The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

  13 J. H. Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from Its Origins to 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 11, 22–23; J. H. Galloway, “The Mediterranean Sugar Industry,” Geographical Review 67, no. 2 (April 1977): 180–81, 189–90.

  14 Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985), 23–24, 28.

  15 Blackburn, “Old World Background to European Colonial Slavery,” 83–84, and Galloway, “Mediterranean Sugar Industry,” 180–90.

  16 See Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, 56.

  17 Galloway, Sugar Cane Industry, 27, 31, 32, 42. Historians disagree on the degree to which Mediterranean slavery and Latin American–Caribbean slavery resembled each other. While Blackburn stresses the differences between the two slaveries, in scale permitted by plantation agriculture and capitalist processing and distribution and in ideology, Galloway and Mintz emphasize the similarities.

  18 See Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 76–77.

  19 Ibid., 84–85.

  20 Ibid., 76, 171.

  21 Ibid., 114–15.

  22 Historical Encyclopedia of Slavery, 369.

  23 See Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 236, A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 125, and Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988), xiv.

  24 Ekirch, Bound for America, 1, 26–27, 135, 139, 193; Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, Eighteenth Century Criminal Transportation: The Formation of the Criminal Atlantic (Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave, 2004), 5, 7, 1; David W. Galenson, “Indentured Servitude,” in A Historical Guide to World Slavery, ed. Seymour Drescher and Stanley L. Engerman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 239.

  25 See Michael A. Hoffman II, They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America, 4th ed. (Coeur d’Alene, Idaho: Independent History & Research Co., 1991), 6, 14, 39.

  CHAPTER 4: WHITE SLAVERY AS BEAUTY IDEAL

  1 François Bernier, “A New Division of the Earth,” originally published anonymously in Journal des Sçavans, 24 April 1684, trans. T. Bendyshe, in Memoirs Read before the Anthropological Society of London 1 (1863–64): 360–64, in The Idea of Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi and Tommy L. Lott (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), 2–4.

  2 This information comes from an audio recording of Dirk van der Cruysse speaking at the University of Paris IV (Sorbonne) on 13 Feb. 1999, available through the website of the Centre de Recherche sur la Littérature des Voyages, at http://www.crlv.org/outils/encyclopedie/afficher.php?encyclopedie_id=13. See also van der Cruysse, Chardin le Persan (Paris: Editions Fayard, 1998). The discussion of improving Persians’ looks through intermarriage with Georgians and Circassians is at http://www.iranian.com/Travelers/ June97/Chardin/index.shtml. See also Georgette Legée, “Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840): La Naissance de l’anthropologie à l’epoque de la Révolution Française,” in Scientifiques et sociétés pendant la Révolution et l’Empire (Paris: Editions du CTHS, 1990), 403.

  3 Journal du Voyage du Chevalier Chardin en Perse & aux Indes Orientales, par la Mer Noire & par la Colchide (The Travels of Sir John Chardin into Persia and the East Indies, 1673–1677) (London: Moses Pitt, 1686), 78, 81–82. My translation.

  4 Ibid., 70, 77, 80, 82.

  5 Ibid., 105–6, 82–83.

  6 Ibid., 105.

  7 Ibid., 183, 204–5.

  8 http://kaukasus.blogspot.com/ 2007/04/young- georgian-girl.htm and http://www.flickr.com/photos/ 24298774@N00/108738272, http://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Image:Ossetiangirl1883.jpg, Corliss Lamont, The Peoples of the Soviet Union (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946), facing 79.

  9 See Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 129–39, and “The Anatomy of Difference: Race and Sex in Eighteenth-Century Science,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 23, no. 4 (Summer 1990): 401.

  10 See Pierre H. Boulle, “François Bernier and the Origins of the Modern Concept of Race,” in The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, ed. Sue Peabody and Tyler Edward Stovall (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 11.

