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

by Joyce E. Chaplin

With this sweeping reinterpretation of early cultural encounters between the English and American natives, Joyce E. Chaplin thoroughly alters our historical view of the origins of English presumptions of racial superiority, and of the role science and technology played in shaping these notions. By placing the history of science and medicine at the very center of the story of early English colonization, Chaplin shows how contemporary European theories of nature and science dramatically influenced relations between the English and Indians within the formation of the British Empire.

In Chaplin's account of the earliest contacts, we find the English - impressed by the Indians' way with food, tools, and iron - inclined to consider Indians as partners in the conquest and control of nature. Only when it came to the Indians' bodies, so susceptible to disease, were the English confident in their superiority. Chaplin traces the way in which this tentative notion of racial inferiority hardened and expanded to include the Indians' once admirable mental and technical capacities. Here we see how the English, beginning from a sense of bodily superiority, moved little by little toward the idea of their mastery over nature, America, and the Indians - and how this progression is inextricably linked to the impetus and rationale for empire.

Genres: History, American History, Nonfiction, History Of Science, Science

428 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 2001

About the author

Joyce E. Chaplin (born July 28, 1960, in Antioch, California) is an American historian and academic known for her writing and research on early American history, environmental history, and intellectual history. She is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. She was a Guggenheim Fellow and American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow of 2019. In 2020 she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

Reviews

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

How is this book a food studies text? Because you cannot think about the transmission of ideas about food, health, and culture without also critiquing the ways in which all conceptualizations of these issues revolve around intersecting ideas of nature, technology, and power. Chaplin’s book does a close material reading of the many exchanges in early America to get us to think critically about how the prevailing English colonist notions of technology and science mediated and then produced their understandings of Indian customs, practices, and bodies, eventually turning those understandings from appreciation and coexistence to framings of difference, disease, and inferiority. Chaplin looks closely at many different modes of material and knowledge exchange—from minerals to weaponry to plants and pharmecology—and maps alongside colonial responses that show prevailing anxieties over dominant systems of knowledge and power. If the initial period of living in survival mode on the American content left them a bit a sea, it was partly because that period forced a discussion of whether colonists could survive without indigenous knowledge or technologies—could they farm, could they endure different climates, could they win any battles they were set to endure? On top of these prevailing questions then came hypothesis from subsequent encounters with disease and warfare, producing contradictory impressions of Indian bodies as powerful (made by “artifice” to manipulate nature) and weak (made vulnerable by disease). Which bodies were powerful enough to withstand nature, and then which bodies and their technologies were powerful enough to control nature and landscape, then became racialized assumptions—by the end of the 17th century, the Indian had been produced as an inferior, pre-civilized product, meant for study through the rationality of science rather than a full participant and contributor of technological knowledge. In particular Chapters 4, 6 and 7 are especially strong in how they blend material evidence of encounters with establishing the emergent ideology of empire. As Chaplin notes, none of these ideas were imported wholesale in the moment of conquest; rather, they emerged over time through a particular logic of negotiating technology and nature against racialized neighbors.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book offers a fascinating thesis: that Native Americans offered the British a canvas upon which they constructed their sense of self—but that this image was fraught with anxieties and fluctuated distinctly during the British colonial experiment in the Americas.

Her first chapter expertly outlines her project, her method, and her historiographical interventions. I was hooked.

Then I read the rest of the book and found the arguments pretty much repeated, with little nuance despite the innumerable examples Chaplin musters to her cause. Each chapter seemed to follow a similar pattern: she seemed to fall into a habit of telling you what she was going to argue, then proceeding to bury you with dozens of examples supporting her argument, then repeating her arguments at the end of the chapter. Looking back, I could have just skipped over the evidence, just read her arguments, and came away from the book with a very similar level of understanding.

Also, Chaplin had a habit of ascribing motive to her actors. The British, she seemed to suggest (though never outright), knew they were racists and were drawing racist conclusions about the Native Americans in order to justify their taking their land from them. Yet this is never substantiated by Chaplin's evidence. They seem to sincerely believe the Indians are sickly, lack technology, and the proper dispositions to develop and 'own' their land.

That these arguments, alone, seemed to provide British colonists a justification for displacing and killing Native Americans should be a frightening enough conclusion for us to consider. That Chaplin feels the need to ascribe a racial false consciousness on top of it all seems like an overkill.