Read The History of White People Online
Authors: Nell Irvin Painter
Tags: #History, #Politics, #bought-and-paid-for, #Non-Fiction, #Sociology
The History of White People (7 page)
A first shipment of 100 homeless children landed in Virginia around Easter in 1619, some four months before the arrival of “20 and odd Negroes” became the symbolic ancestry of African Americans. And so it went, with Africans and Britons, both ostensibly indentured servants, living under complete control of their masters, subject to sale as chattel at any time. The Virginia Company, ever entrepreneurial, also transported poor women on “bridal boats,” selling them in Virginia and Maryland for 120 pounds of tobacco. At this point in the seventeenth century, Britons, male and female, outnumbered Africans in American tobacco fields; even by the middle of the century, when Virginia’s population of settlers numbered about 11,000, only some 300 were African. Any of them—African, British, Scottish, or Irish—were lucky to outlive their terms of service. Of the 300 children shipped from Britain between 1619 and 1622, only 12 were still alive in 1624.
20
Most of those forcibly transported ended up in the Chesapeake area, but Massachusetts harbored its share of the unfree. One-fifth of the early New England Puritans were indentured servants, including eight who died while crossing on the
Mayflower
in 1620. John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts, philosophized in 1630 that “God Almighty in His most holy and wise providence hath so disposed of the condition of mankind as in all times some must be rich, some poor; some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in subjection.” Puritans “mean and in subjection,” like all the other unfortunates of any race, could be and were sold into bondage in Virginia.
21
Oliver Cromwell’s government had begun sending people abroad as indentured servants as a means of putting down an Irish Catholic insurrection, sending some 12,000 political prisoners to Barbados between 1648 and 1655, where voluntary indentured servants had been going since 1627.
22
Field laborer was the role of a white underclass in seventeenth-century North America.
It was a handsome business, this transport of the unwilling. And it endured. Faced with an overflowing prison population, Parliament passed the Transportation Act in 1718, allowing for the removal of convicts to the North American colonies. Tens of thousands were corralled under the act, convicts seen as scarcely human, already known as “crackers,” and routinely labeled “scum and dregs.”
23
Benjamin Franklin, an eloquent spokesman for the colonists’ loathing, proposed that in return for the convicts, Americans send the mother country a like number of rattlesnakes. Between the beginnings of the trade and its ending during the American Revolution, some 50,000 convicts were forcibly transported to British North America.
24
Shortly after American independence, Britain, in need of another outlet, began shipping its convicts—some 160,000 before 1868, when the practice ceased—to Australia, continuing the process for another ninety years.
In sum, before an eighteenth-century boom in the African slave trade, between one-half and two-thirds of all early white immigrants to the British colonies in the Western Hemisphere came as unfree laborers, some 300,000 to 400,000 people.
25
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The eighteenth century created the now familiar equation that converts race to black and black to slave.
A
s the eighteenth-century science of race developed in Europe, influential scholars referred to two kinds of slavery in their anthropological works. Nearly always those associated with brute labor—Africans and Tartars primarily—emerged as ugly, while the luxury slaves, those valued for sex and gendered as female—the Circassians, Georgians, and Caucasians of the Black Sea region—came to figure as epitomes of human beauty. By the nineteenth century, “odalisques,” or white slave women, often appear young, naked, beautiful, and sexually available throughout European and American art. (The odalisque still plays her role as the nude in art history, though her part in the scientific history of white race has largely been forgotten.)
Needless to say, this early scholarship was ethnographically imprecise, pairing as it did Africans with Tartars (increasingly termed Kalmucks) on the ugly side. But, clearly, figuring some as ugly and some as beautiful seemed much more important than ethnographical consistency. The relationship between slavery and racial classification brings the beauty ideal squarely into the history of whiteness.
Note the earliest known human classification scheme, “Nouvelle division de la terre par les différentes espèces ou races qui l’habitent” (“A New Division of the Earth and the Different Species or Races Living There),” originally published anonymously in April 1684 in
Journal des Sçavans
, the journal of the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris. The author turned out to be François Bernier (1625–88), a French traveler and personal physician to the last important Mughal (Persian) emperor of India. Bernier put forward an idiosyncratic taxonomy, one keying on four geographical divisions. It was really no odder than the thousands of other racial schemes to follow.