  11 See Amjad Jaimoukha, The Circassians: A Handbook (Richmond, UK: Curzon, 2001), 16, 168–69.

  12 Oxford English Dictionary Online, http/dictionary.oed.com/cgi/ entry/00330118= 3fsingle=3d1&query _type=3dword&queryword =3dodalisque&first =3d1&max_to_show=3d10.

  13 Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1763), trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 89.

  14 Johann Gottfried von Herder, Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity (1:256), quoted in Cedric Dover, “The Racial Philosophy of Johann Herder,” British Journal of Sociology 3, no. 2 (June 1952): 127 (emphasis in original).

  15 Edward Daniel Clarke, Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia and Africa (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1810–23), 1:35–36.

  16 Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 55–56, 120, 193, 162, 202, 536–39, 605.

  17 See “Horrible Traffic in Circassian Women—Infanticide in Turkey,” New York Daily Times, 6 Aug. 1856, http://chnm.gmu.edu/lostmuseum/lm/311/. See “Letter from P. T. Barnum to John Greenwood, 1864,” http://chnm.gmu.edu/lostmuseum/lm/312. Barnum exhibited a woman purported to be a Circassian beauty and example of racial purity in 1865. This information comes from “The Lost Museum” website of American Social History Productions, Inc., George Mason University and the City University of New York. See also Sarah Lewis, “Effecting Incredulity: Comic Retraction as Racial Critique in the Circassian Beauty Spectacle,” paper given at the 20th James A. Porter Colloquium on African American Art, Howard University, 18 April 2009.

  18 Classic Encyclopedia Online, http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Circassia.

  19 See Joan DelPlato, Multiple Wives, Multiple Pleasures: Representing the Harem, 1800–1875 (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), 22–25, 230–39, and Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” in The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 33–59.

  20 Stephen Railton and the University of Virginia, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture, http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/sentimnt/grslvhp.html.

  21 See Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” Art in America 71, no. 5 (May 1983): 126.

  22 See Reina Lewis, “‘Oriental’ Femininity as Cultural Commodity: Authorship, Authority, and Authenticity,” in Edges of Empire: Orientalism and Visual Culture, ed. Mary Roberts and Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005), 95–120.

  23 Orientalist scholarship has continued to explore the European gaze in art and literature and the ways its subjects have looked back. See, e.g., Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996), Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem (London: Tauris, 2004), and Orientalism’s Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography, ed. J. Beaulieu and Mary Roberts (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).

  24 See Lewis “‘Oriental’ Femininity,” 100.

  25 According to the website, it is dedicated to “the memories of the Circassian Genocide victims exiled from their land by Russian Empire.” See http://www.circassianworld.com/About_Site.html.

  CHAPTER 5: THE WHITE BEAUTY IDEAL AS SCIENCE

  1 This discussion draws heavily on Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). Also useful were Walter Pater, “Winckelmann,” in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973), E. M. Butler, The Tyran
ny of Greece over Germany: A Study of the Influence Exercised by Greek Art and Poetry over the Great German Writers of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries (New York: Macmillan, 1935), and Edouard Pommier, Winckelmann, inventeur de l’histoire de l’art (Paris: Gallimard, 2003). For a modern consideration of the hard, cold ideal body, see Leslie Heywood, Dedication to Hunger: The Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture (Berkeley: University of California, 1996).

  2 See Sander Gilman, On Blackness without Blacks: Essays on the Image of the Black in Germany (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 26, Potts, Flesh and the Ideal, 160–61, and Steven Daniel deCaroli, “Go Hither and Look: Aesthetics, History and the Exemplary in Late Eighteenth-Century Philosophy” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Binghamton, 2001), 248–316.

  3 David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 89–90.

  4 See Pater, “Winckelmann,” in The Renaissance, 191–92. See also Michael Bronski, “The Male Body in the Western Mind,” Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review 5, no. 4: 28–30, and “Greek Revival: The Implications of Polychromy” and Thomas Noble Howe, “Greece, Ancient: Architectural Decoration, Colour,” both Grove Art Online, http://www.groveart.com/shared/views/article.Html?section=art.034254.2.2.3.3. See also Miles Unger, “That Classic White Sculpture Once Had a Paint Job,” New York Times, 14 Oct. 2007, Art 35, and Penelope Dimitriou, “The Polychromy of Greek Sculpture: To the Beginning of the Hellenistic Period,” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1951), 1–15.

