In the late 18th century, planters in the Caribbean and the American South insisted that only Black people could labor on plantations, arguing that Africans, unlike Europeans, had bodies particularly suited to cultivate crops in hot climates.
Katherine Johnston’s The Nature of Slavery (Oxford Univ. Press, 2022) disrupts this longstanding claim about biological racial difference.
Drawing on extensive personal correspondence, colonial records, and a wealth of other sources, she reveals that planters observed no health differences between Black and white people. Yet when slavery and their economic livelihoods were at stake, slaveholders and slave traders promoted a climatic dichotomy, in which Africans’ and Europeans’ bodies differed significantly from one another.
By putting the health of enslaved laborers at significant risk, planters’ actions made environmental racism a central part of Atlantic slavery. White plantation owners contributed to historical myths about enslaved bodies that permeated the public imagination, became accepted as natural, and helped to construct and circulate a groundless theory of race across the Atlantic world.
Katherine Johnston is an Assistant Professor of History at Montana State University.
The Massachusetts Historical Society will host a virtual program with Katherine Johnston set for Wednesday, March 22nd. The program will begin at 6 pm and will be held both virtually and in person. Admission is $10 for in person attendance, free for virtual. For more information or to purchase tickets, click here.
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