Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society

Boyle, Cavendish, Swift

Cristina Malcolmson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317048909
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire pour la littérature comparée

Arguing that the early Royal Society moved science toward racialization by giving skin color a new prominence as an object of experiment and observation, Cristina Malcolmson provides the first book-length examination of studies of skin color in the Society. She also brings new light to the relationship between early modern literature, science, and the establishment of scientific racism in the nineteenth century. Malcolmson demonstrates how unstable the idea of race remained in England at the end of the seventeenth century, and yet how extensively the intertwined institutions of government, colonialism, the slave trade, and science were collaborating to usher it into public view. Malcolmson places the genre of the voyage to the moon in the context of early modern discourses about human difference, and argues that Cavendish's Blazing World and Swift's Gulliver's Travels satirize the Society's emphasis on skin color.

Chapter 1
Race and the Experimental Method in the Society

When Leonardo Magalotti toured the museum of the Royal Society on April 25, 1669, he found a few objects to be of special note:

Amongst these curiosities, the most remarkable are an ostrich, whose young were always born alike; an herb which grew in the stomach of a thrush; and the skin of a moor, tanned, with the beard and hair white; but more worthy of observation than all the rest, is a clock, whose movements are derived from the vicinity of a loadstone, and it is so adjusted as to discover the distance of countries, at sea, by the longitude.¹

Unlike most modern commentators on the museum, Magalotti actually points out the presence of “the skin of a moor,” but he shares with contemporary critics a preference for less disconcerting specimens. For him, like many scholars of the scientific revolution, it is the clock that best sums up the Royal Society’s new attitude toward nature as mechanical, as well as the prospective benefits that could result from this approach.² However, I will argue in this chapter 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 considering the topic. The Royal Society sent out questions about skin color in response to new colonies and trade-routes, and English travelers used the experimental method to mediate their relationships with other peoples. The method allowed Western witnesses to fix any instability of power into a contrast between an “impartial,” “indifferent” observer, and those observed, often known solely in terms of a physical body.

As Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park define it, the “collective empiricism” of the Royal Society did not include modern notions of objectivity, the disappearance of the observer, or a view from nowhere, which developed into the norm associated with machine-produced results in the mid-nineteenth century. Rather the empiricism of the early Royal Society required impartiality towards traditional explanations and authorities, and was built around special cases, wonders, marvels, monsters, which called into question accepted viewpoints. These special cases compelled naturalists to reassess traditional views and look for better explanations.³ In its pursuit of information on skin color, the Society began with the useful purpose of challenging beliefs in the curse of Ham and the climate theory. However it created a special case out of black skin, and thus featured in its museum the representation of an African evacuated of subjectivity, identity, or culture. The specimen of the “entire SKIN of a MOOR” was offered as a “curiosity” or “marvel” available to naturalists and tourists from 1669 until at least 1686, but probably throughout the early eighteenth century. The particulars that were the goal of the Society’s global acquisition of information dissociated the people they studied from their homeland, experience, and humanity, and reduced them to surfaces, and, eventually, to the stereotypes of the colonial and imperial project.

There is no question that some useful science was accomplished in the process; Sidney N. Klaus tells the story of how naturalists accumulated evidence about pigmentation during this period. However, Klaus’s goal to outline the achievements of “the Age of Discovery” relegates the more problematic aspects of the story to ironic asides.⁴ He never considers the possibility that the empirical approach developed at the time could be used to promote the vested interests of English naturalists. Klaus believes that “political and social forces” intruded into “the disciplines of anatomy and biology” only at the end of the eighteenth century, but the engagement of the members of the Royal Society in colonialism calls this into question.

I. Boyle on Colors

Boyle’s Experiments and Considerations touching Colours (1664) is considered a fundamental work in the development of British empiricism.⁵ Boyle included “Experiment XI” on “The Blackness of the Skin, and Hair of Negroes” in the volume to demonstrate that skin color was a topic that the new experimental method could usefully address.⁶ Boyle’s work on colors is valued in the history of optics because it affirmed accurately that objects are seen as white because they reflect all light, and objects are seen as black because they absorb all light.⁷ Perhaps written in the late l650s but published in 1664, it was an early example of what Francis Bacon had called for in the Novum Organum: data-collection and experiment that would free natural philosophy from Aristotelian traditions.⁸ Bacon writes, “For first of all we must prepare a Natural and Experimental History, sufficient and good; and this is the foundation of all; for we are not to imagine or suppose, but to discover, what nature does or may be made to do.”⁹ The latter half of this quotation appeared on the title page of Boyle’s work on colors.¹⁰ Bacon claims that observation and experiment must be the basis for any theory, and should replace theory as the first work of the naturalist. Similarly, Boyle states in his preface “That the professed Design of this Treatise is to deliver things rather Historical than Dogmatical”; that is, Boyle will offer particular examples and experiments rather than an overarching explanation for the cause of colors (p. 5).

