Content area
Full Text
The topics of racial/ethmc diversity and of race/ethmc relations were frequently addressed by Harriet Martineau in her long and prolific career as a writer and sociologist. Martineau's earliest published engagements with those issues were with her essay on the slave trade in The Monthly Repository (1830) and in Demerara,, one of the earliest short novels in her 25-volume Illustrations of Political Economy (1832/33). Later Martineau would lay out guidelines for studying issues of cross-cultural diversity in her exploration of social science research methodology How to Observe Morals and Manners (drafted in 1834 and published in 1838), would analyze at length African American slavery as a constituent but anomalous feature of American society in Society in America (1836), would incorporate a race relations explanation into her foundational exploration of women's work in "Domestic Service" (1838), would research and then create what is arguably her most important work of fiction, The Hour and the Man ( 184 1), and would take up these topics in her reports on Ireland (1852) and on the Middle East (1848) and in the numerous editorials she wrote for the London Daily News between 1852 and 1866 on the circumstances leading up to and involved in the U.S. Civil War. WMIe the moral question of African American slavery was overwhelmingly the central focus of tMs writing, Martineau extended her vision of race relations beyond that question in her exploration of the experiences of free people of color in the New World (1836), (1841), and in her analyses of domestic service and society in Ireland, and society in the Middle East.