As usual in Western literature, Bernier’s four races give pride of place to Europe and extend over a vast area, including North Africa and Asia as far away as Thailand and Indonesia. (For some reason, “a part of Muscovy,” i.e., the area around Moscow, is excluded.) More oddly, American Indians belong to Bernier’s first, mostly European species. In the second species are people in sub-Saharan Africa, and in the third are those in Muscovy, part of southeast Asia, China, and the vast lands between China and Russia, including Tartars, all around the Fertile Crescent, and into the Levant. Georgians, Muscovites, Tartars, Usbeks, and Turcomans all belong to the third species. Alone in the fourth species are the Lapps. (Race theoreticians stumbled continually over what to do with the Lapps.)
Why such a weird configuration? At least part of Bernier’s answer seems to lie in physical appearance. In skin color, the third people (Asians) are “truly white, but they have broad shoulders, a flat face, a small squab nose, little pig’s-eyes long and deep set, and three hairs of a beard.” The Lapps are “little stunted creatures with thick legs, large shoulders, short neck, and a face elongated immensely; very ugly and partaking much of the bear.”
Veering off toward sexual desire, Bernier dedicates more than half his paper to the relative beauty of women, employing phrases that became commonplace and ideas fated for oblivion. Showing a certain relativism, Bernier admits that each people will have its hierarchy of beautiful and ugly women, but, he insists, some peoples really are better looking than others: “You have heard so much said [already of] the beauty of the Greeks,” he says, and “all the Levantines and all the travelers” agree that “the handsomest women of the world are to be found…[among the] immense quantity of slaves who come to them from Mingrelia, Georgia, and Circassia.” Nothing beyond the commonplace so far. But Bernier continues, speaking, he says, only for himself: “I have never seen anything more beautiful” than the naked black slave girls for sale at Moka, in the Indian Ocean off the coast of East Africa.
1
While Bernier’s paper appeared in a prestigious journal and laid a lot of groundwork, its brevity soon consigned it to history’s footnotes. A longer travel account by Jean Chardin appearing five years later gained much wider circulation. Its depiction of the beautiful white slave echoes through the ages.
J
EAN
-B
APTISTE
C
HARDIN
(1643–1713)—also known as Sir John Chardin—a French Protestant (Huguenot) whose family were jewelers to the court of Louis XIV, traveled routinely to Persia and India in the 1670s and 1680s seeking rare baubles for the French royal household.
*
His two-volume account
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
) (1689) describes a trip that deviated from his usual route. Preventing his going via Venice through Constantinople to Asia Minor, local disputes rerouted Chardin north of Constantinople through the wilds of the Caucasus (today’s Chechnya) and Georgia. In the seventeenth century, this was untamed country, according to Chardin the lands of “people without Religion, & without Police.” A scientist at heart, he took meticulous notes while racked by constant fear.
2
Chardin loathed this chaotic Black Sea region, where brigands controlled the highways, often threatening his goods, his freedom, and his life. As he says of the Circassians,
†
“it is impossible for them to glimpse an opportunity for thievery without taking advantage of it.” They eat with their hands, go to the bathroom right next to where they eat, and then continue eating without washing.
3
Chardin is totally disgusted.
The habits of the Mingrelians (Caucasian people on the northeast coast of the Black Sea) are vile. They “and their neighbors are huge drunkards, worse than the Germans and all the northern Europeans when it comes to drink.” Not only do Mingrelians consider assassination, murder, and incest as admirable traits, they steal each other’s wives without compunction. The women are not much better; they wear too much makeup, and their bodily stench overcomes whatever amorous intention their appearance might have inspired. “These people are complete savages,” Chardin rails. “They used to be Christians, but now they have no Religion at all. They live in wooden cabins and go around practically naked…. The only people who go there are slave traders.”