Boyle seems to have Bacon’s Novum Organum in mind as he writes. The Novum Organum notes “whiteness” and “the nature of color” as issues that deserve rethinking using Bacon’s method. Recognizing that the project of data-collection he is proposing is “various and diffuse,” Bacon outlines several “instances,” or examples of the particular details he thought would lead to new understandings. As an example of a “Solitary Instance,” Bacon cites prisms, since it is unlike other things that produce color, like “flowers, coloured stones, metals, woods.” Bacon, like Boyle, seeks to refute Aristotle’s claim that color inhered in the object. That both prisms and flowers show color demonstrates, according to Bacon, that “colour is nothing more than a modification of the light received upon the object, resulting in the former case from the different degrees of incidence, in the latter from the various textures and configurations of the body.”¹¹ This is very similar to Boyle’s carefully worded view on the subject: “though this be at present the Hypothesis I preferr, yet I propose but in a General Sense, teaching only that the Beams of light, Modify’d by the Bodies whence they are sent (Reflected or Refracted) to the Eye, produce there that Kind of Sensation, Men commonly call Colour …”. (p. 59).

Boyle also follows Baconian methods in his chapter on skin color.¹² Just as the work as a whole refutes Aristotelian explanations for color, so “Experiment XI” disputes popular explanations for black skin color, particularly the curse of Ham and the climate theory, in which skin color was understood as a sign of temperament and the result of geography.¹³ In Boyle’s description of his method in the chapter, as well as the work as a whole, he uses his characteristic tentativeness:

The General Opinion [the climate theory] (to be mention’d a little lower) has been rejected even by some of the Antient Geographers, and among the Moderns Ortelius and divers other Learned Men have Question’d it. But this is no place to mention what thoughts I have had to and fro about these Matters: Only as I shall freely Acknowledge, that the Enquiry seems more Abstruse than it does to many others, and that because consulting with Authors, and Books of Voyages, and with Travellers, to satisfie my self in matters of Fact, I have met with some things among them, which seem not to agree very well with the Notions of the most Classick Authors concerning these things; for it being my Present Work to deliver rather matters Historical than Theorys, I shall Annex some few of my Collections, instead of a Solemn Disputation. (pp. 84–5)

A “Solemn Disputation” would be presented by an Aristotelian to prove a theory according to logic; Boyle uses “matters Historical,” or bits of information in travel narratives and conversations he has had with travelers, to consider the validity of prevailing theories. He is at all times careful not to generalize. It seems remarkable that he would state, “But this is no place to mention what thoughts I have had to and fro about these Matters,” since this seems to be exactly what he is doing. However, his point seems to be that, while he will restrain himself at this point in the chapter from divulging any theories he might have developed, he is “freely” and openly acknowledging his doubts about the opinions of the “most Classic Authors.”

Boyle organizes the chapter through the collection of “matters of fact” rather than governing theories. Historians of science Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have identified this method as fundamental to the Royal Society in their study of Boyle’s experiments with the air-pump.¹⁴ However, for Daston and Park, information gained from “experimental manipulation” is not as important as what Daston calls “Baconian facts”:

What chiefly distinguishes the new empiricism of facts from the old empiricism of experience was not experiment but the sharp distinction between a datum of experience, experimental or observational, and any inference drawn from it.¹⁵

Boyle makes this very point by entitling his chapter on skin color, “Experiment XI.” This is probably a joke, since he admits at the end that “it is high time for me to dismiss Observations, and go on with Experiments” (p. 93). But the chapter uses the same method as the rest of his chapters on experiments since it privileges matters of fact over “any inference drawn from it.” In Thomas Sprat’s account of the Society’s experiments in The History of the Royal-Society of London For the Improving of Natural Knowledge (1667), Sprat spends two sentences on the experiment, and sixteen pages in describing the process of sharing general knowledge before the experiment, and discussing it afterwards “to judg, and to resolve upon the matter of Fact.”¹⁶

In “Experiment XI,” Boyle gathers evidence that suggests the problems with the climate theory: people in the same latitude have different complexions, African children turn black without exposure to the sun, transplanted black Africans do not lose their color, groups of people on two sides of the same river have different complexions. So with the theory of the curse of Ham: the Bible does not identify the cursed Cham with black skin, Africans consider whiteness not blackness a curse, standards of beauty are relative.

Boyle may find “The Blackness of the Skin, and Hair of Negroes” to be an example of what Bacon calls “Singular Instances.” According to Bacon, “They are such as exhibit bodies in the concrete, which seem to be out of the course and broken off from the order of nature, and not agreeing with other bodies of the same kind.”¹⁷ Boyle opens Experiment XI by claiming that inquiries into the cause of black skin should have considered why some animals in a particular species have black fur: “why some whole races of other Animals besides Men, as Foxes and Hares, are Distinguished by a Blackness not familiar to the Generality of Animals of the same Species …”. (p. 84). Although this line of thought affirms that blackness is natural, and undermines the curse of Ham, or what Boyle calls a “supernatural cause,” the formulation also describes blackness as not general, but special, unfamiliar, uncharacteristic of the bulk or majority of people. By “not familiar,” Boyle might be using the word not only to mean unknown or uncommon, but also in its earlier meaning of not “pertaining to one’s family or household,” that is, set apart ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Race and the Experimental Method in the Society
• 2 Discussions of Race and the Emergence of Polygenesis in the Society
• 3 Boyle, Biblical Monogenesis, and Slavery
• 4 Race, Gender, and the Response to Boyle in Cavendish’s Blazing World
• 5 Race, Gender, and the Imagination in the Philosophical Transactions
• 6 Gulliver’s Travels and Studies of Skin Color in the Society
• Conclusion: The Royal Society and Atlantic Studies
• Appendix: Jonathan Swift’s Debt to Margaret Cavendish
• Bibliography
• Index