose me so’ (2.7.79). His case is adjudicated differently. As the field of early modern critical race studies has shown since the 1990s, early modern anti-Black discourse was informed by properly racial modes of thinking.1 As entangled as racial thinking might have been with ideas of ethnicity, it was distinct from them. Such confusion is not unique to readings of the early modern period: the Chicago School of Sociology, for instance, which dominated approaches to race and race relations in the United States until the 1960s, subsumed racial difference into ethnicity, thereby stalling political progress until the civil rights movement forced sociological discourse to move beyond that paradigm (Omi and Winant 1987: 14–20). The civil right’s movement knew that racism cannot be dismantled when race is studied through the lens of ethnicity. What was true in the 1960s was true in the early modern period: for Portia, the Prince of Morocco’s difference is different. This chapter seeks to disentangle the often conflated notions of race and ethnicity in the early modern world, with a particular focus on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English, French and Spanish cultures. This chapter was completed with the generous support of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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FIGURE 6.1  Diego Velázquez, The Adoration of the Magi, 1619. © Universal History Archive/ Universal Images Group/Getty Images.

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KEYWORDS: ETHNICITY, NATION, RACE Ethnicity is a concept whose usefulness to appraise early modern identity formations is limited. In early modern Europe, the term ‘ethnic’ strictly meant pagan, or non-Christian: thus, Europeans, assembled in Christian nations, certainly did not think of themselves as having any sort of ‘ethnicity’. And yet, while the validity of the term ‘race’ in historical discourse focusing on the early modern period has been under constant scrutiny ever since the inception of the field of early modern critical race studies thirty years ago, the term ‘ethnicity’, widely favoured by scholars who deem the term ‘race’ anachronistic, has remained conspicuously unexamined.2 Given the semantic gap between early modern and contemporary understandings of ‘ethnicity’, the reasons behind modern scholars’ enthusiastic use of that category warrants a preliminary analysis. To people whose native language has no equivalent for the English word ‘ethnicity’, such as the author of the present essay,3 that term is, perhaps ironically, an ethnographic curiosity in itself. As Werner Sollors reminds us, the term was first used by American sociologist W. Lloyd Warner in 1941, ‘to conceptualize ethnic differentiation on a broader basis than “national origin” (which does not include Negroes and presents problems with native-born descendants of immigrants)’ while ‘race was discredited by the emergence of fascism’ (Sollors 1996: x). Thus, ‘the term was intended to substitute for “race” at a time when the older word had become deeply compromised by racism’ (xxix). Such attempts at substitution prove that the widely acknowledged fallacy and dangerousness of the concept of race are not coterminous with race’s demise as a powerful epistemological tool. The term ‘ethnicity’ was thus, from its very inception, spurred by a reluctance – regardless of whatever laudable intentions might have motivated that reluctance – to use the word race in order to talk about race. That reluctance explains the contradictions at the core of the concept of ‘ethnicity’. The term is broadly defined as ‘status in respect of membership of a group regarded as ultimately of common descent, or having a common national or cultural tradition; ethnic character’ (OED Online 2019). The slippage between culture (which is constructed and can be acquired) and descent (which is not) within the Oxford English Dictionary definition is also at work in the dominant definition of the term used among social scientists today, which was articulated by R. A. Schermerhorn: An ethnic group is … a collectivity within a larger society having real or putative common ancestry, memories of a shared historical past, and a cultural focus on one or more symbolic element defined as the epitome of peoplehood. Examples of such symbolic elements are: kinship pattern, physical contiguity (as in localism or sectionalism), religious affiliation, language or dialect forms, tribal affiliation, nationality, phenotypical features, or any combination of these. A necessary accompaniment is some consciousness of kind among members of the group. (quoted in Sollors 1996: xii) Stuart Hall gets to the heart of the matter when he explains that, although ethnicity is the sum of ‘shared languages, traditions, religious beliefs, cultural ideas, customs, and rituals that bind together particular groups’ (2017: 83), it is experienced and imagined by many not as a discursive construction but as having acquired the durability of nature itself … it is the discursive form in which cultural

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identity appears as part of ‘kith and kin,’ rooted in ‘blood and soil’ … whereas race is grounded in the biological and slides toward the cultural, ethnos or ethnicity … appears to be grounded exclusively in the cultural … yet it constantly slides – especially through commonsensical conceptions of kinship – toward a transcultural and even transcendental fix in common blood, inheritance, and ancestry, all of which gives ethnicity an originary foundation in nature that puts it beyond the reach of history. (2017: 107–9) It is that very potential for ‘sliding’ towards the naturalized and biologized that conveniently allows the term ‘ethnicity’ to talk about race without saying so. Because of the structurally fraught relation between the terms race and ethnicity, this chapter will not use the latter; in its stead, it will invoke the early modern category of the nation, a structure articulating the central questions of community and belonging relevant to our theme. As Nicholas Hudson observes, until the late eighteenth century, nation was the dominant concept used to categorize people around the world, outweighing ‘anything approaching a modern tendency to identify a particular skin-color or physiognomy with a “race”’ (1996: 250). Benedict Anderson famously and usefully defines the nation as An imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion … . The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings has finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind … . It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm … . Finally it is imagined as a community because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. (1983: 6–7) Although Anderson would not argue for the existence of nations as he defines them prior to the late eighteenth century, this chapter shares Marcus Keller’s premise, influenced by Etienne Balibar, that ‘the idea of nationhood and the process of nationalization are not tied to the existence of the nation-state’ (2011: 5). Anderson’s vision can illuminate early modern nations.4 English lexicographer John Baret defined a nation as ‘a people: sometyme a kindred. Gens, gentis, f. ge. Virg. ἔθνος …. A nation, a people hauing their beginning in the countrye where they dwell’ (1574). That definition was to remain fairly stable in English lexicons for almost a century. Early modern definitions of nations thus hinged on a sense of ‘from here-ness’: a nation was imagined as a community of natives bound to one another and to their land by birth. David J. Baker comments on the elasticity of the early modern nation as ‘both a distinct geopolitical entity, and, variously, as one among the “peoples,” “ethnic cultures,” and/or “locally defined communities” that such an entity may have displaced, subsumed, or integrated in the early modern period’ (1997: 6). That elasticity was not unique to the British definition: the Spanish definition of the terms, for instance, makes room for what we would read as regional identities, making the nación a synonym for ‘realm, or large province, such as the Spanish nation’ (vale reyno a provincia estendida como la nacion Española) (Covarrubias 1611: 560). In all

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cases, the nation designated a people bound by birth into a community that mapped onto a clearly designated geographical area (Figure 6.2).5 Such communities, Keller notes, were often evoked through the essentializing metaphors of family, blood and grafting (2011: 4) – although the processes by which one could become incorporate into a nation were performative in nature.

FIGURE 6.2  Marguerite Van der Mael, Tableau des nations de l’Europe sous le règne de Louis XIII, en tout victorieux, 1669. © BNF Gallica. Public domain.

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Indeed, legal historian Tamar Herzog compellingly argues that ‘the exercise of rights, rather than legal enactments of official declarations, defined the boundaries of early modern communities’ (2003: 6) in Spain, Latin America, France, England and Italy (15). Belonging to a political community then ‘was constituted on its own, at the moment when people acted as if they felt attached to the community’ (7) by complying with specific duties and exercising specific rights. In other words, the early modern nation might have been theoretically defined by an ideal of nativeness, but in practice ‘nativeness had its own logic. This logic determined that people who were integrated in the community and were willing to comply with its duties were indeed natives, independent of their place of birth or descent and independent of formal declarations’ (9). Nativeness was a performative practice.6 The present chapter focuses on the complex relations between the nation thus defined and the concept of race as it emerged and evolved in the early modern period: a core idea here is that race affected the performative processes through which early modern nations defined themselves by determining who could efficiently engage in the performative practices of national belonging. Race as discussed in the field of critical race theory is a system of power falsely packaged as a system of knowledge in order to justify unequal distributions of rights, resources and privileges in multicultural societies.7 Racial thinking selects attributes strategically (those can be, for instance, religious, status-based or appearance-based), it somatizes those attributes (often through the symbolism of blood, as noted by Kimberly Anne Coles et al. 2015), and it essentializes them, by turning them, with the help of the dominant epistemic discourses of the time, into hereditary markers that justify the position of those attributes’ owners in the social hierarchy. Thus, race is not defined by its content, or what it is – which changes across time and space – but by its effect, or what it does – which remains stable across time and space. In the sixteenth century, the dominant paradigms of race hinged on religious and status-based attributes – but the encounter with Africans and Indigenous Americans in the age of discovery followed by the development of de facto colour-based slavery in the Iberian world at the end of the fifteenth century led the early modern racial matrix to produce a new paradigm, hinging on phenotypical attributes, for which skin color quickly became a shorthand.8 It is the interaction between that emergent racial paradigm and the performative contours of early modern nations that this chapter unpacks. That interaction is usually described as some type of messy entanglement. Early modern critical race scholar Joyce Green Macdonald sees it as a ‘mutual articulation’,9 and Lara Bovilsky uses the model of ‘slippage’ and ‘shared vocabularies’ to analyse that mutual articulation.10 The present chapter reads the messy entanglement of race and nation as a dialectical movement. I argue that, in early modern Europe, a crucial reason why the old and powerful logic of the nation, which, in theory, should have halted the spread of racial thinking along new paradigmatic lines, proved so weak to do so in practice, is that the racial matrix was simply too good at helping performative nations strategically negotiate their own boundaries at specific junctures to be stopped. The usefulness of racial thinking in the process of nation building ensured that the new racial paradigm would become a key feature of early modern epistemes of identity.

THE LOGIC OF NATION AND THE LOGIC OF RACE Bound to a specific land and terroir, each early modern nation was imagined as unique. In line with a literary tradition initiated in the thirteenth century, in his Discourse upon Usury (1572), Thomas Wilson paints national characters based on the idea that ‘as

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everyone of these countreys hath its especial faults, so they have their proper vertues and several qualyties, more excellent than any other nation’ (quoted in Hoenselaars 1992: 21).11 Here again, this mode of thinking is not limited to England: Ellen Welch notes that, in the French cultural context, In Antoine Furetière’s words, ‘chaque nation a son caractère particulier’ [each nation has its own character], an assumption conveyed in common phrases such as ‘l’humeur de la nation’ [the humour of the nation] or ‘le génie de la nation’ [the genius of the nation]. This conception of nationality as ethnicity is what allowed seventeenthcentury French writers to refer to ‘Italiens’ or ‘Allemands’ centuries before Italy or Germany had come into being as nations in the modern, political sense of that term. (2013: 7) Early modern Europeans may have held xenophobic and caricatural views of their neighbours, but those views relied on the notion that each nation had its own unique quality. The logic of the nation, because it hinged on the idea of uniqueness, was at odds with the logic of racial thinking, which makes invisible all singularities in order to enhance its one strategically selected attribute. And yet, despite its antiquity and its hold on collective imagination, the logic of the nation proved surprisingly weak to stem the expansion of racial thinking in the early modern period. Naturally, the logic of the nation had long coexisted with discourses that lumped people into larger supranational bodies by virtue of some essentialized quality. Such, for instance, was the religious discourse that mapped global human population upon the descent of Noah’s three sons, giving Europe to Japhet, Asia to Sem and construing Africans – the descendants of the cursed son Ham – as naturally fit to serve the rest of Noah’s posterity. That division of mankind into hierarchically organized continental groups endowed with their own set of qualities travelled from religious to geographical and ethnographic discourse, manifesting in the allegorical aesthetics of the four continents which came to pervade early modern culture through genres as varied as court masques, street pageants, atlas frontispieces, or even almanacs (Figure 6.3). In the realm of medical discourse, the logic identified by Mary Floyd-Wilson as ‘geohumoralism’ – according to which the world was divided into three large regions whose different climes affected the humoral complexion of their inhabitants and thus their temperament and character – similarly erased national singularities without a blink (2003: 23–47). Although geohumoralism could be – and often was – scaled down to account for the character of individual nations, it was predicated upon a lumping logic that could potentially be mobilized for racializing purposes. All those discourses obtained across Renaissance Europe, and across the porous boundaries between elite and popular culture. The racializing potential of that discursive nexus was activated – that is to say, the racial matrix started mobilizing it – when the economic interests accrued during the age of discovery required it. When the new racial paradigm for which skin tone was quickly becoming a shorthand expressed itself through that discursive nexus, the logic of the nation infallibly yielded the place. Travel writing provides a good view of the strategic nature of negotiations between the logic of nation and the logic of race. In The Golden Trade (1623), for instance, Richard Jobson recounts his attempt at entering the transSaharan gold trade, and he encourages his fellow Englishmen to join his efforts. Jobson describes the various ‘nations’ he encountered ‘within four leagues of the river Gambra’ (1623: 8): they include ‘Blackmen alias Mandingos or Ethiopians’ ‘who are Lords, and

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FIGURE 6.3  Marguerite Van der Mael, L’Adoration des Nations, 1672. © BNF Gallica. Public domain.

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Commaunders of this country, and professe themselues the naturall Inhabitants’ (37), but also the ‘Fulbies’, a ‘tawny people’ (33) speaking a language different from their Mandingo masters, whom Jobson likens to ‘Gypsies’, whose female beauty he praises, and whose cleanliness he commends as superior to that of the ‘Irish Calios’ (37). Finally, he describes the treacherous Portingall of mixed African and Portuguese descent, mulattoes who retain the Portuguese language but not the Christian religion, and, whom Jobson thinks the English would do well to remove from the region (28–33). In his detailed account, Jobson overwhelmingly uses the logic of the nation, moved as he is by a desire to develop and impart a granular knowledge of potential Gambian business partners, like any keen tradesman would. By contrast, the slave trading captain John Hawkins, when he recalls his attempt at abducting ‘some Negrose’ in Cabo Verde and along the Guinea coast on his way to the West Indies in 1569, is thoroughly uninterested in the granular singularities of the various sub-Saharans he encounters. When a local king forms an alliance with him by promising slaves in exchange for military help, Hawkins simply describes his ally as a generic ‘Kynge oppressed of other Kynges his neyghboures’ (Hawkins 1569: A3r). The only moment in the whole account when Hawkins uses the word ‘nation’ is when he berates his ally for failing to deliver as many slaves as he had hoped for: he resents ‘the Negro (in which nation is seldom or never found troth)’ (A4r). Here, Hawkins is obviously not referring to his ally’s specific African nation – which he does not even care to name. Rather, he uses the phrase ‘Negro nation’ to refer to a supranational group defined by one strategically selected attribute (black skin) construed as the mark of essential qualities (such as treachery) and fit for one specific social condition (slavery) – the ‘Negro nation’, in other words, refers to a race. As early as 1569, in the mind of a slave trader whose interests in intercultural encounters are obvious, the logic of the nation recedes, and the elasticity of the word ‘nation’ adopts racially recognizable contours. The imbrication of the nation/race antithesis within dynamics of strategic power play is particularly palpable in one of the dominant media of early modern culture: theatre, which, based as it is upon the performance of identities, was a privileged medium for shaping, pressuring, complicating and disseminating discourses of the nation that mobilized ethnic and racial types. For instance, in his play Escarmientos para el cuerdo (Word to the Wise), published in 1636 but written about twenty years earlier (Gonano 2005: 221), Spanish playwright Tirso de Molina dramatizes the well-documented shipwreck of Manuel de Sousa y Sepulveda, the Portuguese captain-general of the island fortress of Diu, India, off the Cape of Good Hope on his way back to Lisbon (Tirso de Molina 1636).12 Sousa y Sepulveda, along with his wife and crew, died – as early modern accounts go – because the Kaffir nation, which controlled the territory comprising Sofala and Mozambique, suspicious of European incursions into the African continent, refused to give them hospitality. At the end of Act 2, spectators meet two Kaffir characters, Quingo and Bunga, who, as they comment on the regular Portuguese incursions into their territory, provide a clear mental map of the scene’s location in line with the logic of nations: we are two hundred leagues by sea from Sofala and one hundred leagues from the river Espíritu Santo (Tirso de Molina 1636: 67r). Their exchange is written in standard Castilian, construed by Spanish spectators as the exemplary language of mutual intelligence among members of the same nation. Enter the shipwrecked soldier and poet Carballo, to whom Bunga, despite the cannibalistic habits of her nation, takes a fancy; the moment Carballo becomes aware of their presence, the linguistic perspective of the scene

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shifts, as spectators are led to perceive the Kaffir characters through Carballo’s Galician ears – thus, they start speaking in gibberish (69r). Carballo is taken by the Kaffirs, whose king later sends him as a messenger to Sousa y Sepulveda: negotiations are mediated by a Kaffir interpreter named Curguru, who ‘knows our language more or less, because he has been involved in Portuguese ransoms’ (Éste sabe nuestra lengua / bien que mal, porque trató / en rescates portugueses) (Tirso de Molina 1636: 31). Curguru speaks neither standard Castilian nor gibberish: he speaks the stage dialect known as habla de negros, or Blackspeak, in Hispanic studies – a stereotypical accent explicitly scripted in the playtext and meant to caricature the accent of enslaved people of African descent in the hispanophone world. That stage accent flattened the richness and uniqueness of the numerous Afro-Iberian accents that existed offstage into one unified grotesque Black sound.13 In other words, the moment Tirso de Molina’s play enters the realm of strategic negotiations involving captivity, ransom and slavery between Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans, spectators enter an acoustic and linguistic space predicated upon the logic of race – and not the logic of the nation any longer.

COLOURING THE NATION The antithetical relation between the logic of nation and the logic of race did not survive the early modern period: it was gradually replaced by a synthetic relation informed by the same strategic and utilitarian motivations as its antithetical predecessor. It is by virtue of this synthetic relation that, in the words of Jean E. Howard, early modern English nationalism ‘shares with modern nationalism a supposed fraternity of subjects within an imagined community defined in part by a bounded geographical essence and in part by cultural and racial differences from other such imagined communities’ (1994: 101). Indeed, race proved to be a tool of critical purchase for nations to negotiate their boundaries in an age of nation-building. For Benedict Anderson, such a synthetic relation between race and nation is unthinkable: From the start, the nation was conceived in language, not in blood, and one could be invited into the imagined community. Thus today, even the most insular nations accept the principle of naturalization, no matter how difficult in practice they may make it …. The fact of the matter is that nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations, transmitted from the origins of time through an endless sequence of loathsome copulations: outside history … the dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class, rather than in those of nation: above all in claims to divinity among rulers and to ‘blue’ or ‘white’ blood and ‘breeding’ among aristocracies. (1983: 145–9) Anderson is right to identify class (or status) as a paradigm within the early modern racial matrix, but he fails to perceive racism’s use to national thinking. In that respect, Etienne Balibar’s analysis proves more productive. For Balibar, nationalism precedes the existence of nations: it is the discourse of nation building that produces ‘fictive ethnicities’, and those ethnicities are produced ‘against other possible unities’. It is the ‘historical system of complementary exclusions and dominations’ known as racism that ‘contributes to constituting [nationalism] by producing the fictive ethnicity around which it is organized’

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(Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 49). Thus ‘racism is not an expression of nationalism but a supplement of nationalism, or more precisely a supplement internal to nationalism, always in excess of it, but always indispensable to its constitution and yet always insufficient still to achieve its project’ (54). In the early modern period, the emergent paradigm of phenotype-as-race quickly started functioning as a ‘supplement internal to nationalism’, or a necessary yet not sufficient condition in the process of nation-building. As such, the new phenotypical paradigm in the racial matrix followed in the footsteps of the older and dominant paradigm of religion-as-race, which had served, for instance, to expel Spaniards of Jewish and Muslim descent, as Spain fashioned itself into a Christian nation of fictive Gothic stock during and after the Reconquista.14 The racial matrix had long functioned as a supplement internal to nationalism: the encounter of the logic of phenotype-as-race with the logic of the nation was thus less of a sudden collision than a brutal flare of a chronic condition. The extension of strategic exclusionary functions from the dominant racial paradigm to the emergent one is palpable in The Merchant of Venice, a play that stages the parallel exclusion of Jews and Blackamoors from the Venetian body politic – often read as a proxy for the English body politic that produced and consumed the play. The character of Shylock is construed as an outsider who perceives himself as a member of a ‘sacred nation’ (1.3.42), a term he uses thrice to refer to the Jewish people. He lives in a cosmopolitan city whose ‘trade and profit … consisteth of all nations’ (3.3.30), and as integrated as he is in the commercial life of the city, in the end, he loses all he owns because he is an alien: It is enacted in the laws of Venice, If it be proved against an alien That by direct or indirect attempts He seek the life of any citizen, The party ’gainst the which he doth contrive Shall seize one half his goods; the other half Comes to the privy coffer of the state. (4.1.346–52) In that sense, Shylock is reminiscent of another Jewish character of the early modern English stage: Pisaro, the Portuguese Marrano in William Haughton’s 1598 Englishmen for my Money, who married an Englishwoman and lives in London, but whose obstinate desire to have his daughters marry foreigners, ‘wealthy merchants in the town / All Strangers, and my very speciall friendes’ ([1598] 1616: B1r) – despite their inclination to marry Englishmen – bespeaks an imaginary Jewish refusal to become one with the English nation. A similar fate befalls Black people. As mentioned at the outset of this chapter, the Prince of Morocco who, through Portia, hopes to marry into a European nation, is rejected by her before he even takes the casket test on the basis of his skin colour. In that sense, the play, first printed in 1600, eerily echoes Elizabeth I’s 1596 warrant, which, to compensate Caspar van Senden for bringing eighty-nine English prisoners back to England from Spain, allowed him to take up so much blackamoors here in this realm and to transport them into Spain and Portugal … for those kind of people may be well spared in this realm, being so

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populous and numbers of able persons the subjects of the land and Christian people that perish for want of service, whereby through their labour might be maintained. (Loomba and Burton 2007: 136) This edict was the second in a series of deportation edicts stretching from 1596 to 1601: the first two repeatedly refer to Blackamoors as ‘those kind of people’ and the third orders a general deportation of Black people from the kingdom, where by ‘the queen closes borders, and gives priority to “her own natural subjects”’ (Bartels 2006: 317) along colour-based lines. The Merchant of Venice, while staging clear mechanisms of exclusion from the nation on the basis of racial paradigms such as religion and phenotype, also suggests that those exclusion mechanisms are doomed to fail eventually. Indeed, regardless of whether Shylock’s forced conversion ultimately invalidates his racial difference or not, his daughter Jessica marries a Christian man, and we know that at least one white man, the clownish servant Launcelot is responsible for the ‘getting up of a negro’s belly’ (3.1.33). That is to say, blood-mixing across racial lines is in the works at the end of the play. While staging the exclusionary operations of race at work in defining the borders of the nation, the play also suggests that tougher racial negotiations of national identity await the next generations. The various paradigms of the early modern racial matrix do not always function analogically in relation to the nation (as is the case in The Merchant of Venice); sometimes, they are edged against each other in the process of nation-building. For instance, in his 1655 petition to Cromwell to grant Jews re-entry into England whence they had been expelled by Edward I in 1290 after nearly two centuries of anti-Semitic persecutions, massacres and local expulsions, the Dutch Rabbi of Portuguese descent Menasseh ben Israel – sometimes dubbed ‘the ambassador of western Jewry to European Christendom’ (Katz 2004)  – strategically mobilized the phenotypical racial paradigm to renegotiate his people’s relation to the English nation. Here too, the opportunistic dynamics that drive conceptual formations and reformations in the context of interracial power play are patent. Ben Israel emphasizes in the opening line of his address his awareness that he is writing at a strategic moment – as he puts it ‘at such a juncture of time’ (1655: A2r) – when Cromwell’s government is showing signs of willingness to undo the past deeds of the English monarchy, his hope being that ‘the kingly Government being now changed into that of a Commonwealth, the ancient hatred towards them [Jews] would also be changed into good will’ (A3r). On the frontispiece of the petition, he frames himself as writing ‘in behalfe of the Jewish nation’, and he uses throughout the rhetoric of the nation to refer both to Jews and to England, ‘having some years since often perceived that in this [English] nation, God has a people that is very tender-hearted and well-wishing to our sore-afflicted nation’ (A3v). The bulk of the petition eloquently argues that Jews are faithful subjects to princes and beneficial to the countries where they live, and it debunks the slanderous myths about alleged Jewish proselytism, usury and the blood libel. Ben Israel also makes more unexpected moves. First, he argues, based on scripture, that the Messiah cannot ‘come and restore our nation’ until ‘the dispersion of the Holy people [is] completed in all places’; and since Jews live in all parts of the world except England, admitting them into the English nation is the way to haste ‘the restoring time of our nation into their native country’ (ben Israel 1655: A4r). Here, ben Israel is using a rhetoric that blends self-contradictory diasporic fantasies of national integration and separation. Even more

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strikingly, he enlists shared whiteness between Jews and Englishmen in support of his petition. Indeed, he opens his rebuke of the blood libel with a vivid image: As for killing of the young children of Christians; it is an infallible truth what is reported of the Negroes of Guinea and Brazil, that if they see any miserable man that has escaped from the danger of the sea or has fallen or suffered any kind of ill-fortune or Shipwrake, they persecute and vex him so much the more saying God curse thee. And we that live not amongst the Blacke-moors and wild-men, but amongst the white and civilized people of the world, yet we find this an ordinary course that men are very prone to hate and despite him that has ill fortune, and on the other side, to make much of those whom fortune doth favour. (ben Israel 1655: 21) This reference to ‘Negroes’, ‘Blackemoors’ and ‘wild-men’ might seem extraneous to the argument at first sight, but I would argue that it is more than a rhetorical flourish. Indeed, it bespeaks an awareness that for many Europeans in the mid-seventeenth century (ben Israel had lived in the Low Countries most of his life), whiteness and blackness formed the axis of a new racial paradigm that warranted the realignment of former arrangements. In his petition, the logic of phenotypical race does not triumph at the expense of the logic of nation, rather, it triumphs because it is called upon to shape the borders of a nation racially united in whiteness. As ambivalent as its diasporic fantasies of blending and separation were, the new arrangement between Jews and Englishmen that ben Israel called for could only take place because ‘Negroes’ and ‘Blacke-moors’, like ‘wild-men’ did not belong in the British nation (Figure 6.4).15 It has been argued, and rightfully so, that the logic of race does not always close the borders of the nation: sometimes, it opens those borders up. For instance, Marjorie Rubright, foregrounding an epistemology not of difference but of resemblance and approximation, focuses ‘our critical attention on the ways in which English representations of Dutchness were meditations on the elasticity of the self-other divide, revealing a picture of English culture as far more alive to variations by degree than has generally been appreciated’ (2014: 19). Central to Rubright’s argument are early modern references to the Dutch and the English as part of a common race descended from one common stock, such as Thomas Scott’s statement in The Belgicke Pismire (1622): ‘neither need wee be ashamed of such tutors [the United Provinces], who come of the same race originally that wee do, as our speech witnesseth’ (quoted in Rubright 2014: 56). The use of the racial logic to establish relations of kinship between European nations was not limited to the Anglo-Dutch connection, far from it, and in most cases, it was – like any occurrence of racial discourse – opportunistically deployed, for strategic purposes, at specific ‘junctures’. For instance, in A Comparison of the Englishe and Spanishe Nation Composed by a French Gentleman Against those of the League in France which Went about to Persuade the King to Break his Alliance with England and to Confirme it with Spaine (1589), the anonymous author’s incentive to deploy the logic of race is obvious: And I pray you, what people is there in the world, that has juster occasion to love us than the English, which are allied unto us in blood, conformable in manners, and brotherly given to the selfsame virtuous inclinations? … Nothing can be said more brotherly than these two nations. … If the French and English may not be called by the term of Charondas homosipnoi, that is, living together, or according to Epemenides

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FIGURE 6.4  Hottentot (Black African tribes), South Africa, from voyages made to Persia and India 1727, by Johan Albrecht de Mandelslo (1616–1644). © World History Archive/Alamy Stock Photo.

homokapnoi, that is partakers of the same smoke, or as they say brought up together at board and at bed, yet may they by right good be termed homophuloi, that is, descended of the self-same extraction. (‘Gentilhomme françois’ 1589: 5–9) Homophuloi literally means ‘made of the same wood’: the author here is using the racial logic to render the limits of the nation malleable for clear geopolitical purposes. However, to put pressure upon the borders of the nation is not to renounce fashioning it. The logic of race, whether it draws up the boundaries of the nation or brings them down, ultimately helps the nation negotiate its borders in a self-aware manner. It is in the very to and fro between those movements of narrowing and widening that nation-building happens. It is by questioning both its own proximity to the Dutch or French people and its own distance from specific phenotypes and religions that the English nation (like any European nation) slowly and recursively crafted its fictive ethnicity. One of the best reflections of this dual process of nation-building via the logic of race is the ‘Ballet des Nations’ which closes Molière’s hyper-canonical comédie-ballet, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (The Would-Be Gentleman) first performed in 1671.16 In the first entry of the ‘Ballet des Nations’, a man enters to sell the ballet’s libretto and converses with the many spectators who want to buy his copies (Molière [1671] 1688: 101–4).

