Before Race Mattered: Geographies of the Color Line in Early Colonial Madras and New York

Abstract

By the 1710s, British authorities at both Madras, India, and New York City had made, by fits and starts, more than a half-century of progress in their efforts to increase their power over people they categorized as black. Yet the residential color lines they drew in these two cities contrasted sharply. In Madras, known today as Chennai, stout stone walls separated a privileged European neighborhood from the city's Asian districts. Similar arrangements existed in other colonial cities in the Eastern Hemisphere, but Madras was the first place in world history to officially designate its two sections by color: White Town and Black Town. In New York, by contrast, a small part of town outside the city wall sometimes called the negro lands was dismantled, along with the wall itself. In a pattern that New Yorkers would scarcely recognize today, but which was common among slave-importing cities of the Atlantic world, authorities forced black slaves to live inside the households of whites, especially the wealthiest ones. There, the politics of domestic life settled further questions of color and space. What can we learn from juxtaposing these tales of two cities on opposite sides of the world? Read together, they tell us much about the ties between ventures of European expansion in the Eastern and Western hemispheres, and about the cities that anchored many of those ventures. They also allow us to explore the intellectual, political, and institutional emergence of color lines not only in their commonly assumed Atlantic birthplace, but also in the Indian Ocean, where much less is known about their earlier years.1 Around the turn of the eighteenth century, some European colonial officials in both hemispheres reassessed the categories of human difference they deemed most useful to their political projects, and turned increasingly to color