Reviews of Books

Conquering Bodies

Reviewed by Peter C. Mancall, University of Southern California

When English colonists met Native Americans, the result for the latter, as we know from countless works, was a disaster. The English, like other Europeans who arrived on shores across the Western Hemisphere in the decades after 1492, unwittingly spread epidemic disease, reoriented indigenous economies, tried to replace native religious beliefs with Christianity, and fought against Indians who resisted them. To be fair, some of the battles were in retaliation for what the English believed were unjustified attacks on colonial settlements. Still, the first century of English intrusion in the Americas left the documentary record stained with blood from the north (where Martin Frobisher and his men fought against Inuits), through New England (notably in 1637 and from 1675 to 1677), to the Chesapeake (especially in 1622 and 1644). We in the business of interpreting this century of horror like to call ourselves "colonial" historians, but we rarely refer to each other by what we are: historians of invasion and conquest. Following conventional wisdom, we have no trouble labeling Hernán Cortes and Francisco Pizarro as conquistadores, but somehow that mantle does not quite fit on the broad shoulders of a Captain John Smith, a pious William Bradford, or a shivering Martin Frobisher.

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Joyce E. Chaplin's superb Subject Matter forces us to rethink what we do. Chaplin looks at the invasion head on and with results that cannot be ignored. She does more than point to broad areas of conflict between natives and newcomers in eastern North America. She insists we realize that the battle for control of the Western Hemisphere was fought on the bodies of Native Americans. Most important of all, she traces a century and a half of complex changes in English thought (and, to a lesser extent, changes in the ways that Indians thought) and shows how the invaders' ideas about the conquered people evolved over time as the English wrestled with the ideological and scientific legacy of their actions.

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