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Those spectators vary in status (they include gentry, courtezans, bourgeois families) and in origin, since they include ‘people from different provinces’ (des gens de provinces différentes), either French (from Gascony) or French-adjacent (from Switzerland). All characters speak in French, but those from Gascony and Switzerland have heavily scripted accents that signal their difference as hybrids living in-between the French, Spanish and German nations. The third and fourth entries of the ballet continue in the same vein by bringing foreigners on stage: the third entry includes three Spaniards who sing in Spanish, dance and perform their Spanishness in ways that underline their closeness to and distance from the Gascony characters of the first entry (104–6). The fourth entry includes Italian musicians who sing in Italian and commedia dell’arte zanni Scaramouche, Trivelin and Harlequin, who dance ‘in the manner of Italian actors, in measure’ (à la manière des acteurs Italiens, en cadence) but probably remind spectators that Harlequin was an Italian born in Paris, and thus a national hybrid from his very inception (106).17 The fifth entry stages two musicians and dancers from Poitou, who sing without any accent and dance French menuets, as if to try to re-stabilize the category of Frenchness (107–8) – but in vain, since the final entry of the ballet triumphantly stages ‘the mixing of the three nations’ (le mélange des trois nations), while the libretto has the whole company present on stage approve, applaud and join in the dance (108). What this ‘Ballet des nations’ illustrates, ultimately, is the difficulty, for the early moderns themselves, of drawing up stable separations between European nations. The ballet foregrounds the pleasurability of neighbourly commixing to which cultural, linguistic and aesthetic mixture irrevocably attest. Race happily pressures the borders of the French nation here, yet this performance must be understood in the larger economy of the play that embeds the ‘Ballet des Nations’. The plot of Le Bourgeois gentilhomme presents M. Jourdain, a Parisian bourgeois, who, as the title announces, entertains delusions of grandeur, wishes to become an aristocrat, and thus refuses, against common sense, to let his daughter Lucile marry her wooer Cléonte, who has no aristocratic pedigree. Cléonte and his servant Covielle devise a trick to overcome the senex’s opposition: Cléonte pretends to be the son of the Great Turk, and successfully claims his beloved’s hand from a M. Jourdain who values the aristocratic status of his new son-in-law over his race, both in the religious and phenotypical senses of the term. The mariage takes place, M. Jourdain remains deluded until the very end of the play, which closes with the aforementioned ‘Ballet des Nations’, performed to celebrate the marriage of Cléonte and Lucile. M. Jourdain is blamed by every rational person in the world of the play for marrying his daughter to a Muslim and a Turk: his punishment is enacted onstage when, during the mock-Turkish ceremony, he converts to Islam in order to be ennobled by his future sonin-law. M. Jourdain receives a bastinado, a treatment fit for the king of misrule that he is: ‘The Turks … beat him with a stick rhythmically’ (Les Turcs … lui donnent plusieurs coups de bâton en cadence) (Molière [1671] 1688: 89). The comedy that embeds the ‘Ballet des nations’ is thus driven by a desire to close the borders of the French nation to the racial Other that is the Muslim Turk, which is why the play foils M. Jourdain’s attempts at opening those borders in order to improve his own race, understood as the old status-based paradigm in the early modern racial matrix. The borders of the French nation that the Ballets des nations pressures are thus drawn back up with a vengeance in the comedy that frames it: Le Bourgeois gentilhomme – a play commissioned directly by Louis XIV, the King most often associated with French nation-building – illustrates the very to and fro between approximation and distanciation, between the drawing up and bringing down of borders through which the racial logic dually helped early modern nations fashion themselves into fictive ethnicities.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Race and Gender Inkle, Yarico, Intertextual Revisions and the Problem of Female Vengeance CARL PLASA

Because of its long historical span and broad, indeed transnational author- and readership, Inkle and Yarico constitutes an important point of reference in thinking about the cultural representation of the colonization of the New World. —Dobie (2010: 148) It’s not over just because it stops. —Morrison (1994: 253)

INTRODUCTION: VIOLENT ORIGINS The stories that a culture chooses to tell not only reveal something about its aesthetic preferences but also provide an insight into its ideological investments. One especially compelling instance of such interconnections between storytelling and ideology, within and indeed beyond the time frame allotted to this volume, is the narrative of Inkle and Yarico. Existing in scores of different versions from the early seventeenth century to the postcolonial present, this perennial tale has been described by David Brion Davis as a ‘great folk epic’ (1988: 10–11), forming a sprawling ‘corpus’ whose structure can be likened to that of a ‘branched medieval legend’ (Dobie 2010: 148). First popularized in an essay written by Sir Richard Steele and published in issue number eleven of The Spectator for Tuesday 13 March 1711, the story unfolds along the following lines: Mr. Thomas Inkle, an ambitious young English trader cast ashore in the Americas, is saved from violent death at the hands of savages by the endearments of Yarico, a beautiful Indian maiden. Their romantic intimacy in the forest moves Inkle to pledge that, were his life to be preserved, he would return with her to England, supposedly as his wife. The lovers’ tender liaison progresses over several months until she succeeds in signaling a passing English ship. They are rescued by the crew, and with vows to each other intact … embark for Barbados. Yet when they reach the island Inkle’s former mercantile instincts are callously revived, for he sells her into slavery, at once raising the price he demands when he learns that Yarico is carrying his child. (Felsenstein 1999: 2)

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Although Steele invents the surname of his ‘ambitious young English trader’, this mercurial colonial romance is not wholly of his own making, but self-consciously indebted to and significantly adapted from a short passage in Richard Ligon’s A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (1657) (Figure 7.1). As numerous critics have noted, however, Ligon’s text is itself foreshadowed by a similarly brief but particularly harrowing episode in Jean Mocquet’s Voyages en Afrique, Asie, Indes Orientales & Occidentales (1617), a work translated by Nathaniel Pullen in 1696 as Travels and Voyages into Africa, Asia, and America, the East and West-Indies.1 Here Yarico appears not in propria persona but as an anonymous ‘Indian-Woman’ who falls in love with a shipwrecked English ‘Pilot’ (Mocquet 1696: 2:125) and protects him against the ‘many Dangers’ he faces from her hostile countrymen. He returns her affection but eventually abandons his lover-guardian to the ‘Mercy of Fortune’ when rescued by countrymen of his own in a fishing-vessel. This act of betrayal makes him the indirect recipient of a horrifying revenge: ‘full of Rage and Anger’, the ‘forsaken’ woman tears the child they had conceived together into two pieces, ‘cast[ing] the one half towards him into the Sea, as if she would say, that belonged to him, and was his part of it’ and carrying ‘the other … away with her … full of Mourning and Discontent’ (2:126) (Figure 7.2). Fringed by the classical narratives of Dido and Medea, Mocquet’s disturbing tale ‘lays a treacherous foundation upon which to erect a legend of noble savagery’ (Sypher 1942: 124), yet it is precisely in this direction that the story typically evolves: in Ligon’s account, for example, Yarico is no child-killer but an ideal mother, who loves her ‘lusty

FIGURE 7.1  John Elphinstone, ‘Illustration to the story of Inkle and Yarico, by Sir Richard Steele: Thomas Incle embarking for the West Indies’, c. 1711. © National Galleries of Scotland, David Laing bequest to the Royal Scottish Academy (transferred 1910).

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FIGURE 7.2  John Elphinstone, ‘Illustration to the story of Inkle and Yarico, by Sir Richard Steele: Thomas Incle shipwrecked’, c. 1711. © National Galleries of Scotland, David Laing bequest to the Royal Scottish Academy (transferred 1910).

Boy’, proudly cradling him ‘in her arms … frolick and lively’ (Ligon [1657] 1976: 55) just after he is born. Nonetheless, the threat of deadly female vengeance posed in Mocquet’s ur-text continues to resurface in subsequent iterations of the tale, needing in each case to be negotiated afresh. Besides Steele’s own much-feted essay, these include the anonymously published Yarico to Inkle: An Epistle (1736a); Incle and Yarico (1742), a three-act play usually attributed to the mysterious figure of a Mrs Weddell; and Matthew Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor, a work posthumously published in 1834, but largely written in 1816–17, during its author’s residence on the two sizeable Jamaican plantations he inherited on his father’s death in 1812. This chapter elaborates a close reading of these four texts, arguing that they all follow Ligon’s example by variously seeking to transform and so contain the originary act of violent reprisal Mocquet records, thus also sanitizing and making more palatable the figure of the racially other female. Although Lewis’s Journal lies well outside this volume’s historical scope, it is considered all the same, in a brief coda, because it makes a significant contribution to the Inkle and Yarico tradition that has to date gone entirely unexamined.

‘THIS QUESTION BETWEEN THE SEXES’: LITERARY REVENGE IN THE SPECTATOR While Steele’s essay is framed by the voice of Mr Spectator, its secondary but more important narrator is the bookish Arietta. As Mr Spectator visits this ‘Woman … of Taste

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and Understanding’ in her salon one ‘Afternoon’, he finds her listening to a ‘CommonPlace Talker’ holding forth on ‘the old Topick, of Constancy in Love’ and smugly criticizing, in particular, the ‘Perjuries of the Fair’ and their ‘general Levity’. In order to support his ‘Arguments’, this ill-mannered personage draws upon ‘Quotations out of Plays and Songs’, but relies most heavily on a classical exemplar, Petronius’s ‘celebrated Story of the Ephesian Matron’ (Steele [1711] 1965: 48). As might be expected, Arietta becomes increasingly vexed by her garrulous and selfflattering guest and sets about disrupting his complacent and insulting ‘Discourse’ (Steele 48) with narratives of her own. The first of these comes from Aesop, ‘himself reputed to have been a slave’ (Horesji 2006: 209): But your Quotations put me in Mind of the Fable of the Lion and the Man. The Man walking with that noble Animal, showed him, in the Ostentation of Human Superiority, a Sign of a Man killing a Lion. Upon which the Lion said very justly, We Lions are none of us Painters, else we could show a hundred Men killed by Lions, for one Lion killed by a Man. (Steele [1711] 1965: 48–9; emphasis in the original) As Arietta goes on to explain, Aesop’s ancient narrative is an allegory for the dilemma in which she and other females have historically been trapped: men have always monopolized the privilege of literary authorship – assumed the lion’s share of it, so to speak (to reverse the conceit) – and so been able to represent women in detrimental terms, while women themselves have been denied the means to gainsay this misogynistic system. As the invocation of Aesop suggests, the irony here is that it is male-authored stories that constitute the resources Arietta uses in the dispute with her interlocutor, the second story she summons deriving from Ligon: ‘I was the other Day amusing myself with Ligon’s Account of Barbadoes’, she comments, ‘and, in Answer to your well-wrought Tale, I will give you (as it dwells upon my Memory) out of that honest Traveller, in his fifty fifth Page, the History of Inkle and Yarico’ (49). In one sense, Arietta’s choice of text – or countertext – is surprising, since there are aspects of that ‘honest Traveller’’s book that she would be likely to find far from entertaining, including Ligon’s tendency to reduce the racially other women he observes during his time in Barbados to objects of visual pleasure and erotic fantasy, fetishizing their body parts. In the course of giving an inventory of the ‘few’ ‘Indians’ on the estate where he is staying – just prior to introducing the story of Yarico – Ligon spotlights the females among this group and, especially, their ‘breasts’, which, as he remarks, are ‘very small … and have more of the shape of the Europeans than the Negroes’. In Yarico’s own case, Ligon’s classificatory gaze is still more intimate, focusing not just on size but pigment too: ‘We had an Indian woman, a slave in the house, who was of excellent shape and color, for it was a pure bright bay; small breasts, with the niples of a porphyrie color, this woman would not be woo’d by any means to wear Cloaths’ (54). Apart from its prurience, the detail of Yarico’s ‘niples’ as being ‘porphyrie’ in ‘color’ is ironic, since such a hue is associated with a regality of status which she, as house-slave, does not possess (but which is restored to her in Steele’s text when Arietta calls her ‘a Person of Distinction’ [50]). Conversely, Arietta may well be amused by A True & Exact History because of its contradictions and incoherencies. These become apparent when Ligon’s narrative of how his ‘Indian Maid’ is exploited by her ‘young man’ (Ligon [1657] 1976: 55), is placed alongside his totalizing comment that her enslaved compatriots ‘are much craftier, and

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subtiler then the Negroes’ on his plantation ‘and in their nature falser’ (54). As the tale itself demonstrates, such casual if adamantine taxonomies practise their own deception: Ligon’s ‘poor Yarico’ manifests none of the characteristics ascribed to her kind by the selfappointed voice of colonial authority but instead remains true to the one with whom she falls in love at ‘first sight’ and for whose ‘safety’ she both ‘venture[s] her life’ and finally loses her ‘liberty’ (55). Ligon’s tale thus reveals itself to have a subversive potential – a capacity to debunk a supposed general truth – that is well-suited to Arietta’s iconoclastic purposes. Yet while Arietta describes how the tale ‘dwells upon [her] Memory’, she does not simply passively recollect but actively revises it, making a number of interrelated changes. First, in Ligon, for instance, Yarico becomes pregnant after she is ‘sold … for a slave’ (Ligon [1657] 1976: 55), whereas, in Arietta’s version, it is disclosed that she is with child before her enslavement. Secondly, in Ligon’s account again, the father of Yarico’s ‘Child’ is a mysterious and indentured ‘Christian servant’ (54), while, according to Arietta, paternity rests with Inkle, who, when he learns of the ‘poor Girl’’s condition, exploits it by ‘ris[ing] in his Demands upon’ the ‘Barbadian Merchant’ who is her ‘Purchaser’ (Steele [1711] 1965: 51). And thirdly and crucially, Ligon nowhere explicitly asserts (or even implies) that the male ‘youth’ (Ligon [1657] 1976: 55) in his tale is enamoured of the woman who rescues and, by contrast, becomes besotted with him; Arietta’s more sentimental retelling, on the other hand, emphasizes a powerful mutual attraction that eroticizes racial difference: ‘If the European was highly Charmed with the Limbs, Features, and wild Graces of the Naked American; the American was no less taken with the Dress, Complexion and Shape of an European, covered from Head to Foot’ (Steele [1711] 1965: 50). By thus refashioning Inkle as Yarico’s lover (and subsequent betrayer), Arietta resurrects the plot line first laid down in Mocquet, while at the same time establishing a suggestive link between the ‘Hero of [her] Story’ (50) and the male authors whose literary productions she challenges, since all of them are engaged, one way or another, in the art of duplicity. Such a connection is written into the onomastics of Steele’s text, with the name ‘Inkle’ containing the word for the very substance such authors use in order to practise their perfidious craft: ink. This connection is consolidated by Arietta when she observes how male ‘Reflections’ concerning the allegedly inherent nature of female ‘Hipocrisy [sic]’ and capacity for emotional dissemblance are themselves ‘sprinkled up and down the Writings of all Ages’ (49; my emphasis). As much as Arietta deviates from her narrative model by means of the changes adduced above, she also conforms to it, since, in her version of events, as in Ligon’s, Yarico is, once again, not portrayed as an agent of vengeance, either against Inkle or their mixed-race progeny. At the same time, however, if female revenge does not feature in the story itself, it is embodied even so in the very act of the story’s narration, which operates as a form of retaliation against the commonplace talker, exposing the truths concealed by the male literary tradition for which he is the boorish mouthpiece. In this respect, Steele’s Arietta becomes allied with the prototypical Yarico in Mocquet, simultaneously sublimating the literal violence which that ‘Indian-Woman’ performs and redirecting it away from an ill-starred love-child towards the textual offspring begotten by the male writer, whose pen, as Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar once famously conjectured, might be seen as a metaphorical penis (1979: 3). This alliance is implicit, once more, in Steele’s language. Although the commonplace talker’s opinions are dismissed as mere ‘Raillery’, their effect upon Arietta is profound: she feels them as an ‘Outrage done

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to her Sex’ that induces in her a ‘serious Anger’ (Steele [1711] 1965: 48), a response in turn recalling the fury of Mocquet’s Yarico-in-waiting when she is left desolate by her lover. Similarly, Arietta figures the relationships between male authors and the women about whom they write as insouciantly violent affairs, in which the former inflict an ‘Injury’ that the latter cannot ‘return’ (49) – and of course the fable she chooses in order to illustrate her point is itself awash with a violence that, ironically, is wantonly reciprocal in form, as men kill lions and lions kill men. Arietta describes the commonplace talker as ‘repeat[ing] and murder[ing]’ (48) Petronius’s story, meaning that, even as the tale may have been originally well-crafted, it is badly marred by the one who delivers it anew, but it is evident that, metaphorically speaking at least, she harbours murderous impulses of her own.

VENGEANCE DISPLACED: YARICO TO INKLE: AN EPISTLE As previously argued, one of the salient differences between Ligon’s text and Steele’s is that, in the earlier work, Inkle’s emotional and erotic investment in ‘the poor maid’ (Ligon [1657] 1976: 55) is not part of the narrative, whereas, in the later, Inkle and Yarico are unequivocally portrayed as ‘mutually agreeable’, living in a ‘tender Correspondence’ for ‘several Months’ (Steele [1711] 1965: 50–1). Such is the seductive power of Steele’s reworking of Ligon that the interracial relationship he elaborates (but that is already evident in Mocquet) establishes itself as an intertextual given in and across all further articulations of the tale, the next for consideration in this chapter being Yarico to Inkle: An Epistle. As well as following Steele in this way, this long poem follows him by defining the telling or retelling of the story as an expression of vengeance (while silently and notably changing Yarico’s identity from Indigenous American to African). Now, however, the storyteller in question is not Arietta but Yarico herself, just as the retribution she seeks is not destined to be visited upon male writers in general as a literary counterblast but upon one (metaphorical) writer in particular, whose duplicitous nature she is resolved to expose. This, of course, is Inkle, described by Yarico, in the poem’s final verse-paragraph – despite his treachery – as ‘the still-lov’d Author of [her] Pain’ (Anonymous 1736a: 15). Yet while the text thus positions Yarico as an avenging figure, it does so at a point when she is on the brink of death, her letter a ‘dying Farewel’ (Anonymous 1736a: 1) composed for the perusal of the one who is the ‘cruel Cause, and Source of all [her] Woes’ (2). Yarico is granted such a role, in other words, only to the ironic extent that it is about to be negated. This removal of the female subject from the scene of her own vengeful writing is complemented in the diegetic patterns of the story that she pens. Here Inkle is threatened with a punishment for the ‘Ingratitude’ (7) he displays towards her that is repeatedly imagined as being administered by figures other than Yarico herself, all of whom are either implicitly or explicitly male. Yarico to Inkle falls into the genre of the Ovidian heroic epistle, ‘the preeminent form before the novel for ventriloquizing the female voice and representing women’s inner lives’ (Wechselblatt 1989: 202).2 Ironically, though, the poem begins with Yarico’s referring to herself in the third- rather than first-person, lamenting the onset of her Barbadian enslavement just as, in the words of the poem’s ‘Argument’, Inkle is ‘embarking for England’ (1; emphasis in original):

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From the sad Place, where Sorrow ever reigns, And hopeless Wretches groan beneath their Chains; Where stern Oppression lifts her Iron Hand, And restless Cruelty usurps Command; To soothe her Soul, and ease her aking Heart, Permit a Wretch her Sufferings to impart: To Inkle she complains, to him, who taught Her Hand in Language to express her Thought. (Anonymous 1736a: 1) In these lines, the grammatical usurpations of ‘my’ by ‘her’ and ‘I’ by ‘she’ can perhaps be read as a symptom of the loss of autonomy which the reifying effects of slavery create or, alternatively, as a means of protecting the self from acknowledging its own abjection. Either way, they are consistent with the dissociations enumerated previously, whereby Yarico’s impending demise divorces her from her own account of the ‘ill Usage’ (Anonymous 1736a: 1) she has undergone. The account itself displaces and regenders as male the vengeance that it is rightly hers to exact. The process of regendering, it is worth noting, is also in evidence in these lines, albeit in reverse: it is collusive male figures, after all, who subject Yarico to slavery, whether they be Inkle himself or the trader to whom he sells her, even as the ‘Oppression’ under which she labours is personified as female. As the poem ventures beyond its opening mise en scène and Yarico belatedly finds her first-person voice, it becomes apparent that hers is an ‘I’ divided against itself. The most striking instance of this comes early on, when, immediately after having confessed to her enduring love for Inkle, Yarico makes an abrupt emotional volte-face in which she imagines him once again shipwrecked and imperilled as he ‘spread[s]’ his careless ‘Sails’ (Anonymous 1736a: 1) for home: False as you are, how dare you trust anew To Winds and Seas, as treacherous as you? Think, will the Gods you serve, if Gods they are, For Crimes like your’s [sic], their Punishments forbear? If injur’d Innocence their Care be made, Tho’ I forgive, their certain Vengeance dread. What if your Bark, by adverse Tempests tost, Shou’d on some barbarous Shore like mine, be lost; Think that you see your Friends and you pursu’d By savage People, greedy for your Blood, Who then wou’d snatch you from your pale Dispair? (Anonymous 1736a: 2) In Mocquet, Yarico’s vengeance is displaced from Inkle onto their child, but here the displacement concerns the agent rather than the object of revenge, as it is Inkle’s ‘Gods’ who are summoned to punish his ‘Crimes’, even as those questionable deities in turn express their anger through the medium of ‘Winds and Seas’ rather than direct intervention. This displacement-effect recurs at two further junctures, located towards the poem’s mid-point and its end. In the first, adopting a monotheistic rather than polytheistic frame

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of reference, Yarico reminds Inkle of the ‘Promises’ he made to his Christian God during the time of the lovers’ brief accord, as well as the seemingly confirmatory ‘Oaths’ that accompanied those vows. As she recalls, Inkle instructs the ‘Power that mad’st’ him to ignore his ‘dying Pray’r’ and permanently debar him from Heaven – should he ‘ever … forget’ Yarico’s kindness. Yet given that Inkle has already precisely and spectacularly forgotten Yarico’s ‘tender Care’, she is to be excused for wondering why he has not been punished in the present, rather than in an imagined future in which he seeks divine forgiveness for his misdeeds. ‘Is he a God, whose Curses you implor’d, / And shall his Hand not grasp th’avenging Sword?’ (Anonymous 1736a: 7), she asks. Following this question, Yarico tells Inkle that he can no longer ‘hope in sweet Content to live, / Or know that Comfort, [he] refus’d to give’ (Anonymous 1736a: 7), a conviction echoed and underscored in the poem’s penultimate verse-paragraph: ‘Yet sweet Contentment never hope to own’, she sternly warns, ‘Or taste of soft Repose – tho’ stretch’d on Down; / In vain for Ease to Business you’ll repair, / My Wrongs shall find you, and revenge me there’ (15). In making such claims, Yarico provides the third and final instance in the poem in which vengeance is simultaneously displaced and regendered as male, shaping an image of Inkle as harried by his own guilt-ridden thoughts, which attend him not only in moments of rest and relaxation but also when he seeks psychological escape from past transgressions by retreating to the realms of ‘Business’. In this sense, Yarico suggests, Inkle will ultimately be just as riven by internal conflict as she is, albeit in a different way. One reason for this pattern of displacements and regenderings across the course of the poem is that for Yarico personally to lay claim to and perpetrate revenge upon Inkle would render her unfeminine. Equally, though, there is a sense in which she is already a figure who disrupts gender-conventions. Such at least is the implication of the passage early on in the poem in which she asks Inkle to explain his mistreatment of her: O tell me, why am I so wretched made? For what unwilling Crime am I betray’d? Is it because I lov’d? – Unjust Reward! That Love preserv’d you from the Ills you fear’d; If ’twas a Fault, alas! I’m guilty still, For still I love, and while I live I will; No change of Fortune, nor your cruel Hate Shall cure my Passion, or its Warmth abate. (Anonymous 1736a: 2) This address is open to opposing interpretations. While it may well simply be that Yarico is being ironic in constructing her ‘Love’ as a ‘Fault’ – a crime or a sin? – and her ‘Passion’ as a disease that is incurable, it could be argued, conversely, that her language is more literal than this, functioning as a measure of the degree to which she has internalized patriarchal edicts. How then can she punish Inkle when her own desire for him goes against the order of things? What, to use the word that circulates so equivocally throughout the poem, are Yarico’s ‘Wrongs’ exactly? Are they things she has suffered or things that she has done? It can be further argued that Yarico’s ‘Reward’ is in fact legitimate rather than ‘Unjust’, if only from the vantage of this self-serving patriarchal logic. This is an idea suggested by her description of her initial encounter with Inkle in the ‘shady Wood’ where he has

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sought shelter from the ‘Fury of the desp’rate Foe’ who are pursuing him: ‘There I beheld you, trembling as you lay, / And, e’er I knew it, look’d my Soul away’ (Anonymous 1736a: 4), she recollects. This latter phrase is a curious one, not least because it robs Yarico of the personal property – in the shape of her ‘Soul’ – that she hopes, at the start of the poem, to be able to ‘sooth’ by means of her epistolary blues. But as well as thus introducing a contradictory note into the text, the phrase has a wider import, since it suggests that female desire is somehow intrinsically immoral and so worthy of punishment, as the look that Yarico trains on Inkle plunges her into an instantaneous spiritual ruin. The moment when Yarico constitutes Inkle as sexual object occurs at the start of what is ‘the most erotic portion of the poem’ (Felsenstein 1999: 115n8), but the ‘soft Pleasures’ and vacant blisses that engulf the text’s heroine at this pivotal juncture – ‘I knew / No Thought, no Wish for any Thing but you’ (Anonymous 1736a: 5) – are obtained, it seems, at the price of her own perdition.

