The Newtonian slave body: Racial enlightenment in the Atlantic World

Abstract

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 – the preoccupation of many intellectual genealogies of race – 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.