Natural Philosophy and an Early Racial Idiom in North America: Comparing English and Indian Bodies

Abstract

I N his history of East and West Florida, eighteenth-century naturalist and cartographer Bernard Romans carefully considered the different peoples who lived in that part of the British empire and questioned how reasonable it was to designate the Indians Americans. We might call them Americans, Romans conceded, as the inhabitants of the old world are each distinguished by a name expressive of, or relative to the quarters, from which they respectively originate, but this would be confounding them with the other natives, well white black, which i think by no means reasonable. Published in I775, this astonishing statement is easily read too narrowly in the context of the colonies' maturity and stirrings of independence. Romans's words hint at the political and cultural primacy of the British immigrants who had introduced themselves into the New World, and they were a part of an emerging argument for an exceptional American cultural identity. Yet Romans's assertion was also a concluding part of a long argument about the