ABSTRACT
African cultural inferiority was an essential part of the racial justification of slavery launched in the 1770's. There were some precedents for seeing savagery as a product of racial incapacity. To explain why environmentalism prevailed even with such suspect arguments is to demonstrate once again the unsuitability of eighteenth century thought as a vehicle for the pseudo-intellectual racism of an Edward Long. A pervasive conservatism underlay the reluctance of nearly all commentators to jump to conclusions which would see race as a cause of cultural difference and inferiority. Edward Long, in claiming that Negro backwardness was permanent, and Samuel Estwick, in declaring that Negroes had degenerated to a point of no return, was attempting to exploit a general feeling that savagery was deplorable. In the eighteenth century, particularly, the underlying belief in the unity of mankind was sustained by miscegenation, by scientific definition of species, and by observation of the human attributes of Negroes.
