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

The Complexion of Race attends thoughtfully and copiously to an important and understudied problem that was addressed with varying degrees of self-consciousness throughout the eighteenth century: how to explain the human diversity that expanding commerce and conquest was bringing more prominently into view? Wheeler describes an eighteenth-century Britain in which often contradictory concepts of skin color and civil society interacted, yielding "categories of difference" that overlap but do not coincide with the biologized race-as-phenotype that later became the norm. Historicizing race calibrates its heterogeneous historical formulations, a project Wheeler undertakes as much by historicizing civil society as by pursuing "race" head on. According to Wheeler, skin color was indeed noticed and considered throughout the period, but it was less influential than--indeed readily subsumed within--such influential models of identity formation as Christianity, climate, humoral theory, and the Scottish Enlightenment's four stages theory of the development of civil society. Until the last decades of the eighteenth century, such systemizations of human diversity typically demarcated peoples and places believed improvable through commerce and the adoption of European manners, not beings marked by insurmountable or biological differences.

Structured chronologically, the book's first two chapters address in turn the early eighteenth-century elaboration of "Christian," "savage," and "slave" as religious and political categories and the ways that trade with Africa challenged British self-definition in terms of civility. Wheeler begins by deconstructing simplistic, if often unarticulated, presumptions that colonialism was "staged between white and black men" (89). The "men" here is key: Wheeler argues that efforts to negotiate conflicting masculine ideals in the colonial context shaped the articulation of religious and political categories. Defining in order to lay claim to "civilization," commentators on foreign trade and cultures noted skin color much less readily than they did clothing (and lack thereof), degrees and kinds of hospitality to strangers, and technological facility. Slavery, the abnegation of masculine autonomy, was presented more routinely as an economic and social condition than as the correlate of "race." Within the context of early eighteenth-century essays on the origins of skin color, the rapid expansion of the slave trade, and the pressures commercial opportunism and violence placed upon ideals of civility, these chapters feature extended and elegant analyses of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Captain Singleton (1720), ably dramatizing all those occluded by a color binary of black and white-Moors, West Africans, and other Europeans--in the apprehension of these works' representation and the material realities of colonial activity. Here especially Wheeler shows herself to be a perceptive close reader, as in her meditation on the different bodily features by which Crusoe and Friday identify Europeans (white skin color vs. beardedness) and on the accompanying illustrations of Friday (in the 1720s, he is black and identical to the other "savages" of the island, approximating the idealized Caribbean Indian of the text itself only in the 1780s).

In the third chapter, an earlier version of which appeared in Eighteenth Century Studies, Wheeler examines six popular mid-century novels in which the redemptive possibilities of Christian conversion figure prominently in the depiction of interracial sex and marriage among white Britons and Muslims, Hindus, Native Americans, and black Africans. She counters the presumption that the novel's devaluation of the romance (a form which, as Margaret Doody most famously has argued, regularly features travel and interaction with foreigners), signaled the emergence of an idealized domesticity that eschewed non-English locales and characters. Wheeler's broad focus considers, for example, the implications for raciality and models of human difference of Britain's greater tolerance, relative to its colonies, of interracial liaisons; the mid-century shift in governmental attention from acquiring territory to consolidating modes of governance; and the 1752 Marriage Act. Unlike earlier stories of "amalgamation" (to follow Wheeler in using the eighteenth-century term) such as Inkle and Yarico, these stories--Sarah Scott's History of Sir George Ellison (1766), Henry Brooke's The Fool of Quality (1767-70), and four less well-known works--cast even acquired Christianity as a metonym of human value, associated closely with the civilizing effects of consumption.

Like earlier historians of race in Britain, Wheeler sees the systemization of skin color and physical attributes assuming a new prominence in the 1770s and 1780s. The book's final two chapters take up specific aspects of this shift toward a recognizably modern, "scientific" race: the deluge of theories of human variety and social progress in the 1770s, against which Wheeler reads Edward Long's History of Jamaica (1774) and Samuel Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775); and the advent of the abolition lobby in the 1780s, against which she reads Equiano's Interesting Narrative (1789). The illuminating juxtaposition of Long and Johnson emphasizes their shared advocacy of proper relationships to commercial luxury goods as civilizing influences. Jamaica and Scotland were both widely associated with the feudal stage of society, the former notable for "too much of wrong kind of commerce," the latter "for its paucity of commerce" (210). Finally, Wheeler examines the strengthening grip of natural history categories to enumerate minute differences among groups of people in the first three editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1771, 1781, 1797), the successive revisions of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's On the Natural Variety of Mankind (1775, 1781, 1795), and Samuel Stanhope Smith's Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1787). The physicalization of difference, she shows, was one aspect of an increasing attention to exterior appearances in social and political situations. "Claiming that dark complexion did not matter was easier than arguing that civility did not matter, but the combined force of a black-complected people in an unpolished society was difficult to negotiate" (261); hence Equiano's efforts to keep Britishness separate from whiteness could not but founder.

