ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Boyle’s response to the pre-Adamite controversy and discussions of race in the Society, as well as his defense of Biblical monogenesis. I argue that Boyle attempted to exclude polygenesis from discussions within the Society, and supported efforts to provide baptism and conversion to enslaved Africans and Indians because of his belief in monogenesis. Boyle had evidence that his chapter on skin color and the “General Heads” were contributing to the development of racialized accounts of non-Europeans, and he may have been trying to mitigate this effect of his writings. His own relationship to colonialism was a vexed one, since he participated in the beginnings of Charles II’s empire, and believed that slavery provided work for the idle.1 He also pursued missionary work and natural philosophy as an alternative to commercial interests.2 But Eric Williams reminds us that the crucial event is not a way of thinking, like preAdamism, but institutions, like slavery.3 I will argue that Boyle was trying to stop polygenesis in the Royal Society, although he himself had contributed to it through his support of slavery and his call for studies of skin color in the Royal Society.
