Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 - Hardcover

Chaplin, Joyce E.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674004531 ISBN 13: 9780674004535

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2001

Synopsis

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 h

About this title

About the Author

Joyce E. Chaplin is Professor of History at Harvard University.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674004531
• ISBN 13: 9780674004535
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 428