Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676

Environmental History, Oct 2001 by Salisbury, Neal

Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676. By Joyce E. Chaplin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. xiii 411 pp. Illustrations, tables, figures, bibliographical notes, index. $45.00.

Although historians' illuminating of connections between science and empire is no longer novel, Joyce E. Chaplin demonstrates in Subject Matter that the enterprise still has its rewards. By examining sixteenth- and seventeenth-century discussions of English encounters with native peoples in eastern North America (with occasional glances at Africa and the Caribbean) against the background of contemporary discourses about human bodies and technology, Chaplin finds three broad stages in English writers' evaluations of their nation's colonial undertakings. Before 1585 most English viewed Indians as fundamentally like themselves, but worried that "climate" (meaning environment) caused the bodily differences they observed and might preclude English colonizers from remaining English in the new lands. On the other hand they concluded that the Inuits and Roanoke Indians who interacted with Englishmen were capable of learning the latter's more advanced technical skills. After 1600, Chaplin finds that England's self-confidence increased with the beginnings of permanent colonies, but that Indians' abilities to master English technology now engendered anxiety rather than pride. The new colonies banned the transfer of guns and other goods and skills to natives, fearing that the latter might drive them out. At the same time, the English now argued that peoples from temperate climates, like themselves, could thrive in any climate in either hemisphere.

From the 1640s, Chaplin maintains, having securely established themselves in the Chesapeake and New England, colonists denigrated Indian bodies as inferior to their own, denying the technological hybridity (e.g., maize, canoes) that characterized their earlier relations with natives. The key to this shift was the demographic catastrophe among Indians occasioned by epidemic diseases introduced by Europeans (although the English refused to acknowledge these origins at the time). At the same time, English writers viewed Indians' bodies as artificially cultivated to withstand the severe physical pain displayed by native women in childbirth and native men under enemy torture. These artificially manipulated bodies crumpled in the face of diseases while English bodies flourished. Indian bodies were among the American "curiosities" colonists studied and reported on to correspondents in England, including fellow members of the Royal Society. By now, Chaplin argues, the English were saying in effect, if not quite explicitly, that heredity explained not simply bodily differences but technological and more broadly cultural differences between the two peoples. English colonizers represented inferior Indians as vanishing from the American landscape while naturalizing themselves as the true "Americans." By 1676, writers in England and its colonies had created the basic racial stereotypes of Native Americans "as pre-scientific and technologically deficient" (p. 322) that persist in our own time, even in the face of Indians' resurgence over the past century,

A brief review can neither do full justice to the strengths of Subject Matter, nor spell out its limitations. The author grounds its argument in a wide range of literary, scientific, philosophical, and other sources ranging from John Dee to William Petty as well as from Thomas Hariot to Cotton Mather. In this respect the book will be disappointed by the secondary role accorded religion in this study, and others will note the paucity of its insights into the actual histories of (as opposed to English thinking about) American Indians and environments. But most scholars will recognize that the tripartite evolution of scientific imperialism it outlines is a valuable corollary to England's gradually developed success in asserting colonial power. More critically, Chaplin's arguments promise to reshape our understanding of the origins of Anglo-- American racism, the moreso after a promised second volume, extending the study into the eighteenth century, appears.

Reviewed by Neal Salisbury. Mr. Salisbury is a professor of history at Smith College, and a historian of Indian-European relations in colonial North America. His most recent publication, edited with Philip J. Deloria, is A Companion to American Indian History (Blackwell, 2002).