The Complexion of Race: Categories of difference in eighteenth-century British culture. (Reviews).

The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture. By Roxann Wheeler (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. pp. 371).

This work is a sensitive analysis of the development of British racial thought and of the emergence of skin color as a component of that process. Roxann Wheeler's primary target is a recent strand of literary-historical interpretation which treats British race-thinking as a constant binary division of black versus white over the whole course of British imperial history. Wheeler easily demonstrates that this chromatic premise derives from an anachronistic perspective. Although she does not draw attention to alternative strands of racialization that focused upon intra-European "markers" of linguistic, mythical and cultural difference, her approach is entirely justified within the Atlantic frame of reference.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century skin color was far less important and far more diffusely related to group identity than were designations based upon religion and civility. Wheeler identifies the 1770s as the pivotal decade in this century's process of British racialization. From that point to the end of the century race became more rigidly defined and progressively more significant as a marker of British difference, especially as between Britons and Africans. Wheeler illustrates the course of this development through an impressive array of publications, ranging across natural histories, encyclopedias, travel accounts, novels and polemical essays. She excels in close and nuanced re-readings of major eighteenth-century texts, most elaborately with the writings of Daniel Defoe, Edward Long, Samuel Johnson, and Olaudah Equiano, identified as successive benchmarks in the deepening pattern of racial hierarchy. Wheeler often argues for a subtle convergence of apparently unrelated discourses, notably Johns on's description of the Scottish Highlanders in 1775, and Edward Long's description of Africans and mulattoes in Jamaica in 1774.

In general, Wheeler follows Anthony Barker's lead (The African Link) in identifying the 1770s as marking an intensification of British interest in skin color and theories of African inferiority. Two components of her argument strike me as interesting but not yet convincing. The Complexion claims that the Scottish Enlightenment's social science "stage-theory" of historical progress, from hunting "savagery" to commercial "civilization," strongly reinforced the development of hierarchial racial superiority in natural history, in that both descriptively placed Africans at lower levels of their relative scales of achievement. Wheeler too easily conflates the description of Africans at the less developed end of the Scottish tale of technological progress and civil freedom on the one hand, and some naturalist linkages of Africans with lower levels of intelligence and capacity on the other. Most Scottish empirical rationalists were describing processes, potentially accessible to all human groups, not static "natural" characteristics.

Wheeler's chief Scottish example of convergence is David Hume's famous venture into national character. As Barker has shown, however, the fate of Hume's speculation on inherent Negro inferiority later demonstrated the weakness of racialization as applied to fin-de-siecle Africans. By contrast, Adam Smith's systematic and more influential elaboration of stage theory goes entirely unremarked in The Complexion. So does the fact that in a thousand pages of The Wealth of Nations, "race" is applied most often to European workers and monarchs, and never to their counterparts in West Africa, whether as slaves or sovereigns. Even the most subtle readings of selected texts do not obviate methodological problems of establishing representativeness and influence. Wheeler not only recognizes, but insists, that her conflation of developmental and naturalistic hierarchies blurs the historical distinction between late eighteenth-century visions of global commercialization, nineteenth-century imperial colonialism and late twen tieth-century projects of multinational globalization (p. 283). Nor is there any logical reason why the low position of African societies in United Nations' publications on economic and human development might not be similarly categorized as "informed" by racial ideology.

The most problematic argument in The Complexion is offered in its penultimate chapter, "The Politicization of Race." Wheeler maintains that fin-de-siecle Britons began to regard color as a primary marker of human difference, and to perceive Africans as naturally inferior to Europeans. An unprecedented flurry of publications on complexion, slavery, savagery, etc., from the 1770s onward, supposedly intensified by the national political debate over the slave trade from the late 1780s, "compelled" even the most committed abolitionists to incorporate race and the image of African inferiority into their discourse. Wheeler's own range of exemplary publications, however, curiously shows that her proof-texts do not extend beyond the first outburst of mass abolitionism at the end of the 1780s. Nor did such racialization play more than the most marginal role in contemporary Parliamentary debates. As Wheeler notes, anti-abolitionist polemics almost avoided "race" altogether. Edward Long's (by-then-classic) racialist argu ment was of use to abolitionists only as the expression of a discredited argument. Moreover, assertions of African cultural inferiority, no novelty before 1770, were more widely linked than ever before to the European-sponsored slave trade. The zone beyond European "temptation" was elevated by the hypothesis of a "superior interior." By 1790 the politicalization of slavery had effectively depoliticized race.

In short, by 1800 the language of racial inferiority was not yet surging relentlessly towards its nineteenth century peak. The documentary record of Africans as "fellow creatures," and "men and brothers" had trumped the naturalistic language of difference. It was the isolated racial scientist of the 1790s who felt compelled to preface his discussion with an affirmation of impeccable abolitionist credentials. The turning point in British cultural racialization should probably be set closer to 1850 than to 1770, but wherever the pivot is located, The Complexion of Race marks a decisive break with literary history's binary version of eighteenth-century British racial thought. It is certain to complicate the complexion of race in the best sense of that term.