In some ways, this paper makes for a kind of pre-submission seminar.Manchester University Press will soon publish my second monograph, Bodies complexioned. Human variation and racism in early modern English culture, c.1600–1750. Yet as much as I might summarise its main findings, I try in this paper to come at my book’s subject from a different angle. I examine not so much the early modern significance of somatic diversity as the question of how the English thought of ‘race’ itself. Bound up with humoralism, this understanding was discriminatory prior to colonial engagement with non-Anglophone peoples and in spite of Christian universalism.

Mark Dawson teaches early modern English history at the ANU