Winthrop D. Jordan

PLANTER AND SLAVE IDENTITY FORMATION: SOME PROBLEMS IN THE COMPARATIVE APPROACH*

The phrase “comparative history” has a fashionable, one might almost say a voguish, ring. It suggests a breakaway from narrow parochialism, a widening of historical horizons. Sometimes the comparisons run along regional lines, but the most frequent comparisons are between or even among national states. While such comparisons can be and indeed have been enormously revealing, they can serve, as this paper argues, t o obscure as well as t o illuminate. It is not the virtue of making comparisons that is being challenged; rather the objection is t o the assumptions that so frequently underlie comparisons as they are customarily made. Viewed from one standpoint, there is cause for unease in the very term comparative history. The term suggests that there is such an animal as noncomparative history. But surely this is a unicorn in the bestiary of scholarship. Even narrowly focussed studies of a particular corner of the past are riven with implicit comparisons. Take, for example, Perry Miller’s magisterial investigations of New England Puritanism, which have not been customarily heralded as triumphs of comparative history. We are fascinated by the Puritans because they are revealed to be different-different (at least after the first generation) from Englishmen, different from the New England Indians, different from Virginians, different from most other Christians, and different ( to put the matter mildly) from the inhabitants of New England today. We see that the New England Puritans struggled with age-old existential problems and arrived at answers that were different from the answers offered by other men in other places and at other times. By sensing these differences, lo and behold, we have been making comparisons. By studying the various cultures of the past, the historian is making implicit comparisons in much the same way as the ethnographic anthropologist. When we are told, for example, that there are (or were) a few peoples who saw n o connection between sexual intercourse and pregnancy, we are not fascinated by the fact itself but by the comparison we make so automatically and instantaneously. In short, we are not greatly interested in the fact that other people eat, but we are interested if we learn that other people eat worms. There are further difficulties specific t o the comparative history of slavery. One lies in the term slavery itself. We use a single term to describe a number of varieties of forced labor. The term works reasonably well in the New World, where the expanding western Europeans established hereditary systems of chattel forced labor that were integrally linked with the increasingly commercial Atlantic economy and that dragooned only people of other races, i.e., Indians and Negroes. Once we look at the process of enslavement in Africa, however, we are in a nearly hopeless bind. Emerging from all the agonized disputes about whether “slavery” existed in West Africa prior t o the coming of the Europeans is the fact that there

A Sense of Success: Heredity, Intelligence, and Race in American History and Culture

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the current debate concerning race and IQ in American history and culture. The current debate concerning race and IQ is profoundly disturbing to many people, partly because it concerns public and particularly educational policy and partly because it touches deep nerves of moral concern in the culture. The central contention is that the very essences of the concepts involved are culturally bound, that the conceptualization and application of the central terms, in particular ways at certain times, are part of the culture in which one participate—the whole debate governed as cultures are by cumulative experience. There have indeed been interesting changes during the past one hundred years, but there have also been profound continuities in thinking about race and intelligence despite Darwin, Mendel, Boas, and a changing climate in academia. This view suggests that because things have been going on in a particular way for a long time, they are not going to change very rapidly, not very much, nor very soon. Yet it also suggests that one is now on the cusp of an appreciable change because one is losing that sense of success that animated the overseas venturing and conquests.