DRAMATIC DEVELOPMENTS: MRS WEDDELL’S INCLE AND YARICO The story of Inkle and Yarico is nothing if not formally protean, adumbrated first as part of Mocquet’s early modern travelogue and then reworked in Ligon’s colonial memoir, Steele’s satirical essay and the unattributed heroic epistle just discussed. Such formal versatility takes a further turn in Weddell’s Incle and Yarico: A Tragedy in Three Acts (1742). As is consistent with the status of its (putative) author – about whom almost nothing is known – this sentimental melodrama is one of the more obscure threads in the tapestry of literary history: in its own Georgian era, the tragedy was rejected for performance by the ‘Playhouse Criticks, to whom … it was submitted’ (Weddell [1742] 1999: 5), just as, in our own day, it has received little attention and tends to divide opinion among those few scholars who have granted it notice (Nussbaum 2003: 297n11). But whatever the precise nature of the play’s claim to critical recognition, either then or now, it is certainly germane from the perspective adopted in this chapter, since it is a text in which the question of vengeance is prominent once again. Like Yarico to Inkle, which was written, as its Dedication makes clear, to support ‘the Negro’s Cause’ (Weddell [1742] 1999: ii), Weddell’s text features a ‘sable Heroine’ (6), rather than the Indigenous American protagonist found in Mocquet, Ligon and Steele. At the same time, the play considerably strengthens the sense of Yarico’s African identity by setting its first two acts on the coast of West Africa itself, before switching the scene, in Act Three, to Jamaica – as opposed to the customary Barbados. The sense of the civilized (and stratified) African milieu from which Incle will so brutally cut Yarico adrift is fashioned, concurrently, by the presence in the text of a host of minor characters, ranging from Yarico’s two female attendants to various officers and guards, ministers and messengers, as well as the two unnamed working-class ‘Natives’ (29) who appear in Act Two, Scene Two, in one of the play’s comic interludes. Additional cultural specificity is provided by Weddell’s creation of a subplot in which Yarico seems destined, before her disastrous encounter with Incle, to be exchanged in a politically expedient marriage arranged by her father-King and the neighbouring royal suitor, Prince Satamamo. These quite radical shifts in the story’s geographical and cultural location go hand in hand with an emphasis on and critique of the transatlantic slave trade that is much more pronounced, sophisticated and sustained than in any of the works examined so far (Figure 7.3). Equally, this substantially more searching and detailed focus gives the

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FIGURE 7.3  S. Hutchinson, Slave Traffic, 1793. © National Maritime Galleries, Royal Museums Greenwich, UK.

play a new angle from which to approach the issue of vengeance, expanding it beyond the realms of gender and into those of race. This is evident from the play’s very first moments, when, engaged in ‘traffick on the Afric Coast’ (Weddell [1742] 1999: 19), Incle and his crewmates are shipwrecked in a storm. Although they escape being drowned in the Atlantic, the ‘Ocean’s Rage’ (23) only delivers them unto a landfall that brings its own perils, in the shape of anticipated reprisals for the deeds and misdeeds of previous slave traders: ‘’twere vain to hope for Safety’, Incle laments, in the play’s opening lines, ‘Where the Rememb’rance of the Multitudes / Borne hence, to Slav’ry, by our Countrymen / Must make each Man we meet an Enemy’ (11). While Incle’s guilty fears are complacently dismissed by his vessel’s Captain, for whom the Africans will ‘not avenge, / Upon our Heads, the Ills they’ve felt from others’ (12; emphases in the original), they are realized nonetheless at the end of Act One. Here both the Captain and the other four sailors who make up the wrecked ship’s company are captured by Yarico’s father and sentenced to slave-‘Labour’ (25) as a way of atoning, at least partially, for the ‘Horrid Crimes / Committed on this Land’ (23) by the traders who have gone before them – with the elusive Incle embowered all the while in the sanctum of Yarico’s ‘Grot’ (20). Shortly after voicing his anxieties about potential retribution, Incle suggests that the Africans’ sense of the pain inflicted upon them by the slave trade is a collective one, commenting that ‘The Wrongs they suffer fall alike on all, / And leave no room for them to make Distinctions’ (12; emphasis in the original). By the same token, the punishment the King visits upon the ‘Five Europeans’ (23) can be interpreted as the sign of another kind of indiscrimination, in which the differences between traders past and present are

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ignored or dissolved. Such a dissolution is fitting, since, as Weddell repeatedly points out, it is in the nature of slavery, as imagined in this play at any rate, to eradicate differences, at least in terms of class. As the far more outspoken of Yarico’s attendants puts it, during the scene of first contact between the play’s two principals, ‘all who fall into [the traders’] Hands, alike / Are miserable; nor Virtue there avails / Nor Sex, nor Birth:– The princely Youth, or Maid, / Find no Distinction there’ (18). This is of course an ominous declaration for the high-born Yarico, who, by Act Three, has undergone the Middle Passage to become a much-valued ‘Slave of Quality’ (47). Yet as much as slavery perversely democratizes in this way, it is an institution more fundamentally predicated on an essentialist ideology of racial difference, which not only sets White above Black but also allows class-hierarchies to be inverted, as unnatural and violent chains of command are forged anew. As the same attendant forthrightly continues, using a syntax that is almost as convoluted as the situation it describes, ‘Deaf to Humanity, th’imperious Master, / Perhaps a Beggar born, inflicts a Task / Of Slav’ry on a Prince; whose gen’rous Arm / Unskill’d in menial Acts, subjects His Back / To Stripes, whom Nature form’d to sway an Empire’ (Weddell [1742] 1999: 18; emphases in the original). At first glance, Incle and Yarico appears to underwrite such essentialism, as indicated, in particular, by the moral colour codes it invokes, which insistently and rigidly associate forms of malefaction with blackness. To cite just three instances of this pattern: Yarico’s father describes his daughter’s liaison with Incle (in which he doggedly refuses for some time to believe) as a ‘black … Act;’ her wilful and protracted ‘Concealment’ of her lover in her ‘Grove’ is thought an ‘Action’, and similarly, ‘of so black a Dye, / As cannot stain a Maid’ (Weddell [1742] 1999: 34). Incle, for his part, is the prime mover in what the Preface designates a ‘dire Scene of black Ingratitude’ (7; emphasis in the original) when he heartlessly betrays his ‘Preserver’ (63), once the pair arrive on Jamaica’s ‘Christian Shore’ (51; emphasis in the original), by selling her to a local planter. Equally, however, the text simultaneously challenges the racist assumptions that inform its moral lexicon: the ‘Paths of Innocence’ might be ‘white’ (Weddell [1742] 1999: 71), but whiteness is itself merely a dazzling mask for an underlying baseness. In Yarico’s eyes, Incle is a ‘Form celestial’, who has ‘with him brought / The Brightness of his ParentGod the Sun’, but, for the rather more down-to-earth attendant, this lustrous Apollonian descent is a devastating fiction: ‘This seeming Deity, / So far from what his Looks declare, / Is something worse than mortal’ (17), she assures her love-blind mistress, numbering the object of Yarico’s desire among ‘the Ravagers who bear’ their fellow Africans ‘To distant Realms, to Slav’ry, and to Death’ (18). For the play’s home audience (had one ever been assembled) such a denunciation would no doubt have caused disquiet, even as it is not so much the fact of Incle’s whiteness as his Englishness that is truly unsettling, since it gives back to the spectator an image of national identity that is unpalatable – in contrast to the slave-grown sugar that he or she would also be consuming at this time. Coupled with and placed in opposition to Yarico as African or ‘native Black’, it is indeed the ‘perfidious Incle’’s uncanny status as ‘an Englishman’ that constitutes the ‘Disadvantage’ of the ‘Story’ (6; emphases in the original) on which Weddell’s play is based and it is this that may even have been one reason for the drama’s failure to effect the transition from page to stage.3 In contrast to the sexually innocent Yarico – and in a departure from convention – Incle is portrayed in this text as something of a libertine, albeit one able to feel remorse for his own exploitative behaviour. As he confesses early on, his ‘Life’ has been ‘mispent [sic]’ (Weddell [1742] 1999: 12), particularly in relation to the mysterious and virginal Violetta, whom he has seduced and whose ‘Ruin’ (16) leads, after ‘some few Months’ of

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‘Anguish’ (62), to her death. Although Violetta is not a character who appears in person in the play, she nonetheless preys upon Incle’s mind as if she were present. As he comments, in the first of his three soliloquies: ‘Ev’n now, methink [sic], I see / Thy beauteous Form, adorn’d with ev’ry Grace / Which Virtue, and which Innocence can give, / Sit list’ning to my baneful Tongue, well pleas’d / To be deluded by the Man you lov’d / Too much, to think a Traytor to a Form / He seem’d to worship’ (16). The hallucinatory immediacy of this memory is one sign of how Weddell endows Incle with a more troubled psychology than he ever possesses in the works produced prior to her play, giving him a degree of depth and interiority not unlike that which, as noted earlier, the heroic epistle affords the female subject. At the same time, the memory itself brings into focus in no uncertain terms the resemblances between Violetta’s situation and Yarico’s and these correspondences are made all the more overt in Incle’s third soliloquy, towards the end of the play, in Act Three, Scene Five. Here the Atlantic storm to which he and his companions are exposed at the start of the text has become internalized, so that his ‘Breast / Beats with perpetual Tempest’ and the women he has betrayed, past and present, White and Black, take turns to arraign him: ‘first Violetta pleads, / Then Yarico; and with alternate Shame / Feed one continu’d Burning in my Soul, / And damps [sic] my ev’ry Purpose … / … Ev’n now, methinks, / They both stand full before me … slow repeating / The Ills I’ve brought them to’ (64). As Incle acknowledges, there will eventually be a reckoning for the sufferings he has inflicted, though, as in Yarico to Inkle, retribution is meted out to him in this text not by his victims, but by other agents operating on their behalf who, as in the earlier poem, are either implicitly or explicitly male. As he comments at the beginning of the play, with respect to the violated Violetta, for example, ‘Heav’n … / … pursues [his] Steps / With heavy Veng’ance’ (Weddell [1742] 1999: 16), a statement that reinterprets the danger and adversity besetting the early phases of his African sojourn as fit punishment not for participation in the slave trade but for the sexual and emotional abuse of an ingenuous young woman. This chivalric pattern is repeated in Yarico’s case, once she finally realizes the full extent of Incle’s ingratitude towards her – how he has ‘repaid’ her ‘purest Love and Tenderness’ with ‘Chains’ and ‘slavish Bonds’. At this point, as the stage direction indicates, she ‘Weep[s] in Rage’ (Weddell [1742] 1999: 53) and, shortly thereafter, is reported by the sympathetic Amyntor, her new owner’s son, as exhibiting similarly mixed emotions. As he informs his father, ‘Her gentle Breast, by oft-unequal Swellings, / Beats Dissolution to her tender Form, / And Death to her Undoer’ (57), even as it falls once more to a divine power, rather than Yarico herself, to avenge her distress: as Yarico prophesies in Act Three, Scene Two, it is ‘Heav’n … sure’ that ‘will … / Pour Vengeance on [Incle’s] most perfidious Head’ (54). As if to underscore his sympathy for ‘This injur’d Princess’ (Weddell [1742] 1999: 68), Amyntor echoes this prophecy in the following scene, at a juncture when Incle is on the verge of returning to England. Mockingly assured that his ‘whining Tale’ of Yarico’s Caribbean afflictions will ‘scarcely overtake’ (59) Incle’s homebound ship, Amyntor both agrees with this claim and at the same time discounts it: ‘The Tale may not;– / But the keen Eye of slow-attending Veng’ance, / Will never miss it’s [sic] Mark: and the deep Sighs / Of injur’d Innocence are often heard / O’er the wide Ocean’s Face’ (60). As it turns out, vengeance is not at all slow in its attentions but fast, overtaking Incle while he is still in Jamaica and Yarico, despairing and enslaved, has undergone (in a cruel pun) the ‘roughest Labours’ in an ‘open Field’ (Weddell [1742] 1999: 65) and died in childbirth, along with her ‘weak Babe’ (67). This acceleration of events occurs when Incle,

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driven mad by the sight of Yarico’s ‘fading Corps’ (69) – which Amyntor had counselled him to ‘avoid’ (68) – is killed in a swordfight with Honorius, a character introduced in the Preface as Violetta’s brother but somewhat disconcertingly recast, in the play itself, as her lover. But whatever his exact role, Honorius functions as an agent of the ‘celestial Judge’ who ‘suffer’st not the guilty e’er t’escape / Due Punishment’, delivering a double or composite justice for Violetta and Yarico in a single act. As he exclaims, addressing the Christian God who, for him, is an ‘unerring Being’, ‘’twas matchless Goodness, thus / To let me ’venge two Murders by one Wound’ (71; emphases in the original). The ‘Surprizing Incident’ at the centre of Incle and Yarico’s denouement provides another instance of how the text collapses distinctions, this time between the sufferings endured by its two ‘injur’d Virgins’ (Weddell [1742] 1999: 71). Yet such an elision of difference is problematic. After all, despite their commonalities, the narratives belonging to these women are ultimately more striking for their race-based discrepancies, with Incle creating a far profounder ‘Havock’ (68) in Yarico’s world (including the collateral suicide of Satamamo and the implicit offstage death of her father) than in Violetta’s. Weddell’s play indeed recognizes this in the conversation between Honorius and the merchant whom he meets in Act Three, Scene Four, when the latter, using the racially loaded vocabulary mentioned earlier, describes the ‘Crime’ Incle commits against Violetta as ‘black’, before condemning the ill-treatment of Yarico as ‘blacker’ (63) yet (Figure 7.4).

FROM THE PICTURESQUE TO THE GOTHIC: INKLE AND YARICO IN LEWIS’S JOURNAL Following Weddell’s play, versions of the story continue to proliferate, especially during the abolitionist campaign against the slave trade (1787–1807), the most popular (and ambitious) of these being George Colman the Younger’s serio-comic Inkle and Yarico, an opera originally staged in the year when the campaign officially got underway. Although, as Frank Felsenstein notes, the tale tends to lose its grip on the literary imagination in the aftermath of abolition (1999: 40), there are some exceptions to this rule, one of the most intriguing of which is Lewis’s Journal. In the course of this text, Lewis enters into dialogue with the Inkle and Yarico narrative in two quite different ways, the first taking the form of a series of direct allusions, all of which link the tale to fragmentary stories about other female slaves. The most complex and haunting example of this pattern is the earliest, occurring in the journal-entry written on 5 January 1816, less than a week after Lewis arrives on the Cornwall plantation that is the larger of his two Caribbean holdings: As I was returning this morning from Montego Bay, about a mile from my own estate, a figure presented itself before me, I really think the most picturesque that I ever beheld: it was a mulatto girl, born upon Cornwall, but whom the overseer of a neighbouring estate had obtained my permission to exchange for another slave, as well as two little children, whom she had borne to him; but, as yet, he has been unable to procure a substitute, owing to the difficulty of purchasing single negroes, and Mary Wiggins is still my slave. (Lewis [1834] 1999: 46)4 In this vignette, Lewis portrays his temporarily thwarted transaction with the ‘overseer’ in strikingly impersonal terms – objectifying Mary Wiggins as an ‘it’, before aestheticizing her as ‘picturesque’ and later ‘statue-like’ (Lewis [1834] 1999: 46; emphasis in the

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FIGURE 7.4  William Blake, Europe Supported by Africa and America, 1796. © Interim Archives/Getty Images.

original). Yet in proceeding to compare this enigmatic ‘mulatto girl’ to Yarico in terms of both her ‘air and countenance’ (46), he not only reminds the reader of the pain and exploitation that the business of slavery routinely entails – and that cannot be disguised by the generous ‘profusion of rings’ Mary wears ‘on her fingers’ and that ‘glitter … in

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the sunbeams’ (47) – but also affiliates himself somewhat unflatteringly with Inkle. Such effects are perhaps mitigated by the fact that this particular exchange of black bodies is designed to unite Lewis’s slave with her overseer-‘husband’ and their two small children, even as Lewis denies Mary herself the narrative space to voice her private opinion of his match-making efforts. As is subsequently implied, however, Lewis is uncomfortable with the resemblance to Inkle which his own allusion imposes upon him, since he no sooner metaphorically weds Mary to Yarico than decides that the former in fact ‘remind[s]’ him ‘most’ of another woman, the illustrious contralto, ‘[Josephina] Grassini, in “La Vergine del Sole”’ – with the qualification that his much-coveted slave is ‘a thousand times more beautiful’ (46; emphasis in the original) than her Italian counterpart. The irony of this shift in focus towards Grassini is that the opera in which Lewis recalls seeing her perform is inspired by the kind of early modern violence (Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of Peru) that is embodied in the Inkle and Yarico legend in the first place. As well as using allusion, Lewis engages with the narrative of Inkle and Yarico far more obliquely. This he does, specifically, in ‘The Isle of Devils’, the long Gothic poem set in the mid-sixteenth century that appears at his journal’s approximate mid-point in the entry for 10 May 1816 and whose rhyming couplets seem so oddly out of step with its frenzied sexual and racial energies. In this strange, provocative and sometimes lurid verse narrative, Lewis relies upon a technique of intertextual reversal, whereby the moral identities of the story’s original protagonists are turned on their heads, transposed across the gender-line and geographically relocated. The treacherous and dishonest Inkle is thus recast as Irza, the sexually pure niece, ‘Not fourteen years’ of age (Lewis [1834] 1999: 162), of the Viceroy of Portuguese India, while the virtuous Yarico is reincarnated, still more startlingly, as the ‘master-fiend’ (169) who rules the demonic if imaginary domain that gives the poem its title and who is identified by Lewis as being of African descent. As with Inkle and Yarico, Irza and the ‘dark demon’ (Lewis [1834] 1999: 173) are flung together by a storm that wrecks the ship belonging to the ‘angel niece’ as she is returning from Goa’s ‘precious sands to Lisbon’s shore’ (163) accompanied by Rosalvo, the Viceroy’s son and her prospective spouse. Rosalvo, who is ‘scarce two’ (162) years Irza’s senior, is seemingly lost in this tempest (along with the ‘jewels … of various dyes, / Ingots of gold, and pearls of wondrous size’ [163] that his governor-father has plundered from his Indian territories) and accordingly disappears from the reader’s view, even as he briefly reenters the poem later on, albeit at the cost of his own life. Irza, for her part, remains textually afloat, so to speak, after the storm and is carried in its wake to the shores of the ‘“Demon-Isle”’ (168) and it is here that further correspondences between Lewis’s submerged source-material and his poem are elaborated. For example, just as Inkle finds himself cast adrift on an alien land and mortally threatened by the natives who inhabit it, so Irza is no sooner washed-up on the ‘strand’, than she is surrounded by a ‘throng’ of ‘monstrous dwarfs’ with ‘gnashing teeth’ (Lewis [1834] 1999: 168) who are intent upon her cannibalistic destruction but whose flesheating appetites are at the same time suggestive of sexual violation: ‘One snatch’d her chaplet, nor forsook his hold, / Though hard she struggled: while more bold, more fierce / Another seized her arm, and dared to pierce / With his sharp teeth its snow. The pure blood stream’d / Fast from the wound, and loud the virgin scream’d.’ Yet if, to develop the parallels, it is Yarico who intervenes to save Inkle from her countrymen in the versions of the tale from Ligon to Weddell, so Irza is rescued from her sinister assailants by the ‘demon-king’ who banishes the ‘imps’ and ‘court[s] her to his cave’ (170). This ‘grotto vast in depth and size’ (171) is no Edenic haven or playground of untrammelled sexual

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pleasure, however – notwithstanding the cornucopia of sensory delights that it proffers. Instead it is a gilded cage in which Irza is twice raped by her saviour turned escort turned ‘infernal gaoler’ (175) and it is these acts of sexual violence that result in the birth of two sons. Despite their shared parentage, the infants are the racial antitheses of one another: like its ‘hellish sire’ (172), the first is black and duly stigmatized by its mother as a ‘monster-brat’ (174), while the second sports a ‘skin’ that is ‘more smooth and white’ than the ‘down of swans’ and that renders it the ‘model’ of its mother’s ‘beauteous’ if traumatized ‘self’ (177). Irza’s ordeal on the ‘strange isle’ (Lewis [1834] 1999: 175) extends over ‘three full years’ (178) and includes Rosalvo’s brutal murder at the ‘ebon hands’ of the ‘fiend’ (176), when, unaware that his ‘virgin love’ is not ‘dead’ (174), the young groom returns to the poem and wanders towards her ‘grot’ (175), singing his dolorous lay. Her trials are finally ended, however, when she is once again rescued, on this occasion from her islandprison itself, by the ‘reverend monk’ (179) who, along with Rosalvo, had also been part of the entourage travelling with her on her initial voyage home. Whereas Inkle abdicates parental responsibility by nonchalantly commoditizing his offspring and consigning it to slavery, Irza takes leave of her ‘fav’rite babe’ (178) far less willingly, compelled to do so by the monk. For him, the infant’s ‘azure eyes’ and ‘golden hairs’ are not to be read at face value, but constitute ‘snares’ designed ‘To win new subjects’ for ‘Satan’ and it is for this reason that he orders his ‘brethren’ speedily to convey the mother back to ‘Cintra’s walls’, where she must offer ‘repentance’ (180) for the misguided adoration of her duplicitous ‘boy’ (177). In acting in this manner, the monk ironically reveals himself also to be something other than he seems, not so much Irza’s liberator as her captor and tyrant: he emancipates her from her ‘savage lord’ (178) while simultaneously breaking her bond with the child whom she idolizes as a ‘cherub elf’ (177). In answer to the mixed feelings it engenders in Irza, this dramatic departure in the monks’ ‘barge’ (180) induces an overwhelming combination of ‘grief and rage’ (181) in her ‘demon-husband’ (180) that is ultimately resolved into a ‘vengeful ire’, taken out not on Irza herself but on her fair-skinned darling: ‘He gnash’d his teeth, he stamp’d his iron hoof, / Whirl’d the boy wildly round and round his head, / Dash’d it against the rocks, and howling fled.’ In this way, Lewis’s ‘infant-murderer’ (181) brings things full circle: he performs an act which not only aligns him with Mocquet’s ‘Indian-Woman’ but also unites two texts from different traditions – French and English – that are separated, as literary-historical convenience would have it, by a period of two hundred years precisely.

CONCLUSION As Edward Said has argued, ‘The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them’ (1994: xiii). This observation is fully borne out by the evolution of the story of Inkle and Yarico which this chapter has sought to trace, as the possibility of female vengeance so shockingly exhibited in Mocquet is not only reworked but also stymied in the versions of the tale that follow his own – excluded altogether in Ligon, sublimated in Steele, displaced in Yarico to Inkle and Weddell’s Incle and Yarico alike and subjected to an extravagant Gothic makeover in ‘The Isle of Devils’, in which (as in the previous two texts) it is also regendered. These responses do not exist in an intertextual vacuum, but are inextricably tied to the ideological beliefs of the culture in which they are produced (and which they help to

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create and consolidate) – whether in the figure of the Noble Savage or in women as passive and forbearing victims of male oppression, rather than as agents of retribution. ‘The Isle of Devils’, of course, portrays the savage as anything but noble and comes closest, of all the texts this chapter has explored, to rehearsing the atrocious violence carried out in Mocquet’s primal scene, but does so only by safely masking it in a Gothicized male form. There is in all this ultimately a certain irony, as the writers who seek to escape Mocquet’s terrifying vision at the same time repeat it, abandoning and betraying his ‘Indian-Woman’ just as surely as she is deserted by the English pilot whom she so ‘dearly Loved’ (Mocquet 1696: 2:126). It might even be claimed, in a further irony, that Mocquet himself takes flight from the destructive energies he unleashes. Split into two sections marginally tagged as ‘Strange History of an English Pilot’ (2:124) and ‘Strange and Cruel Acts of an Indian Woman’, his anecdote tacitly provides the reader with a formal expression of the severing of the child that occurs at its heart, but concludes by deflecting attention away from this climactic incident, described as a ‘horrible and cruel Spectacle’ (2:126). After all, the abiding if barely tolerable object of the reader’s gaze is neither the violence the ‘IndianWoman’ commits nor she herself but the one who brings that violence about. As Mocquet puts it, in his anecdote’s final sentence: ‘I could not look upon [the pilot], but always with Horrour and great Detestation’ (2:127).

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Race and Sexuality From Othello to Abolitionism NICHOLAS HUDSON

One’s understanding of the relationship between race and sexuality from the Reformation to the Enlightenment depends a great deal on the kinds of texts that one chooses to accentuate. An emphasis on early modern ethnographic texts, travel accounts and the beginnings of race ‘science’ predictably leads to the conclusion that ‘The antithesis for European sexual mores and beauty is the black’ (Gilman 1985: 83). In numerous accounts, African societies and people of African descent are portrayed as combining physical ugliness with untamed, ‘beastly’ sexual desires unrestrained by civility or Christian standards of monogamy. Promiscuity is presented in these texts as even an inherent characteristic of African-descended and other non-European peoples. Nonetheless, in turning to a literary tradition portraying non-European and especially Black sexuality, a very different picture emerges. From Othello to versions of Oroonoko, from variations on the Inkle and Yarico story to numerous poems of the eighteenth century, poets and dramatists represented miscegenous relationships between white and non-white couples as variously noble or filled with pathos, as exhibiting universal ‘human’ desires, and often as revealing the corruption and prejudice of whites. The question posed in this chapter is how we should coordinate these two quite different legacies in the Western tradition of portraying non-white people. The overwhelming tendency among modern historians and literary critics has been to distrust positive-seeming portrayals of non-white sexuality in plays, poems and novels as somehow complicit with the more obviously racist depiction of this sexuality in early anthropological literature. In one way or another, the seeming nobility of Othello and Prince Oroonoko, or the betrayal of the dark-skinned Yarico by the merchant Inkle, must covertly denigrate the cultures that Europeans were enslaving, exploiting or eliminating. As I will suggest, this ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, to use Paul Ricoeur’s phrase (1970: 27), is in many ways accurate: if one reads deeply into the most ostensibly ennobling literary depiction of interracial romance, one will certainly be able to uncover tendencies to diminish the non-white Other. On the other hand, pro-slavery advocates of the later eighteenth century became increasingly concerned that their practices were being challenged by poetical ‘fables’ that implied the common humanity of whites and nonwhites and that villainized the exploitation of non-white people. The literary tradition was having an undeniable social and political impact. Othello and Thomas Southerne’s

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tragicomedy Oroonoko were performed hundreds of times during the eighteenth century, inciting tears of sympathy for Black characters; the story of Inkle and Yarico, which featured the betrayal of a variously Indigenous or Black maiden by a ruthless trader, became a familiar legend redone in numerous poetic and dramatic forms. Of particular interest is that sexual love stood at the center of this contention. If economic and imperial interests saw the advantage of denigrating the sexual lives of nonwhite people, this sexual life also represented an indelible link between European and non-European experience. On the real frontiers of the international Western empire, miscegenation was rife, even banal. Paradoxically, those who most strongly denigrated Black sexuality were often those most familiar with interracial sex in the act of rape but also in the form of taking of Black mistresses and even wives. The tendency to idealize miscengenous relations was strongest among people at home in Europe where miscegeny was less common. In this world, sexual love could made the springboard for reflections on a wider set of debates concerning marriage, self-interest, power, femininity, masculinity and a range of issues that preoccupied Europeans. The power of these literary representations meant that we can indeed trace, despite all the latent racism of European culture, a path from Othello or other early modern literary works to the abolitionism of the late eighteenth century. Poetic tradition was making a significant contribution to the emergence of what we now recognize as humanitarian attitudes in the West, even amidst the rise of racial science and the continuing exploitation of colonized peoples.

