Notes
Notes Introduction 1. Robert Boyle, "The Experimental History of Colours Begun," part 2 in The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, vol. i (1664; London: J. and F. Rivmgton , 1772), 36; Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, On the Natural Variety of Mankind, in The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Fnednch Blumenbach, trans, and ed. Thomas Bendyshe (1775; London: Longman, 1865), 113. A decade after Boyle's treatise on color, Matthew Hale describes human beauty similarly in The Primitive Origination of Mankind, Considered and Examined According to the Light of Nature (London : William Godbid, 1677), but he gives more weight to skin color: It consists equally in figure, symmetry of parts, and color (64). The lighter the color, the more beautiful to Hale: "In the torrid Climates the common colour is black or swarthy, yet the natural colour of the temperate Climates is more transparent and beautiful" (65). Such an understanding of white complexion as beautiful is certainly commonplace but not universal. In delineating key points characteristic of human groups, Hale observes that each nation "hath a certain humour or disposition appropriate to it," which manifests itself in their speech, accent, and pronunciation (164). On the whole, however, he is more diverted by the variations he finds in "improving knowledge and discoveryof things," which, he understands, results from sloth, evil custom, barbarousness,or lack of education. These deficienciesin arts and invention are noticeable in parts of Europe, Africa, and Ireland (159). By the eighteenth century , the deficiencies are mainly located in Africa, America, and, to a lesser extent, in Asia. 2. As many other scholars have noted, choice of terminology is a difficult decision . My study of skin color as a component of what we now call race is premised on the fact that race does not reflect an essential condition but is, instead, a historically changing cultural, economic, and political construction in all parts of the globe. Although the use of race makes sense to us now as a term that designates fairly rigid distinctions in appearance and even behavior, it did not have the same currency in the eighteenth century. Wherever possible, I've chosen the term human variety or human difference to underscore eighteenth-century sensibility, which did not always register the sense of difference that the term race does today. I have chosen the term racial to indicate the main effect of ideology and to distinguish effects that were highly ethnocentric but that weren't necessarily racist. The term racial records 304 N O T E S TO P A G E S X-J the tension between ethnocentric assumptions and racist ones. As I address in the epilogue, racism in the eighteenth century was not based in essentialism. 3. The use of complexion in the title to this book incorporates its two main eighteenth-century definitions: "The inclosure or involution of one thing in another ," referring to the way that complexion and civility could inhere in each other, and to skin color, or "The colour of the external parts of the body." Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (London: W. Strahan, 1755) offers three definitions for complexion, the two I cite and a third, which I discuss at length later in the introduction: "The temperature of the body according to the various proportions of the four medical humours." The fact that Johnson includes the adjectival and adverbial forms of "complexion" suggests its common usage. 4. Physicians and philosophers were not sure whether skin color arose from the combined action of the humors and the heat of the sun, whether it was all due to the workings of climate and other external factors, or whether skin color was lodged in a layer of the skin and transmitted by sperm. A few writers believed that black color might originate differently from other colors. Sir Thomas Browne, Francois Bernier, and Buffon all subscribed to some combination of climate and the intermixture of groups to account for skin color. John Mitchell, Claude Nicolas Le Cat, and Edward Long believed skin color was transmitted by a layer of the skin membrane . Linnaeus, Blumenbach, and Oliver Goldsmith subscribed to climate's formation and transmission of color. 5. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, 5 vols., ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 2:518. 6. Situations such as the one described in Bartholomew Stibbs,Journal of a Voyage up the Gambia (1723; London: Edward Cave, 1738) are not isolated incidents. In William Chetwood's Captain Richard Falconer, 2 vols. (London: W...
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