  5 A. D. Potts, “Greek Sculpture and Roman Copies: Anton Raphael Mengs and the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 43 (1980): 150–51, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, de Kooning: An American Master (New York: Knopf, 2004), 67, 102.

  6 A history of the various controversial cleanings of the Parthenon sculptures appears in two versions by Ian Jenkins, The 1930s Cleaning of the Parthenon Sculptures in the British Museum, http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/ parthenon/indes.html, and Cleaning and Controversy: The Parthenon Sculptures 1811–1939, British Museum Occasional Paper no. 146 (2001).

  7 Potts, Flesh and the Ideal, 17; Pater, “Winckelmann,” 185, 192; Butler, Tyranny of Greece over Germany, 28–34, 42–43.

  8 E. M. Butler concluded that “the Germans have imitated the Greeks more slavishly; they have been obsessed by them more utterly, and they have assimilated them less than any other race. The extent of the Greek influence is incalculable throughout Europe; its intensity is at its highest in Germany.” Tyranny of Greece over Germany, 6.

  9 Johann Kaspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, vol. 2, part 2, 362, 369.

  10 Bindman, Ape to Apollo, 95, 118, 123.

  11 Miriam Claude Meijer, Race and Aesthetics in the Anthropology of Petrus Camper (1722–1789) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 97–115, Stephen Jay Gould, “Petrus Camper’s Angle,” Natural History, July 1987, pp. 12–18.

  12 Charles White, An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, and in Different Animals and Vegetables; and from the Former to the Latter (London, 1799), 134–35. See also Angela Rosenthal, “Visceral Culture: Blushing and the Legibility of Whiteness in Eighteenth-Century British Portraiture,” Art History 27, no. 4 (Sept. 2004): 567–68, 572–74, 578.

  CHAPTER 6: JOHANN FRIEDRICH BLUMENBACH NAMES WHITE PEOPLE “CAUCASIAN”

  1 K. F. H. Marx, “Zum Andenken an Johann Friedrich Blumenbach,” in The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach…With Memoirs of Him by Marx and Flourens and an Account of His Anthropological Museum by Professor R. Wagner, and the Inaugural Dissertation of John Hunter, M.D., on the Varieties of Man, trans. Thomas Bendyshe (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1865), 26–27. See Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 56; Tore Frängsmyr, “Introduction,” in Linnaeus: The Man and His Work, ed. Tore Frängsmyr, rev. ed. (Canton: Mass.: Science History Publications, 1994 [originally published 1983]), ix; and Luigi Marino, Praeceptores Germaniae: Göttingen 1770–1820 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995), 48–52, 74.

  2 See Patricia Fara, Sex, Botany and Empire: The Story of Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2003).

  3 David M. Knight, Science in the Romantic Era (Aldershhot, UK: Ashgate Variorum, 1998), x; F. W. P. Dougherty, ed., Commercivm Epistolicvm J. F. Blvmenbachii: Aus einem Briefwechsel des Klassischen Zeitalters der Naturgeschichte: Katalog zur Ausstellung im Foyer der Niedersächsischen Staats-und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen 1. Juni–21. Juni 1984 (Göttingen: Göttingen University, 1984), 116.

  4 Rudolph Wagner, “On the Anthropological Collection of the Physiological Institute of Göttingen” (Göttingen, 1856), in Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, 384.

  5 Stefano Fabbri Bertoletti, “The Anthropological Theory of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach,” in Romanticism in Science: Science in Europe, 1790–1840, ed. Stefano Poggi and Maurizio Bossi (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1994), 111–13.

