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

By Joyce E. Chaplin. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi, 411. $45.00, ISBN 0-674-00453-1.)

Joyce E. Chaplin makes one of the most original contributions to the history of race since the classic studies by Winthrop D. Jordan and Edmund S. Morgan that have dominated the field for over three decades. She offers a cogent critique of postcolonial readings of early modern race formation, suggesting that they read modern categories of difference too readily back into an era in which they do not belong. In doing this, she accepts and then subverts the increasingly familiar conservative defense of colonizers, slaveholders, and conquerors that insists that they cannot be held up to modern standards of behavior but should be judged according to the standards of their times.

Chaplin does not set about this task by offering polemically revisionist readings of other scholars' work. Instead, she redirects attention away from the origins of European prejudices against Africans and toward the racialization of Native Americans. Methodologically, she follows a strategy reminiscent of the scholarship that revolutionized interpretations of early modern political thought beginning in the 1960s. She approaches sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English descriptions of Native Americans with careful attention to the intellectual and cultural contexts of the time in order to recover what people living then would have understood the texts to say. Rather than narratives of cultural inferiority, she finds stories of difference rooted in early modern science and medicine.

Chaplin divides her narrative into three parts. During the earliest period of English contact with Native Americans, ca. 1500-1585, explorers assumed that Indians had superior knowledge of America and could teach Englishmen how to gain control over the foreign (to Englishmen) natural environment of the New World. From 1585 to 1660, hostility came to dominate relations between settlers and Indians, but even during this period Chaplin disagrees with those who find evidence that the English believed themselves inherently or culturally superior to Native Americans. Settlers and visitors to America did write extensively about Indians during this period, but they did so in the "context of military confrontation and with the aim of supplying military intelligence" (p. 81). Cultural and technological exchanges occurred across the militarized boundaries separating settlers and natives, creating hybrid cultures out of violent relationships. Hybrid cultures also emerged out of settlers' attempts to domesticate the American landscape, a project that entailed learning from the Indians (about, for example, tobacco and maize cultivation) while struggling to conceive of America as a place where the English might thrive.

It was, in the end, the health of English bodies in America that fueled settlers' growing conviction that they were suited to America, while the ravaging effects of disease on Indians convinced the English that native bodies were inferior and doomed. The English had expressed interest in native bodies from first contact, but their focus on the body became more prominent and quasi-racial during the third quarter of the seventeenth century, when settlers began foregrounding the devastation of epidemic disease on native peoples and pointed toward the extinction of Indians as healthier Europeans replaced them. Chaplin demonstrates that settlers had access to theories of disease and contagion that would have underscored the role of settlement in the introduction of smallpox and other maladies to America, but they denied settlers' responsibility for native illness. Similarly, Europeans knew from their experiences with the plague that nursing sick communities could decrease the mortality of those struck by deadly disease, but they opted not to help native villages attacked by smallpox. Instead, they watched disease destroy native villages while continuing to appropriate indigenous knowledge of the landscape, agriculture, and the medicinal uses of local plants. Just as they came to see native bodies as too weak to survive in the New World--and thus as insufficiently "American"--they also came to view the hybrid culture that they were building as a specifically European-style American culture, one characterized by settlers' success at "improving" the land. This culminated toward the end of the seventeenth century with the founding of the Royal Society in London: settlers who wanted to participate in this new scientific world turned Indians into objects of study--"others" who were different from and inferior to Europeans. A sense of racial difference, of racial superiority, had emerged in America out of the interaction between settlers' desire to control the New World and the stirrings of modern science.

Subject Matter is too rich and complicated to succumb to summary, and a short review cannot help but oversimplify Chaplin's arguments and skim over too much--particularly her rich readings of gender, the body, and early modern science. This book merits the attention of all historians interested in early America or in the history of race in America. It should play an important role in redirecting the study of race away from anachronistic readings of current concerns back onto the past and toward more careful attempts to understand how race emerged as a way of understanding human difference out of an intellectual context in which it did not have a place.

JAMES SIDBURY

University of Texas at Austin