This paper reviews Winthrop Jordan's White Over Black (1968), a landmark intellectual history tracing how European — particularly English — perceptions of Africans and blackness evolved alongside the growth of the Atlantic slave trade. The review examines Jordan's central argument that racism and slavery reinforced each other symbiotically: racial prejudice justified the institution of slavery, while the economic demands of the slave trade intensified anti-African ideology. The paper discusses Jordan's treatment of early English encounters with Africans, the role of cash-crop colonial economies in hardening racial attitudes, and how figures such as Thomas Jefferson reflected the eventual codification of racist thought. The review also assesses Jordan's method as intellectual history rather than a study of African perspectives.
The review employs analytical summary — rather than simply retelling the book's content, it evaluates Jordan's interpretive choices, such as his focus on intellectual history over African perspectives and his use of primary source accounts that vary widely in emphasis. This technique shows how to critically engage with a historian's methodology and scope.
The paper opens by framing Jordan's core question (did racism cause slavery or vice versa?) and his answer (both, symbiotically). It then moves through the book's chronological argument: early English encounters, the economic drivers of colonial slavery, the hardening of racial ideology through figures like Jefferson, and finally Jordan's broader intellectual-history approach. The conclusion reasserts the complexity of Jordan's portrait and the book's limitations in scope.
White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 by Winthrop Jordan. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968.
In his landmark study of European views of "blackness" and Africa, the historian Winthrop Jordan grapples with a foundational question: to what degree did racism cause the European slave trade, and to what degree did the slave trade cause racism? Slavery had existed in both Europe and Africa long before the interaction between the two cultures produced the particularly brutal form of the institution that would define so much of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century relationship between black and white peoples — even as the ideology of human brotherhood was being championed in other corners of Enlightenment discourse. Jordan's answer is that the relationship was symbiotic: racism justified the forms that slavery took, and European prejudices portraying Africans as inferior fed the flames of the slave trade. Neither force was simply the cause of the other; each intensified the other in a mutually reinforcing cycle.
Jordan begins his book with the first slave "entrepreneurs," the Portuguese, though the bulk of his study focuses on the English, who arrived in Africa in the sixteenth century. The Portuguese, echoing Columbus's gaze upon the native inhabitants of the Americas, tended to view Africans as natural slaves. Jordan argues, however, that the evidence suggests the first English settlers saw Africans less as inherently inferior beings and more as "natural men" — different, but not necessarily in need of subjugation or conversion. Finding other commodities to trade was the early Englishmen's primary concern. It was not until nearly a century later that the first permanent English settlements and the Royal African Company were established with the explicit intent of enslaving African peoples.
Jordan argues that without such a pressing economic need, Africans would never have been brought to the Americas in the numbers they were. European racism, on its own, was not virulent enough to generate the transatlantic slave system; what made the difference was the availability of a large labor supply drawn from populations that lacked the military technology to resist European force. Viewing blackness as evil and Africans as heathens may have predated the economic benefits of slavery, but the institution provided the fuel that transformed those latent prejudices into a fully developed racial ideology. Slavery did not simply reflect existing racism — it actively produced and deepened it.
Jordan's book is not concerned with how Africans perceived whites, nor with how enslaved people experienced or resisted their bondage. It is, explicitly, an intellectual history of white perceptions of blackness and of how those perceptions contributed to a sociological and economic phenomenon of enormous consequence. Jordan draws upon a wide range of historical voices — including Quakers and abolitionists in the later sections of the work — to build a portrait of remarkable complexity. European racism and the fear of African "blackness" were not always as virulent as they would become under the full weight of the slave system, but they were always present, bubbling beneath the surface, available to be mobilized whenever economic or political circumstance demanded it.
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