DENIGRATING BLACK SEXUALITY IN EARLY ANTHROPOLOGY AND POPULAR CULTURE The depiction of African sexuality in Leo Africanus’s History and Description of Africa, first published in Italian in 1550, sets out the basic assumptions developed in innumerable ethnographic accounts over the following two centuries. ‘The Negroes … lead a beastly kind of life’, Africanus wrote, ‘They haue great swarmes of harlots among them; whereupon a man may easily coniecture their manner of living’ (1896: 1:187). In his folio compendium Africa, John Ogilby portrayed the inhabitants of ‘Negro-land’ as ‘much addicted to Venus’. In ‘Quoia’ the women consumed aphrodisiacs from treebark that made them desire ‘almost hourly Congresses’ (Ogilby 1670: 318, 391) (Figure 8.1). In Some New and Accurate Observations Geographical, Natural and Historical, James Houstoun testified that the sexual habits of Africans ‘exactly resemble their Fellow Creatures and Natives, the Monkeys’. It was not surprising that the ‘Slave Coast’ was ‘prodigiously populous’ as kings had ‘several Thousands of Wives, and every Man a Proportionable Number’ (Houstoun 1725: 33–4). With the development of so-called racial science in the later eighteenth century, these geographical accounts provided a rich source of material for classifying non-white peoples as not just lacking in civility but as inherently prone to unrestrained lust along with a host of other vices. According to Edward Long in The History of Jamaica, people of African descent were inherently ‘proud, lazy, deceitful, thievish, addicted to all kinds of lust … incestuous, savage, cruel, and vindictive’. The physical deformity of African people showed that Black women mated with orangutans (Long 1774: 2:354, 365). In the early nineteenth century, the physiologist William Lawrence portrayed the ‘black race’ as engaging ‘almost universally, in disgusting debauchery and sensuality’ and as utterly insensible ‘to beauty of form, order, and harmony’ (1822: 412).

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FIGURE 8.1  Hans Burgkmair, Hottentots with Herd, c. 1510. © Heritage Images/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

There was some variation in these supposedly ‘factual’ or ‘philosophical’ accounts. In contrast to the supposedly hyper-sexualized Africans, Indigenous Americans were frequently portrayed as sexually feeble, a sign of their inferiority to more virile European colonizers. In Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains, Cornélius De Pauw argued

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that ‘Le peu d’inclination, le peu de chaleur des Américains pour le sexe, démontroit indubitablement le défaut de leur virilité’ (The Americans’ little inclination, little heat for the female sex, demonstrated their lack of virility) ([1768–9] 1771: 1:34). As so often, the Khoi people of southern Africa, popularly known as ‘Hottentots’, presented Europeans with confusing anomalies. Some early travellers to the Cape of Good Hope, such as Georg Meister in 1677, conformed with ethnographic convention by describing these people as shamelessly abandoned savages who copulated in the open and exposed their private parts without provocation (Raven-Hart 1971: 1:204). Closer and more objective observation nonetheless revealed the inaccuracy of these assumptions. Peter Kolb insisted in The Present State of the Cape of Good Hope (translated into English in 1731) that the Khoi were in fact rigidly monogamous and modestly private in their sexual relations, punishing adultery with death (Kolb 1731: 1:162). These corrective testimonies did not hinder the display of the almost naked Saartje Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus’ as a sexual object before crowds in Paris and London in the early nineteenth century (Figure 8.2). The unpleasant episode of the Hottentot Venus exemplified the link between emergent ‘race science’ and unreflective, popular racism: Saartje Baartman became the subject of sexualized fascination for both scientists such as Georges Cuvier and for gaping crowds. The popular press was littered with doggerel poems and crude stories that generally corroborated ethnographic representations of Africans as hyper-sexualized and unable to control their passions. Whereas the ethnographers were grave and detailed, however, the vulgar accounts illustrated moral proverbs and made jokes. François Pétis de la Croix’s Mille et un jours. Contes persans (translated into English, 1714–15), contains the story of an ‘ugly black Slave called Torgut’ ([1714–15] 1722: 3:225) who, denied sex by a beautiful Arab girl, murders his master’s baby and blames it on her in revenge. In an often republished story in Spectator No. 215, Joseph Addison illustrated his message about the value of education by describing ‘an amazing Instance of Barbarity’ where two illiterate ‘Negroes’ on Saint Kitts, having fallen insanely in love with the same slave girl, kill her and then themselves (Spectator 1712–15: 3:263–4). Another often reprinted story, ‘The Negro: or, Love’s Artifice’, recounts the ploy of a young white virgin who, imprisoned in her house by her over-protective father, replaces the statue of an African with a real Black slave, who is discovered when the father notices him move in the mirror (Anonymous 1734a: 3–8). Significantly, African characters were often associated with statues. In Spectator No. 215, Addison similarly drew an analogy between his love-crazed slaves and crude blocks of marble unpolished by education and civility. In a famous passage in Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave, the narrator observes that ‘The most famous statuary could not form the figure of a man more admirably turned from head to foot’ ([1688] 1994: 11–12). Oroonoko is like a classical statue, with a Roman nose and thin lips, carved from ebony. Such analogies underscored the materiality of the black body, the often eroticized physicality of the African form in distinction from colour, in ways that finally turn grotesque in Behn’s Oroonoko when the hero’s dying body stinks with putrefaction. Popular poems and tales about miscegenous relationships between Africans and whites are by turns guilty and comic. Part IV of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) parodies travel accounts of savages abandoned to lust, as when Gulliver is attacked by a sexually aroused female Yahoo, though with the disturbing implication that Europeans are at best only more civil Yahoos. Other texts drew analogies from classical history and the more elite tradition of literary representation. For example, in a poem published in the 1772 issue of The Town and Country Magazine, ‘Extemporary on a Gentleman in Love with a Negro Girl’, the anonymous poet comforts a guilty white lover by reminding him that even

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FIGURE 8.2  Caricature of Englishman and Hottentot Venus. © Historical Picture Archive/ CORBIS/Getty Images.

Antony fell in love with ‘Cleopatra’s jetty charms’. The final line of the poem nonetheless counsels the lover not to ‘judge the muse too much affected’ (Anonymous 1772: 551), hinting that the poet really is discomforted by the gentleman’s desire and has affected praise that he does not truly feel. The comic poem ‘The Ink Bottle’ by Thomas Hamilton (1680–1735) concerns the bored wife of a scrivener who, seeing a Black footman ‘pissing

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at a wall’, is so impressed by his member that she invites ‘Oroonoko’ to have sex. The poem dwells with jocular prurience on their entwined black and white bodies. The poem ends with the scriviner’s bewilderment when his wife bears a dark-skinned child, causing the lady to recall that her husband had spilled an ink-bottle on himself before their last

FIGURE 8.3  Ignacio María Barreda, Casta de nueva españa (The Caste of New Spain), 1777. © Album/Alamy Stock Photo.

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marital relations (T. Hamilton 1764: 57–60). These poems reveal that interracial sexual relationships were popularly regarded with distaste or bemusement. In contrast with the colonies, where miscegenous unions were relatively frequent and subject to strict legal penalties (see Cruz and Berson 2001; Hughes 2007: xv–xvi), such unions in Britain were regarded as oddities and left legally unrestricted (Figure 8.3). Interracial marriages were not unknown: both the abolitionist Olauda Equiano and Samuel Johnson’s Black servant Francis Barber married white women. Nonetheless, popular prejudice against interracial sex differed sharply from the sentimental or even ennobling depiction of such relationships in admired dramatic and poetic works. Though focusing on the marriage of a Black man with a white woman, Othello and Southerne’s Oroonoko were widely received as intensely moving portraits of wronged love and the capacity of non-white people for noble erotic passion.

THE SEXUALIZED BLACK HERO: OTHELLO AND OROONOKO In a chapter in Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, Ania Loomba places Othello in the context of the ethnographic literature that we have just reviewed, citing, for example, Robert Burton’s judgement that ‘Southern men are more hot, lascivious and jealous, than such as live in the North’ (Loomba 2002: 94). Loomba argues that Shakespeare’s tragedy ‘played upon the beliefs, anxieties, or desires of its audience’ (101) and that the failure of scholars to acknowledge the racist implications of Othello may indicate a desire to protect the Bard’s reputation (110). Yet Shakespeare placed much of this contempt for Moors and dark-skinned people in the mouth of the villainous Iago who, despite acknowledging that Othello ‘Is of a constant, loving, noble nature’ (Othello 2.1.289), seems driven to destroy the Moor through an incoherent loathing of his Blackness. Iago feels this disgust without the racial categories that would be developed almost two centuries later. It is as if, in the words of Michael Neill, ‘racism were just something that Iago, drawing in his improvisational way on a gallimaufry of quite unsystematic prejudices and superstitions, made up as he went along’ (1989: 395). Moreover, as argued by Neill, Iago’s hateful obsessions focus on the hidden sexual life of Othello with Desdemona, the imagined spectacle, as he taunts Desdemona’s father Brabantio, of ‘an old black ram … tupping your white ewe’ (Othello 1.1.85–6). This is the prurient fantasy of a young man, for, as Othello admits, mature age has deprived him of most of his sexual appetite (Othello 1.3.256–8) (Figure 8.4). Shakespeare’s first audience may well have felt discomforted by witnessing their own prejudices embodied in such a devious villain as Iago and as productive of such tragic consequences. In later decades, some critics made no doubt of Iago’s villainy while objecting to Shakespeare’s making an African into the hero of a tragedy. As Thomas Rymer complained in A Short View of Tragedy, ‘What Poet wou’d give a villainous Blackamoor this Ascendant? … this outrage to an injur’d Lady, the Divine Desdemona, might in a colder Climate have provok’d some body to be her champion’ (1693: 130). In Remarks added to the 1714 edition of Nicholas Rowe’s Works of Mr. William Shakespear, Charles Gildon objected similarly that ‘when a common Woman admits a Negro to a Commerce with her, every one starts at the Choice’ (N. Rowe 1714: 9:362).1 Yet such objections to the miscegenous marriage of Othello and Desdemona were hardly typical of eighteenthcentury criticism, particularly as the century drew on. As the dramatist and actor Samuel

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FIGURE 8.4  W. Cope and T. Vernon, Othello Relating his Adventures, c. 1860. © Retro Images/Getty Images.

Foote observed of Othello in 1747, ‘Sure never has there been a Character more generally misunderstood by Audience and Actor, than this before us, to mistake the most tenderhearted, compassionate, humane Man, for a cruel bloody, and obdurate Savage’ (1747: 33–4). John Hill similarly advised the actor of Othello that his playing of this character must distinguish nicely between ‘the savage fury of a bravo, and the just resentment of an injur’d husband’ (1750: 142). In the notes and commentary on Othello in his 1765 edition of Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson made no reference whatsoever to the hero’s skin colour. Among the ‘beauties of this play’, Johnson wrote, was ‘The fiery openness of Othello, magnanimous, artless, and credulous, boundless in his confidence, ardent in his affection, inflexible in his resolution, and obdurate in his revenge.’ What Othello exhibits was not, for Johnson, the predictable behaviour of a Black man but ‘proofs of Shakespeare’s skill in human nature’ (1958–2014: 8:1047). It was in this context that the novelist Sarah Fielding satirized a silly gentlewoman in David Simple who opined that Desdemona deserved to die for being ‘such a Fool as to marry a filthy Black’ (1744: 1:149; emphasis in the original). Othello was likely one influence on Aphra Behn’s portrait of a noble African hero in Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave (1688). This story became best known in Thomas Southerne’s tragicomedy which, after only seven performances between 1695 and 1700, remained one of the most popular plays of the eighteenth century, staged hundreds of times and revised by at least three later dramatists. Southerne’s play was even compared to the best

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of Shakespeare (Shiells 1753: 3:18). Southerne’s decision to convert Oroonoko’s wife Imoinda into a white woman has puzzled modern critics, who have explained that women were not allowed to act in black face (see Ferguson 1994: 218–20). This explanation does not, however, resolve the problem of why eighteenth-century audiences reacted with such ardent sympathy to a play about a miscegenous marriage (Figure 8.5). For example, in his role as natural philosopher in Sketches of the History of Man, Lord Kames was among

FIGURE 8.5  Charles Grignion, Mr Savigny in the Character of Oroonoko, 1776. © HultonDeutsch Collection/CORBIS/Getty Images.

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the many to postulate that ‘male savages, utter strangers to decency or refinement, gratify animal love with as little ceremony as they do hunger or thirst’ (1774: 1:184). Yet in his role as literary critic in Elements of Criticism, Kames twice applauded the impassioned speeches of Southerne’s hero as examples of tragic eloquence (1762: 2:164; 3:115). Southerne’s tragicomedy situated the relationship between the black Oroonoko and the white Imoinda in stark contrast with the degraded sexual relationships of the white characters. When Oroonoko fears that Imoinda will be torn from him, his enslaved friend Aboan advises him that he can expect no help from the absent Governor of Surinam when he arrives: He is young Luxurious, passionate, and amorous; Such a Complexion, and made bold by power, To countenance all he is prone to do; Will know no bounds, no law against his Lusts. If in a fit of Intemperance, With a strong hand, he should resolve to seize And force, my Royal Mistress from your Arms, How can you help your self? (Southerne 1712: 60) It is the absent governor, not Oroonoko, who epitomizes the sexual intemperance associated in other literature with the ‘complexion’ of savages. Nor is the governor the only white character who displays unruly or degraded amorous desires. The LieutenantGovernor ultimately resorts to attempted rape in order to satisfy his lust for Imoinda. In the comic subplot, Charlotte Welldon, disguised as a man, bargains away her sister to Daniel, the comically inept son of the planter Widow Lackitt. The interracial love of Oroonoko and Imoinda shines as the play’s single embodiment of noble, faithful and monogamous romance. Significantly, this is sexual rather than Platonic love, for Imoinda is pregnant with the fruits of their miscegenous union. Later revisions of Southerne’s play deleted the comic subplot in response to the more general disfavour for double-plotted tragicomedies during the eighteenth century. But these plays also intensified the anti-slavery and anti-racist potential of the original. Johnson’s friend John Hawkesworth opened his 1759 Oroonoko with a speech from a greedy planter who scoffs at ‘a great raw-boned negroe Fellow’ who ‘has the Impudence to think he is my Fellow-Creature, with as much Right to Liberty as I have’ (Hawkesworth 1759: 2). Hawkesworth also expressed dissatisfaction with the light-hearted slave songs in Southerne’s play which he thought should be ‘plaintive, the Expression of Beings at once capable of Love, and conscious of a Condition in which all its Delicacies must become the Instruments of Pain’ (vi). A year later in Francis Gentleman’s Oroonoko, the captain who sold Oroonoko is referred to as a ‘sordid Buccanner’ engaged in a ‘savage trade’. Threatened with rape by the Lieutenant-Governor, Imoinda pleads, ‘let weak nature, with resentment rouze, / And pierce, if possible, thy savage heart’ (Gentleman 1760: 12, 75). Gentleman applauded Oroonoko’s noble nature in a later critical tract, The Dramatic Censor. As he observed, ‘How much stronger is the glow of love and gratitude in Oroonoko, who forgives even the villain who has kidnapped him, as the means of finding his beloved Imoinda’ (Gentleman 1760: 1:408). All three versions of Oroonoko nonetheless failed to condemn the practice of slavery with the fullness desired by later abolitionists. Both Hawkesworth and Gentleman, for

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example, retained lines from the original play where Oroonoko, abandoned by his fellow slaves, regrets trying to raise a rebellion amongst Africans who are naturally slaves: I own the Folly of my Enterprise, The Rashness of this Action, and must blush Quite through the Vail of Night, a whitely Shame, To think I cou’d design to make those free Who were by Nature Slaves. (Southerne 1712: 80) In Southerne’s play as in Behn’s novel, Prince Oroonoko is singled out from the other slaves as an isolated example of African nobility. Both works focus on the defilement of aristocratic prerogative in contrast to the submissive degradation of the African rabble, which evidently deserves to be enslaved. Southerne’s phraseology ‘whitely Shame’, re-echoed by Hawkesworth and Gentleman, curiously implied an inversion of the usual hierarchy of whites over Blacks: it is ‘white’ that connotes the disgrace of Black slaves who fail to rebel. Nonetheless, in his abolitionist updating of these plays, The Prince of Angola (1788), John Ferriar singled out Oroonoko’s speech for justifying natural slavery and as ‘a groveling apology for slave-holders’. Addressing the citizens of his native Manchester, who had recently signed a lengthy petition against the slave trade, Ferriar argued that something more was needed than a detached, theoretical disapproval of slavery. What the play potentially provided was the heartfelt experience of slavery’s brutality: ‘The magnitude of a crime, by dispersing our perceptions, sometimes leaves nothing in the mind but a cold sense of disapprobation. We talk of the destitution of millions, with as little emotion, with as little accuracy of comprehension, as of the distances of the Planets’ (Ferriar 1788: i–ii). Ferriar thus intensified the anti-slavery sentiments of the earlier versions of Oroonoko, further villainizing the planters and emboldening the hero into passionate and unmitigated hostility to the slave trade. Yet in designing to make the play more of a political manifesto, Ferriar also diminished the role of Imoinda and her tragically wronged love for the Black prince. It was this romantic relationship that had given Southerne’s play its reputation as one of the most moving tragedies of the era. In a standard plot in eighteenth-century drama, female characters struggle to marry whom they wanted against the authority of their avaricious fathers, part of a more general movement in English society towards relaxing arbitrary paternal control in the middle ranks. In Southerne’s play and its later versions, love struggles against not the arbitrary control of a father but against the avarice and aberrant sexual morals of the male plantocracy. The common thread between Oroonoko and plays about rebellious daughters was liberty of choice, with sexual love serving as the vehicle for a more general demand for freedom. Hence Hawkesworth revised the slave songs in Oroonoko into hymns to the freedom of love: ‘Yes Love and Joy must both be free. / Must both be free, for both disdain / The sounding Scourge, and galling Chain’ (Hawkesworth 1759: 19). Similarly, the Oroonoko plays generated a body of verse about the cruelly thwarted love of Black characters. William Dodd’s The African Prince (1755), with its accompanying poem Zara, are love epistles between an African who resembles Oroonoko and his wife in his native Angola. This poem was inspired by a recent incident that created a public sensation in London, as retold in a number of later accounts (see Anonymous 1758: n224; Reed 1777). Like Oroonoko, the speaker of Dodd’s poem is an African prince betrayed into slavery by a nefarious sea captain. Having finally escaped to London, the prince was

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feted by fashionable society and taken with an African friend to see Southerne’s play. This incident is recalled with great emotion in Dodd’s poem: ‘O! ZARA, here, a story like my own, / With mimic skill, in borrow’d names was shown’ (Dodd 1755: 12). In the episode at the London theatre, life and drama intercrossed in ways that intensified empathy for Africans. The prince was reportedly so affected by the performance that he left the theatre in tears, creating a sensation in the audience that overwhelmed attention to the play. Here was the popular mood that Thomas Day and John Bicknell tapped in their explicitly abolitionist poem, The Dying Negro (1773), published just in the wake of the famous Somerset ruling that legally proscribed slavery in England. As announced in the Advertisement to this poem, Day and Bicknell also drew on a real event, in this case the refusal of the owner of an unnamed slave to allow his marriage to a white servant. In what is presented as the African’s last epistle to his lover before he kills himself, he too links love and freedom: ‘So may ye still repeat to every grove, / The songs of freedom, the songs of love!’ (Day and Bicknell 1773: 10). Day and Bicknell were in obvious ways also rehashing the story of Oroonoko; their dying African is similarly tricked into bondage by an unscrupulous trader who embodies the vicious greed of European society. Nonetheless, the speaker is not a prince but only an ordinary man, widening the original tragic theme of defiled aristocracy to the more general humanitarianism of the abolitionist campaign. The Dying Negro was so popular that it was made into songs sung in taverns and other public venues in England. It provided the basis for numerous other abolitionist poems including Hannah More’s Slavery (1788), written like Ferriar’s play at the height of the abolitionist campaign. The links with Southerne’s Oroonoko were not lost, for More invoked Southerne as her poetic and political muse: O, plaintive Southerne! whose impassion’d strain So oft wak’d thy languid Muse in vain! Now, when congenial themes her cares engage, She learns to emulate thy glowing page. (More 1788: 3) More’s poem is by no means innocent of what we now recognize as implicitly racist attitudes: Africans are associated with a capacity for strong passion rather than reason: ‘For they have affection, kind desires / … Strong, but luxuriant virtues, boldly shoot / From the wild vigour of a savage root’ (5). Nonetheless, these passions provided More with evidence of the common humanity of whites and non-whites: ‘Revere affections mingled with our frame, / In every nature, every clime the same’ (9). Significantly, such enlightened notions of common humanity were being fostered not by the theoretical reasoning of Enlightenment philosophers but by popular sentiment stirred by well-known plays and poems aimed at a general audience. In fact, major philosophers of this era such as Hume, Voltaire and Kant held deeply racist views. As Lynn Hunt (2007) has argued, the invention of ‘human rights’ was perhaps less the work of enlightened reasoners than of tearful novel readers and playgoers. It is in this way that we can trace a direct path from one of Shakespeare’s most admired tragedies, Othello, to the Oroonoko legend that it helped to inspire and finally to the abolitionist movement that drew from these theatrical sentiments. Supporters of the slave trade and slavery were indeed aware that their profitable system was being counteracted by the impact of popular literature. In an anonymous reply to John Wesley’s abolitionist Thoughts upon Slavery (1774), the writer doubled down on the

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depiction of ‘Negroes’ as ‘in general stupid, senseless, brutish, lazy Barbarians’, citing the testimony of Hume and Voltaire. If he had not known that the Methodist Wesley hated the theatre, the author quips, he would have suspected him of imbibing his impressions from ‘the Behaviour and Sentiments of the Immortal Oroonoko’ (Anonymous 1774b: 60, 22, 92). The opposition between the representation of Africans in ethnographic and literary texts indeed became a battle over who owned the truth. For defenders of slavery, Othello, Oroonoko and other noble African characters were mere fabrications. These plays were indeed the black-face performances of white culture. Although David Garrick auditioned the Black author Ignatius Sancho for either Othello or Oroonoko, finally judging that his articulation was deficient (Sancho 1782: 1:x), the series of famous actors who played these parts – Thomas Betterton, James Quinn, Henry Mossop – were all white. Nonetheless, it was the emotion rather than the reality that most stirred popular opinion. Lovers of these stories also pointed to their supposed basis in truth at a time when the blurring of distinctions between supposed ‘histories’ and fiction remained standard practice. This blurring similarly nourished the enthusiastic popular reception of another legend concerning the sexuality of a non-white woman, the story of Inkle and Yarico.

THE SEXUALITY OF NON-WHITE WOMEN: INKLE AND YARICO As detailed in Carl Plasa’s chapter in this volume, the Inkle and Yarico story was popularized by Sir Richard Steele’s account in Spectator No. 11 where his narrator, Arietta, cites her source in Richard Ligon’s A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (1657). Ligon’s short account in turn drew from Jean Mocquet’s Voyages en Afrique, Asie, Indes Orientales & Occidentales (1617). The Spectator essay nonetheless became the main source for the numerous versions of this story throughout the eighteenth century which, like a classical myth, was so well known that it could be improvised without much explanation. The basic story recounted the love of a young woman named Yarico on some foreign coast, either America or less usually Africa, for an English trader named Inkle whom she shelters from her fellow inhabitants, who are cannibals or otherwise dangerous. In an unnatural act of ingratitude, Inkle subsequently sells Yarico into slavery along with, in most versions, the fruit of their miscegenous union still in her womb. The exact ethnicity of Yarico was one space for improvisation. In Steele’s version Yarico is a darker-skinned ‘Indian’, though never called ‘Black’. Very quickly, however, as in an anonymous poem entitled ‘The Story of Inkle and Yarico’, published in The London and Dublin Magazine, she becomes ‘a negro virgin’ (Anonymous 1734b: 244). The ambiguity of Yarico’s ethnicity reflects, as argued by Felicity Nussbaum, the inexact colour scale of ethnicity in the era before race science: the adjectives ‘Black’ or even ‘Negro’ were frequently applied to the colour of a large number of groups from Africans to Asians to Indigenous Americans (Nussbaum 2009: 143). Nonetheless, the use of ‘Negro’ to describe Yarico fitted the usefulness of the story for casting a moral shadow on the slave trade. Inkle, merely a ‘trader’ in Steele’s version, became specifically a slave trader in some later versions. Yarico, in turn, became ‘a Nubian Dame’ living on the African slavecoast in Edward Jerningham’s Yarico to Inkle: An Epistle (1766: 6). At the centre of all versions of Inkle and Yarico is the sexual desire of a non-white woman for a white man. Representing sexual desire in white women became increasingly suspect in eighteenth-century plays, poems and novels. Because Yarico, on the other hand, lives in a non-white and uncivilized world, her open desire could be made to seem natural

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and vulnerable rather than guilty or lewd. In the century’s most widely reprinted poetic version of the story, the anonymous Yarico to Inkle: An Epistle, her sexual submission to the visiting merchant is naive rather than unchaste or debauched: ‘Unskill’d in Art, unable to deny, / Blushing, I yielded to the silent Joy’ (Anonymous 1736a: 5). This sentimentalized expression of female desire in the non-white Other contrasted sharply with travel accounts and ethnographic descriptions which presented ‘savage’ women as abandoned to lust. Le Comte de Buffon merely rehearsed the reports of travellers when he described the women of Sierra-Leon as ‘still more debauched that those of Senegal’ (1791: 3:145). In the Yarico poems and plays, on the contrary, the non-white female is the innocent victim of white sexual desire. From Steele’s essay to later versions of the legend, authors presented Yarico’s story as a corrective to Petronius’s tale of the Ephesian matron. In that often reprinted story, a widow has sex with a solider on the tomb stone of her husband, supposedly showing the inherently wayward sexuality of women. In the Yarico story, by contrast, a fickle and self-interested man cruelly exploits the natural desires of an untutored girl, whose passion is inseparable from her humanity in trying to protect him. All versions of the Yarico legend implicitly flattered the cultural advantages of Europeans as well as their superior beauty. Inkle should have known better and displayed the gratitude and humanity suitable to civilized people. His seduction of the innocent Yarico is easy because his whiteness is so beautiful to her. In an unperformed tragedy ascribed to ‘Mrs. Weddell’, Incle and Yarico, Yarico is lured from her darker-skinned Indigenous lover by Inkle’s whiteness, which she describes as reflecting ‘The Brightness of his Parent-hood the Sun!’ (1742: 15). Similarly, in the poem published in The London and Dublin Magazine, Yarico worships Inkle as a white god: With reverential fear, the well-shap’d maid Thought him a god, and low obeisance paid. His race like polish’d marble did appear; His silken robe, and long curl’d flaxen Hair Amaz’d the nymph. (Anonymous 1734b: 244) Significantly, it is Inkle’s white face and fashionable dress that attracts Yarico while it is Yarico’s ‘well shap’d’ body that allures the European. As Yarico recalls in the anonymous Yarico to Inkle: An Epistle, ‘Your Eyes o’re all my naked Beauties stray’d, / While mine your Dress, and fairer Face survey’d’ (Anonymous 1736a: 5). Yarico’s sexual desire is excusable because it is ignited by the right advantages – a beautiful white face and the accoutrements of civilization. Inkle’s lust is less justifiable because it is merely corporeal, as his final betrayal demonstrates. In all these works, however, Yarico is embodied, materialized, the sexual appeal of her naked body almost entirely eclipsing her face, which is seldom mentioned. Like Oroonoko in Behn’s story, she is like a living statue cut out of some dark material, a shape that is erotically charged ‘bating [her] colour’, as Behn put it ([1688] 1994: 12). Notwithstanding this implicit flattery of Europeans, the Yarico story legitimized a miscegenous relationship, condemning Inkle for abandoning a woman of colour whose sexual submission along with her protection imposed a commitment on him. This does not mean that this story necessarily condemned all forms of slavery, for Inkle’s perfidy represents a case of singularly egregious ingratitude and betrayal. Like Southerne’s play,

