Reviews of Books

Primary Colors

Reviewed by Benjamin Braude, Boston College

The Complexion of Race identifies an important problem in the history of culture: how, when, and why did black and white became crucial markers of social identity? So deeply embedded is skin color in our assumptions about humanity that this question has been barely raised. "Our contemporary sense of race," Roxann Wheeler observes, "is heavily filtered through recent assumptions that obfuscate an earlier moment in which biological racism . . . and Europeans' racial destiny as rulers of the world were not inevitable" (p. 299). Well into the eighteenth century, the English, like other western Europeans, classified and ranked human beings on the basis of culture, not color; they operated, in Wheeler's words, according to a "theory of multiplicity," defining the diverse peoples in the first British empire by multiple criteria, including religion, cannibalism, clothing, commerce, and civility as well as gender. The first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1771) attended little to race in its modern sense; a decade later, the second edition (1781) revealed an explosion of interest in skin color's ideological saliency.

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Wheeler documents and analyses this transformation through a close reading of a relatively small corpus of literary texts, principally, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Captain Singleton (1720), lesser-known novels of interracial marriage published from 1736 to 1767, Edward Long's History of Jamaica (1774) and Samuel Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), and The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano (1789). The criteria by which these particular works were chosen are not clearly set forth; the theoretical methodology is a materialist and post-structuralist reading.

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