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

2. Racializing Civility: Violence and Trade in Africa

Chapter 2 Racializing Civility Violence and Trade in Africa [Negroes are] a Race of People who appear to be different from the rest of Mankind; their Hair being woolly, and their Colour black; their Noses flat, and their Lips large; but whether these are an original Race, or whether the Difference arises from the Climate, the Vapours of that particular Soil, the Manner of breeding their Children, and from the mothers forming of their Features, is not here determined. — FRANCIS MOORE Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa (1738)1 [A Negro is] an individual (esp. a male) belonging to the African race of mankind, which is distinguished by a black skin, black woolly hair, flat nose and thick protruding lips. — Oxford English Dictionary (1933)2 NTIL the mid-iggos, critics and theorists alike tended to equate the analysis of race with the study of the European representation of Africans and black skin color; accordingly, most previous studies of race during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries investigated European writing about black Africans or privileged this material. Certainly, a focus on color difference seems warranted given that England escalated its participation in the slave trade between 1660 and 1720 and given that the current study of race was initially a by-product of the civil rights movement in the United States. Two of the most influential historians of black Africans outside of Africa, Winthrop Jordan and Peter Fryer, date racial slavery in the English colonies — as opposed to religious or economic slavery—to about 1700 and find evidence of black color prejudice even earlier. It is not surprising, then, that few scholars have wondered if the link between race and Africans is suspect or if skin color ranked among the most important embodiments of English claims to superiority at this time. Indeed, perhaps because there has been so much fine analysisof the way blackness functions in the early modern period, the tendency among literary critics has been to assume that racismintensifies or blackness carries the same meaning from one historical period to another. This chapter seeks to unsettle teleological and presentist conceptualizations of race and racism by untangling the customary equation of slavery and race and by considering the significance of complexion anew. A theory of multiplicity is historically and theoretically useful when the focus is on Africans and Europeans. One wayto sort through the severaltheories of human variety and complexion in the early modern period and their bearing on eighteenth-century social formations and literary texts is to establish what was culturally available versus what was dominant ideology. Moreover, it is helpful to inquire whether divergent ideas about complexion and civility were coexisting or competing.The English narratives about Africa of the 17205 and 17305 that I focus on in this chapter reveal a range of coexisting responses to Africans and Europeans in Africa, and they indicate the ideological limits of English writing about Africans during the first three decades of the eighteenth century. In these accounts, concepts of the European and African are still in formation and not overdeterminedby racist ideology.3 Moreover, asboth eyewitness accounts and Daniel Defoe's Captain Singleton (1720) illustrate, the dominant preoccupation at this time was with masculine identity and the enterprising male figure. European and African men engaged in trade emerge more fully than their female counterparts in early representations of imperial contact and in conceptions of human difference.4 This chapter examines eyewitness accounts of Africa, particularlyWilu 92 C H A P T E R TWO liam Snelgrave's New Account of Some Parts of Guinea, and the Slave-Trade (1734), and Daniel Defoe's Captain Singleton, an early novel that depicts twenty-seven European pirates who find themselves stranded in Madagascar and their journey from Mozambique, across central Africa, to Angola with sixty African men whom they enslave to carry their baggage. The issues raised by this conjunction of texts primarily concern the relationship between trade and racial ideology. Thus, I depart from the assuranceof a negative or fixed African difference to study the inconsistencies of racial ideology , which are also important to understanding British culture and the history of race. While some negative conceptions of Africans carried over from previous centuries, they did not simply intensifyduring the eighteenth century, nor were they unchallenged. There was an uneven, not a cumulative , development of racial ideology. Moreover, skin color, even in the case of black Africans, was not the primary...