Throughout, Wheeler objects to previous treatments of race in several related ways. Too often, scientific and philosophical writings, "which posited human differences as more significant and more pronounced than any other realm of discourse" (238), have been read as if there were no other important descriptions of race available in the eighteenth century. Wheeler urges an eighteenth-century attentive to global systems; in keeping with this goal, her own analysis focuses on such mid-century shifts as the yielding of a military concept of empire to a commercial one, the increased integration of global and national economies, and Britain's shift from Europe to America as its primary export market. This breadth of view informs her critique of Henry Louis Gates' reliance on late-century scientific documents to characterize the eighteenth-century tout court (though she strongly approves of his attention to the ways literacy, a nonphysical distinction, was used to codify human diversity). Wheeler also suggests both that Benedict Anderson's emphasis on print nationalism erroneously suggests that print was "the only factor responsible for suturing Britons to a new sense of their identity in the eighteenth century"; she argues instead that "visual compatibility" derived from "complexion" "helped constitute a conscious sense of group belonging in the colonies quite early on and in Britain as well" (260). She points out that Kim Hall's justly influential scrutiny of "economies of race and gender in early modern England," which elaborates the central importance of dark-light binaries to the articulation of fears about cultural interaction in the Renaissance, can give the mistaken impression that proto-racialism derived solely from black-white interactions and imaginings. Finally, she notes that historians of race such as Ivan Hannaford have failed to consider the ways that four-stages theory, elaborating the transition of societies from savagery to civilization in ways that valorized English commerce, functioned widely throughout the eighteenth century as a racial ideology.

These critiques, rooted as they are in wide and subtle reading, are persuasive and important. Indeed, critique--the exposure of flaws in existent models--structures the book as a whole. Each chapter in The Complexion of Race addresses "a twentieth-century impasse in historicizing race" (46); thus, for example, Wheeler's reading of Crusoe revisits Toni Morrison's comparison of Clarence Thomas to Friday in Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas and the Construction of Social Reality (1992). The book is strongest on these important grounds: wide and attentive archival reading is juxtaposed with contemporary criticism and scholarship in order to expose the ahistoricism of the latter.

Alas, Wheeler's facility in exposing the flaws in others' models does not extend to the articulation of a paradigm to replace them. It is commonplace now to deploy theoretical frameworks in an ad hoc fashion, the better to attend to historical particularities; for example, Lisa Lowe's call for "heterotopicality" in Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, [1991], 10) is a notably cogent early example of the effort to articulate a methodology adequate to the heterogeneity of its subject, orientalism. Wheeler uses the term "multiplicity" to characterize her theoretical allegiances, the elaboration of which is too cursory to be compelling as a theoretical model. A more readily corrected lapse is the omission of many endnotes, an oversight that is the more noticeable for the thoroughness and precision of the book as a whole. For example, I would have welcomed identification of the "one recent critic" who "calls Johnson a 'tourist' and explicitly rejects the connection to imperialism" (193) and of the "[p]resent day scholars" who "refer to the ideological and economic place of the Jamaican mulattos and Scottish Lowlanders as buffer groups" (221).

Wheeler notes quite rightly that efforts to explain the gradual emergence of modern race can offer only distorted accounts of their target if they track it primarily through depictions of blackness. This central point is most fully realized in the book's suggestive delineation of linkages between civility and proto-racialism and its inclusion of regional denigration (Scotland) within its history of race. Wheeler's careful juxtaposition of Long to Johnson deftly illustrates the importance and the conceptual power of careful tracing of the middle ground between "civilized" and "uncivilized," "white" and "black," for which the book calls: Long, so often a poster boy for British racism, becomes a complicated critic of the ideology of trade as improving for all, and Johnson's Scotophobia becomes something that it is less possible simply to pass over or decry. The first book-length study to take as its central task the elucidation of the emergent character of "race" in the eighteenth century, The Complexion of Race addresses a crucial need in our field. Lively, thorough, and suggestive, it deserves wide readership and will reward adoption for graduate and upper level undergraduate courses in global eighteenth-century studies.