Review: “General Heads,” Great Minds, and the Genesis of Scientific Racism

Reviewed Work(s): Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society: Boyle, Cavendish,
Swift by Cristina Malcolmson
Review by: Robin Runia
Source: Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Spring 2015), pp. 112-
118
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/jearlmodcultstud.15.2.112
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 R E V I E W E S SAY

“General Heads,” Great Minds,

and the Genesis of Scientific Racism
robin runia

Cristina Malcolmson. Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society:

Boyle, Cavendish, Swift. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013.
233 pages. $85.00.

It is commonly presum’d that the Heat of the Climate wherein they live, is
the reason, why so many Inhabitants of the Scorching Regions of Africa
are Black; and there is this familiar Observation to Countenance this
Conjecture, That we plainly see that Mowers, Reapers, and other Coun-
trey-people, who spend the most part of the Hot Summer dayes expos’d to
the Sun, have the skin of their Hands and Faces, which are the parts im-
mediately Expos’d to the Sun and Air, made of a Darker Colour than be-
fore, and consequently tending to Blackness; And Contrarywise we
observe that the Danes and some other people that Inhabit Cold Climates,
and even the English who feel not so Rigorous a Cold, have usually Whiter
faces than the Spaniards, Portugalls and other European Inhabitants of
Hotter Climates. But this Argument I take to be far more Specious than
Convincing. (153–54)
There is another Opinion concerning the Complexion of Negroes,
that . . . the Blackness of Negroes [is] an effect of Noah’s Curse ratify’d by
God’s, upon Cham; But though I think that even a Naturalist may without
disparagement believe all the Miracles attested by the Holy Scriptures, yet

the journal for early modern cultural studies

vol. 15, no. 2 (spring 2015) © 2015

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 Runia • “General Heads,” Great Minds 113

in this case to flye to a Supernatural Cause, will, I fear, look like Shifting off
the Difficulty, instead of Resolving it; for we enquire not the First and Uni-
versal, but the Proper, Immediate, and Physical Cause of the Jetty Colour
of Negroes; And not only we do not find expressed in the Scripture, that the
Curse meant by Noah to Cham, was the Blackness of his Posterity, but we
do find plainly enough there that the Curse was quite another thing, namely
that he should be a Servant of Servants, that is by an Ebraism, a very Abject
Servant to his Brethren. . . . Nor is it evident that Blackness is a Curse, for
Navigators tell us of Black Nations, who think so much otherwise of their
own condition, that they paint the Devil White. Nor is Blackness inconsis-
tent with Beauty, which even to our European Eyes consists not so much in
Colour, as an Advantageous Stature, a Comely Symmetry of the parts of
the Body, and Good Features in the Face. So that I see not why Blackness
should be thought such a Curse to the Negroes, unless perhaps it be, that
being wont to go Naked in those Hot Climates, the Colour of their Skin
does probably, according to the Doctrine above deliver’d, make the Sun-
beams more Scorching to them, than they would prove to a people of a
White Complexion. (159–60)
Greater probability there is, That the Principal Cause (for I would not
exclude all concurrent ones) of the Blackness of Negroes is some Peculiar
and Seminal Impression. (161)
—Robert Boyle, Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664)

T he above extracts present Robert Boyle’s delineation of racialized differ-

ence, as produced and evaluated by the Royal Society; this delineation,
production, and evaluation is the lifeblood of Cristina Malcolmson’s Studies of
Skin Color in the Royal Society. Exploring the development of the modern no-
tion of race within the context of colonialism, Malcolmson argues that “the
attention to skin color in the Royal Society allowed racialization to develop
and eventually flourish within the practices of the new science” (7). Specifically,
attention to the imbrication of this process within institutional and economic
commitments to British imperial dominance helps to fill in the gaps between
an attention to skin color, consideration of its causes, and the dehumanization
and subjugation of non-European individuals. Malcolmson’s focus on the
Royal Society’s activities and publications and on Margaret Cavendish’s and
Jonathan Swift’s reactions to them provides an important and nuanced contri-

