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The late-eighteenth-century British public's fascination with complexion can be seen as symptomatic of the period's preoccupation with a new identity and status for Afro-Britons following Lord Mansfield's decision in the Somerset case (1772), in which a slave-owner was denied the right to deport his slave, James Somerset, back to the colonies. Although Lord Mansfield repeatedly emphasized that his ruling did not mean that slaves in Britain were free,1 this was the popular belief, and the judge became the toast of London's black population.2 The Jamaican planter and white supremacist Edward Long was the first to respond to Judge Mansfield's ruling, in a pamphlet entitled Candid Reflections (1772). Playing on the fear that the nation, overrun by freed blacks, will become "embronzed with the African tint," Long lets the West Indian bogey of widespread racial intermixture loose in Britain.3 Equally prominent in this tract, though less remarked, is Long's focus on "whiteness" and "whitening." The idea of whiteness can be seen most obviously in the title's pun on "candid," with the process of whitening appearing shortly afterwards in the Preface's jibe against Mansfield. The supposedly impossible act of "washing the Black-a-moor white" had, Long jeered, been performed by "a lawyer."4
The aim of this essay is to bring into greater prominence the racialization of whiteness in the 1760s and 1770s, both in the metropolis and in the colonies, and to relate this racialization of skin color to gender. A highly charged discourse about whiteness and whitening, circulating already in travel narratives and colonial histories, is given a new focus in the wake of the Somerset decision, then gathers further momentum during the heyday of abolitionism. Indeed, the racialization of whiteness forms an important cultural context for reading later abolitionist texts and for understanding how gender increasingly came to encode ideas of racial difference. The texts of the 1760s and 1770s that receive particular attention in the first three sections of my essay are Edward Long's Candid Reflections (1772), his massive History of Jamaica (1774), John Singleton's A General Description of the West-Indian Islands (1767), and most importantly for my overall argument, Janet Schaw's Journal of a Lady of Quality, a travel diary of the West Indian and American colonies begun in 1774, the same year in...