The Newtonian Slave Body: Racial Enlightenment in the Atlantic World James Delbourgo Available Online: 19 Apr 2012
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This article was downloaded by: [James Delbourgo] On: 19 April 2012, At: 07:02 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Atlantic Studies: Literary, Cultural and Historical Perspectives Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjas20 The Newtonian slave body: Racial enlightenment in the Atlantic World James Delbourgo Available online: 19 Apr 2012 To cite this article: James Delbourgo (2012): The Newtonian slave body: Racial enlightenment in the Atlantic World, Atlantic Studies: Literary, Cultural and Historical Perspectives, 9:2, 185-207 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2012.666412 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and- conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Atlantic Studies Vol. 9, No. 2, June 2012, 185Á207 The Newtonian slave body: Racial enlightenment in the Atlantic World James Delbourgo* This essay examines an influential treatise on the causes of African skin color published by the Virginia-born physician John Mitchell in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions in 1744. Instead of charting Mitchell’s position in the development of eighteenth-century thinking about human variation Á the preoccupation of many intellectual genealogies of race Á the essay links Mitchell’s account to specific period practices in the natural sciences, questions of authority, and networks of circulation. The diachronic impulse to identify the emergence of a robust concept of race is relaxed in favor of a more synchronic approach that explores how and why such an account was crafted to achieve credibility in the first place. Central here are Mitchell’s combination of anatomical work with Newtonian optical theory to explain variations in skin color. His status as a Creole-American author is also considered, as are the relationship between Newtonianism and variationist discourse, and the way in which anti-slavery campaigners later reframed Mitchell’s account to draw abolitionist arguments from it. Emphasis is placed on the value of moving from intellectual genealogies of racial thought to histories of practice, authorial situation and circulation. Keywords: race; experiment; anatomy; color; optics; Newtonianism; Creole; enlightenment; Atlantic; Abolitionism; slavery; Virginia; British Empire Introduction: Dissecting the matter of color In the course of delineating the story of his life in the autobiography he published in 1789, Olaudah Equiano rejected the proposition that skin color was an essential and fixed property of human bodies. Demonstrating curiosity about the natural world, a trait increasingly denied Africans by European and American commentators during the eighteenth century, was in fact central to Equiano’s writerly self-presentation. His self-conscious literary performance as a civilized Afro-British author included Downloaded by [James Delbourgo] at 07:02 19 April 2012 marshalling causal claims about natural phenomena such as skin color. ‘‘‘The Spaniards, who have inhabited America, under the torrid zone,’’’ he wrote, quoting another author as evidence, ‘‘‘are become as dark coloured as our native Indians of Virginia; of which I myself have been a witness.’’’ Skin color, he meant to suggest, was an impermanent physical characteristic, an accidental quality resulting from climatic variation. Equiano was drawing here on the Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1786) by Thomas Clarkson, published as part of the campaign to abolish the British slave trade. Since, by the later eighteenth century the association of slavery with blackness had become so powerfully reinforced by white propagan- dists, abolitionists understood that it was important to de-naturalize the very notion of blackness as an essential marker. They also realized the importance of challenging such notions with the greatest possible authority. But this particular quotation *Email: [email protected] ISSN 1478-8810 print/ISSN 1740-4649 online # 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2012.666412 http://www.tandfonline.com 186 J. Delbourgo originated not with Equiano’s contemporary and fellow abolitionist Clarkson, but in an earlier source, published almost half a century prior. The example of Spaniards turning as dark as Virginia Indians Á one that evoked longstanding European anxieties about darkening and degenerating in the torrid zone, not to mention English competition with Spain for mastery of the American landscape Á was ‘‘a fact as related by Dr. Mitchel.’’ Arguing successfully for abolition would require the mobilization of matters of fact against color as a putative mark of inferiority.1 Equiano and Clarkson’s source was the Virginia-born physician and naturalist John Mitchell (1711Á1768), best known for the map of Britain’s North American colonies he produced for the Board of Trade in 1755, but also the author of ‘‘An Essay upon the Causes of the Different Colours of People in Different Climates,’’ read before the Royal Society and published in its Philosophical Transactions in 1744. Although often cited, and cited as influential in eighteenth-century debates about human variation, Mitchell’s early work has received little sustained analysis. In his landmark study White over Black (1968), Winthrop Jordan interestingly suggested that Mitchell’s examination of skin color was uniquely detailed for a colonist, most Americans ‘‘seemingly not much disposed to investigate a question that to them was loaded with implications extraneous to science.’’ The science of race was, on this reading, an exclusively European project during the enlightenment, uninteresting (perhaps even threatening) to those on American shores caught up in the practical business of slavery. As such, ‘‘Mitchell was more a European than an American.’’ It were as though engaging in a serious anatomical investigation designed to explain the cause of skin color demonstrated that Mitchell must in fact be European Á an interesting judgment concerning the distribution of scientific labor in the colonial era which, as we shall see, is directly relevant to understanding the ambiguities of Mitchell’s Atlantic career.2 Much historiography of race, and the interplay between the sciences and the question of human variation, has dwelt on the task of identifying the emergence of a robust concept of race. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have been identified as witnessing a decisive shift among European commentators from claims that Europeans possessed a civility that barbarous foreign peoples might slowly acquire to doctrines of fixed anatomical inferiority and unbridgeable difference. The genre of most such studies Á many of them valuable readings against the grain of previous views of enlightenment thought distorted by later nineteenth-century Downloaded by [James Delbourgo] at 07:02 19 April 2012 concerns Á is intellectual genealogy, and most such genealogies have usually taken for granted (as Winthrop Jordan implied) that the task at hand was to uncover western European statements about non-European peoples.3 The approach adopted in this essay is somewhat different. Instead of charting Mitchell’s ideas as a step on the path to a mature concept of race, it aims, after a full exegesis of Mitchell’s text, to bring questions from the historiography of the sciences to bear on conceptions of human variation, which most writing on enlightenment sciences of race have overlooked. These questions concern scientific practice, authorial credibility, rhetorical persuasiveness and the reformulation of arguments in the appropriating hands of later users.4 Put simply, it seems insufficient to ask only what commentators on human variation said; we need also to consider how they said it. What forms of knowledge and styles of performance might best establish truth claims about variation for learned European audiences in the eighteenth century? Andrew Curran in his fine recent study has convincingly argued against the notion of Atlantic Studies 187 a unified European discussion feeding into a single conception of race in the late eighteenth century, so it seems helpful to suspend the diachronic impulse to trace such a putative genealogy, and pursue a more synchronic approach, to explore original contextual resonances, and related questions of credibility and commenta- tors’ historical situatedness.5 In Mitchell’s case, this requires understanding two aspects of his treatment of the causes of skin color in particular. The first is his combination of anatomical dissection with a theoretical account of the nature of color conspicuously derived from Isaac Newton’s