Book Review

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.	1
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.	2
The creation of permanent colonies, however, ushered in several important changes. In the second phase of Chaplin's story, from the Roanoke expedition of 1585 to 1660, colonists invoked ideas about nature to justify English occupation and Indian displacement. Assumptions about Anglo-Indian similarities—buttressed by a shared military technology of archery and the perceived resemblance between America's natives and ancient Britons—gave way to impressions of Indian inferiority. The linchpin of Chaplin's argument is that scientific discourse led colonists to interpret the Indians' susceptibility to disease as evidence of their intrinsic bodily deficiency. That discourse simultaneously construed English demographic success as proof of physiological triumph over climatic challenges. Out of such ideas colonists constructed what Chaplin carefully identifies as a racial idiom—not yet a full-blown ideology of inherited racial inferiority, but a growing recognition of essential differences.	3
In the third phase of the narrative, from 1640 to 1676, the English, confident of their bodily superiority, proceeded to assert technological and intellectual primacy. They ignored the fact that colonial culture was actually a hybrid of English and Indian ways and instead emphasized their success in utilizing superior English technology to improve American nature. Colonists insisted that Indians, in contrast, employed their limited technological skills in an effort to master themselves, not nature. Although impressed with Indian warriors' fortitude and native women's strength in agricultural labor and childbirth, colonists charged that the artificial measures producing these effects were ultimately insufficient to compensate for Indians' naturally weak bodies. And as English scientists and their colonial correspondents came to reject magic as part of nature, they identified Indians—whose views still melded physical and metaphysical elements—as intellectually backward: possessors of weak minds to match weak bodies. By 1676, European science fully validated the colonists' impression that they were the natural residents of America and that the Indians were doomed to disappear.	. . .