The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture

Epilogue. Theorizing Race and Racism in the Eighteenth Century

Epilogue Theorizing Race and Racism in the Eighteenth Century There can be no timeless and absolute standard for what constitutes racism, for social structures change and discourses are subject to rearticulation . — MICHAEL OMI and HOWARD WINANT Racial Formation in the United States (1994) "Race" is, in fact, a rather recent phenomenon; the hierarchical ranking of "peoples" is a much older measuring instrument in the western lexicon of supremacism. . . . It is not the case that an innocent racialness was corrupted by a later ranking of races,but rather that race and racism are fundamentally interwoven. — RUTH FRANKENBERG, Displacing Whiteness (1997)1 N eighteenth-century Britain, the ideology of human variety broadly changed from being articulated primarily through religious difference, which included such things as political governance and civil life, to being articulated primarily through scientific categories derived from natural history that featured external characteristics of the human body—color, facial features , and hair texture. At the end of the century, the contours of racial ideology were more established than a century before, a solidification that accompanied the more important role of race and racism in the intellectual pursuits and structures of everyday life in Britain. The transference from a cultural emphasis to abodily emphasiswas imperfect, of course, and occurred at various paces in different realms that used racial ideology as a reference point. Cultural and physical ways of racializing people could work separately, but mostly they appeared in conjunction. Early in the century, race was not always visible in ways that we recognize immediately today; it was, however, visible to early modern and eighteenth-century Europeans in the clothing, habitations, and trading behavior of other people. By the end of the century , race was newly important at the level of the body and supported by a respectable scientific and historical artillery, even though there was still disagreement about who was a European or the criteria on which to base racial groupings. In Britain, references to skin color and its life in racial taxonomy, travel literature, and common parlance often envisioned a world of people with similar capabilities, which were, in many cases, unrealized, but who looked and acted quite differently from Europeans. As Oliver Goldsmith put it, demonstrating ethnocentric optimism at its best, "All those changes which the African, the Asiatic, or the American undergo, are but accidental deformities , which a kinder climate, better nourishment, or more civilized manners , would, in a course of centuries, very probably remove."2 The terms of race were quite flexible in their oppression or elevation of certain groups: sweepingly general or minutely specific —empirical, aesthetic, or theoretical . Race, though variously articulated through the coordinates of civility and theories of the body, is best understood as a hybrid political, economic, religious, and social construction that, from the 17705 onward, also had a healthy life in the emerging disciplines of moral philosophy, natural history, and comparative anatomy. Eighteenth-century writers placed great faith in cultural "makeovers" for Others within Britain's borders and beyond. Christian conversion, European clothing, increased trade activity, and desire for ornamental commodities were all components of this process. In representing Britain's Others, all of the authors of the narratives analyzed in this book, despite their considerable differences in rank and politics, typically reveal a desire to remake I other people in the image of the English, whether these Others are Catholic and French, Islamic and North African, Native American, or West African. This narrative desire is mainly refracted through non-British characters who freely choose to imitate the British by adopting their manners and dress because of the greater rational appeal of them. Foreigners' recognition of English superiorityalways garners the intense admiration of Britons, as reports on visitors to Great Britain throughout the century reveal. This narrative desire for peaceful acceptance of English superiorityrelies on the assumption of a shared human nature and the potential to change. The British ideology of race, however, was motivated by a commitment not to equality but to similarity. In fact, racial ideology relied on ingrained belief in the desirability of subordination, most familiar to Britons through their hierarchy of ranks within the nation as well as their translation to conditions abroad. Racial ideology, like commerce, imagined a world of mutual interdependence and gradual change wrought by foreign emulation of Europeans. One of the best places to discover an anatomy of Britishness was the novel. Throughout the century, the novel, natural history, and four-stages...