Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America by Sharon Block (review)

Sharon Block's short book makes two important contributions to early American studies. First, it provides an important illustration of the possibilities of digital humanities. Second, Colonial Complexions, a title in Penn Press's Early American Studies series (disclosure: I am on the McNeil Center's Advisory Council), offers an important corrective to "historians' deployment of skin color categorizations as stable identities" (1).

Colonial Complexions rests on more than 4000 missing persons advertisements, originally published between 1750 and 1775 in more than two dozen newspapers from eight colonies, available through searchable online databases. Uniquely, these advertisements for runaway slaves and servants, and smaller numbers of escapees from jail, deserters from the military, and those placed in workhouses, allow scholars "to aggregate thousands of parallel descriptions of physical appearance of enslaved and free people" (145). From this base, Block has written "a cultural history that relied on quantitative analysis" (149). As such, she distinguishes her approach from intellectual history and, readers of this journal should know, social history. Block faults the latter for a tendency to treat physical descriptions "as objective representations rather than symbolically powerful choices" (146).

Block convincingly argues that skin color was not equivalent to race in this period and that the central categories for describing it were not "red" or "black" or "white." The eighteenth-century colonial eye recognized many hues, and complexions, moreover, indicated far more than race. Yet, Block concludes, "Descriptions that interpreted a runaway's internal world were more commonly applied to European-descended runaways, using broad humoral understandings of bodily appearance to connect behavior to physical features. In contrast, the external marks others had left on bodies more often filled African-descended runaways' descriptions. Such selective interpretations, not innate and essential corporeal differences, made race into a physical reality" (136).

A synchronic analysis, proceeding in five chapters, demonstrates the varied, race- and gender-specific ways that eighteenth-century advertisers described the bodies of those they sought. Chapter one focuses on the non-racial meanings that eighteenth-century British colonists would have seen in complexion, particularly within the framework of humoral medicine, arguing, "Rather than being a shorthand for categorical skin color, complexion signaled individual health, character, and behavior" (11). Although her focus on this particular medical-philosophical tradition leads her to minimize the significance of non-humoralist understandings for complexion, including stories drawn from the classics, scripture, and science, the chapter's numerous examples effectively set up the book's major claim about complexion not being exclusively tied to race in this period.

The second and third chapters are the book's strongest. Chapter 2 examines the host of bodily traits other than skin color that advertisers described, including age, height and weight, demeanor, and signs of illness. Block argues, "Racial differentiation could be accomplished by making bodies seem naturally different in their purpose, form and function, even without recourse to complexion, color, or black and white binaries" (59). Missing persons of European ancestry were more often described in humoral terms, while advertisements for others tended to focus merely on external traits without internal explanation. To take one example, men with African ancestry were "almost twice as likely as European-descended men to be described by the strength and form of their limbs" (46), a manifestation of advertisers' focus on labor value. Chapter 3 focuses on descriptions of skin tone and hair. Among the most striking findings are that advertisers described the complexion of more than half of European-descended runaways, but only about a quarter of those who were African descended (62); "white" and "black" were seldom used; and "brown…was more than ten times as likely to refer to a person of European descent as to one of non-European descent" (65). These patterns reflected and further reinforced colonial advertisers' assumption that little further physical description was necessary beyond the labels such as "Negro" and "mulatto."

The book's fourth and fifth chapters focus on descriptions of place of...