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however, the earlier texts contained the potential for an abolitionist revision while never quite going so far. In 1793, John Anketell published Yarico to Inkle: An Epistle under his own name, changing nothing in the poem’s opening paragraph except for the addition of a couplet, which I have italicized: From this sad place where anguish ever reigns, And helpless wretches groan beneath their chains; Where stern oppression lifts its iron hand, And restless cruelty usurps command; Where slav’ry its infernal visage rears, And racks its victims with incessant cares: To soothe her soul and ease her aching heart, Permit a wretch her suff’rings to impart. (Anketell 1793: 238; my emphasis) Although the original poem implied the rebarbative nature of the slave trade, which is cruel and oppressive, its primary focus is on the heartless behaviour of Inkle. Inkle is associated with the unfeeling greed of City merchants, for even in this age of rising commerce literary works conventionally disapproved of excessive avarice and self-interest in the mercantile class. Anketell’s added couplet stepped more boldly into opposition to the slave trade at the peak of the abolitionist movement. The mood was right for a version of the Yarico legend that could be embraced by the abolitionist cause, and this mood was satisfied by George Colman the Younger’s comic-opera Inkle and Yarico (1787). Curiously, the text of this play does not itself seem very hostile to the institution of slavery and is littered with racist remarks. Understood in its historical context, however, the play stirred both humanitarian applause and hostility from advocates of the slave trade. Read simply as a text in separation from its popular reception, Colman’s Inkle and Yarico may well seem to corroborate Daniel O’Quinn’s reading that it accords with institutional scientific racism and imperialism: ‘Colman’s play performs a re-adjustment of the colonial encounter to fit emergent forms of biological state racism’ (2002: 390) (Figure 8.6). The opera opens in ‘An American Forest’ (Colman 1787: 7) which is filled with cannibals. Although these people are evidently Indigenous Americans, Inkle’s comically garrulous servant Trudge describes the inhabitants as ‘black as a pepper-corn, but as hot into the bargain’ (8). The opening scenes are filled with vulgar racist epithets – ‘black devils’ (14), ‘old hairy negroes’ (11), ‘black bloodhounds’ (14). The use of such terms is largely confined to the play’s lower-ranking, clownish characters such as Trudge and Medium. Later in the play the servant Patty refers to the Americans as ‘Hottypots’, evidently meaning ‘Hottentots’ (51). It is true that the Governor of Barbardos later says that he wishes to purchase a servant for his daughter Narcissa, though ‘above the common run, and none of your thick-lipped, flat-nosed, squabby, dumpling dowdies’ (63). Nonetheless, much of this racist verbiage seems intended to amuse the less educated segment of the theatre audience, the notoriously crude ‘upper gallery’ filled with servants and small ‘mechanics’ who enjoyed coarse humour and farce, as displayed by their counterparts in the play. Colman indeed ‘lowered’ the whole tone of the Yarico legend, conventionally tragic and sentimental, by presenting instead a joyously plebeian romp replete with comic songs and broad, physical humour. Nonetheless, Colman also corrected these popular attitudes. He shifted the focus of the legend away from Inkle’s relationship with Yarico and towards his servant Trudge’s relationship with the oddly named American Wowski, who seems

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to serve Yarico in a similarly subordinate role. Significantly, Wowski seems more darkly complexioned than her mistress. While Yarico is praised as being ‘a good comely copper’ (54), Wowski is consistently described as ‘ebony’ (71) and ‘dingy’ (37). Wowki also shares her beloved Trudge’s boisterous good humour and comically ungrammatical English. In subtle ways, Colman implied that servants and lower-ranking English people endure the same status as the more dark-skinned inhabitants of America. They similarly step and fetch for their more articulate masters and mistresses; Trudge, no less than Wowski, is treated like a slave. Nevertheless, it is the servant Trudge who exhibits, in his unpolished way, the play’s most genuine anti-racist sentiments, despite his enjoyment of racist epithets. When Inkle and Trudge find their way from continental America to Barbados, a planter tries to buy Wowki, whom Trudge regards as his wife. Trudge is shocked: ‘Zounds! what a devil of a fellow! Sell Wows – my poor, dear, dingy wife!’ (Colman 1787: 37). He tells the planter that he has the truly ‘black’ character: ‘Rot her complexion. – I’ll tell you what, Mr. Fair Trader: If your head and heart were to changes places, I’ve a notion you’d be as black in the face as an ink-bottle’ (37–8). The play implies that it does not matter if you laugh at a racist joke so long as your heart is in the right place. In contrast to Trudge, the language of the more educated Inkle is free from racist epithets. When he first calls Yarico ‘as beautiful as an angel’, Trudge quips ‘only she’s an angel of a

FIGURE 8.6  Robert Pollard, Inkle and Yarico, 1788. © Smith Collection/Gago/Getty Images.

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rather darker sort’ (19). Inkle’s fault is less racial bigotry than obsessive greed, which Trudge ridicules behind his back throughout the beginning of the play. Inkle is not a slave trader but rather a city merchant who has diverted to America on his way to Barbados merely to seek new investments. As Inkle later acknowledges to Yarico in one of the play’s wittiest lines, while Americans hunt animals Europeans ‘hunt money, a thing unknown to you’ (67). When he reaches Barbados, however, he agonizes over the decision to sell Yarico into slavery, for she protected him from her cannibalistic people. He wishes to marry the governor’s daughter Narcissa, who will bring £30,000. Unknown to him, Narcissa has already married the good-hearted though impoverished Captain Campley. The play thus sets up the standard contrast between self-interested marriage and marriage for love. Colman equivocates over the issue of slavery. The real Barbados was governed by one of the most intolerantly racist regimes in the colonized world. In contrast even with Jamaica, which required the support of mixed-race people against rebel slaves or ‘Maroons’, a ‘single drop’ of African blood disqualified persons from legal citizenship in Barbados (Sio 1976: 9). Yet the fictional governor of Barbados in Colman’s play, Sir Christopher Curry (the real Governor was David Parry), evidently only tolerates the selling of slaves to free them from the slave traders. He privately intones, ‘Let Englishmen blush at such practices. Men who so fully feel the blessings of liberty, are doubly cruel in depriving the helpless of their freedom’ (Colman 1787: 63). When he learns of Inkle’s plan to sell Yarico, he condemns him as ‘dead to all sense of honor, gratitude, or humanity’ (68). Implicitly, Inkle’s obligation to Yarico is founded on their sexual relationship. As the result of the chaster mores of the late eighteenth-century stage, we learn little about this relationship except that they cohabited in Yarico’s cave, exotically decorated with furs and feathers. Nonetheless, Inkle finally marries Yarico less from love than in order to preserve his reputation from the stigma of having used and then abandoned a young woman, whatever her colour. His is evidently an individual moral obligation rather than an endorsement of miscegenous marriage or a condemnation of slavery, which the play generally presents as distasteful and morally dubious rather than as a legal blight. Notwithstanding, Colman’s play’s was received as supportive of abolitionism. It was spectacularly popular: its twenty-one night opening run was cut short only by the end of the theatrical season. It was performed 164 times in London theatres to the end of the century (J. Hamilton 1994: 17). In the press, it was agreed that ‘Mr. Colman, junior, has judiciously conceived that the reformation of his hero would be agreeable to an English audience’ (Monthly Review 77 [November 1787]: 389). A playbill for the Dublin production of the play in 1795 bore the heading ‘Inkle & Yarico. Or the SlaveTrade Exposed’. According to this single-page broadsheet, ‘Inkle’s selling Yarico for a Slave … would have been a dangerous Circumstance to represent before an English audience.’ Inkle’s reformation was not just a matter of personal honour but, the playbill implied, a political conversion. He comes to ‘feel the Blessings of Liberty, and the cruelty of depriving the helpless of their Freedom’. Defenders of the slave trade were quite aware that Colman’s play, like Oroonoko, was inspiring sentiments dangerous to their interests. As Gilbert Francklyn replied to the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, referring to Jamaican planters: I doubt not Mr. Clarkson’s treatise was considered by them as merely an academical exercise, no more deserving an answer, and so equally a fable, as the Tragedy of

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Oroonoko, the Royal Slave, or the play of Inkle and Yarico, both which, I doubt not, you will have had repeatedly acted, to influence the minds of people whom he, and others, have endeavoured to impose upon. (Francklyn 1789: 2) This was again a battle over who possessed the ‘truth’ about the slave trade and the conditions of colonial slavery, literary renditions or the real experience of slave traders and planters. Because of its origin in travel accounts, the Yarico legend was presented by abolitionists as essentially truthful despite its fictional embroidery. A supporter of the slave trade, Bryan Edwards, criticized the Abbé Raynal for indicating in his great anti-slavery tract, Histoire des deux Indes (1770), that Inkle’s perfidy had stirred a slave rebellion in Barbados. This was no less romantic fiction, Edwards wrote, than Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Yet even Edwards thought that the Inkle and Yarico story was essentially true and that Inkle’s crime, though irrelevant to modern slavery, ‘admits of no palliation’ (Edwards 1793: 1:351; see Raynal 2016: 194). Disputes over the details of that historical truth nonetheless hardly mattered. The political power of these literary texts lay not in their factuality but in the public’s broad sentimental identification with the romantic relationship between Othello and Desdemona, Oroonoko and Imoinda, or Inkle and Yarico. These stories were fundamentally about a legitimate and even noble form of interracial sex, inspiring the no doubt self-congratulatory feeling that humans are all the same and that love should be free. Such humanitarian impulses could certainly coexist with personal racism and the opinion that dark-skinned people were usually ugly and inferior. Modern literary scholars are correct to find features of abiding Eurocentrism in all three of these literary traditions. Yet the detailed insights of modern postcolonial critics are distant from the generalized, emotional impressions of theatregoers and readers in that earlier era.

‘CLEOPATRA’S JETTY CHARMS’: RESTORING BLACKNESS IN LITERARY TRADITION We have considered the three most renowned legends of interracial sexual relationships in the literary tradition that helped to shape attitudes into the era of abolitionism. Nonetheless, other literary works encouraged ennobling or at least humanizing perspectives on dark-skinned protagonists. Edward Young’s immensely popular tragedy The Revenge (1721) essentially reversed the situation of Othello by showing the conspiracy of a darkskinned Moor, Zanga, to inflame the sexual jealousy of a heroic white soldier Alonzo, who is finally driven to murder his betrothed Leonora. Unlike Iago, however, Zanga is not motivated by incoherent racial hatred. A Moorish prince whose father was killed by Alonzo in battle, Zanga was subsequently enslaved by the Spanish hero and, in an incident that he recalls with deep humiliation, struck across the face. Whereas Iago is finally taken away to torture and death, Zanga vaunts over the dying body of Alonzo, who has stabbed himself on learning that Leonora was innocent: If Men shall ask who brought thee to thy End, Tell them, The Moor, and they will not despise thee. If cold white Mortals censure this great Deed,

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Warn them, they judge not of superior Beings, Souls made of Fire, and Children of the Sun With whom Revenge is Virtue. (Young 1721: 61) As in other works of the period about non-white characters, Zanga displays negative traits associated with ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages’. He is inexorably driven by passion rather than higher motives and harbours no inkling of the supposedly Christian virtue of forgiveness. Yet the anonymous author of A Companion to the Theatre judged that Young endows Zanga with ‘a certain Greatness of Sentiment, which must convince every one, that if he had not been unfortunate, he would not have been wicked’ (Anonymous 1751: 199; emphases in the original). In A General View of the Stage, Thomas Wilkes concluded similarly ‘while we abhor Iago, and view his fall with pleasure, we find something in the character of Zanga that commands our pity’ (1759: 127). Young’s Revenge is not about miscegeny. It nonetheless exemplifies a similar capacity of white authors and audiences to identify sympathetically with the racial Other even in opposition to colonial brutality. This sympathy also affected the reading of ancient stories passed down through classical tradition. Little in Virgil’s Aeneid, for example, suggests that the Trojan hero’s beloved Dido is Black, though she is North African. (In some readings, she was a traveller from elsewhere who built Carthage with the permission of the indigenous Moors.) At the height of the abolitionist campaign, however, some abolitionists cited Dido as an example of the common and equal humanity of Africans. In An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies (1784), James Ramsay wrote the following in response to David Hume’s notorious inference that ‘negroes’ were ‘naturally inferior to whites’ (Hume 1987: 208n10): Had [Hume] lived in the days of Augustus, or even but a thousand years ago, his northern pride, perhaps would have been less aspiring, and satisfied to have been admitted even on a footing of equality with the sable African. Virgil makes Dido insinuate to Æneis, the reason he had to expect humane treatment among her people, not because they were polished Phœnicians, but because they dwelt more immediately than other powers under the powerful influence of the sun. (J. Ramsay 1784: 199) Similarly, the history of literary and non-literary texts gave few indications that Cleopatra was Black, though she too was North African. In the first act of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen beseeches the absent Antony to ‘Think on me, / That am with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black’ (1.5.27–8). But there is no reference to Cleopatra’s dark skin in John Dryden’s version of this story, All for Love (1676), which outperformed Shakespeare’s play throughout much of the eighteenth century. We have nonetheless already seen a reference to ‘Cleopatra’s jetty charms’ in a poem published in 1772. Similarly, in a 1721 poem Giles Jacob reminded his dark-haired mistress that ‘Antony for Cleopatra kind, / A Negro Beauty, the whole World resign’d’ (Jacob 1721: 40). In another poem to a dark-haired lady, Edmund Smith observed that Julius ‘own’d his Cleopatra fair. / Her Negro Beauties, in deep Shadows set, / Gain’d more Advantage

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from their native Jet’ (E. Smith 1731: 94). It does not appear that Cleopatra was ever fully reimagined as a Black queen during the eighteenth century. Yet authors were clearly willing to conjure the image that this most famous inspiration for world-surrendering erotic passion was dark-skinned.

CONCLUSION Literary traditions that sentimentalized or humanized interracial sex did not, of course, stem the tide of biological racism and imperial conquest into the nineteenth century. The often vicious denigration of non-white sexuality even intensified in many regions of the world such as the southern American states where laws against miscegeny became entrenched into the 1960s. One might also cite many novels, plays and films that debase and ridicule the sexuality of non-white characters. Nonetheless, throughout the period leading to the first great human rights campaign in Western history – the abolitionist campaign – literary tradition played a significant role in mobilizing public feeling against the worst and most systemic abuses against non-white people. These texts cannot be simply conflated with the racism of Hume, Voltaire, Kant or Edward Long; they indeed often posed a humanitarian counter-narrative to philosophical, geographical and proslavery texts that fiercely degraded ‘savage’ sexuality. Sex was at the centre of this debate, for here human beings met on a subject that was fraught, involuntary and surrounded by guilt and prohibitions even in white societies. It was through sex that white audiences could identify their own trials and repressions with the agonies of non-white lovers. The darker regions of the body, we might say, engendered humanitarian impulses against the most pernicious excesses of racial exploitation and bigotry.

CHAPTER NINE

Anti-Race The Human Race and Racial Formation, 1550–1750 ROXANN WHEELER

Anti-race is a recent term, derived from a US racial formation based in democracy. Paul Gilroy’s Against Race; Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line acknowledges the contentious ‘utopian aspirations’ of his ‘postracial stance’, which calls for ‘liberation not from white supremacy alone, however urgently that is required, but from all racializing and raciological thought, from racialized seeing, racialized thinking, and racialized thinking about thinking’ (2000: 41, 42, 40). Anti-race conceptualizes a solution to theorizing about human differences that sprang from the new discipline of Enlightenment science.1 Segregating humans into four or more distinct continental groups based on their appearance, government and even potential for full humanity, these racial divisions became sophisticated weapons that justified European and American slavery, colonial rule, and even genocide through the twentieth century (31, 65).2 Gilroy’s anti-race is a planetary humanism centred on a single human identity, or ‘an anti-anthropological sameness’ (98). What often goes unrecognized is that Gilroy’s concept secularizes what was actually the prevailing definition of ‘race’ during the Reformation and Enlightenment: the belief that there was one race of humans created by God, descended from Adam and Eve.3 Two other meanings of race from this era contributed to a racial formation that was shaped differently from our own today and do not relate as strongly to Gilroy’s antirace. First, in the mid-sixteenth century, race defined as royal ancestry came to designate the exclusive bloodline of rulers, a worldview that structured political power, social organization and aesthetics within Europe. Anchored in the ownership and inheritance of land (through primogeniture in England), this concept of race pertained only to the most educated and powerful sections of the population. Under this usage, to be against race would be nonsense, entailing a stance against marriage, procreation and strategic alliances of the royal families of Europe and peers of the realm. Second, race was newly employed by the 1550s as a generic designation and complicates matters further: to demarcate any plant, animal or human group evincing shared behaviour or appearance in neighbourhoods or the world, in the present or throughout history. This secular notion of race was not centred on humans, which has been the focus of most scholars. To be against this concept of race would entail a ridiculous stance against groups tout court, such as the race of quadrupeds or the race of pineapples. The objection to a group of people who constituted a race was commonly reserved for so-called papists in

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the era following 1558 but also extended occasionally to the lower orders of English and Irish, the French, Spaniards, Jews, Turks, Moors, other Africans and so-called savages of the Americas. The main argument of this chapter is that numerous new religious and secular terms originated in the 1550s to 1580s to express one human race: these four decades are remarkable for linguistic innovation. This new vocabulary flourishes in a dynamic racial formation, likely responding to a newly emerging political, intellectual and religious imperative. The dominant Reformation conception of race as shared creation and lineage is today’s secularized anti-race. Although anti-race, such as Gilroy theorizes, did not consciously refute a pre-existing notion of human difference between 1550 and 1750, we can discern that the idea of common humanity was sometimes asserted with detractors in mind, whether the opposition arose from racial difference as tantamount to distinctions of rank or behaviour within the British Isles or differences of climate, religion or government around the globe. The other two definitions of race mentioned above weakened the onehuman-race concept to the extent that the first elevated race as exclusive ancestry and the second naturalized a neutral proliferation of races.4 While none of these definitions of race functioned in the way that the scientific racial classification of humans deriving from the Enlightenment did, we can note that they all share a similar premise: from the mid-sixteenth century, race implied the visible and/or invisible transmission of something important (from shared creation and bloodline to religious faith). Scholars agree that race comprised both inheritance and cultivation in this era.5 Arguably, as cultivation became more important, common inheritance and shared creation became less so. Rather than repeating close readings of authors and documents that others have performed ably, I aim for a less directed approach to reveal usage in print culture. I leverage a technique of big data collection from Franco Moretti’s concept of distant reading to capture the vocabulary of race, its contexts and genres, especially its occasional function akin to today’s anti-race.6 Using the databases Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO), I sampled hundreds of thousands of documents to discover what race meant.7 Although database searches and spot readings are imprecise tools, they unearth some of the key cognates of race over two centuries, and they estimate historical origin, frequency and accelerating or declining relevance. I have featured examples from typical sources, so there is a preponderance of religious texts, but I have included poetry and the novel as well as the stage, songs and slang for comedic tones. I agree with scholars who have noted that analysis of race is not exhausted by the use of the word itself but contend that emphasizing the new and frequent usage of race in this era indexes the widespread nature of this linguistic habit. We discover just how ubiquitous race thinking was after 1550.8

RACE AS COMMON CREATION AND SHARED BLOODLINE Paradoxically, the predominant definition of race conveyed a Christian version of what we now consider anti-race: all humans were created by God, shared the blood of Adam and Eve, and were similar in essentials throughout time. From the mid-sixteenth through at least the mid-eighteenth century, race signified a Christian perspective even in secular contexts.9 Derived from a literal interpretation of the Bible, race meant one blood. The migration of the tribes of Israel explained human difference within essential similarity. Acts 17:26, for example, compresses key passages of the Old Testament: ‘And [God] hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth.’ For

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centuries, this genealogy ‘was the essential point of departure for understanding the races, linguistic groups, ethnicities and nations of the world’ (Kidd 2006: 20–1).10 Humans had been defined since classical times as having reason, which also separated them from animals (Fredrickson [2002] 2015: 37). Original to the mid- to late sixteenth century, synonymous phrases such as the comprehensive the whole race of mankind, race of men, race of Adam and race of Abraham appear mainly in religious texts, the largest category of printed material.11 Most poets and playwrights, regardless of religious profession or political party, employed human race or race of man to signal common descent or define human nature: Christopher Marlowe, John Milton, Aphra Behn, William Congreve, Giovanni Paolo Marana, Mary Astell, Thomas Otway, Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Mary Chudleigh, Colley Cibber, Richard Steele, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Matthew Prior and Laurence Sterne, to name just a few, assumed a global and ahistorical human similarity; John Dryden, Nicholas Rowe and Eliza Haywood ranked among the most frequent users of these terms. The novel, always with an ear to the new, invoked the race of man to make the point that everyone everywhere shares the same passions; the narrator of Aphra Behn’s The Fair Jilt, however, satirizes a new kind of fashionable man, the fop, as having more ‘Self-Love, than the rest of the Race of Man’ (Behn 1688: 2). Milton’s Paradise Lost memorializes the creation of the human race multiple times, as when Satan recounts, ‘There is a place / (If ancient and prophetic fame in Heav’n / Err not) another World, The happy Seat / Of some new Race call’d Man’ (Milton 1667: bk 2, line 54). Race, man and mankind all rhymed well with other words and frequently occur in poetry with classical allusions wherein the divine and mortal races are distinguished: literally different orders of beings with different abilities (but just one human race). By contrast, a song popular for the entire eighteenth century blurs this distinction. The male slave to love opines hyperbolically about his beloved: ‘Of Race divine thou needs must be, / Since nothing earthly equals thee; / For Heaven’s Sake, Oh! favour me, / Who only lives to love thee’ (Ramsay 1724: 136).12 Both race of Adam and race of Abraham originated in the 1560s. Race of Adam embraced all humans from the past through the present. Emphasizing descent from the first common male ancestor, it could function as a political statement folded into a religious phrase, as when former slave Ignatius Sancho envisions life after death in a letter: may you, dear M__, and all I love, yea the whole race of Adam, join with my unworthy weak self, in the stupendous … Hallelujahs! [When we die,] We will mix, my boy, with all countries, colours, faiths – see the countless multitudes of the first World – the myriads descended from the Ark – the Patriarchs – Sages – Prophets – and Heroes! My head turns round at the vast idea! we will mingle with them. (1782: 1:122–3)13 Sancho merges the ahistorical Christian afterlife with the cosmopolitan ideal of fraternizing with strangers of various geographic origins and religious beliefs. Particularly in the seventeenth century, however, race of Adam could connote degenerate, sinful or cursed to emphasize the fallen nature of man. Inspired by Matthew 3:8, the Cambridgeeducated, free-thinking writer and preacher Samuel Clark demands in A Lent-Sermon, ‘Is not the whole Race of Mankind, by the Fall, degenerated?’ (1700: 1). Notably, race of Eve was not popular, but the sentiment that Eve’s curiosity undid her race (all humans)

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occurred in serious poetry of the eighteenth century.14 By contrast, race of Abraham conjured up the Jewish historical past rather than the present and carried a positive connotation, as in the schoolboy who envisions major events of the Bible unfolding before him: ‘I see the race of Abraham at last set free, / By God deliver’d from their slavery’ (Anonymous Poetical Essays 1765?: 8).15 The race of Abraham was an important lineage of Jesus: Abraham’s symbolic sacrifice in the circumcision of his son Ishmael prefigured Christ’s shedding of blood for all of posterity; Jewish circumcision of the past corresponded with the more recent Christian baptism (Richeome 1629: 235). Shared creation and bloodline informed the term species of man from its emergence in 1586. Human resemblance and sympathy originated in the act of creation: ‘God made all Nations … out of one Blood … to the end they might Love each other, and stand in a mutual Sympathy, and help each other’ (Conway 1692: 56). Favoured by Locke to mean one race, species of man was typically interchangeable with species of men from the mid-seventeenth century in religious writing (1690: 37–8).16 Puritan theologian Richard Baxter confirms that ‘there be but one species of men’ (1667: 562). Oxford theologian Elisha Coles refers to the longue durée of God’s creation as ‘the intire Species of Men from Eternity’, which he separates from the notion of election (1673: 81). The renowned judge, jurist and Member of Parliament Matthew Hale invokes alike the ‘Whole Species of Men’, ‘Species of Man’, ‘Species of Mankind’ and ‘Race of Mankind’ in The Primitive Origination of Mankind (1677: 264, 112, 112, 111). Responsible for establishing the Church of England in the colony of Maryland and gaining the royal charter for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPGFP), Thomas Bray, in his often reprinted A Course of Lectures upon the Church Catechism, mentions ‘the whole Race of Mankind’ and ‘the whole Race of men’, harking back to Adam and Eve, but includes without contradiction the far smaller group of ‘our Christian Race’ (1696: 100, 106, 86). Similarly, the first translator of the Psalms into common ballad meter, Thomas Sternhold, in the influential The Whole Booke of Psalmes, renders neutrally God’s perspective on the ‘whole race of ma[n]kynd’ but pejoratively recalls that humans are a ‘wicked race’ and that God will cut off transgressors’ ‘budding race, and rich posterity’. His translation also includes the more colloquial meaning of race as reproduction: he originated the phrase ‘race to race’, or from one generation to the next (Sternhold 1562: 248, 271, 365).17 Meaning varied by context because both species and race could mean the only one and more than one. Defending one race but demonstrating the way that species, like race, could designate two exclusive groups of humans, John Goodwin’s Cata-baptism contemplates the practice of infant versus adult baptism, hotly debated at midcentury, and denounces the anti-scriptural position that infants and ‘beleevers are two contra-distinct, or opposite species of men’ (1655: 181). Viewing infants as immature believers and innocents, he excoriates those who perceive the irrationality of infants (and others) as a rationale for casting them as an inferior, separate species. With the word choice of species and men, Goodwin economically denounced the heresy that there could be categorically different kinds of humans. Some other seventeenth-century writers, however, slyly used species of men to convey unorthodox belief in multiple acts of creation or degenerate humans. By the eighteenth century, Pope, Swift, Smollett and other major satirists ironically invoked species of men to denote a subset of men: handsome young fellows (H. Fielding 1749: 1:243), scholars (S. Johnson 1752: 3:36) or ‘monstrous’ atheists (Addison 1721: 3:153). The concept of a single human race occurred in multiple phrases that expressed commonality across distance. Emerging in 1548, common nature was an important phrase

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to express shared humanity especially before 1700.18 Religious in meaning, it appeared in sermons, philosophy, literature, and juvenile poetry and instruction. Strangers’ afflictions were capable of arousing common nature: And those, for whom thou art grieued, are not of the same house, stocke, village, or country with thee: yet because they are men, and haue fellowship with thee in common nature, or because they are christians, and haue fellowship with thee in the same common religio[n], thy hart is grieued by way of compassion, to heare of the calamities that are hapned vnto them. (Hayward 1614: 124) Critical distinction from common sentiment is implied when Henry Fielding’s Amelia, a paragon of domestic virtue, replies to her husband, ‘Am I of a superior Rank of Being to the wife of the honest Labourer? Am I not Partaker of one common Nature with her?’ (1752: 4:149). Religious and conduct writers most often deployed fellow creature to denote shared humanity despite rank or nation.19 Creature meant God’s creation and was synonymous with human being. With a 1572 origin, fellow creature combined two older but separate words to denote persons or things sharing ‘the fact of being a product of divine creation’ (OED). This definition continues: ‘(in a more secular sense) a fellow living thing, esp. a human being or animal regarded as such’. The secular meaning was usually treated seriously as both groups resulting from God’s creation and sharing the local land. Invoking fellow creatures indexed a grievance against powerful landowners. Gerrard Winstanley, the leader of the True Levellers, chose the term to underscore the inequity of landowners benefitting by the violence of their ancestors: ‘for the power of inclosing Land, and owning Propriety, was brought into the Creation by your Ancestors by the Sword; which first did murther their fellow Creatures, Men, and after plunder or steal away their Land, and left this Land successively to you, their Children’ (1649: image on 2). By the late seventeenth century, fellow creatures functioned as a genteel reference to those lower in the social order and connoted reproach: some writers exhorted the elite to view the lower orders as fellow creatures and not to treat their servants as slaves.20 The most respected and popular conduct writers employed fellow creature within a Christian framework. Secularizing Church of England teaching, Richard Allestree’s The Whole Duty of Man, reprinted and adapted countless times for two centuries, offers a prayer for the reader to repeat: ‘O Merciful God, who hast mark’d out my Compassion to my Fellow Creature, as the Standard by which thou intendest to measure Thine to me!’ ([1658] 1700: 133). Repackaged in The Polite Lady: or a Course of Female Education, which went into at least eight editions by 1800, the prayer is translated into secular instruction in a letter from mother to daughter: ‘I shall now give you my sentiments of those virtues, which I told you were founded in humanity and good-nature. And the first I shall mention, is, pity or compassion. By this, my Dear, I mean that pleasing pain, which every generous mind feels upon seeing a fellow-creature in distress.’ The pleasure arises from her ‘power to alleviate the calamities of the unhappy sufferer’, here, as with Allestree, imagined as local (C. Allen 1760: 261). Defoe popularized the phrase fellow creatures in dozens of his most reprinted texts on conduct and projects as well as his novels, as did Mary Davys.

