| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Joyce E. Chaplin. Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2001. Pp. xiii, 411. $45.00.

This book examines pre-1676 literature on technology, body, and science—broadly conceived—in the English colonies of North America. Joyce E. Chaplin is keen to explore what the sources can reveal about Native American points of view on these topics, but no sources exist from the Native Americans themselves. Their points of view are necessarily mediated by literate English. 1

Chaplin tells a fascinating story of "bodily imperialism": by the second half of the seventeenth century, the English used both Native Americans and Africans to identify their own bodies as optimally suited to rule America. Native American corporeal frailty allowed and justified their subjugation; African corporeal strength affirmed their proximity to beasts. According to Chaplin, three developments secured the English claim of physical and cultural superiority over Native Americans: the emergence of modern concepts of race, identification of technology as a distinctive part of English culture, and a Weberian "disenchantment of the world" (the celebration of English reason over and against native ignorance and superstition). She traces these developments in establishing her thesis that "early modern science was the foundation of English colonization of North America" (p. 10). . . .

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