Title
Subject Matter / Joyce E. CHAPLIN.
ISBN
9780674029439
Published
Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2022]
Copyright
©2001
Language
English
Language Note
In English.
Description
1 online resource (425 p.)
Other Standard Identifiers
10.4159/9780674029439 doi
Call Number
E46 ǂb C48 2001eb
Alternate Call Number
TB 2355
Dewey Decimal Classification
973.2
Summary
With this sweeping reinterpretation of early cultural encounters between the English and American natives, Joyce E. Chaplin thoroughly alters our historical view of the origins of English presumptions of racial superiority, and of the role science and technology played in shaping these notions. By placing the history of science and medicine at the very center of the story of early English colonization, Chaplin shows how contemporary European theories of nature and science dramatically influenced relations between the English and Indians within the formation of the British Empire. In Chaplin's account of the earliest contacts, we find the English--impressed by the Indians' way with food, tools, and iron--inclined to consider Indians as partners in the conquest and control of nature. Only when it came to the Indians' bodies, so susceptible to disease, were the English confident in their superiority. Chaplin traces the way in which this tentative notion of racial inferiority hardened and expanded to include the Indians' once admirable mental and technical capacities. Here we see how the English, beginning from a sense of bodily superiority, moved little by little toward the idea of their mastery over nature, America, and the Indians--and how this progression is inextricably linked to the impetus and rationale for empire.
Access Note
Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics
text file PDF
Source of Description
Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 31. Jan 2022)
Frontmatter
Contents
Tables and Figures
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Noses, or The Tip of the Problem
PART ONE. Approaching America, 1500-1585
CHAPTER ONE. Transatlantic Background
CHAPTER TWO. Technology versus Idolatry?
PART TWO. Invading America, 1585-1660
CHAPTER THREE. No Magic Bullets: Archery, Ethnography, and Military Intelligence
CHAPTER FOUR. Domesticating America
CHAPTER FIVE. Death and the Birth of Race
PART THREE. Conquering America, 1640-1676
CHAPTER SIX. How Improvement Trumped Hybridity
CHAPTER SEVEN. Gender and the Artificial Indian Body
CHAPTER EIGHT. Matter and Manitou
Coda
Notes
Index
