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  • The "Long'd-for Aera" of an "Other Race":Climate, Identity, and James Grainger's The Sugar-Cane
  • Jim Egan (bio)

Of all the objections to colonization offered by English writers from the sixteenth century onward, none proved more resilient than those focused on climate. As Richard Eden explained in 1561, "[a]ll the inhabitants of the worlde are fourmed and disposed of suche complexion and strength of body, that every [one] of them are proportionate to the Climate assigned unto them" (qtd. in Chaplin). Drawing on classical authors for their information, these writers contended that one risked losing one's national identity or even one's life by moving to a new climate. Thus, opponents of colonization contended that the "alien" climates of America would fundamentally alter if not kill those colonists who dared live there. Climate, in fact, was thought to play the key role in determining virtually everything about a people, from their skin color to their work habits to their system of government. The belief in the "physical and moral effects" of climate grew more powerful in the eighteenth century even after literally tens-of-thousands of loyal English subjects had lived in apparent health in the wilds of America for almost one hundred years. Indeed, whereas in earlier centuries climate had been coupled with religion to explain cultural difference, many who wrote on natural history in the eighteenth century held climate entirely responsible for this difference. John Arbuthnot contends in 1731 that "it seems agreeable to Reason and Experience, that the Air operates sensibly in forming the Constitutions of Mankind, the Specialities of Features, Complexion, Temper, and consequently the manners of Mankind which are found to vary much in different Countries and Climates" (Arbuthnot 146). It would not be going too far to say, then, that for many eighteenth-century British writers, place makes person.1 [End Page 189]

While we modern scholars of colonial American literature often overlook the significance of climatological theories in our analyses of transatlantic arguments over colonial cultural production, eighteenth-century British-American writers ignored the climatologists only at their own peril.2 The many detailed analyses of climate produced by those colonists who hoped to be taken seriously by a European audience suggests the importance British-American writers placed on disproving the theory that where you were determined who you were. Climate, they insisted, was not destiny. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, argued that the "Increase of Offspring in particular Families" owed more to "Examples of Industry in the Heads" than to climate, and he went on to point out that the birthrate was sufficiently high in the colonies that "in another Century . . . the greatest Number of Englishmen will be on [the American] side of the Atlantic" (Franklin 373). Thomas Jefferson devoted virtually all of Query VI in Notes on the State of Virginia to refuting Buffon's claim that animals and humans inhabiting "the climate of America" suffered an inevitable "degeneration" (Jefferson 61). Noah Webster even went so far as to argue that instead of being transformed by a region's climate, the colonists could transform local weather patterns to suit their own needs (see Webster).

In defending against allegations of cultural inferiority brought on by America's uncivilized climate, British-American writers necessarily had to suggest alternative theories of identity formation. If, as the colonists insisted, climate could not be used to explain what both the colonies' detractors and their defenders agreed were the obvious differences between groups of people, what did produce the different "Constitutions of Mankind" whom British travelers encountered around the globe? As if this question were not difficult enough to answer on its own, the colonists had to explain these differences so that the "Constitution" known as "British" would not only stand as the ideal collective identity but would also include the colonists in the category.

In order to explore these problems, I want to look at a single poem, James Grainger's The Sugar-Cane (1764), in which climate is integral to the refashioning of British identity as the empire extends itself across the globe. The Sugar-Cane uses the georgic poem of four books of approximately 600 lines each to instruct its...

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