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Fellow creatures took on a new life in the campaigns against slavery and racism, not least because early novelists Penelope Aubin and William Chetwood included the phrase in their popular moral novels to argue against slavery and perceptions of human difference as deriving from religion or skin colour. In Aubin’s The Life of Charlotta du Pont, Charlotta tells Isabinda, who is about to marry her father’s former slave Domingo: The selling human Creatures, is a Crime my Soul abhors; and Wealth so got, ne’er thrives. Tho he is black, yet the Almighty made him as well as us, and Christianity ne’er taught us Cruelty: We ought to visit those Countrys to convert, not buy our Fellowcreatures, to enslave and use them as if we were Devils, or They not Men. (1723: 89) The author of Two Dialogues on the Man-Trade accuses his countrymen of murdering Africans, ‘our fellow rational creatures’; Africans and Europeans ‘are members of one and the same great society, spread over the face of the whole earth … and are joined together, by the close and strong tie of human nature, common to us all … a lover of mankind [a citizen in the world] is a braver character [than a patriot]’ (Philmore 1760: 41, 9). A key change in dialogue between John O’Keeffe’s 1784 and 1788 versions of The Young Quaker, A Comedy creates a more emphatic claim of relation between master and slave. In both endings, the young English Quaker announces that he will keep his father’s American plantations but free the slaves; the 1788 version adds a line: ‘let us cease to make a sordid traffic of our fellow creatures’ (O’Keeffe [1784] 1788: 61). Indexing Britons’ continuing search for expressions of human sameness despite rank, colour or religious difference, the older fellow feeling and sympathy became interchangeable with the prized term sensibility by the 1760s.21 Fellow feeling did not arise naturally between so-called superior and inferior ranks of Britons or in the worldwide community: it had to be imagined or forged. Similar to other one-race terms, brethren by nature emerged in the 1580s. In its earliest iterations, it endorses merely Christian fellowship. Drawing illustrations from the Old Testament, a clergyman identifies four kinds of brothers: by nature (same mother and father); by nation (biblical and contemporary Jews); by affinity (same family line); and by faith (meaning Christians, who are also brethren by affinity) (H. Smith 1591: image on 5).22 Surprisingly, Henry Smith connects biblical lineage only to Christians. Another preacher tinkers with Smith’s wording and selection of passages to offer a slight variation. Brethren by nature share a mother; brethren by consanguinity are of the same family, either through marriage or in a next or previous generation (for example, an uncle or a nephew); brethren by nation were what Paul called the Jews (Paul was a Jew who had initially persecuted the disciples of Jesus and then was converted); and brethren by profession were Christians in the present united by the past and future: ‘brethren not onely because made of one God … came all out of the loynes of one Adam, but because they are called to the same inheritance, the kingdom of heaven’ (Barker 1597: images on 40–1). Remarking the proclivity of New England colonists to favour the English race, Roger Williams reproaches them: ‘Boast not proud English, of thy birth & blood, / Thy brother Indian is by birth as Good. / Of one blood God made Him, and Thee & All’ (1643: 133). Degrees of brotherhood parsed more or less affinity: ‘all Men are our Brethren by Nature, all Christians our Brethren by the Covenant of Grace, all Englishmen our national Brethren, and all Members of the

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Church our Brethren by Communion’ (Dolben 1726: 5–6). Throughout the eighteenth century, brethren by nature continues to be overwhelmingly found in sermons, hymns and other religious writing, but it rarely assumes a larger constituency than Christians with any regularity until the mid-1760s.23 Brethren by nature and consanguinity played a role in the anti-slavery campaign. A man of letters who edited critical editions of Shakespeare and his friend Pope, William Warburton, the Bishop of Gloucester, preached a sermon before the SPGFP on Indigenous Americans and African bondsmen. The latter are ‘creatures endowed with all our Faculties, possessing all our qualities but that of colour; our BRETHREN both by Nature and Grace, [their enslavement] shocks all the feelings of humanity, and the dictates of Common Sense’ (Warburton 1766: 26). Clergyman, Whig and Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University Peter Peckard publicly denounced British complicity in slavery. His trenchant address to the British legislature leverages Christian heritage in the economic and political context of the slave trade, railing that God will judge those who promote ‘the horrid Traffick of our brethren in Nature and Blood’ (Peckard 1788: 78). Seemingly the most secular term to connote a global consciousness of human similarity, cosmopolite emerged in 1574 in French. This neologism derived from the Greek cosmos (the universe as a harmonious system), the Latin mundus (world), the French politesse (both intellectual culture and civil behaviour) and the Roman cives (the whole social body of male citizens) (Blount 1661).24 Denoting an educated gentleman who rose above individual or country interest to improve all of humanity, cosmopolite could signify an atheist or a worldly (rather than godly) man, a negative connotation not shed until the 1670s. A cosmopolite sought to unlearn all prejudices. The highest aspiration of princes, Christians and gentlemen, the synonym citizen of the world is the one phrase from this era to rejuvenate in the democratic twenty-first century.25 Cosmopolite meant both human habitation on earth and knowledge of it. In a speech to princes, Frederique, Duke of Wirtemberg, condemns the Chinese and the Muscovites for barring subjects from leaving or strangers from entering their dominions. These restrictions subvert knowledge ‘among the Children of Adam’: ‘this whole Globe of the Earth, is no other then [sic] the Native Country of all kind of men: It is but one common City, Domicile and Habitation’ (Howell 1653: 2, 3). The notion that the world, divided into land masses and principalities, was in spirit one open border, figured in the concept of the world as one city, all its citizens equal inhabitants. This spirit favoured the discovery of mutual benefits in exchanges and the treatment of other people as brothers, not enemies to be exploited, enslaved or conquered. Men of letters from Francis Bacon in the early seventeenth century to Addison, Pope, Swift and the third Earl of Shaftesbury in the early eighteenth century refer to citizens of the world positively. Bacon’s essay ‘Of Goodness and Goodness of Nature’ envisions individuals transcending their local connections: ‘if a Man be Kind and Courteous to Strangers and Foreigners, he proves himself a Citizen of the World, and that his Heart is not like an Island, cut off from other Lands, but like a Continent that joins to them’ ([1625] 1742: 1:73). The Earl of Shaftesbury distinguishes the thinking man who traces his pedigree beyond the local or national to ‘view his End and Constitution in Nature itself’ or ‘as a Citizen or Commoner of the World’ (1732: 2:185). Church of England belief was commensurate with cosmopolitanism, especially from the late seventeenth century. Funeral elegies were occasions to invoke global humanism. In the sermon originally given at Robert Boyle’s 1691 funeral, Gilbert Burnet, the Bishop of Salisbury, offers that like Boyle, a good man rises above his body and passions to

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extend his compassion: ‘with relation to the whole of mankind, [he] considers himself as a citizen of the whole world, and as a piece of human nature’, by which he means without political partisanship or partiality to local attachments, and ‘stretches the instances of this, to the utmost corners of the earth, if occasion is given for it; and that intends to make mankind the better, the wiser, and the happier for him in the succeeding as well as in the present generation’ (Burnet [1713] 1742: 179). A devout Anglican, inventor, chemist, physicist and a founder of the Royal Society, Boyle provided a model that his eulogizer also exemplified: fluent in several ancient and modern languages, including Hebrew, the Whiggish Burnet was a prolific writer known for his liberal views and duty to the crown. The very popular French historian and educator Charles Rollin explains how the whole of mankind underwrites the cosmopolitan ideal in his essay on philosophy: God is the Common Father of a great family, and all men are his children, joined together by the bond of humanity …; thus man should not limit his views or his zeal to the particular place, where he was born, but look upon himself as a citizen of the whole world, which in this sense is but a single city. (1734: 4:205) Rollin concedes that this vision is rare because society typically divides itself into hierarchical units. A sermon invokes the cosmopolitan ideal in the bond among kingdoms and people, ‘resulting from the mutual Dependency of one community upon another’, and specifically refers to the importance of peace, non-violence and the rejection of fraudulent encroachments: ‘this sketch of a peaceable disposition properly pursued through all the different relations incident to Man … constitutes, what we call, a good Subject or citizen of the World’ (Garnett 1741: 4). His exhortation during the War of Jenkins’s Ear, which largely operated in the slave-owning Caribbean, was timely. These Anglicans viewed patriotism and religious faith as folded into cosmopolitanism, not antithetical to it. Some didactic literature embraced a global commitment to doing good. In a popular text, Scottish professor of philosophy David Fordyce stages a dialogue between two young gentlemen about the oath necessary to enter the ideal academy of instruction. Simplicius must swear not to be partisan. His interlocutor explains he must look upon himself as part of the society to which he belongs and to ‘promote its most extensive Interest above all private or personal views; tho’ still in subordination to the two grand Societies of [his] Country and Mankind’. The oath continues, ‘I likewise solemnly declare, that I consider myself as a Citizen of the intellectual World … from this time forth devote my Life to the Service of God, my Country, and Mankind’ (Fordyce 1745: 2: 35).26 Fordyce specifies active benevolence as a Christian, not merely knowledge or kindly disposition (60). Citizen of the world was silently appropriated for women by Eliza Haywood (1745– 6: 170). Similarly, Mary Collyer’s didactic novel Letters from Felicia to Charlotte associates a lady with planetary consciousness: Charlotte praises their friend Marilla as both well educated and having ‘unlimited goodness of heart, which, uncircumscribed by ties of blood, or the distinctions of religion, grasps at the happiness of every human creature’. In this, Charlotte observes, Marilla is like her brother Lucius, who considers himself a citizen of the world, ‘and they both regard the whole universe, however varied … as having reciprocal claims to benevolence, and the kindest acts of humanity’ (1749: 2:304).27 Always aspirational, easier for elite men rather than institutions or governments to enact, the citizen of the world was ripe for satire.28

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Cosmopolitan universalizing and Enlightenment relativism were distinctive impulses that sometimes converged in the idea of one human race with myriad cultures; both differed again from utopian writing. Cultural relativism featured healthy scepticism about the writer’s own country’s norms and a commitment to reason rather than received knowledge. The Enlightenment was arguably ushered in by Michel de Montaigne’s essay ‘Of Cannibals’; its importance cannot be over-emphasized for the way that it instructs readers to detect European bias.29 Satirizing parochial pride, Montaigne posits the French tendency to project barbarism onto others and naturalize their own local customs: ‘there is always the true Religion, there the perfect Government, and the most exact and accomplish’d Usance of all things’ ([1580] 1700: 322). Observing that the world changes over long periods, he cautions that it is not just our knowledge of it that changes (319). Ending a long description of native Brazilian conduct of war, Montaigne concludes wittily with an anecdote from the time of Charles IX that reverses the ethnographic power dynamic he has engaged. Three so-called cannibals at Rouen witness the fashions, architecture and pomp of this great French city; the king asks what they most admire, and, instead of praise, they reply that they are troubled that the country’s leader is not chosen for his abilities but for his bloodline. They believe that the most able and best armed man should be chosen from among those similarly qualified to make the decision. They are also troubled by the great disparity between the haves and have nots, evincing surprise that the poor had not murdered the rich (338). As so many literary historians have noted, the fictional ‘noble savage’ or outsider ‘barbarian’ figure satirized European society by defamiliarizing its vices through a supposedly foreign viewpoint, a rich literary tradition up to 1800. Typically, most European authors did not offer a straightforward celebration of other cultures or a complete condemnation of their own; the texts tend to modulate complex tones. Shared humanity as a value is strongly in evidence in Oliver Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World (1762), which was celebrated for being ‘free from the Influence of Prepossession’ (Riden 1762: 14).30 Offering a surprise, comedic finale, unlike Montesquieu’s The Persian Letters (1722) to which it is most compared, Goldsmith’s fictional letters conclude with the marriage of the main letter-writer’s son, a young man from China, to the niece of the English stranger who had befriended him in London. This newly created family exemplifies the notion of brethren by nature without mentioning the phrase: Lien Chi Altangi and the generically named Man in Black, strangers from two continents, professing different religions, and formed by different habits, find friendship in the older generation and romantic love in the younger. The cosmopolitan ideal is newly located in the domestic context of intermarriage.31

SCEPTICISM ABOUT ONE HUMAN RACE Cosmopolitanism secularized the religious convention of one human race. The heretical suspicion that there was more than one act of creation or separate species of humans was, however, glacially creeping into European intellectual life as well as popular culture. Machiavelli’s The Prince (1513), widely translated in Europe through the eighteenth century, recalls correctly that schools in Spain had ‘disputed, if the Indians were of the race of Adam, or were not a middle bastard species between a Man and an Ape’ (Balzac 1648: 270).32 This comparatively rare notion of an illegitimate species neither fully human nor fully animal positions some populations outside of humankind either because of their location (for example, how did people get to the Americas?), their lack

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of belief in a single deity (often a litmus test), or their ‘savage’ behaviour. Apparently contradicting the Spanish schools but actually engaging a similar thought experiment, Sir Richard Blackmore’s ‘The Nature of Man’ promises ‘the most successful Methods trace / That raise, and long uphold a worthy Race, / And the Defects which a great Stock debase’ (1718: 249). He includes Africa, the Indies and the polar regions in the tribes of the single race of mankind yet argues that they are inferior, ‘who rude and barb’rous, and without Controul … . A middle Species seem of blended Men and Beast’ (250). Much hangs on ‘seem’; Blackmore attributes these regions’ failure to live up to the ‘great Stock’ to environmental causes: the poor climate, the lack of submission to a strong government with laws and to the paucity of the institutions of a civil society.33 For Blackmore, without cultivation, shared creation and bloodline offered merely a tenuous connection among the world’s people. To the extent that some writers explicitly refuted the heresy of different human species, we see anti-race as a concept emerging in a new racial formation. These writers seem to mount indirect, rearguard action against the idea that there was more than one species of humans. Renowned Scottish physician and man of letters David Abercromby argues that there are not different species of men but simply differing human abilities that result in social hierarchy ([1685] 1686: 18). Bodies are proof that humans are all the same, he urges, and benign distinction arises in men of superior abilities whose actions call forth the homage and esteem of others (19). His assumption that there is no difference between elite and common bodies of Britons clearly counters others who believe that there is. For Abercromby, the exterior human form groups all as one, and temporal differences are not essential but merited. In this era, the body itself was not the primary signifier of race, yet this assumption is increasingly contested.34 Jeremy Collier similarly establishes the parameters of this tacit debate. Best known as a Nonjuror bishop and for his largely successful, reactionary anti-theatrical criticism of contemporary comedy, Collier wrote prolifically. Although variations may seem to uninformed people to produce distinctive species, humans are a single species, he argues (Collier 1689: 21). Prejudice was part of the fallen nature of humans; Christian teaching was clear that God does not regard individuals at the level of the person but judges their interiority: ‘he loketh on [their] cleannesse of the hart, & on [their] inward innoce[n]cy’. Humans, however, display no such ability either to discern or care about virtue. They are subject to the prejudice of their eyes and commonly esteem men through ‘race, country, dignity, riches, honor, beauty & other lyke things’ (Brooke 1563: 16), an insight borne out by subsequent writers who either lament this situation or exacerbate it.

RACE AS ROYAL BLOODLINE The other major definition of race between 1550 and 1750 was exclusive rather than inclusive, and its tendency was to validate race as desirable: it referred to the dynasty of emperors and kings, or one ruler’s heirs over the duration of the family’s power. Secular except insofar as the divine right of kings persisted as a sacred doctrine through most of the seventeenth century, this concept embraced broad constructions (French kings) and specific ones (race of Bourbon or Charlemagne). Flowing through the bodies of powerful men, bloodline organized comprehensive histories of the world, as in John Beaumont’s The Present State of the Universe, or, An Account of I. The Rise, Births, Names, Matches, Children, and Near Allies of all the Present Chief Princes of the World, II. Their Coats of

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FIGURE 9.1  Diego Muñoz Camargo, Aztec emissaries making a treaty with the seated Cortez, his interpreter La Malinche standing to his left, 1585. © Bettmann/Getty Images.

Arms, Motto’s, Devises, Liveries, Religions, and Languages (1694). Royal lineage anchored histories of China, India, Greece, Europe and to a lesser extent Africa and the Americas (Figure 9.1). Similarly, this definition prevailed in epic, tragedy and romance on the stage and page. Dryden features race as royal inheritance in most of his plays and poems. A typical example is Alibech, the current Indian Queen of Mexico in The Indian Emperour, who laments about the Aztec empire: ‘Orbellan, though my Brother, did disgrace, / With treacherous Deeds, our Mighty Mothers Race’ (Dryden 1667: 44). Race and stock were frequently but not always interchangeable terms in the early modern era; stock waned in importance after 1700. ‘Stock of the Persian Race of Kings’ was not thought redundant in An Introduction to the History of the Kingdoms and States of Asia, Africa and America (Anonymous 1705: 224).35 Popularized by both Chaucer and Milton, the figurative word stock dates to the tenth century and means family tree: ‘The trunk or stem of a (living) tree, as distinguished from the root and branches.’ The OED also defines stock generically as ‘a line of descent’ and as people, ‘the descendants of a common ancestor, a family, kindred’. A typical treatment of kingly race as shaping the people of a country announces the chapter ‘The State of English Spirit under the Stuart Race’ in Observations on the Power of Climate over the Policy, Strength, and Manners, of Nations (Anonymous 1774a). Royal lineage was, however, also a practical, embodied

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concept. The mayor, aldermen and common Council of Durham sent a letter that expressed hope for King James II that ‘your Royal Stock and Race’ will always wear the crown; they added for good measure that they prayed that he and the queen would have more sons (Anonymous 1688). Other titled men were part of races, and it was cause for homage if not eulogy: William, Lord Montjoy, ‘who besides nobility of race, was adorned with such piety & good literature’ (Melanchton 1561: image on 59). Race could indicate a much smaller unit than even the Mountjoys or Stuarts. The lawful male children of a Duke are referred to as his ‘masculine race’ (Anonymous 1700a: 8). The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Iuliet uses race and stock interchangeably to distinguish families: ‘There were two auncient stockes, / which Fortune high dyd place / Aboue the rest, indewd with welth, / and nobler of their race’ (Brooke 1562: 1). Even though initially the definition of race as family bloodline signalled elite ancestry, over the seventeenth century it came to encompass select other families that had recently ascended to greatness from gaining great wealth or prestige for military or trading endeavours.

RACE AS SHARED RELIGIOUS BELIEF Race was not always related to noble lineage; it also indexed religious belief and stood for intermarriage within a religious group of people regardless of their differences of rank. In many instances, race meant religion and bloodline combined, and it typically occurred in travel writing and geography: ‘The Emirs [of Turkey], who boast of being descended from the Race of Mahomet, wear a Turbant all green’ (C. Thompson 1744: 2:141). Circumcision was a religious practice of this era akin to baptism, and they both constituted racial difference. Scriptural Poems imagines Samson’s parents addressing him about Delilah: ‘but thou wilt this Philistine take, / Of Race uncircumsised [sic]?’ (Bunyan 1700: 21). Apparently redundant constructions were common, such as the ‘Race of the Jewish Nation’ (Anonymous 1705: 46), which acknowledges that the Jews were associated with land as well as a bloodline and common faith. During and after the Civil War, English religious sects of various kinds met with vitriol: race and stock came in handy here. A writer who distinguished Quakers from Apostate Christians, Catholics and Protestants states blandly that the first only are ‘of the stock and race of the true Christians, that believed in Christ’ (Burrough 1660: 9). Agitating against Puritans in several publications, Anglican scholar and preacher Peter Heylyn identifies two different races of men in France: ‘Protestants are a plain race of men, Simple in their actions, without craft and fraudulent behaviors’ (1656: 217), by contrast associating the Catholic race with mendacity and degeneration.

RACE AS SHARED COUNTRY If race mapped onto religious practice, race and place correlated bloodline, land ownership, governance and climate. A country might have a single race, such as the ‘Race of men here in England’ or ‘our ancient British Race’ (Anonymous 1679: 16). Nonetheless, in the hands of another author, that same country might sustain several races that represented waves of conquest, immigration or both: the Germans, Saxons, Angles and French were all races of England.36 Several cognates delineated races that differed from the English. The ancient words Frenchman, alien and stranger all legally denoted a non-English person: Frenchman ‘was anciently used for every stranger’; an alien was ‘one born in a strange Countrey, it is usually taken for the contrary to Denizen, or a natural subject,

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that is, a stranger never here enfranchised’. Nevertheless, those born ‘out of the Land’ in colonies or of English parents outside of England were still considered subject to the king. The same seventeenth-century law dictionary defines race as family or family line (Blount 1670). These legal distinctions of belonging and subjection hint at long-standing habits that connect place and rights that militate against the idea of common humanity.

RACES EVERYWHERE At its most generic, race denoted a similarity based on appearance or behaviour resulting from choice, nature or selective breeding. Race as a result of breeding and cultivation applied to animals and vegetables, particularly domesticated ones: a ‘race of mares’ (Gardiner 1553, image on 8); a ‘race of Beagles about Portsmouth that were Artists in hunting of Moles’ (Sandys 1684: 223); or ‘the Cole Race’ that encompasses asparagus, artichokes, cauliflower and cabbages, and the ‘lemon Race [that] grows’ more quickly than oranges (Bradley 1718: 138, 222). Adventitious and political groupings of humans conveyed much vitriol. A ‘race of Rebels’ referred to the Bible and to would-be regicides (Baron 1700: 122). In The Character of a Whig, the anonymous author maligns scriveners as ‘a Surreptitious Race of Men’ who were ‘bred out of the Corruption of several Ages, or like some Africk Monsters, are the Amphibious Product of a Heterogeneous Copulation’ (Anonymous 1700b: 116). Predominantly part of elite religious, historical, political and geographic writing, the word race figured less often in popular print culture but carried similar meanings with tones of irony and even sarcasm. William Burnaby’s Drury-Lane comedy The Reform’d Wife features race as an elite family bloodline but cross-fertilized ironically with lowly manual labour in a put-down of Act 4. Lady Dainty wittily observes to Clerement about his ineptitude as a lover: ‘Indeed I have heard of Kings that were bred to the Plough and fancy you might Descend from such a Race, for you Court as if you were behind one’ (Burnaby 1700: 34). The one-act ballad opera The Chamber-Maid features sarcasm compressed into farcical dialogue about the word race and the possibility that some boorish contemporary men share manners with primates. The character Brush has not yet met his bride-to-be, and he espies Sir Nicholas Wiseacre with his wife and daughter Rosella. Thinking only of the potential for sex and breeding, he exclaims upon meeting them for the first time, ‘Upon my Soul, what a beautiful Race! I cou’d wish for nothing more in this World, than to have just such a Wife and such a Daughter. What Health! What Complexion!’ In a different order of racial joke, the maid Betty asks Rosella sarcastically, ‘You will not marry this Baboon?’ (Phillips 1730: 19, 20), to which she replies emphatically no (Phillips 1730: 19, 20). Eighteenth-century songs were, like the stage, a significant medium that conjured up surprising racial groups, usually for comedic effect. ‘One April Morn’ imagines two young lovers kept asunder by their parents’ partisanship: the two ‘Met in a Grove, to vent Their Spleen / On Parents unrelenting: He bred of Tory Race had been, / She of the Tribe dissenting’ (Anonymous 1716–33?: 1:193).37 ‘Despairing beside a Clear Stream’ imagines a young lady lamenting having left London for the country. The narrator satirically observes of the rude country: ‘Fond Virgin, thy Power is lost / On a Race of rude Hottentot Brutes; / What Glory in being the Toast / Of noisy dull Squires in Boots’ (Anonymous 1736b: 3:68).38 ‘I am a Jolly Toper’, a drinking song popular between 1719 and century’s end, invokes the virgin goddess Diana, of the divine race, who inspires the

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earthly female race: ‘Herself, Diana, Goddess, / The pride of female race.’39 ‘I am a Jolly Toper’ also celebrates earthly restrictions on the poor – ‘Our Laws prohibit hunting, / To the Plebian Race’ – because it was originally a kingly right that now belongs to the singers (Anonymous 1735: 2:15–16). Other songs seemed more caustic about prejudices among elites. ‘Tom and Will Were Shepherd Swains’, originally a Dryden poem, touches on the inequity of male birth order in the same family under primogeniture: of two shepherd swains, ‘Tom came of a genteel Race’ and the other, Will, ‘was noble, but alas, / He was a younger Brother’ (Dryden 1706: 251).40 Superior to Tom, Will is of a noble race but lesser than his eldest brother: so much for brethren by nature. Bacchus and Venus, a widely known dictionary of wit, song and slang, with editions in 1737, 1770, 1775 and 1785, illuminates the way that racial judgements infused the view of criminal low life to demarcate groups of people by affiliation or behaviour. BawdyBaskets, defined as ‘the twenty-third race of canters’, or users of secret languages who deceive the rich and ignorant alike, are ‘a sort of diminutive pedlar who sells obscene books but lives more by pilfering and stealing’ (Anonymous 1737). A canibal [sic] is an English person, ‘a cruel, barbarous Fellow; a Delighter in Blood, so called from a Race of People in some parts of the Indies, who are Men-Eaters’ (Anonymous 1737). To be of a ‘Mongrel Race or Breed’ is to be ‘a Cur, or Man, of a base, ungenerous Breed’ (Anonymous 1737). In these examples, race still has a universal application, just negatively.

