Cambridge. (book reviews)

CAMBRIDGE. By Caryl Phillips. Knopf. 184 pp. 19.

When one reads the travel writing of the English men and women who voyaged by sea to the worlds of Africa, India and the Caribbean, one is struck by the perception that people were naturally assumed unequal. The problem lies with the word "natural"; even more disturbing than the bias of these journals is that it came clothed in the language of science. Descriptions of, say, how many seeds were required to yield a certain number of mangoes calmly reside with an equally quantified view of the human subject-one that was ...

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