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COPYRIGHT 2002 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
By Roxann Wheeler. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. ix + 371 pages.
The Complexion of Race is an important book about the many historical, cultural, and taxonomic categories which eighteenth-century Englishmen and women invoked, developed, and argued over in order to understand human variety at home and overseas. Roxann Wheeler covers considerable ground in her book, commenting on travelogues, novels, and autobiographies, on treatises by philosophers, political economists, and natural historians, and on the enormous volume of prose produced by the slave trade debates of the last thirty years of the century. She thus makes clear that the political and military consolidation of Great Britain as an empire at home and abroad was accompanied and abetted by narratives that featured models of socioeconomic, cultural, and racial difference. In most cases, the primary ideological effect of these opportunistic and often ignorant maps of the globe (or even of the Celtic cultures of Britain), and of geographical and human particularities elsewhere, was the production of a proper, normative definition of Englishness or "Britishness." Such collective or national self-definition--even if difficult to arrive at and always debated--was grounded in arguments for mercantile and colonial expansion, for the centrality of slavery and the slave trade to such overseas power, and for the "civilized" values Britain would claim to export as part of its imperial mission.
Wheeler calls attention to the variety of explanations developed in order to explain observable human variety: climatic and geographical variation were correlated with differences in social organization and political governance; agricultural societies were contrasted with, and seen as the prelude to, commercial states; religious beliefs and practices were catalogued, denigrated, and celebrated; clothing and physiognomy were remarked upon. In effect, Wheeler points to the ways in which eighteenth-century British polemicists, philosophers, political economists, and natural scientists grafted prior forms of explanation onto contemporaneous observation and speculation and produced characteristic "modern" proto-academic and disciplinary vocabularies. Wheeler makes clear, of course, that such modern systems of thought, with their purportedly empiricist and rational foundations, were not particularly dispassionate or objective. "Empire, Europe, and Britain," she writes, "were reimagined in the eighteenth century; skin color and civil society, the two main coordinates of this book, emerged as critical categories that helped define these related...
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