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 114 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies • 15:2

bution to the recent scholarship in this area as well as a call for additional work
to be done.
The value of this volume lies in Malcolmson’s thorough presentation of
compelling evidence and insightful close readings that expose the Royal Soci-
ety’s complicity in the spread of racialized discourse and racist thought. In ad-
dition, Malcomson’s original contributions to scholarship on the historical
construction of race include her critique of polygenesis1 as inherently racist and
her methodical analysis of the extensive publications by and associated with
the Royal Society. If, in infrequent moments, Malcolmson’s intimacy with the
details of her study distract from the ability of the volume to achieve a coher-
ence as careful and insightful as her readings of discrete texts within the soci-
ety’s publications and of the literature she examines, the consistency and
richness of these local readings contribute significantly to our global under-
standing of the range, complexity, depth, and explanatory value of the Royal
Society’s textual production and the discourse surrounding it.
Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society follows the example set by
Andrew Curran’s The Anatomy of Blackness: Science & Slavery in an Age of En-
lightenment (2011), but Malcolmson’s focus is much narrower, limited in
chronology to the early years of the Royal Society and in geography to England
and its colonial interests. Malcolmson’s work extends backwards in time to
that of George Boulukos and his focus on the English-speaking transatlantic
world, “opening up – or perhaps unleashing – new possibilities for imagining
race and slavery in colony and metropole alike” (Boulukos 32). While Boulukos
troubles the association between monogenesis, abolition, and racism to argue
that British abolitionists’ use of the grateful slave trope perpetuated racism,
Malcolmson exposes earlier racialized discourse linking monogenesis and
Christian arguments in favor of slavery. This exposure importantly troubles
Robert Wald Sussman’s reiteration of previous scholarly consensus viewing
polygenesis as the origin of racism in The Myth of Race: The Troubling Per-
sistence of an Unscientific Idea (2014).
Malcolmson begins by establishing the influence of early Royal Society
publications on a range of writing, from the imaginative science fiction of Mar-
garet Cavendish’s A Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World
(1666) to Francis Moore’s Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa (1738). First,
Malcolmson explores the etymological development of the word “race” as
“family or stock” (3) and the connection of this definition to Adamism, the
Christian belief in the descent of all humankind from Adam. In contrast, we

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 Runia • “General Heads,” Great Minds 115

are told, pre-Adamism speculated that not all humans were the descendants of
Adam. According to Malcolmson, Paracelsus’s speculation in Astronomia
Magna (1537–38) that Native Americans were descended from non-Adamic
men and Giordano Bruno’s belief, expressed in De innumerablilibus, Immenso
ed Infigurabilii (1591), that Ethiopians and Indians were descended from non-
Adamic men should be “characterized as proto-racial rather than an early ap-
pearance of the modern idea of race” (14). For Malcolmson, the differences even
among pre-Adamite thinkers and pre-Adamism’s emphasis on sacred history
distinguish it in important ways from the later development of secular race
theory that she traces through the Royal Society. In contrast, she establishes
criteria essential to the development of that secular theorization through Rob-
ert Boyle’s commitment to coordinating the efforts of science and colonialism
in acquiring knowledge and spreading Christianity to non-Christians. The in-
troduction’s useful framing of racial definition categories is supported by a pre-
ceding two-page, glossy, full-color foldout reproduction of Richard Waller’s
“Tabula Colorum,” which was “discussed in the Society at four meetings be-
tween February 10, 1686, and April 28, 1686” (71). This table that (we are later told)
hung in the Royal Society’s meeting room, organizes a rainbow spectrum of
color according to the Aristotelian opposition of black and white, but with the
intriguing differentiations between “Niger” or “Black” and “AEthiopicus” or
“Negro Black.” With this suggestive cue, the following six chapters, conclusion,
and appendix promise to provide detailed coverage. Malcolmson’s extensive
notes further demonstrate her comprehensive knowledge of both her topic and
its scholarly context and also provide an inspiring model of careful, engaged
scholarship. The bibliography of manuscript, primary, and secondary sources as
well as the brief index offer specialists and emerging scholars useful tools.
The first chapter is organized around the conclusion that “questions about
skin color directly contributed to the development of the experimental method
during this period, and that naturalists honed their skills at the method by con-
sidering the topic” (30). Malcolmson supports this claim by paying close atten-
tion to questions the Royal Society developed for English travelers to new
colonies and trade routes. The focus of the Royal Society’s questions included the
physical body of peoples encountered and the testing of traditional views and
theories about those bodies. For Malcolmson, it is particularly important to con-
sider the role that Boyle played in compiling these questions in General Head for
a Natural History of a Country (1666), after the idiosyncratic focus of experiment
XI in his Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) on “The Black-

