Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676

Abstract

Many American historians have assumed that racial definitions based on biological difference. emerged only in the late eighteenth century, and primarily to explain distinctions between blacks and whites. Joyce E. Chaplin' s new book requires us to think again. In it, she argues that such notions of racial difference emerged more than a century earlier to distinguish white colonists from Indians. As if that were not a sufficiently impressive contribution, Chaplin embeds this conclusion in a work with far more ambitious goals. .Subject Matter addresses racial views as part of the larger question of how ideas about nature shaped Anglo-American colonial experience over nearly two centuries. Chaplin invites readers to reimagine colonization as an intellectual as well as a political or economic enterprise. Dividing the narrative into three phases (the last two overlapping by twenty years), she analyzes the influence of early modern scientific views of nature on colonists ' relations with the Indians. Between 1500 and 1585—before there were any permanent English settlements—the discourse on nature offered an intellectual context within which explorers compared themselves with America's natives. Far from asserting their biological or cultural superiority, the English initially approached Indians more from a position of anxiety than from one of self-confidence. Aware of England's technological weaknesses in such areas as navigation and mining, particularly compared to Spain and Portugal, colonists expected to learn from native peoples about how to live in America and to exploit its resources. Sixteenth-century scientists who incorporated magical elements into their understandings of nature were not predisposed to disparage Indians who did the same. Relegated to the northern parts of America by Spanish predominance elsewhere, English adventurers marveled at the Inuits' extraordinary adaptations to an unforgiving environment and consequently reassessed accepted notions about the effects of climate on human bodies. There is no better measure of scientific interest in America, Chaplin suggests, than the numbers of mineral experts and mathematicians who participated in early English voyages of discovery.