4
The hugely profitable slave trade powered the Black Sea economy. Turks made the money, but Mingrelians supplied the goods. Chardin deplores Mingrelians’ unbelievable “inhumanity—their cruelty toward their compatriots and even people of their own blood…. They sell their wives and children, kidnap the children of their neighbors, and do the same thing. They even sell their own children, their wives, and their mothers.” Chardin was appalled to find “these miserable creatures were not beaten down; they seemed not to feel the tragedy of their condition…. Knowing their value as slaves, women are erotically adept and entirely shameless when it comes to the language of love.”
5
And a precise value it is, too. The cargo of Chardin’s Black Sea vessel sold according to an erotic price scale. Pretty girls aged thirteen to eighteen went for twenty crowns,
*
plainer girls for less. Women went for twelve crowns, children for three or four. Men aged twenty-five to forty sold for fifteen crowns, those older for only eight or ten. A Greek merchant whose room was near Chardin’s bought a woman and her baby at the breast for twelve crowns.
The woman was twenty-five years old, with a smooth, even, lily-white complexion and admirably beautiful features. I have never before seen such beautifully rounded breasts. That beautiful woman inspired overall sensations of desire and compassion.
6
This particular scene was destined for greatness, but Chardin found other lovely faces and figures among the people of the Caucasus mountains and, especially, in Georgia.
The blood of
Georgia
is the most beautiful in the Orient, & I would have to say in the world, for I’ve never noticed an ugly face of either sex in this country, and some are downright Angelic. Nature has endowed most of the women with graces not to be seen in any other place. I have to say it is impossible to look at them without falling in love with them. No more charming faces and no more lovely figures than those of the
Georgians
could serve to inspire painters. They are tall, graceful, slender, and poised, and even though they don’t wear many clothes, you never see bulges. The only thing that spoils them is that they wear makeup, and the prettier they are, the more makeup they wear, for they think of makeup as a kind of ornament.
7
The enduring legend of beautiful white slave women—Circassians, Georgians, Caucasians—dates from Chardin’s seventeenth century. (See figure 4.1, “Young Georgian Girl,” and figure 4.2, “Ossetian Girl.”) However a twentieth-century photo of Georgians shows them as fairly ordinary looking people. (See figure 4.3, Georgians in Tbilisi.)
8
In fairly short order, Chardin’s unflattering descriptions of squalid and smelly Caucasians would fade from race theory, but his image of the powerless, young, disrobed female slave on the Black Sea acquired eugenical power.
9
So well received was the work as a whole that
The Travels of Sir John Chardin into Persia and the East Indies, 1673–1677
gained its author membership in the newly founded Royal Society of London.
10
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Within fifty years, Chardin’s erotic figure had invaded Western art, whose preferred term, “odalisque,” derives from the Turkish
odalk
, meaning “harem room.” Georgian, Circassian, and Caucasian were interchangeable names for the figure. Each term refers to young white slave women, and each carries with it the aura of physical attractiveness, submission, and sexual availability—in a word, femininity.
11
She cannot be free, for her captive status and harem location lie at the core of her identity.
12
Fig. 4.1. “Young Georgian Girl,” 1881.
Along with a number of others, the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) picked up this theme. Living in northeastern Germany, now part of Poland, Kant put forward his own ideas of race in
Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen
(
Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime
, 1763). Here Kant actually attacks the idea that standards of human beauty may differ by culture. Beauty ideals are universal, he maintains, for “the sort of beauty we have called the
pretty figure
is judged by all men very much alike.” Cueing on Chardin, Kant agrees that “Circassian and Georgian maidens have always been considered extremely pretty by all Europeans who travel through their lands,” as well as by Turks, Arabs, and Persians. He even picks up Chardin’s statement that Persians beautify their offspring through connection with slave women and deplores the fact that great fortunes could arise from a “wicked commerce in such beautiful creatures” sold to “self-indulgent rich men.”
13
Only one ambivalence appears in Kant’s analysis: the progeny of such unethical unions often turned out to be beautiful, and clearly, Kant concludes, Turks, Arabs, and Persians (Kant lumps them together in ugliness) could use a lot of genetic help.
