Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society Boyle, Cavendish, Sift [Hardcover]

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 Cavendishs Blazing World and Swifts Gullivers Travels satirize the Societys emphasis on skin color.

PRIZE: Shortlisted for the British Society for Literature and Science Book Prize 2013

'... offers an original, nuanced, and deeply compelling investigation into the pre-history of modern understandings of race. ... Combining a meticulous attention to 17th century theories such as pre-Adamism and polygenesis with a careful regard to the institutional trappings of the new science, this study reveals how material practices, such as colonialism, gender politics and of course the brutalities of the slave trade, were bound up with the scientific practice of Boyle and others.' Patricia Cahill, Emory University, USA

'Studies of Skin Coloris an impressive addition to Ashgates excellent Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity series, demonstrating in depth for the first time the significant connections between seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science, commerce, colonialism, and slavery; and, perhaps more importantly, the unique capacity of l³-