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

Introduction. The Empire of Climate: Categories of Race in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Introduction The Empire of Climate Categories of Race in Eighteenth-Century Britain Nor is blackness inconsistent with beauty, which even to our European eyes consists not so much in colour, as an advantageous stature, a comely symmetry of the parts of the body, and good features in the face. — ROBERT BOYLE "Of the Nature of Whiteness and Blackness" (1664) [C]olour, whatever be its cause, be it bile, or the influence of the sun, the air, or the climate, is, at all events an adventitious and easily changeable thing, and can never constitute a diversity of species. —JOHANN FRIEDRICH BLUMENBACH On the Natural Variety of Mankind (1775)1 WHEN present-day North Americans and Britons think about race, we are likely to default automatically to skin color. Preconceptions about skin color and about other differences between what we now call races are so ingrained in our contemporary culture that many of us hardly think twice about the complexity of the terms black and white. This association between color and race first became commonplace during the eighteenth century and obtained particular currency in the new discipline of natural history. Even today, however, black and white are simplifying,though powerful, cover stories for a dense matrix of ideas as closely associated with cultural differences as with the body's surface. As the epigraphs indicate, skin color and race as we know them today have not always been powerful tools to convey difference. At various times in European history, they have fostered meanings incongruent with the current ubiquitous conviction about their significance to identity.2 Colors, especially embodied in black and white skin tones, functioned on several registers during the eighteenth century: Climate, humors, anatomy, Christianity, and neutral description were all available paradigms.3 The ancient Greeks and Romans believed that climate was responsible for the complexion of a nation 's inhabitants, particularly air temperature and exposure to the sun. Complexion referred to inhabitants' temperament or disposition; it arose from the interaction of climate and the bodily humors (blood, bile, phlegm, and choler). Skin color, then, was only one component of complexion. Eighteenth -century Europeans maintained great faith in the strong effects of climate on the body. Their other traditional frame of reference for skin color derived from Christian semiotics, which combined moral and aesthetic meanings, primarily in the binary pair pure white and sinful black. This powerful color construction referred to internal turmoil, actions, spiritual states, and external coloring. Two contemporary fields of inquiry, medicine and travel, contributed to the reification of skin color as a discrete item of analysis.The "new" anatomical body of the seventeenth century was a model that eventually helped detach skin color from the larger matrix of temperament in humoral theory. Under this rubric, skin color resided in a thin layer of the skin rather than in a changeable balance of the internal bodily fluids and the temperature of the environment. A 1677 injunction from the Royal Society of London to travelers in foreign countries noted skin color as one of many characteristics of foreign people that travelers were supposed to record. The several articulations of skin color I have outlined could work singly or in conjunction , but as I explore throughout this book, they carried assumptions that were not always compatible with each other. Moreover, the context of individual usage did not always clarify that author's adherence to a single meanw THE E M P I R E OF C L I M A T E 3 ing. Writers referred to complexion and skin color synonymously as well as using them as discrete concepts. This arrayof possibilities for thinking about complexion and skin color may seem complicated to us today, and even eighteenth-century Britons found the shifting meanings of complexion confusing.4 An example from the Spectator 262(1711) illustrates the multiple definitionsof complexion that coexisted. In a chatty meditation on his attempt to instruct yet delight his readers, Joseph Addison mentions the mental process he goes through to protect the individualswho are the models for his sketches of contemporary manners. "If I write any thing on a black Man," he explains, "I run over in my Mind all the eminent Persons in the Nation who are of that Complection . . . that it may not bear any Resemblance to one that is real."5 When he mentions "black" and "Complection" in the same sentence, Addison does not refer to men of African descent...