Race Matters in the Colonial South‪.‬

WHEN EUROPEANS BEGAN COLONIZING THE SOUTHERN STRETCH OF NORTH America in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they had been thinking and writing about Indians and Africans for at least a hundred years. As Europeans hungered for Indian lands and African labor, their ethnocentric notions of cultural difference were transformed into ideas of immutable, inheritable, racial difference. From Jamestown to St. Augustine, Charleston to Santa Fe, North American colonizers drew upon ideas circulating throughout the early modern Atlantic world to identify and signify differences that were then used to organize and justify social hierarchies and determine access to economic, political, and social rights. While Europeans shared ideas about Africans and Indians, each of the various groups of Europeans had specific colonial goals, and the circumstances they encountered varied across the South. As a result, the racial orders that emerged by the end of the colonial period were quite distinct. And just as material realities influenced how officials and elites decided whether and, if so, how to incorporate Indian and African bodies into their social orders, North Americans of all ancestries similarly made pragmatic decisions about how race would shape their lives. In recent decades we have learned much about racial ideas and their codification in law but far less about how race really worked on the ground. Focusing on representations of Africans and to a lesser extent Indians, histories of racial thought analyze how Europeans' ideas about differences between themselves and those who would become colonized others developed as Europeans found themselves increasingly involved in transatlantic ventures that depended upon the exploitation of Africans and Indians. (1) This process of racial formation began long before individual colonists arrived in North America. Literary images and descriptions of Indian and African peoples--as well as travelers native to the Americas and Africa--circulated throughout Europe from the fifteenth century on. Part of a burgeoning print culture that grew up alongside Europe's expansion into the Americas, travel narratives spread images of the continents and their inhabitants throughout Europe, crossing national and linguistic boundaries with ease. (2)