“Candid Reflections

In describing the natural world, Enlightenment and Romantic natural philosophers may well, for the most part, have been attempting to assert a Baconian objectivity and disinterestedness in their work in trying to describe the world as they saw it. With the privilege of hindsight we can see how their works were infiltrated with assumptions and prejudices about society, race, and gender that rendered their speculations and hypotheses anything but neutral and the belief that such neutrality was possible, illusory. However, what happens when such ideas are taken out of the arena of an allegedly objective science and are, instead, put into a polemical context in which they can be used as evidence for the support of a political or economic position? What happens when the participants in a debate have a vested interest in employing (or not employing) arguments that they may or may not believe, but the presence of which may convince others or their deliberate withholding may fail to prevent others from taking up a position? Historians of transatlantic slavery have long accepted the presence and importance of racial ideas in the debate about slavery and the slave trade and they have debated the nature of the relationship between capitalist expansion and the development of racial and racist ideologies.KeywordsSlave TradeBlack SkinAfrican SlaveHuman DifferenceRace ThinkingThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves

Race (biology) · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · History

• The Newtonian slave body

  James Delbourgo•Atlantic Studies•2012

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