Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America by Sharon Block (review)
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Sharon Block's Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America is an important archival contribution to the study of racial formations in the British western Atlantic during the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Bringing to bear digital data mining methodologies on more than 4,000 advertisements for runaway servants and slaves in British North America from 1750–1775, Block elaborates eighteenth-century North American print culture as a dynamic site of what Barbara J. Fields calls "racecraft," or the processes by which societies imagine racial hierarchies and instantiate them in their cultures, economies, and jurisprudence. As scholarship of the western Atlantic continues to mature, Block's study offers a wealth of textual detail that advances the field's nuance while providing a rich data set for future inquiry.
Colonial Complexions is especially important because it studies the 25 years when, scholar Roxann Wheeler has argued, "skin color emerges as the most important component of racial identity in Britain" (The Complexion of Race, 9). Before this, Wheeler notes, race was multiply constructed across several categories of human difference: religion, place of origin, language, sumptuary law, dietary practices, and political custom (39). Block's major contributions to the scholarship of racial formations, then, are to (1) supply qualitative, British North American context for Wheeler's still-authoritative thesis; (2) emphasize that racecraft was a quotidian practice of a literate, property-owning, English-speaking elite with access to newspaper representation of their ideas about racial identity in a translatnatic market for runaway slaves and servants; and (3) show that the third quarter of the eighteenth century is an era when British settler colonialists were flattening the humanity of their (usually African-descended) slaves by portraying them in print as laboring bodies alone while emphasizing the life histories and personalities of their (usually European-descended) servants. Block's de-coupling of racial identity from the North American color binary of black and white, while affirming the radically [End Page 447] disproportionate effects of unfree labor on African-descended people in the early modern Atlantic economy, is a vital intervention in the scholarly record not least because it adds new archival contours to Eric Williams's 1944 thesis in Capitalism and Slavery that industrial Britain's plunder of Africa gave rise to colorist racism.
Composed of advertisements for missing servants and slaves, Block's archive is momentously at the nexus of embodied and labor theories of race. Colonial Complexions' central finding—that pre-color racial formations were an exercise in dehumanization that began through discrete erasures of individual histories when those individuals ran away from their labor arrangements—suggests important links between these two theories. Block's archive shows, for example, that erasures of African-descended peoples' individual histories are a sociohistorical effect of brutal western Atlantic labor regimes, which prompted slaves and servants to run away from their labor situations in the first place. Block also notes that the disproportionate erasures of African-descended people's lives are an effect of the difference in the Anglophone imaginary between free (usually European-descended) and unfree (usually African-descended) labor. While this distinction was sometimes practically unrealized (see, for example, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh's White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America [2008], Hilary McDonald Beckles's White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados: 1625–1715 [1989], and Simon P. Newman's A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic [2013]), the ideological distinction between free and unfree labor was crucial for the writers of Block's archive.
The following chapter summaries are for those readers interested in engaging with the particularities of Block's archival work. "Chapter One: Complicating Humors" situates colonial runaway advertisements in the context of Mary Floyd-Wilson's theory of geohumoralism, or the idea that bodily forms were understood by early modern Britons to have their source in local geo-aerial environment. Block confirms...
