In Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676, Joyce E. Chaplin seeks to answer if, and how, the English conquered America. In the process, she draws extensively on the work of Edward Said and Richard White. Looking at the role of natural philosophy, Chaplin writes, “There was a long delay between 1620, when [Sir Francis] Bacon might have suggested a causal relationship between science and empire, and the eighteenth century, when Europeans would accept that connection” (pg. 1). She concedes that the English viewed similarities between their own and the Indians’ role in nature, but with a key caveat, writing, “The English believed that they shared with Indians the task of subjecting nature to human control, but concluded that the truly inferior material entities in the Americas were the bodies of its native peoples, who were to be subjected to the English” (pg. 9). To that end, her book “reexamines what happened as the English colonized America and as theories of nature were being redefined in order to explore the connections between these developments without making an anachronistic argument about ‘science’ and empire” (pg. 11). In this way, she questions “the tendency of poststructural theory to portray colonizers as components of a cultural or linguistic field of containment, rather than as agents whose creativity and intentionality are worth serious consideration” (pg. 23-24). She concludes of the historiography, “Scholars’ premature differentiation of Europeans and Indians in the early modern era has assumed that a stereotypical pre-scientific ‘savage mind’ predated the Columbian encounter; rather, I will argue, it was a product of it” (pg. 28).
Examining the earliest phase of English colonization, Chaplin writes, “Three sets of ideas were especially relevant for colonizers: hypotheses about the physical nature of new territories, information about technology appropriate to the resources of new places, and assessments of the human bodies suited to these places” (pg. 14). To this end, “Demystifying nature, displaying bodily strength, and using technology all became measures of colonial power” (pg. 15). Chaplin describes the creation of racial identity, writing, “The English were not yet certain that human bodies were intrinsically (rather than superficially) different, nor that their technological abilities made them substantially different from Indians” (pg. 66). Most of the material comparing the English and Indians comes from war, as this was the most common cultural interface that “provided the main opportunity for ethnographic observation” (pg. 81). Chaplin writes, “Fascination with the enemy’s appearance (and weapons) thus operated as a pre-racial assessment of alien peoples; the English in America continued to scrutinize Indians’ bodies without yet concluding that they were intrinsically different from their own. This was a highly gendered comparison, specific to English constructions of masculinity and of war, that would contrast to later settlers’ concern with women and procreation” (pg. 84-85). Gender and the body thus play a key role in her examination. The English, desperate for an advantage in colonization and keenly aware of early Spanish efforts, turned to their physical countenance. Chaplin writes, “The English were finally finding the colonizing strength particular to their nation: their bodies. If other nations had had greater navigational prowess, better ability to discover mines, and swifter military control over native populations, the English could make up for lost time by planting themselves in America and breeding there” (pg. 116-117).
These understandings of nature and their intersection with government continued to develop through the seventeenth century, though the English used them to further justify their occupation of British North America. Chaplin writes, “Increasingly, the English used conceptions of nature as well as of the state to argue that people like the Chickahominy were not as natural to America as the colonists were. Interpretation of Indian reaction to European diseases grounded this claim, and reluctance to intermarry with natives evidenced fear that the weakness of Indian bodies might be passed on generationally” (pg. 157). At the same time, “Gender was particularly important to this perception [of native cultural hybridity]. Indian women’s acquisition of European technology and exchanges between Indian and English women were easy to represent positively, perhaps because for the English these actions seemed the antithesis of the military interface between native and colonial men and safer than sexual relations across cultural lines” (pg. 215). Finally, in terms of religion, “Condemnation of vitalism (the belief that spirit existed in all matter) gave English colonists a new way to criticize native beliefs” (pg. 284). Chaplin concludes that late seventeenth century “definitions of natural philosophy and native ignorance or weakness similarly implied that the superiority of knowledge among the English would work toward the ends of empire without the use of force” (pg. 316). ( )