CONCLUSION The Reformation was a remarkable era for originating new terms to signify one human race. The cultural history of race is more capacious than most scholars have argued, not least because it has a significant non-human component. Surprisingly, race was neutral or even positive in connotation. Common humanity was the dominant racial ideology, and it flourished along with at least two other contemporary definitions of race as royal bloodline and as any group. Embedded in everyday life for all ranks of people in a way that current scholarship has underplayed, racial thinking was multifarious. The concept of common humanity largely derived from Christian common sense; insofar as anti-race was nascent, it occurred as religious rearguard action against the notion of multiple creations or separate species of humans and positively as cosmopolitan planetary consciousness. Part of an emergent cultural formation of the Reformation and Enlightenment, race featured essential human similarity even as writers conceded the widespread human tendency to prepossession of high rank, shared religion and nation. The religious conviction of common humanity was not strong enough to counteract the material forces of colonization, slavery or consumerism.

NOTES

Chapter 1 1 In this chapter, ‘race’ appears in quotation marks when I discuss the word itself, and the word appears without quotation marks when I discuss race as a concept. Ania Loomba briefly discusses an earlier usage of ‘race’ in William Dunbar’s The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins (1508), but notes that in Dunbar’s poem ‘the word means “groups” but does not tell us much about what kinds of groups these might be’ (2002: 22). The OED, of course, provides a useful tool for examining the development of race as a concept vis-à-vis how the word is used. 2 See definitions of gens in Oxford Latin Dictionary (Glarke et al. 1982: esp. definitions 1, 6 and 7). 3 See, for example, Feerick (2010) and Akhimie (2018). 4 On the etymology of race, also see Smedley and Smedley (2012: 35–9). 5 Kidd identifies race in discussions of scriptural genealogies, arguing that ‘Forms of early modern racism did exist, but they should not be parsed anachronistically in terms of modern expectations about their sources, idioms or resonance’ (2006: 54). Kidd suggests caution when discussing race, but his caution derives from the fact that early moderns did not yet have ‘clearly articulated theories of racial difference’ (54). Kidd’s claim that some ideas about race might be anachronistic to the study of early modernity will understandably be met with objection by many early modern critical race scholars. Discussing the way early modern studies polices its borders, Urvashi Chakravarty asks us to interrogate ‘which questions are (still) seen as particular, or peculiar, or (merely?) political; what is accepted as “sufficiently” early modern, and what is construed as “anachronistic”; what is “essential” to and within the Renaissance and what is conceived as “outside” its purview, even imposed upon it’ (2019: 15). Kidd goes on to show, however, that noting that theories of race were not yet clearly articulated does not mean that race and racism were non-existent. Kidd is thus useful for analysing early modern race-as-linage – especially in religious contexts – in relation to later constructions of race, and points to the numerous moments when early modern religious thinking is racist in its assumptions and implications. 6 Arguably, it was because of such an understanding of Christian regeneration that seventeenthcentury Protestant slave owners in the Caribbean hindered the conversions of Africans. For this history, see Gerber (2018). 7 I discuss the racialization of Christian identity in Calvinist discussions of pedobaptism in greater detail elsewhere (see Britton 2014: 35–58). 8 See Cohen (2001); Spiller (2011: 41–78); and Heng (2018: 110–80). 9 For an extended reading of the curse of Ham and representations of blackness in early modern English literature, see Oldenburg (2001). How the story of Noah influenced understandings of human difference more generally, see Braude (1997). 10 Goldenberg (2017) provides a thorough history of how the curse of Ham was used to justify the enslavement of Black Africans.

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11 Feerick (2010) has also provided an important study or race, lineage and social rank in the early modern period.

Chapter 2 1 2

W. Vaughan ([1600] 1617: 5). Pliny (1961: 4:187).

Chapter 3 1

2

To the extent that they did so they brought their usage more in line with the general shift in the theoretical understanding of the term ‘religion’, meticulously documented by Ernst Feil, whereby after the middle of the seventeenth century religion came increasingly understood not in terms of practices but in terms of feelings. Religion ceased to be visible but was locked within the inner dimension of the human person (Feil 2001: 481). The new concept of religion is already indicated by Thomas Hobbes when he wrote: ‘Seeing there are no signes, nor fruit of Religion, but in Man onely’ (1651: 52; emphasis in the original). The self-evidence, and thus primacy, that is sometimes accorded to the supposed visibility of race is easily disturbed by the history of what was reported. In the seventeenth and for much of the eighteenth century, the Chinese were seen as ‘white like us in Europe’ (Semedo 1655: 22), an observation that Buffon, while acknowledging some difference in the reports, depending on location and exposure to the sun, supported (1749: 385). It was not until later that the Chinese came to be seen as yellow (Demel 2016: 31).

Chapter 4 1 2

The short essay was originally published in Voltaire’s Traité de Metaphysique (1734). It was translated as part of his Philosophy of History (1766). The same would not be true of race, slavery and medicine, as opposed to natural history. See Seth (2018).

Chapter 5 1

2

3

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5

Thomas Blount in Glossographia (1656) defines ethnic as ‘heathenish, ungodly irreligious: And may be used substantively for a heathen or gentile’, while Samuel Johnson later provides a similar description in his Dictionary of the English Language (1755) as ‘heathen; pagan; not Jewish; not Christian’. For a broad introduction to the differences between race and ethnicity, see Steve Fenton’s Ethnicity (2010). Note that ‘race both barbarous and bestial’ is translated from ‘gente barbaryca e bestial’ (Zurara 1841: 84). This conflation of ‘people’ and ‘race’ reveals perhaps more about the nineteenth-century translators Charles Raymond Beazley and Edgar Prestage than it does about Zurara. On the origins and uses of monsters, see Stephen Asma’s On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (2009) and Curran and Graille’s ‘The Faces of Eighteenth-Century Monstrosity’ (1997). This situating of the colonial other in the past remained a regular feature of travel writing and histories (e.g. the Mexica as ancient Egyptians) and even later anthropological writing (e.g. ‘primitive societies’) well into the twentieth century (Fabian 1983: 17). Richard Zouch, in The Dove: Or Passages of Cosmography (1613), describes the people of southern Africa similarly as Blemmyes, writing, ‘by Nature, many an ugly shape / Have beene brought forth by Monster-making Fame, / … There headlesse same are framed … With eyes and mouth, like windows, in their breast’ (quoted in Merians 2001: 32).

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6 Scholars trace the origins of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and his colonial figure, Caliban, to reports of ‘cannibals’ in the Caribbean (Hulme 1992: 15, 107). It should be noted that Caliban cries out ‘Setebos!’, a term derived from Antonio Pigafetta’s account of the kidnapping of a Patagonian ‘giant’ (Martyr 1885: 252). 7 For recent scholarship that investigates linguistic colonialism, see Walter Mignolo’s Darker Side of the Renaissance (2003), Joseph Errington’s ‘Colonial Linguistics’ (2001), Edward Gray and Norman Fiering’s The Language Encounter in the Americas (2000), Edward Gray’s New World Babel (1999), David Rojinsky’s Companion to Empire (2010) and Matthew Bennett’s ‘The Arts of Empire’ (2015). On the discrimination of non-hegemonic languages and missionary linguistics forming new nations, see Robert Phillipson’s Linguistic Imperialism (1993). On the racing of language and the languaging of race, see H. Samy Alim et al.’s Raciolinguistics (2016). 8 Note that Linnaeus, in his Systema Naturae, categorizes ‘Wild men’ as one of the six races and describes them as ‘mute’ (Pratt 1992: 32; see also E. Gray and Fiering 2000: 319). 9 Resistance writing by mestizos and Indigenous Americans in the Spanish Atlantic might be exemplified by ‘El Inca’ Garcilaso de la Vega’s Comentarios reales (Royal Commentaries) (1609) and Guaman Poma de Ayala’s El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (The First New Chronicle and Good Government) (c. 1615). 10 For a deep study of the role of language in the colonization of Ireland, see Palmer’s Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland (2001). 11 Linford D. Fisher’s Database of Indigenous Slavery in the Americas (n.d.) is an ambitious and necessary project, but at the time of this writing is still under construction. 12 The regularity with which the prohibition to bear arms appears in imperial and colonial law demonstrates the role of the legal system in defanging colonized peoples. 13 For a discussion of Montesquieu’s relation to colonialism, see Ghachem (1999).

Chapter 6 1 Landmark volumes in the field of early modern critical race studies include Ania Loomba (1992), Kim F. Hall (1995), Arthur Little Jr (2000), Joyce Green Macdonald (2002), Sujata Iyengar (2005), Virginia Mason Vaughan (2005), Ayanna Thompson (2008), Ian Smith (2009), Dennis Britton (2014), Matthieu Chapman (2017), Patricia Akhimie (2018) and edited volumes such as Hendricks and Parker (1994), Erickson and Hulse (2000) and Lowe and Earle (2005). 2 See, for instance, Kidd (1999) and Bassi (2016). 3 The French language, which is the native langue of the present chapter’s author, uses three discrete terms to discuss identity: ‘nationalité’ (citizenship), ‘origine’ (heritage) and ‘culture’ (culture). Those three concepts are entangled in the English term ‘ethnicity’. 4 On the transformation of the nation into a nation-state, see Helgerson (1992). 5 Thus, early modern Eastern Europeans are not always described as forming nations. Monica Matei-Chesnoiu notes that ‘Shakespeare’s English audiences tended to perceive the eastern European space occupied by Romania and other countries as distant and foreign lands, yielding connotations of liminality and barbarity due to their paucity of real knowledge about the region and their reliance on classical accounts of it’ (2009: 17). 6 On the condition and perception of immigrants in early modern England, see Espinosa and Ruiter (2014). 7 For Michael Omi and Howard Winant, racial formation is used ‘to refer to the process by which social, economic and political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories and by which they are in turn shaped by racial meaning’ (1987: 61). Geraldine

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Heng adds that race is ‘a tendency of the gravest import to demarcate human beings through differences among humans that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental, in order to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups … . Race is a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences, rather than a substantive content’ (2011: 324). Finally, for Stuart Hall, racial discourse ‘gives legibility to a social system in which it operates … and through that reading it organizes, regulates, and gives meaning to social practices through the distribution of symbolic and material resources between different groups and the establishment of racial hierarchies’ (1997: 290). On the overlap between ‘religion, class, and color’ within the early modern racial matrix, see Loomba and Burton (2007: 12–16); on the dialectical relation between the emergent paradigm of phenotype-as-race and the dominant paradigm of status-as-race (or what she calls ‘race-as-blood’), see Feerick (2010: 3–24). ‘Race becomes more or less visible in Early Modern culture in the degree to which it is articulated through and articulates some other hegemonic category’ (MacDonald 1997: 13). ‘National difference is partially constituted by, and shades into, cultural and racial difference. The slippage is not surprising, since some of the elements that produce a specific national identity, such as assertions of genealogical or historical continuity, or a common spirit, or even a climatically influences character, are instrumental in generating racial meaning as well. Early Modern English vocabularies of national and racial difference share terminology, trading on imagery of moral and physical blackness or alien subjectivity, emphasizing genealogical relationships, and exhibiting a heightened concern with questions of blood and its purity’ (Bovilsky 2008: 106). Hoenselaars argues that the stage destabilized rigid binaries between Englishmen and their European neighbours. The theatrical dialectics of identity identified by Hoenselaars in the English context resemble those I discuss in the French tradition of the ‘ballet des nations’ in the final section of this chapter. Unless otherwise indicated, translations from Spanish and French into English are my own. On habla de negros, see Nicholas Jones (2019) and my own monograph, Scripts of Blackness, forthcoming with University of Pennsylvania Press. On the construction of early modern Spain’s ‘fictive ethnicity’, see Fuchs (2003). Ben Israel had earlier in his life made plans to emigrate to Pernambuco, Brazil, where he had commercial interests most likely connected to sugar or tobacco – trades that directly relied on colour-based slavery (Nadler 2018: 101). Welch reads this piece as Molière and Lully’s parody of the well-established genre of the ‘Ballet des Nations’, a popular form of entertainment at court in the Baroque age (2013: 4). Welch provides an in-depth and compelling reading of that tradition’s embeddedness in processes of French nation-building. Italian actor Tristano Martinelli created and popularized his signature Harlequin role at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in the mid-1580s (Henke 2002: 155); only later did he bring the character to Italy, where he became Arlecchino.

Chapter 7 1

As Peter Hulme observes, it is difficult definitively to ascertain whether Mocquet’s grisly tale would have been known to Ligon in the original French, although it is perhaps worth pointing out that Voyages was published in a second edition in Rouen in 1645, just two years before Ligon set out for Barbados. Either way, as Hulme goes on to argue, there is ‘an undoubted relationship’ between the two works that is ultimately ‘not dependent upon Ligon’s possible access to Mocquet’s text but on internal similarities’ (1986: 257). Other

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critics to have noted and analysed these intertextual resemblances include Sypher (1942: 122), Garraway (2005: 195–6) and Dobie (2010: 148–9). For an excellent earlier analysis of the potential (as well as the limitations) of this particular (male-authored) literary genre to accommodate female experience, see Beer (1982). As she puts it, ‘the attempt to inhabit, represent, and accord fullest importance to the erotic experience and expressive powers of women means that [the heroic epistle] is a form of literature peculiarly dedicated to the value of such experience …. If it suggested that women could find the apex of significance for their lives only in love, it suggested too that the experience of the slighted, the abandoned, the powerless, mattered’ (129). Another possible reason for this failure relates to how the play throws out a direct challenge to racial stereotypes. In the character of the Africanized Yarico, Weddell imbricates ‘virtue and innocence’ with ‘black femininity’ in a way that produces ‘troubling incongruities’ that ‘no theatre managers’ would be ‘willing to risk’ (Nussbaum 2003: 247). The second of Lewis’s three allusions occurs in the entry for 1 February 1816, where he refers to a ‘Spanish creole’ named Antoinetta who ‘exactly answer[s] … Colman’s description of Yarico, “quite brown, but extremely genteel, like a Wedgewood teapot”’ (Lewis [1834] 1999: 98). The third is located in an entry created exactly two months later, the bulk of which is taken up with a poem, written in a self-consciously maudlin tone. These verses run quite counter to their source, as the eponymous Yarra laments her ‘massa’’s departure for England and praises the ‘care’ that he has shown towards ‘Afric’s sons and daughters’ (including her own ‘sable boy’) by ‘cross[ing] the wave’ ‘To visit far Jamaica’s shore’ (148).

Chapter 8 1

Although originally published under Nicholas Rowe’s name, Remarks on the Plays of Shakespear were written by Charles Gildon, as George Sewell clarified in the preface to his edition of The Poems of William Shakespeare (Sewell 1726: vi).

Chapter 9 1 Late eighteenth-century scientists and philosophers offered a more systematic approach to human difference than had previous theologians and travellers; see Gilroy (2000). 2 Hannaford (1996) and Fredrickson ([2002] 2015) provide long views of the history of race. Between 1680 and 1800, lineage continues to be the dominant definition. Larger groups than the older nation / country were the focus of Enlightenment science: continental groups became races with ‘essentially common traits of body and mind’. Both race and nation derive from the same concept of shared lineage: ‘yet it was “race” that ultimately became the major term of ethnographic scholarship, while “nation” was reserved to describe the political and social divisions of Europe. “Tribe,” in turn, was increasingly used to replace “nation” in descriptions of “savage” peoples outside of Europe’ (Hudson 1996: 247–8). For the significance of climate, religion, trade and clothing to conceptions of human variety in this era, see Wheeler (2000). 3 Henry Louis Gates Jr observes that racial classification was never primarily a problem of lack of empirical knowledge; about anti-essentialism ‘we have inherited from the Enlightenment … a conceptual grammar of anti-racism’ (1990: 322, 323). 4 Early English Books Online (EEBO) identifies only a few sources before 1550 that employ race at all: to distinguish the low rank/occupation of servants, see V. Leigh (1522); for the ancient bloodline and the race of English conquerors, see Harrison (1547); and for the race of all people, see Brunfels (1544). In its major definitions of race, the OED underplays religious meanings and overplays common descent; it ignores the correlation of race with rank. Race

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as bloodline ‘is most frequently used and understood as a mode of social differentiation that naturalizes a rigid social hierarchy within a polity’ (Feerick 2010: 6–7); Feerick argues that the dominant conception of race in this era pertained to the populations of England, Ireland and Wales as well as the migrants to English overseas colonies. Loomba and Burton agree that ‘normative English national identity began to coalesce via the exclusion of the poor and homeless’, but that it also hinged on exclusion of ‘religious outsiders, and that such exclusions were established by describing these different groups in interchangeable terms’ (2007: 16). Loomba and Burton (2007) document cross-fertilization of reasoning that was, by turns, biological, cultural, religious and ethnic – and difficult to disentangle. For the eighteenth century, see Nussbaum (2003); Wilson (2003) and Molyneux (2012), who agree that culture and nature intermingled in regard to race thinking. Davidson (2009) demonstrates that culture was considered primary and formative and yet also inheritable: breeding equalled both blood and upbringing, and human nature resulted from environmental causes, an assumption that was challenged by the mid-nineteenth century. My general inspiration comes from Moretti ([2005] 2007, 2013). I began with race, and the other terms emerged through research. In EEBO, I performed a key word or phrase search to find the origin in print culture and frequency, 1550–1700; in ECCO, I performed an entire document search of a key word or phrase within quotation marks from 1700 to 1760. For each decade, I conducted spot readings of documents to ascertain that the terms continued to carry the meaning I ascribe them. The numbers were verified on 6 May 2020. Most scholars claim that racism and race differ and that race in the United States is not equivalent to ethnicity, class or nation, including cultural differences or general economic inequality: race contains these elements but exceeds them (Omi and Winant 2015: 40, 53, 96), essentially reversing the argument of early modern scholars about their period. Kidd argues that ‘between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries intellectuals confronted race primarily as a theological problem’ (2006: 25). In contrast, religion failed to retard ‘either the growth of the idea of a deep hierarchy between different peoples or the practice of slavery’ among Christians, Jews and Muslims alike; see Loomba and Burton (2007: 10, 6). The religious terms Christians, Jews, Catholics, heathens and pagans all hugely outnumber the terms of race that I analyse, as does sect. Sect is more significant than race, stock or species with 148,296 hits in EEBO and 28,868 hits in ECCO. Kidd’s view has been augmented by secular sources. In sixteenth-century England, global notions of ethnicity were filtered through theories of climate, humours, temperance and civility that were ‘both deterministic and ideologically malleable’ (Floyd-Wilson 2003: 2). Derived from classical texts, theories of complexion were repurposed over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: ‘geohumoralism is fundamental to early modern English conceptions of how their own, more northern, bodies and minds were shaped and influenced by external forces’ of all kinds, both climate- and education-based (3–4). She studies ‘the representations of northern “whiteness” and English identity as barbaric, marginalized, and mutable, and the long-neglected perceptions of “blackness” as a sign of wisdom, spirituality, and resolution’ (11). For a nuanced literary analysis of early modern English complexion, particularly white and black, see Hall (1995). In EEBO, race of men, with a 1549 origin, has 546 hits; Calvin 1556 originates race of mankind and whole race of mankind, with 979 and 552 hits, respectively; race of man, with a 1573 origin, 168; human race, with a 1576 origin, 149. In ECCO, human race has 3,756 hits; race of men, 2,234; race of mankind, 2,166; whole race of mankind, 1,356; race of man, 782.

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12 Appearing in Scottish songsters throughout the 1720s and later, ‘Ann Thou Were My Ain Thing’ moves into collections of the most popular English songs in the 1730s through 1794 and is included in thirty-five different editions or reprintings through 1750. 13 Letter of 23 July 1777. In EEBO, race of Adam originates in 1569 with 149 hits; in ECCO, 324. 14 EEBO has zero hits for race of Eve. ECCO features several examples that are loose fits in a serious tone; see Patrick (1719) and Fowke ([1720] 1732). 15 In EEBO, race of Abraham, originating in 1560 with Calvin’s sermons, has forty-one hits; in ECCO, sixty-eight. Featured in Prior, Foxe and Watts, race of Abraham was first included in E. Rowe (1737), a year after the first edition; there were at least twelve more through 1800. 16 The OED defines species as ‘A distinct class, sort, or kind’ in 1561; ‘outward appearance’ in 1598; ‘A class composed of individuals having some common qualities … frequently as a subdivision of a larger class’ in 1629. In EEBO, species of man, with a 1586 origin, has fiftyone hits; species of men also has fifty-one, beginning in 1649, mainly in a religious context; intire species of men, originating in 1652, has seven hits. In ECCO, species of men has 334 hits and species of man, 179. See OED for the several meanings of species, all early to midseventeenth century, that function like race, meaning a group who share characteristics, particularly in outward form. 17 In EEBO, race to race recurs sixty-three times, mostly in the Psalms, but also in stage tragedy and political history; in ECCO, 395 hits occur also in serious poetry and didactic writing. 18 In EEBO, common nature has 1,651 hits; in ECCO, 877. 19 In EEBO, fellow creature has 433 hits; fellow creatures, with a 1602 origin, has 1,728. In ECCO, fellow creatures has 6,666; fellow creature, 1,170. 20 In EEBO, fellow man, with a 1567 origin, has eleven hits, and fellow men, nineteen; in ECCO, fellow man has thirty-eight hits, most of which have fellow and man near each other but not next to each other, and fellow men, 146. 21 From its 1575 origin, fellow feeling, with 1,441 hits in EEBO and 837 in ECCO, meant compassion: ‘For, so great is the humane Beneficence of their [a particular pair of persons near Reading] Souls, that by a sympathetic Tenderness, and generous Fellow-feeling, they make every Person’s sufferings their own. This [kind listening to, acknowledgement and relief of] gives a double Lustre to their Liberality’ (Latter 1759: 104). Satires employ this term cynically as thinking the same thing as or in cahoots with another person; see Townley’s wildly popular farce (1759). 22 Smith’s sermon had two editions in 1591, fourteen reprints and new editions from 1599 through 1673. In EEBO, brethren by nature, with a 1582 origin, has sixty-eight hits; in ECCO, thirty. By contrast, brethren by affinity did not catch on, with one other mention in EEBO and six in ECCO. 23 Brethren by nature defined the special bond among Englishmen, usually separating Christians from both heathens and beasts; it was also invoked to inculcate submission to superiors; see Person of Quality (1727). 24 Not in Blount, I derived these expansive definitions from the individual words defined in the OED. Blount’s dictionary was reprinted in 1670, 1674 and 1681. 25 In EEBO, cosmopolite has fifty-one hits; citizen of the world, with a 1583 origin, has 103; and cosmopolitan, with a 1591 origin, has eight. In ECCO, citizen of the world has 282 hits; cosmopolite, fourteen. For continued relevance, see Appiah (2019), who examines the way that the political right in Europe and the United States blame a cosmopolitan elite for their national woes.

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26 Dialogues was printed in London, Belfast and Cork in at least three editions and reprinted in 1748, 1753, 1755 and 1757. 27 Collyer’s first edition was 1744. An altered edition of 1749 was the first to include this language; it was reprinted in 1755, 1765 and 1788. She also used fellow creature. 28 Citizen of the world acquired a more exclusive meaning, especially as merely a traveller on the Grand Tour of Europe. For the Restoration stage as satirizing an empty claim to cosmopolitanism by showing contradictory behaviour, see Rosenthal (forthcoming). Satire of the claim to being a citizen of the world yet actually narrowly patriotic appears after 1750; see Smollett (1751: 2.70). 29 Montaigne’s essays were well known because they were widely abridged and printed in their entirety in 1603, 1613, 1632, 1685, 1693, 1700, 1711, 1743, 1759, 1760 and in 1776 an improved and expanded eighth edition; they also circulated in French editions printed in England in 1626, 1724, 1739, 1745, 1754, 1768–9 and 1771. 30 It is worth noting about elite cultural relativism: ‘Respect for other cultures was a politically conservative tendency in the eighteenth century, counseling noninterference and equal status, whereas perceptions of European superiority went along with notions of civilizing the uncultivated. Enlightenment could be both anti-imperial and imperial, depending on who was wielding the critical tool’ (Aravamudan 2012: 100–1). 31 Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World originally appeared as ‘Chinese Letters’ in the journal Public Ledger (1759) and helped to establish his reputation. Intermarriage was typically imagined as an individual ‘solution’ to adventure, captivity, shipwreck, love at first sight or rape; see Wheeler (2000). 32 In EEBO, bastard race, with a 1567 origin, has twenty-nine hits; mongrel race, with a 1611 origin, twenty-two; degenerate race, with a 1613 origin, has forty-two. In ECCO, degenerate race has 307 hits; bastard race, seventeen; mongrel race, fourteen. 33 ‘Seem’ was a gateway verb leading from respectable to heretical, whether in regard to English or foreign populations. Arguing that reason is essential to defining humans, ‘there may be such Degrees of more and less Rational found in Mankind, so that some of them may Seem to be another Species, Sort, or Kind of Men’ that the author calls ‘Brutal’ (Sergeant 1699: 144). Belief in multiple creations of humans was a heresy but one that earned increasing attention after the mid-seventeenth century; see Isaac La Peyrère’s position, signalled by his phrase species of men, and the popularity of A Theological Systeme upon the Presupposition, that Men Were Before Adam (1655) in Kidd (2006). 34 Most claimed elites had greater reason; for others, elite bodies differed from labouring ones. This trend was arguably enhanced with the decline of the humoral theory of the body and the ascension of the new theory of the nervous system; see Barker-Benfield ([1992] 1996: 14). 35 EEBO has noble stock, with a 1525 origin, at 368 hits, and noble race, with a 1557 origin, 568. ECCO has noble race at 735 hits, and noble stock, 148. 36 In EEBO, English people, originating in 1480, has 735 hits; English nation, with a 1482 origin, 6,672; English race, from 1572, has 129 hits (most in an Irish context); British nation, with a 1548 origin, 396; British people, with a 1577 origin, fifty-four; British race, with a 1586 origin, 107; African race, three. Remarkably, Egyptians has 32,941 hits; Ethiopians, 2,556; Africans, 2,793. As an adjective, African has 7,023 hits, mainly modifying bishops, church, king, empire, council and monks; in regard to the Royal African Company (which operated the slave trade), about three hundred. In ECCO, English nation has 1,141 hits; British nation, 641; English people, one hundred; British people, forty-three; British race, forty-nine; English race, seventeen. Egyptians has 6,595 hits; Ethiopians, 1,142; Africans, 998. There are no hits for black or white race/stock related to people in either database.