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 116 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies • 15:2

ness of the Skin, and Hair of Negroes.” Boyle’s focus on skin color in his experi-
ment influenced the questions the Royal Society developed for travelers to its
colonial outposts and the answers travelers returned to the Society. Specifically,
this chapter argues: “the Society produced a new discourse on the causes of skin
color, in which the ‘gaze of natural history’ constructed the natural philosopher
and indigenous subject according to colonial but not yet entirely racialized mod-
els” (64) by establishing connections between Royal Society Membership and
participation in the British colonial endeavors of the Council for Foreign Planta-
tions, the Royal Adventurers into Africa, and the Royal African Company and
Royal Society hypotheses about skin layers and color.
Chapter 2, “Discussions of Race and the Emergence of Polygenesis in the
Society,” begins with illustrations of the continued acceptance of a climatic
theory of skin color throughout the 1680s. Malcolmson goes on to link the in-
fluence of François Bernier’s Journal des Sçavans (1665), with its first use of the
term “race” in the modern sense, and the aforementioned “Table of Colours” by
Richard Waller on Royal Society Member Hans Sloane. She then connects
Sloan’s appointment as the governor of Jamaica’s physician for the year of 1687
to his insistence that black Africans were a distinct race. Specifically, Malcol-
mson analyzes his collection of skulls, skin, and slavery ephemera to suggest
that “Sloan never recognized that his thinking about race stemmed from a
strong desire to justify the English system of colonization” (79). In subsequent
examination of Sloan’s influence upon other Royal Society discourse, she con-
cludes that, “unlike 1675, it had become acceptable in 1690 to explore whether a
population group constituted ‘a Distinct race of Men,’ and, particularly
whether there was a ‘Negro race of Mankind’” (86). By this point in Malcolm-
son’s volume, she has compellingly documented the specific shape and scope of
the Royal Society’s influence on theories of race.
In “Boyle, Biblical Monogenesis, and Slavery,” however, Malcolmson takes
her reader in a new direction, arguing “that Boyle was trying to stop polygene-
sis in the Royal Society, although he himself had contributed to it through his
support of slavery and his call for studies of skin color in the Royal Society”
(94). She supports this claim by tracing Boyle’s own refutations of pre-Adamite
theories of polygenesis, his censoring of Royal Society member John Clay’s as-
sertion of the distinct racial degeneracy of Native Americans, his development—­
with Nehemiah Grew—­of new questions for travelers that avoided the issue of
race, and his support of Morgan Godwyn’s parliamentary bills to secure hu-
mane treatment and Christian conversion for slaves. With this crucial contex-

