ABSTRACT
George Edward Long illustrated his pseudo-intellectual arguments with travellers’ tales from Africa, while among modern scholars Winthrop Jordan has placed considerable emphasis on the same kind of anecdotes to argue the persistence of popular beliefs in Negro affinity with apes. In the history of attitudes to the Negro—as distinct from attitudes to the slave trade—the early 1770s make a more useful dividing line than the 1780s. In this period for the first time men began to argue to the derogatory extreme about the Negro’s place in nature. Sir Thomas Browne in the mid-seventeenth century attacked the theory that Negro colour was the result of the curse on Ham. In the eighteenth century the friends of the Negro confronted causal explanations which included polygenetic theories more derogatory than the Biblical curse on Ham. Samuel Estwick had shown a similar awareness of the philosophical system by arguing that the clinching proof of Negro inferiority was a lack of moral sense.
