ABSTRACT
The problem, of course, is how to gauge whether the sort of story about a particular past conceived and told in the context of a particular present as part of the project of aiming at a particular alternative future continues to be the sort of story worth telling in the context of a new present. And if not, why not? (Scott, 2004, 51)
I
Edward Long’s declaration that ‘there are extremely potent reasons for believing, that the White and the Negroe are two distinct species’ is now fairly infamous. To add injury to insult, Long then proceeds to point out that the ancient Christians did not believe in the Copernican system, just as some might reject the view he has just propounded, which was by no means widespread at the time he was writing:
The freedom of philosophic enquiry may still proceed to extirpate old prejudices, and display more and more (to the utter confusion of ignorance and bigotry) the beautiful gradation, order, and harmony, which pervade the whole series of created beings on this globe. (Long 1774, II: 337)
The outrageousness and the irony of Long’s invocation of bigotry and ancient ignorance is very striking, and we might be moved to wonder about the discursive and narrative conditions that allowed Long to posit racial gradation, order and harmony in the name of ‘freedom of philosophic enquiry’ without himself worrying that he was committing an outrage upon reason. The role Long, among other ‘historians,’ has played and continues to play in contemporary narratives that take this segment of the past as their subject, is also a question worth asking and I return to it very briefl y in this discussion.