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 Runia • “General Heads,” Great Minds 117

tualizing of early British colonial and intellectual commitments, Malcolmson

is able to arrive at the important conclusion that “Ideology of one race allowed
Christian England to justify slavery as a method of bringing other peoples into
the civilizing process and the plan of salvation. Therefore the history of race in
early Modern England cannot be a simple story of the shift from a benevolent
monogenesis to a pernicious polygenesis” (112).
Chapter 4, “Race, Gender, and the Response to Boyle in Cavendish’s Blaz-
ing World” turns its attention from the interaction between members of and
aspirants to the Royal Society to the work of Margaret Cavendish to further
undermine the assumed link between polygenesis and scientific racism. Oscil-
lating between Cavendish’s nonfiction—­Philosophical Letters and Grounds of
Natural Philosophy, and Observations upon Experimental Philosophy—­and fic-
tional Blazing World, Malcolmson’s discussion shows that Cavendish uses
polygenesis in her novel to question both the narcissism inherent in the Royal
Society’s reliance upon technology and its focus on “matters of fact” like skin
color to master nature. While Malcolmson fails to consider the potential dif-
ferences between Cavendish’s nonfictional and fictional texts in Cavendish’s
establishment of her own outsider persona, Malcolmson concludes that:

Although Cavendish suggests strongly in The Blazing World that non-Eu-

ropeans are ‘as ingenious and witty in the invention of profitable and useful
arts, as we are in our world,’ she also implies that the groups under English
control would follow ‘a profession as was most proper for the nature of
their species’. It should be noted, however, that . . . species-difference would
not authorize this English control, but rather a monogenesis built on the
idea that Adam was white. (146)

In her next chapter, Malcolmson elaborates upon previous work on the role of
women’s imagination in fetal development and child-birth. This chapter’s conclu-
sions are based on the fact that she could locate “only two instances in The Philo-
sophical Transactions, the papers of Robert Boyle, the Royal Society’s summary of
their meetings called the Journal Book, and contemporary indexes to this material
from 1660–1750, in which non-European women are represented as exhibiting the
force of Imagination in breeding Women” (155). Reflecting on the absence of such
evidence and other scholarship on the subject, Malcolmson posits that the early
Royal Society also constructed white women’s imaginations, the discourses polic-
ing them, and their chastity in opposition to an assumed savagery and promiscuity
of the non-European woman, a binary construction useful to colonial interests.

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 118 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies • 15:2

“Gulliver’s Travels and Studies of Skin Color in the Society” attempts to

even further historicize scholarly consensus on Swift’s rejection of the Royal
Society’s experimentation in Book Three’s Academy of Projectors and its dis-
cussion of race and racism in Book Four’s Yahoos. Malcolmson compares the
Royal Society texts on skin color to the studies of color parodied by Swift’s
Academy and the Royal Society’s colonial interests with Gulliver’s perceptions
of the Yahoo’s racial traits, providing additional evidence for the reiteration of
her broad conclusion that “studies of skin color in the Royal Society contrib-
uted to the production of whiteness as a national trait” (187).
In her “Conclusion” and “Appendix,” Malcolmson provides yet more support
for her argument that constructions of race in the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries were influenced by the scientific discourse of race and racial differ-
ence authorized by the Royal Society. Acknowledging significant developments in
transatlantic studies concerning the recognition of indigenous knowledge and
agency, she maintains, “there is still much to be gained from studying ‘the paradig-
matic gentlemanly philosopher,’ especially when he travels to Africa and comments
on skin color and polygenesis” (191). For Malcolmson, even “center-periphery-center
voyages” may continue to provide important information on the origin, develop-
ment, and effects of the study of skin color and its relationship to racism. The ap-
pendix engages in a similar call for the continued recovery and reevaluation of
“center” texts by tracing the as-of-yet unacknowledged similarities between Caven-
dish and Swift’s work about the Royal Society. As a result of this work too, she is
hopeful much may be done to reevaluate Cavendish’s contributions to our under-
standing of the work of the experimental philosophers of her time.
Cristina Malcolmson provides the cold, hard, and often damning facts of
science’s perversion by political and economic interests, complicating the rela-
tionship between monogenesis and polygenesis and detailing the multiple,
conflicting, and constructed theories of racial difference.

note
1. Polygenesis refers to a theory of multiple independent origins for humans. Mono-
genesis refers to a theory of race in which all humans are descended from a common origin.

works cited
Boulukos, George. The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British
and American Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008.
Boyle, Robert. Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours. London, 1664.

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