‘Candid Reflections’
The Idea of Race in the Debate over the Slave Trade and Slavery in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20054735 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Peter J Kitson (0000-0001-8947-4859, corresponding author), Peter Kitson |
| Year | 2004 |
| Pages | 11-25 |
| Publication date | 2004-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Venue | Discourses of Slavery and Abolition (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1057/9780230522602_2 |
| OpenAlex | W4234551307 |
| ISBN | 9780230522602 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 3 |
The ‘race’ issue, the origins of the ‘race’ idea and its growth, articulation, and continued pervasiveness, is one that preoccupies a great deal of contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Historians of race and slavery have noted that there is a congruence between the development of a systematized sense of human difference in the natural sciences and the period of the most sustained debate about the validity and morality of the Atlantic slave trade. George Mosse has declared that ‘Eighteenth-century Europe was the cradle of modern racism’ and Roxann Wheeler has argued that a kind of paradigm shift occurs towards the end of the eighteenth century in ideas about the differences between peoples and cultures, one that signals a move from an interest in cultural to physical or bodily markers.1 When discussing slave trade discourse, Wheeler draws our attention to the paradoxical fact that ‘the anti-slave trade position relied more heavily on appeals to racial similarity than slavery advocates relied on appeals to racial difference’.2 This view is supported by the work of Philip Curtin who comments that ‘Men most connected with the slave trade, and even the West Indian planters ... were less inclined to emphasize racial factors than those who stayed in England.’3
Aesthetics · Art · Articulation (sociology) · Criticism · Morality · Political science · Race (biology) · Racism · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society
| Citations per year | 0.22 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2008 - 2023 (16) |
| Highly cited | No |