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37 ‘One April Morn’ as a tune or lyrics appeared in thirty-six songsters and plays between 1719 and 1760. 38 ‘Despairing by a Clear Stream’ appeared in five songsters between 1736 and 1751. 39 ‘I am a Jolly Toper’ was reprinted twenty-five times before 1760. The female race might easily be divided up further, as in those designated a ‘wonton Race’; see Anonymous (1697– 1700). 40 Dryden’s poem becomes part of print song culture in 1738; by 1760, it appears in seven songsters and a single-page broadside format.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Matthew Bennett is Instructor of Humanities at the Seattle Film Institute, USA, and teaches in the University of Washington Editing Certificate Program in Seattle, Washington, USA. His dissertation, ‘The Arts of Empire: Re-Articulating the Coercive Consultation Event, 1492–1693’, received the Paul G. Stanwood Prize in English at the University of British Columbia, Canada, in 2015. His research is comparative in approach and focuses on the confluence of the language arts and imperial expansion, particularly in the colonization of the Americas by the British and Spanish empires. He writes about contemporary politics in Seattle where he also runs a writer mentor programme for under-represented voices. Robert Bernasconi is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies at Penn State University, USA. He is the author of two books on Heidegger and one on Sartre, as well as numerous essays in twentieth-century continental philosophy and the history of racism. He is currently preparing a selection of some of his essays in critical philosophy of race for republication. He is the editor of three journals: Critical Philosophy of Race, Levinas Studies and Eco-Ethica. Dennis Austin Britton is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, USA. He is the author of Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance (2014), co-editor with Melissa Walter of Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (2018) and co-editor, with Kimberly Anne Coles, of a special issue of Spenser Studies on ‘Spenser and Race’ (2021). He is currently working on two monographs, ‘Shakespeare and Pity: Feeling Human Difference on the Early Modern Stage’ and ‘Reforming Ethiopia: African-Anglo Relations in Protestant England’. Jean E. Feerick is Associate Professor of English at John Carroll University, USA. She previously taught literature at Brown University and was appointed William S. Vaughn Fellow at the Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, both USA. She is the author of Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in the Renaissance (2010) and co-editor of The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature (2012). Her research on premodern race, transatlanticism, literature and science, and ecocriticism has appeared in many journals and volumes, including, most recently, The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science (2017) and The Routledge Research Companion to Shakespeare and Classical Literature (2017). Nicholas Hudson is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is the author of Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Thought (1988), Writing and European Thought (1994), Samuel Johnson and the Making of Modern England (2001) and A Political Life of Samuel Johnson (2013). In the area of Race Studies, he has published ‘From “Nation” to “Race”: The Origin of Racial Classification in­

CONTRIBUTORS

215

Eighteenth-Century Thought’ (1996), ‘“Hottentots” and the Evolution of European Racism’ (2004) and ‘The “Hottentot Venus,” Sexuality, and the Changing Aesthetics of Race, 1650–1850’ (2008). Noémie Ndiaye is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago, USA. She works on representations of race and gender in early modern English, French and Spanish theatre and performance culture. She has published articles in peer-reviewed journals (including Renaissance Drama, Early Theatre, English Literary Renaissance and Literature Compass) and various edited collections. She is currently at work on her first monograph tentatively entitled Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race. Carl Plasa is a Professor of English Literature in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University, UK, having lectured previously at the universities of Manchester, UK, and Cork, Ireland. He has written numerous essays and articles on British, American, Caribbean and African American literature, as well as three monographs: Slaves to Sweetness: British and Caribbean Literatures of Sugar (2009), Charlotte Brontë (2004) and Textual Politics from Slavery to Postcolonialism: Race and Identification (2000). Currently, he is completing a monograph titled Literature, Art and Slavery: Ekphrastic Visions, to be published in Edinburgh University Press’ ‘Critical Studies in Atlantic Literatures and Cultures’ series. Suman Seth is the Marie Underhill Noll Professor of the History of Science in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University, USA. He is the author of Crafting the Quantum: Arnold Sommerfeld and the Practice of Theory, 1890–1926 (2010) and Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (2018). He is the editor of a special issue of Postcolonial Studies on ‘Science, Colonialism, Postcoloniality’ (2009), of a FOCUS section of Isis on ‘Re-Locating Race’ (2014) and, with Erika Milam, of a forthcoming issue of BJHS Themes on the descent of Darwin (2021). Roxann Wheeler is Associate Professor of English at Ohio State University, USA. Her current research historicizes the introduction of stylized West Indian pidgin to eighteenth-century literature and performance: ‘The Long Life of Orra’s Songs: The Legacy of Charles Dibdin’s The Islanders and West Indian Stage Pidgin’ is forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation. She is the author of The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century Culture (2000) and a recent essay on the slang term slavey. For the past five years she has co-edited, with Eve Tavor Bannet, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture.

INDEX

Abercromby, David 174 abolitionism 1, 5–6, 17, 139, 155–64, 171 Abraham 23–4, 88, 168 Acosta, Juan de 50 Adam 22–5, 73–4, 93, 165–8 Adams, Hannah 61 Addison, Joseph 148, 171 Aesop 37 Africa, name and nature of 42–3 African Americans 17 Africanus, Leo 8, 146 Akhimic, Patricia 28 Alibech, Queen 175 Allestree, Richard 169 Ames, Richard 4 Anabaptists 23 anatomy, human 72, 77–80 Anderson, Benedict 98, 114, 120 Angus, Earl of 30 animals 8, 95 Anketell, John 159 anti-racism 160, 165–6, 174, 178 anti-slavery see abolitionism aphrodisiacs 146 Aquinas, St. Thomas 20, 93 Arendt, Hannah 98 Aristotle and Aristotelianism 1, 93 Arne. Thomas 5 assimilation 37, 99 Astell, Mary 167 atheism 59 Atkins, John 80, 85 Aubin, Penelope 170 Augustine, St. 20, 74, 93 Aztec civilization 8 Baartman, Saartje 148 Bacon, Francis 37–9, 52, 171 Bacon, Nathaniel 108 Baker, David J. 114 Balibar, Etienne 114, 120 baptism of slaves 67–8, 107–8 Barbados 68, 105–6, 161–2 barbarism 93–5, 103

definition of 93 Barber, Francis 151 Baret, John 114 Barnard, Lady 91 Barne, George 42 Barreda, Ignacio María 150 Barréré, Pierre 85 basil 37 Battel, Andrew 77 Baxter, Richard 67, 168 Beaumont, John 174 beauty, women’s 81 Beddoe, John 103 Behn, Aphra 148, 152, 155, 158, 167 Bell, Derrik 16 Benezet, Anthony 11 ben Israel, Menasseh 122–3 Bennett, Matthew 8, 214; author of Chapter 5 Bergier, Nicolas-Sylvestre 56 Bernard, Jean-Frédéric 61–3 Bernasconi, Robert 3, 214; author of Chapter 3 Bernier, François 60, 65, 76, 80–2 Best, George 25, 42, 75–6 Betterton, Thomas 157 biblical passages 21–2, 73 Bicknell, John 155 black jaundice 77, 85 Black Legend 101 ‘black’ as a synonym for ‘slave’ 107 Blackmore, Sir Richard 174 blackness 3–4, 25–7, 75–81, 151 Blake, Thomas 55 Blake, William 140 blood purity 98–101 bloodlines 166, 173–6 Blount, Charles 58 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich 10, 66, 82, 106 Bodin, Jean 38, 57, 75 Boers, Palatine 109 bonded labour 104, 107 Boswell, James 77 Bovilsky, Lara 116 Boyle, Robert 76–9, 106, 171–2 Brahmins 59

INDEX

Bray, Thomas 168 brethren 170–1 Britton, Dennis Austin 3, 214; author of Chapter 1 Brooks, Francis 3 Broughton, Thomas 61 Brown v. Board of Education case (1954) 16 Brown, K. 81 Browne, Thomas 26–7, 67, 75–9 Bruno, Giordano 73 Budso 61 Buffon, Comte de 8–9, 13–14, 66, 72, 80–6, 89–90, 106, 158 Burgkmair, Hans 147 Burke, Edmund 12–13 Burnaby, William 177 Burnet, Gilbert 171–2 Burton, Jonathan 21, 29, 121–2 Burton, Robert 151 Cabot, John 47 Calvin, John (and Calvinism) 23–4 Canavesio, Giovanni 28 Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge 98, 102 cannibalism 90–1 Caribs 90 Carolina 68 Catholicism 58, 63, 93–5, 99–101, 176 Cham 29 curse of 25–8 Chaplin, Joyce 87 Charles I, King 4, 30 Charles II, King 31 Charles V, Emperor 87 Charlie Hebdo (periodical) 16 Charron, Pierre 57, 62 chattel slavery 35 Chaucer, Geoffrey 175 Chetwood, William 170 Chicago School of Sociology 111, 113 Chichester, Lord 40 Chinese Rites 56–8 Christianity 55 as a religion of white people 68 Chudleigh, Mary 167 Church and state, struggles between 99 Church of England 171–2 Chus 25 Cibber, Colley 167 ‘citizens of the world’ 171–2 civil rights movement 111 Clapham, Henoch 25–6

217

Clark, Samuel 167 Clarkson, Thomas 11, 17, 161 class divisions 98–9, 108, 120 Cleopatra 163–4 climate and cultural milieu, general effect on the human body of 34–6 climate and the slave trade 76–7 climate theory of skin colour 71, 74–8, 5–6 criticisms of 85 Code noir 107 Coles, Elisha 168 Coles, Kimberly Anne 116 colewort 37 Colley, Linda 3 Collier, Jeremy 174 Collyer, Mary 172 Colman, George the Younger 139, 159–61 colonialism and colonization 1, 8, 38, 59, 69, 87, 95, 97, 102 Columbus, Christopher 91–2 common features shared by a whole race 4, 8, 10 common humanity 166–9, 178 communalism 103 complexion, bodily 33–4, 78–9 Condillac, Abbé de 14–15 Condorcet, Marquis de 15 conduct writers 169 Confucianism 58–60 Congreve, William 167 controversies, religious 17, 56, 58, 87–8, 93–5 conversion to Christianity 58, 60, 66–9, 95, 99 forced 99 of indigenous Americans 68–9 of slaves 67–8 Conway, Anne 168 Cope, W. 152 Cornwallis, Charles 103 Corton, Edward 42 cosmopolitanism 171–3, 178 cosmopolite 171 Council of the Indies 87 Couplet, Philippe 58 Covarrubias, Sebastián de 88 critical race studies 111 critical race theory (CRT) 16–17, 116 Croix, François Pétis de la 148 Cromwell, Oliver 4, 122 casta paintings 100–1 cultural practices affecting the human body 34–6 cultural relativism 173 culture

218

need for 37 sowing of 43–50 use of the word as a verb 35 Curran, Andrew 79, 107 Cuvier, Georges 8, 148 Davies, John 103 Davies, S. 56 Davis, David Brion 127 Davys, Mary 169 Day, Thomas 156 de Aguilar, Doña María 100 de Boulainvilliers, Henri 98 de Bry, Theodore 88, 92, 105–6 de la Cruz, Rodrigo 93 Defoe, Daniel 162, 167, 169 ‘degeneration’ of species 9–11, 37, 84, 89 de Islas, Andrés 102 de Laet, Johannes 7, 60 de Léry, Jean 74 Delgado, Richard 16–17 de Nebrija, Antonio 104–5 de Ovalle, Alonso 98 de Pauw, Cornélius 147 Derricke, John 41 de Valadés, Diego 95, 97 dictionaries of wit, song and slang 178 dictionary definitions 19, 88, 113, 175 diffusion of bodily characteristics 86 Dioscorides 53 discrimination based on religion or race 2, 68 divine right of kings 174 Dobie, Madeleine 127 Dodd, William 155–6 Dolben, Sir John 170–1 Dryden, John 163, 167, 175, 178 du Bartas, Guillaume de Saluste 38 Durán, Diego 103 Durham 176 Earl of Essex 40 Earl of Shaftesbury 4 Earle, Rebecca 42 Early English Books Online (EEBO) database 166 East India Company 12 Edelmann, Johann Christian 63 Eden, Richard 42 Edwards, Bryan 162 Egypt 65–6 Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) database 166

INDEX

Elizabeth I, Queen 39, 121 Elphinstone, John 128–9 Elyot, Thomas 20 encomienda system 87 English travellers 35 Enlightenment thinking 2, 7, 16, 72, 84–5, 87, 93, 109, 156, 165–6, 173 enslavement 2–5, 87, 104, 107, 109 of the English 4 environmental influences 37, 65–6 Equiano, Olaudah 11–12, 17, 151 Erickson, Peter 36 Escobar del Corro, Juan 69 L’Espine, Jean de 23 ‘Ethiopians’ 74–5, 79 ethnicity 7–8, 111–14 definitions of 88, 113 Eurocentrism 93, 162 Eve 22, 73–4, 93, 165–8 Fabian, Robert 47 Fanon, Franz 12 Feerick, Jean E. 8, 214; author of Chapter 2 fellow creatures 169–70 Ferriar, John 155–6 Feuillee, Louis 94 Fielding, Henry 169 Fielding, Sarah 152 Fisher, Andrew 98 Floyd-Wilson, Mary 34, 117 folk classifications 92 Foote, Samuel 151–2 fops 167 Fordyce, David 172 Foucault, Michel 14, 98 Foxxe, John 22 Francklyn, Gilbert 161–2 Franklin, Benjamin 109 freedom concept of 2 of expression 16 French Revolution 15 Frobisher, Martin 43–4, 47, 92 Furetière, Antoine 117 Galle, Philips 51 Garrick, David 157 Genesis, Book of 73, 77 genomics 21 Gentleman, Francis 154–5 geography of religion 67 geohumoralism 34, 117

INDEX

George III, King 5 Gesner, Conrad 90 Gheeraerts, Marcus 51 Gilbert, Sir Humphrey 43 Gilbert, Sandra M. 131 Gildon, Charles 151 Gilman, Sander L. 145 Gilroy, Paul 165–6 Glorious Revolution (1688) 4 God’s relationship with people 24 Godwyn, Morgan 105, 107 Goetz, Rebecca Anne 68 Goldsmith, Oliver 9–10, 173 Goodwin, John 168 Grainger, James 8–9 Gray, Robert 43 Great Chain of Being 95–6 Grignion, Charles 153 Groebner, Valentin 78 Grosvenor, Benjamin 5 Grotius, Hugo 73 Gubar, Susan 131 Gutiérrez, Juan 98 Haie, Edward 45 Hakluyt, Richard the Elder 90 Hakluyt, Richard the Younger 90 Hale, Matthew 168 half-breeds 66 Hall, Kim F. 21, 29, 36 Hall, Stuart 113–14 Ham 73 curse of 37, 42, 77, 109 Hamilton, Thomas 149 Hamor, Ralph 47–9 Hariot, Thomas 88 Harris, Gil 36 Hastings, Warren 12 hatred 3 Haughton, William 121 Hawkesworth, John 154–5 Hawkins, John 119, 169 Haywood, Eliza 167, 172 D’Heere, Lucas 46 Hendricks, Margo 20–1, 29 Henry VIII, King 101 Herbert, Edward 57 Herder, Johann Gottfried 14–15 ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ 145 Herzog, Tamar 116 Heylyn, Peter 176 Heywood, Thomas 39

219

Hill, John 152 Hinduism 60–1 Hippocrates 74, 86 Holinshed, Raphael 28–30, 40 Hollis, Gavin 39 Holsinger, Bruce 24 homological patterns 38 Hooker, Richard 22–3 Hooper, John 21–2 ‘Hottentot Venus’ 148 Hottentots 91, 149 Houstoun, James 5–6, 146 Howard, Henry see Surrey, Earl of Howard, Jean E. 120 Hudson, Nicholas 20, 92, 114, 214–15; editor and author of Introduction and Chapter 8 human body as primary signifier of race 174 human nature compared with plant nature 38 human rights 2–6, 17, 156 humanitarianism 6, 9, 156, 162, 164 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 15 Hume, David 11, 17, 57, 72, 156–7, 163–4 theory of nationhood 13 Hume (of Godscroft), David 30 humoral theories of bodily difference 33–4, 37, 78–9 Hunt, Lynn 156 Hutchinson, S. 136 identity 2, 17, 99, 114 racial 35 imperialism 101, 103, 159 improvement of ‘degenerate’ races 11 Inca civilization 8 incest 98 indigenous peoples 36, 81, 84, 87, 93–6, 100–5 injustice, racialized 2 Inquisition, the 69, 73, 100 intellectual culture 6 intellectual interest 78, 98 inter-breeding 84, 100 inter-racial contacts 145–6, 151 Inuit people 76, 92 Ireland 40, 101–4 Ishmael 168 Islamaphobia 16 Jacob, Giles 163 Jacobites 4 James I, King 24

220

James II, King 4, 176 Jefferson, Thomas 109 Jenkins, Robert 5 Jerningham, Edward 157 Jesuits 4, 58, 60 Jesus Christ belief in 59 divinity of 73 humanity of 21–2 Jewish communities 3, 24, 27–8, 93, 122, 170, 176 Jobson, Richard 117–19 Johnson, Robert 43 Johnson, Samuel 151–2 Jones, Inigo 44 Jones, William 88 Jordan, Winthrop 95, 104, 108 Jurieu, Pierre 5 just war theory 93–4 Kames, Lord 8–9, 153–4 Kant, Immanuel 8, 11–14, 56–7, 60, 66, 156, 164 Katzew, Ilona 101 Keller, Marcus 114–15 Kendi, Ibram X. 88 Khoikhoi people 92, 107 Khomeni, Ayatollah 16 Kidd, Colin 21, 24–5, 73, 78, 167 King, William 4 kings found unfit to rule 31 Knight, Francis 3 Kolb, Peter 91, 148 Koslofsky, Craig 78 Lafitau, Joseph-François 7 Lahontan, Baron de 7 language 13, 15, 92–3, 100–6 La Peyrère, Isaac 8, 65, 73 Laplanders 66, 81, 85 Las Casas, Bartolomé de 59, 87, 93–6 Latour, Bruno 35 law 56, 59–60, 67–9, 95–6, 99, 104, 107–9 Lawrence, William 8, 146 Lechford, Thomas 93 Le Clerc, Georges-Louis see Buffon Leeuwenhoek 79 Leibniz, Gottfried 82 Lewis, Matthew 129, 139–42 liberty, love of 4–5 Ligon, Richard 67, 128–32, 135, 142, 157 Lilburne, John 4

INDEX

Lima 100 lineage 20–1, 28, 86, 98–100, 175–6 four human archetypes identified by 82 literary tradition 145–6 Little, Arthur L. Jr 29 Locke, John 5, 14, 81, 168 logic of nation and of race 116–20, 123 Lok, John 42 Long, Edward 65, 84, 146, 164 Loomba, Ania 29, 121–2, 151 Lopez, Odorado 7 Louis XIV, King 5, 125 MacCulloch, Diarmaid 98 Macdonald, Joyce Green 29, 116 Machiavelli, Niccolò 173 Malcolmson, Cristina 79–81 Malpighi, Marcello 79–80 Mandelslo, Johann Albrecht de 124 Marana, Giovanni Paolo 167 Margarita, Doña 100 Marlowe, Christopher 167 marriage 155 inter–racial 151, 153, 156, 176 self-interested or for love 161 see also interbreeding martial law 6 Martínez, María Elena 93, 98–9 Maryland 108 Matthew’s Gospel 167 Meister, Georg 148 mental capacity 9 Mexico 7 migration 34, 38, 66; see also transmigration Milton, John 22, 167, 175 miscegenation 100, 108, 145–8, 151–4, 158, 161–4 missionaries 58–60, 67, 105 Mitchell, John 71–2 Mocquet, Jean 128–9, 133, 142–3, 157 moisture in the human body 34 Molière 124–5 monasteries 101 Monjarrés, Gonzales 100 monogenesis and monogenism 11, 22, 66, 84–6 Montaigne, Michel de 38, 173 Montesquieu, Baron de 13, 66, 86, 109, 173 Montjoy, Lord 176 More, Hannah 17, 156 Moretti, Franco 166 Morrison, Toni 127

INDEX

Moryson, Fynes 40 Mossop, Henry 157 movable type 16 mulattos 84 Müller-Wille, Staffan 82 nakedness 74 nationalism 14, 120–1 nations definitions of 2, 114–15 differences between 8 as distinct from races 13, 105 in non‒European countries 7 nativeness 116 naturalization 50–4 nature, proximity to 35 ‘nature‒culture’ and ‘naturecultures’ 35 Ndiaye, Noémie 7–8, 215; author of ­Chapter 6 Neill, Michael 151 ‘New Christians’ 99–100 Newton, Sir Isaac (and Newtonian theory) 71–2 Nightingale, Carl 100 Noah 23–6, 71–5 sons of 25, 71, 63, 93, 117 ‘noble savage’ image 142–3, 173 Northwest Passage 36 Nussbaum, Felicity 157 obsolete meanings of ‘race’ mid- to late-16th century 167 mid-16th to mid-18th centuries 166 Ogilby, John 146 O’Hara, Matthew 98 O’Keeffe, John 179 ‘one human race’ doctrine 7–11, 17, 72, 166–8, 178 scepticism about 173–4 O’Neill, Shane 39 O’Quinn, Daniel 159 orangutans 84 original sin 22, 24 Otherness 73, 87–90, 95–6 Otway, Thomas 167 Ovington, J. 76 Oxford English Dictionary (OED) 19, 113, 175 paganism 57, 61 Paracelsus 73 Paré, Ambroise 90 parent-to-child transmission of bodily features 34, 86

221

Parker, Patricia 29 participation in public life 100 Paul, St. 23 Paul III, Pope 95–6 Peckard, Peter 171 Peckham, George 43 Percy, George 90 Perez de Lara, Alfonso 69 Peter Martyr 103 Petronius 158 Phasians 74 Philip II, King of Spain 39–41 Philmore, J. 10, 179 Picart, Bernard 62–5 Pigafetta, Philippo 7 Piso, Willem 78 Pius XII, Pope 58 planters and plantations 36, 103–6 plantlife 22, 36–7 Plasa, Carl 6, 157, 215; author of Chapter 7 Pliny the Elder 50 Pocock, J.G.A. 13 poetry 146, 167–8 Pollard, Robert 160 polygenesis and polygenism 8, 65, 73, 77–84 Pope, Alexander 167–8, 171 Powell, Stephen D. 29 Pratt, Mary Louise 88 Prévost, Abbé 89–90 Prichard, James Cowles 15, 66 print culture 7, 166 Prior, Matthew 167 progressiveness of human species 12 promiscuity 145 Protestantism 24, 58, 104, 176 Ptolemy 76 Pullen, Nathaniel 128 Punch, John 107–8 punishment 57, 106 Purchas, Samuel 25, 55–6, 90 Quakers 176 Quinn, James 157 race analysis not confined to use of the word itself 166 as common creation and shared bloodline 166–73 concepts and definitions of 1–2, 6–8, 19–21, 66, 70, 87, 98–9, 116, 165–8 cultural history of 178

222

found everywhere 177–8 gendered formation of 107 as a geographical category 67 and monogenesis 65–7 as a royal bloodlines 174–6 several racial groups in one country 176–7 as shared religious belief 176 use of the word 24, 55–6, 66, 72, 85–8, 113 race medicine 80 race thinking 36, 93, 104, 116 ‘racial’ differences and divisions 9, 11, 13, 33–7, 67, 72, 93, 95, 109, 165 arbitrary nature of 14 used to justify exploitative practices 33 racialism and racialization 9–11, 16, 21, 88. 101–6, 117, 165 racism 87, 91, 98–9, 104, 111, 120–1, 145, 156, 159–64 biological 87, 98, 104 religious 99 Raleigh, Walter 88–9 Ramsay, James 11, 163 rape 146, 154 Rawlins, John 3 Raynal, Abbé 162 Read, Alexander 78–9 reading public 1 Reconquista 121 Reformation, the 87, 101, 178 regicide 30 religion access to truths of 57–8 definition of 58 of gentiles 57–61, 69 as a matter of choice 55 ‘natural’ 57, 61, 65 in the plural 60–5 as a social construction 70 ‘true’ and ‘false’ 55–6, 61, 70 use of the term 56 ‘religious’ difference 21–4 Renaissance, the 37, 74–5 Ricci, Matteo 58 Ricoeur, Paul 145 ‘rights of man’ 15 rights, natural 1; see also human rights Riolan, Jean 78 Robertson, William 8 Rollin, Charles 172 Roman Catholicism see Catholicism

INDEX

Roman Empire 103 Ross, Alexander 24, 61 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 14, 93 Rowe, Elizabeth Singer 167 Rowe, Nicholas 151, 167 Royal Society 81 royal bloodlines 165, 174–6 Rubies. Joan Pau 56 Rubright, Marjorie 123 Rushdie, Salman 16 Rymer, Thomas 151 Said, Edward 142 Sambo 67 Samson 176 Sancho, Ignatius 157, 167 Sandy, George 25 ‘savage’ behaviour 173–4 ‘scarf-skin’ 85 Schermerhorn, R.A. 113 ‘science’, racial 6, 20–1, 31, 70, 80, 98, 106–9, 145–6, 148, 159, 166 Scott, Thomas 123 scriveners 177 Senegal, river 86 sensibility 170 Sepúlveda, Ginés de 87, 93–4 Sepúlveda, Manuel de 119 Seth, Suman 13, 215; author of Chapter 4 sexual relationships 145–64 Seybond, Raymond 38 Shaftesbury, Earl of 65–6, 171 Shakespeare, William 36–9, 49, 52–4, 121–2, 151–3, 156 shared behaviour or appearance 33, 165, 177 Sharpe, Granville 17 Shepard, Alan 29 Sierra Leone 158 Silverblatt, Irene 95, 100 skin colour 34, 42, 47, 66, 68, 72–80, 85, 90–1, 97, 106–7, 116 causation of 75–80, 85 and human anatomy 77–80 skin dryness 85 skin layers 78–9 skin thickness 71 slavery and the slave trade 3–6, 11, 21, 31, 34, 72, 86, 137, 155–62, 170 and climate 76–7 impossible to defend 6 see also ­abolitionism

INDEX

Smedley, Audrey and Brian 92 Smith, Edmund 163 Smith, Henry 170 Smith, John 47 Smith, Stanhope 9, 12 Smollett, Tobias 168 Smyth, John 23 social construction 21, 70 social control 99–101, 104, 109 Sollors, Werner 113 Solórzano Pereira, Juan de 69 somatic difference 24–8 songs 15, 177–8 Southerne, Thomas 145, 152–9 Spain 40, 87 species of men 67 Spenser, Edmund 103 Spitzer, Leo 20 Spotswood, Alexander 106 Stanihurst, Richard 40 ‘state of nature’ 8, 10 Steele, Sir Richard 127–32, 142, 157–8, 167 Stefancic, Jean 16–17 Sterne, Laurence 167 Sternhold, Thomas 168 stock (family tree or line of descent) 175–6 Stukeley, Thomas 39–42 Surrey, Earl of 19–20, 29 Swift, Jonathan 148, 167–8, 171 Taínos people 91–2, 103 taxonomy of races 80–4 theatre 119 Theophrastus 37 Thirty-nine Articles 22 Thomson, James 5 Thorowgood, Thomas 103 thought, history of 7 Tindal, Matthew 59 Tirso de Molina 119–20 Toland, John 63 Topsell, Edward 90 transmigration 36–9 travel writing 42, 57, 88–93, 106–7, 117 Trinitarian doctrine 57 Trojan War 20 Troughton, Thomas 4 Turks 24 ‘turning’ to make a major change 38

223

United States Supreme Court 16 Universities of Mexico and Lima 69 Valladolid controversy 87–8, 93–5 van Kessel, Jan 91 van der Mael, Marguerite 115, 118 van Senden, Caspar 121 Vaughan, William 40 Velázquez, Diego 112 Vernon, T. 152 Vesalius 78 Virgil 19–20, 163 Virginia (state) 38–9, 43, 47, 49, 68, 104, 107 vocabulary of race 166 Voltaire 8, 72, 76–82, 85, 156–7, 164 the Vulgate 22 Warburton, William 171 Warne, John 22 Warner, W. Lloyd 113 Warwell, James 4 water mint 37 Wear, Andrew 36 Weddell, Mrs 135–9, 142 Wedgwood, Josiah 10 Welch, Ellen 117 Wesley, John 156–7 Western ideas 2, 12 Wheeler, Roxann 215; author of Chapter 9 White, John 45, 48, 88 ‘white race’ 107 white supremacy 165 whiteness 68–9, 109, 123, 158 Wilkes, Thomas 163 Williams, Roger 170 Wilson, Thomas 103 Wilson, Timothy 116–17 Winstanley, Gerard 169 Wirtemberg, Duke of 171 Wolff, Christian 58–9 Wood, William 39 Wowski, American 159–60 Young, Edward 163 Yudell, Michael 21 ‘zambos’ 100 Ziegenbalg, Bartholomaeus 59 Zurara, Gomes Eannes 88

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