Bodies politic: Colonialism, race and the emergence of the American North. Rhode Island, 1730-1830. (Volumes I and II)

The American North emerged in the early years of the republic as a place where people of color would be free, but not equal. The shifting complex of racial identities that evolved over a century and a half of colonialism continued after the Revolution to modulate social relations, cultural meanings, and personal senses of self. Central to my thesis is an awareness that the category race is inherently ahistorical: race reduces the complexity and contingency of experience to a false notion of an immutable nature. Consequently I can ask, How did the various people whose lives converged in the English colonies come to conceive of themselves as embodiments of discrete, continentally configured, classes of mankind? How did the body come to demarcate a people or disclose the truth of their character? I ground my answers in the history of eighteenth-century Rhode Island, where a significant number of Narragansett and Africans lived among the English majority.;Using principally legal records, private correspondence, and institutional records, I analyze the complex configurations of culture, power, and identity produced by the coming together of the Narragansett as a conquered people, the English as colonial settlers, and Africans as slaves. I begin in the early eighteenth century with settlement and religion to explore the ways in which differences in culture and status shaped the development of racial identities. I argue that Anglicization ironically reinforced perceived racial differences. Then I turn to slavery, abolition, and sexuality to explore how racial identities structured relations of power. I close with a chapter on racial jokes and an epilogue on the development of racial segregation to show how the colonial legacy of race continued to suffuse the bodies, lives, and minds of all citizens of the new Republic.;If the North and the South divided over the politics of slavery in the early nineteenth century, they remained united by the presumed realities of race. Constant affirmations of racial distinctions in the daily routines of work, religion, family, and politics, characterized and unified the post-Revolutionary polity. Indeed, the colonial legacy of white supremacy was integral to the development of American democracy.