Abstract
The ‘race’ issue, the origins of the ‘race’ idea and its growth, articulation, and continued pervasiveness, is one that preoccupies a great deal of contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Historians of race and slavery have noted that there is a congruence between the development of a systematized sense of human difference in the natural sciences and the period of the most sustained debate about the validity and morality of the Atlantic slave trade. George Mosse has declared that ‘Eighteenth-century Europe was the cradle of modern racism’ and Roxann Wheeler has argued that a kind of paradigm shift occurs towards the end of the eighteenth century in ideas about the differences between peoples and cultures, one that signals a move from an interest in cultural to physical or bodily markers.1 When discussing slave trade discourse, Wheeler draws our attention to the paradoxical fact that ‘the anti-slave trade position relied more heavily on appeals to racial similarity than slavery advocates relied on appeals to racial difference’.2 This view is supported by the work of Philip Curtin who comments that ‘Men most connected with the slave trade, and even the West Indian planters … were less inclined to emphasize racial factors than those who stayed in England.’3
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Notes
George Mosse, Towards the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 1; Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), p. 291. The literature in this area is now substantial but the following are especially notable: H. F. Augstein, James Cowles Prichard’s Anthropology: Remaking the Science of Man in Early Nineteenth Century Britain (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999) and Race: The Origins of an Idea, 1760–1850 (London: Thoemmes, 1996); Michael Banton, Racial Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Robert Bernasconi, ‘Who Invented the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role in the Enlightenment Construction of Race’, in Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 11–36; Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); George Frederickson, Racism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Peter J. Kitson, ed., Theories ofRace, volume 8 of Slavery, Emancipation and Abolition, ed. Peter J. Kitson and Debbie Lee (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999); ‘Coleridge and “the Oran-utan Hypothesis: Romantic Theories of Race” ‘, in Coleridge and the Science of Life, ed. Nicholas Roe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 91–116; “Bales of living anguish”: Representations of Race and the Slave in Writing of the Romantic Period’, ELH, 67, 2 (2000), 515–37; Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Nicholas Hudson, ‘From “Nation” to “Race”: The Origins of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 29 (1996), 247–64; Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Richard H. Popkin, ‘The Philosophical Basis of Eighteenth-Century Racism’, in Racism in the Eighteenth Century. Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, vol. 2, ed. Harold E. Pagliaro (Cleveland and London: Press of Case Western University, 1973), pp. 245–62; Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body (London: Pandora, 1994); William Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes towards Race in America 1815–59 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); Nancy Ley Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain (London: Macmillan, 1982); Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (Routledge: London and New York, 1995); Suzanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies; Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial German, 1770–1870 (Durham, NJ and London: Duke University Press, 1997).
Philip D. Curtin, The Image of A frica: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850 (Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan, 1964), p. 27.
Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1975); Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 (New York and London: Picador, 1997); David Richardson, ‘The British Empire and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1660–1807’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 440–63. For nineteenth-century American race thinking, see Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981); Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots Young, Colonial Desire Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).
See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944); Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1988) and The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492–1800 (London and New York: Verso, 1997), pp. 517–18; Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History ofBlack People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984), pp. 133–190; Henry Louis Gates Jr, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory ofA fro-American Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the ‘Racial’ Self(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), and ‘Introduction: Writing “Race” and the Difference It Makes’, in ‘Race’, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 1–20; James Walvin, Questioning Slavery (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 72–95; Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, vol. 2, The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (London: Verso, 1997), p. 351; Ruth Frankenberg, The Social Construction of Whiteness: White Women, Race Matters (New York and London: Routledge, 1993); Anthony J. Barker, The African Link: British Attitudes to the Negroes in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1550–1807, (London: Frank Cass, 1978), p. 159; Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy and Pornography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), pp. 141–80, 346–97.
David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 1–84, and ‘Introduction’ to Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. xvi–xxiii.
Edward Long, The History ofJamaica, 3 vols (London, 1774), II, p. 356.
Edward Long, Candid Reflections Upon the Judgement latterly awarded by the Court of the King’s Bench on what is commonly called the Negroe-Cause (London, 1772), pp. 13–14, 21.
John Kemeys, Free and candid reflections occasioned by the late additional duties on sugar and on rum (London, 1783), pp. 71–2.
Charles White, An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, and in Different Animals and Vegetables (London, 1799), p. 1.
Thomas De Quincey, Autobiography, ed. Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, vol. 19 of The Works of Thomas De Quincey, 21 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000–3), p. 257; see also pp. 257–60.
Voltaire, Treaté du métaphysique, ed. W. H. Barber, The Complete Works of Voltaire, vol. 14 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1989), p. 423.
Samuel Stanhope Smith, An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species, ed. Winthrop D. Jordan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 157.
William Lawrence, Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Mankind, 3rd edn (London, 1823), pp. 312–13.
Richard Ligon, A True & ExactHistory of the Island ofBarbados (London, 1657), in Caribbeana: An Anthology ofEnglish Literature of the Westlndies, 1657–1777, ed. Thomas W. Krise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 28.
Bryan Edwards, History Civil and Commercial of the West Indies, 3 vols (London, 1798), I, pp. 73–4.
See Bryan Edwards, A Speech delivered at a Free Conference between the Honorable Council and assembly of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica, 1789), in Peter J. Kitson, ed., The Abolition Debate, vol. 2 of Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation, ed. Peter J. Kitson and Debbie Lee (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), pp. 325–47.
Philip Wright, ed., Lady Nugent’s Journal of her residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805 (Kingston, Jamaica: Institute of Jamaica, 1966), pp. 13, 14, 33, 43, 45, 86–7, 98.
James Tobin, Cursory Remarks upon the Rev. Mr Ramsay’s Essay (London, 1787), pp. 141, 69, 116, 129, 122, 118.
James Tobin, Farewel Address to the Rev. Mr. J. Ramsay [in reply to a letter from him] (London, 1788), p. 11.
Letters of Philo-Xylon, first published in the Barbados Gazette, during the Years 1787 and 1788 (Barbados, 1789), No. VIII.
William Beckford Jr, Remarks Upon the Situation ofNegroes in Jamaica (London, 1788), pp. 30, 39, 86, 84.
William Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica (London, 1790), I, pp. 200–1; II, pp. 60, 350, 383.
James Ramsay, Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies (London, 1784), pp. 216, 235.
Thomas Clarkson, An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (London, 1788), p. 134.
Ibid., pp. 134–8, 144–5.
Hannah More, ‘Slavery A Poem’, line 184, in Women Romantic Poets 1785–1832, ed. Jennifer Breen (London: Dent, 1994), p. 15.
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Kitson, P. (2004). ‘Candid Reflections’: The Idea of Race in the Debate over the Slave Trade and Slavery in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century. In: Carey, B., Ellis, M., Salih, S. (eds) Discourses of Slavery and Abolition. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230522602_2
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