  6 On the Natural Variety of Mankind, 3rd ed. (1795), in Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, 227, 214.

  7 On the Natural Variety of Mankind, 1st ed. (1775), in Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, 116–17.

  8 See Comte de Buffon, Histoire naturelle, généralle et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roy, vol. 3, “Variétés dans l’Espèce Humaine,” 373, 380, 384, http://www.buffon.cnrs.fr/ice/ice_book_detail.php?lang=fr&type=text&bdd=buffon&table =buffon_hn&bookId=3&typeofbookId=1&num=0.

  9 On the Natural Variety of Mankind, 1st ed. (1775), 122.

  10 Ibid,. 99–100. See also Michael Charles Carhart, “The Writing of Cultural History in Eighteenth-Century Germany” (Ph.D. Diss., Rutgers University, 1999), 38–39.

  11 On the Natural Variety of Mankind, 3rd ed. (1795), 226–27.

  12 Blumenbach also added the name “Mongolian” in the third edition. See Michael Keevak, How East Asians Became Yellow (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming).

  13 On the Natural Variety of Mankind, 3rd ed. (1795), 209.

  14 Ibid., 229, 264–65.

  15 This is the language Johann Friedrich Blumenbach quotes in a footnote in the third edition (1795) of On the Natural Variety of Mankind. Chardin, vol. 1, p. 171, in Thomas Bendyshe, trans. and ed., The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (London: Anthropological Society, 1865), 269.

  16 Marx, “Zum Andenken an Johann Friedrich Blumenbach,” 30 n. 1.

  17 Dougherty, ed., Commercivm Epistolicvm J. F. Blvmenbachii, 76, 114–16, 148, 150, 171, and Helmut Rohlfing, ed., “Ganz Vorzügliche und Unvergeßliche Verdienste”—Georg Thomas von Asch als Förderer der Universität Göttingen (Niedersächsiche Staats-und Universitätsbibliothek: Göttingen, 1998), 2–3; and Rolf Siemon, “Soemmerring, Forster und Goethe: ‘Naturkundliche Begegnungen’ in Göttingen und Kassel”, http://www.sub.uni-goettingen.de/archiv/ausstell/1999/soemmerring.pdf.

  18 For a thoughtful discussion of the position of the people of the Caucasus in the Russian context, see Bruce Baum, The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2006), chap. 7: “‘Where Caucasian Means Black’: ‘Race,’ Nation, and the Chechen Wars,” 192–233. Baum’s book traces the history of the term “Caucasian” in racial, political, and geographic ideology.

  19 F. W. P. Dougherty, the Canadian-born editor of Blumenbach’s correspondence and papers in Göttingen, died in the mid-1990s, leaving the project incomplete and Blumenbach’s personal life inaccessible.

  20 The quoted phrase comes from Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 193.

  21 See Suzanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 67–68.

  22 See Luigi Marino, Praeceptores Germaniae: Göttingen 177
0–1820 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995), 112–16.

  23 See Britta Rupp-Eisenreich, “Des choses occultes en histoire des sciences humaines: Le Destin de la ‘Science Nouvelle’ de Christoph Meiners,” L’Ethnographie 2 (1983): 151. See also Frank W. P. Dougherty, “Christoph Meiners und Johann Friedrich Blumenbach im Streit um den Begriff der Menschenrasse,” in Die Natur des Menschen: Probleme der physischen Anthropologie und Rassenkunde (1750–1850), ed. Gunther Mann and Franz Dumont (Stuttgart: Fischer, 1990), 103–4, Marino, Praeceptores Germaniae, 111–14, and Suzanne Zantop, “The Beautiful, the Ugly, and the German: Race, Gender and Nationality in Eighteenth-Century Anthropological Discourse,” in Gender and Germanness: Cultural Productions of Nation, ed. Patricia Herminghouse and Magda Mueller (Providence, R.I.: Berghahn Books, 1997), 23–26.

  24 See Zantop, “The Beautiful, the Ugly, and the German,” 28–29, and Colonial Fantasies, 87–90.