In this enterprising study, Rebecca Goetz, a historian at Rice University, charts what she identifies as the process whereby Virginia slaveholders used Christianity to invent race in the English colony. The Baptism of Early Virginia is the first substantial study of race in the Anglo-American colonies to engage centrally with what Goetz calls “hereditary heathenism.” This was the idea that Christianity was a heritable condition and that non-Christian peoples—particularly Indians and Africans—were naturally incapable or less capable of Christian conversion.

She explains the conflict between Virginia's missionaries, who sought to convert Indians and Africans, and the planters who generally opposed their efforts by claiming that Africans were naturally incapable of such. She then charts the legislation, social divisions, labor practices, and theological arguments concerning hereditary heathenism in Virginia. In chapter 1, Goetz states that before colonizing Virginia, the English people distinguished themselves from the Irish (whom they colonized) and from Muslims and American Indians by emphasizing cultural as opposed to racial distinctions. Since these peoples were judged capable of conversion, she claims, they were not racially defined. Conspicuously absent in this chapter is a discussion of how English Christians engaged with Jews. Chapter 2 argues that violent Anglo-Indian wars undermined the optimism of English settlers that Indians might convert to Christianity. Instead, the English began to promote the ideology of hereditary heathenism. Chapter 3 examines English settler proscriptions against interracial sex and marriage (especially between the English and Africans). By 1705, Goetz concludes, these attitudes had fully hardened into race. The fourth chapter examines the legal and theological administration of baptism in Virginia. Whereas “religion and not physical appearance” dominated at the time the earliest African slaves arrived in Virginia, Goetz proffers, the 1700s witnessed the triumph of phenotype over religious identity as the basis of social status in Virginia. And baptism operated eventually as a racial institution imposing the ideology that “only the English could be truly Christian” (111). In her fifth chapter, Goetz specifically examines how Virginia's English settlers articulated “whiteness” as a racial identity, a process she connects to an emerging religious toleration in the colony that extended to Quakers but not to Catholic convicts, blacks, Indians, and “mulattoes” (137). And in chapter 6, Goetz examines how some free and enslaved Africans pursued both Christianity and freedom (these were metonymic), thereby challenging the ideology of hereditary heathenism. An epilogue provides a tidy recap of the foregoing arguments.

The book is without question a seasoned demonstration of historical method. Goetz's lucid prose reveals her detailed, intimate mastery of archival sources—court records, pamphlets, and correspondence. And she distills her discussion of the primary works through a disciplined command over the larger historical context of Virginia. She explains, for instance, that the Virginia Indians provided food for English settlers because this was a Native convention for dealing with political inferiors. And she explicates the intricate political philosophy that guided Anglo-Indian intermarriage from the perspective of the Virginia Indians. Experts in the history of English colonialism will also appreciate the fresh reading Goetz brings to this study of the Chesapeake because she combines incredibly rich historical detail with an exciting query into how Virginia's slaveholding elite shaped religion and race in the colony. Thus, it is easy to see that this monograph, which contributes so uniquely to her field, will serve professional researchers as a valuable source of historical data for years to come.

There is a fundamental tension in the book, however, that is firmly rooted in Goetz's interpretation of this data—her claim that Virginia's slaveholders invented race. On the one hand, the author explains at the outset that the English viewed Christianity in hereditary terms even before they colonized Virginia. And yet her central argument, on the other hand, is that English planters created race in Virginia during the 1600s and early 1700s by promoting the ideology of hereditary heathenism. But it then appears they were creating something that had already existed in some form in England. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that nowhere in the book does Goetz define for her readers the meaning of race. In other words, her argument's chief demonstration (that Virginia planters created race between the 1600s and 1705) requires her to explain precisely what they created (beyond merely using the term race itself) so that readers can understand why this differed categorically from what existed earlier.

This is a critical issue that seems to make it impossible to assess the execution of Goetz's central argument. The book, after all, is making an immensely significant claim—when (from the 1620s to 1705) and where (in the Virginia colony) race was invented. Race is, of course, a global system whose provenance has been fiercely contended for many decades, something of which Goetz is surely aware. The author, for instance, claims that the “ancient world showed few signs of racial prejudice” (4). But this claim is under significant dispute, as one may judge from studies like Benjamin Isaac's The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004). She then states that “Medieval European Christians . . . held what might be called protoracial views of non-Christians, especially Jews.” But Goetz never explains what she thinks protoracial means and why her readers should regard it as something other than race per se. One might speculate with mild confidence that she defines race as investing phenotypic distinctions with the meaning of fundamental difference (that is, as a human type) were it not for her central focus on hereditary heathenism, which as she shows was not phenotypic. In her brief mention of the principle of limpieza de sangre (“purity of blood”), moreover, she even concedes that the derisive treatment that European Christians meted out toward Jews and Muslims (European Christians claimed they were naturally incapable of true Christian conversion) “took on some racial characteristics in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain” (4). So, if in the 1400s and 1500s she thinks the empirical record attests to the “racial” characterization of non-Christians, it becomes even more unclear why, in the author's view, race did not exist until its putative creation by Virginia planters in the 1700s. This claim requires one to bracket the significant history of Anglo-African relations in Cape Coast during the 1600s and the operation of England's Royal African Company throughout West Africa during the same period. Why was race not already an established institution among the English in those geographies? Beyond the domain of English actors, how do we know Spanish colonizers did not invent race first in Lima or in Mexico City (which had the largest population of free blacks in the Americas among a Native American majority) or the Portuguese in Brazil (which had the largest population of African slaves) during the 1500s? Was race not invented already by the Portuguese in the 1400s in the Atlantic sea islands or in Elmina or the Kongo State?

Readers will also wonder why Goetz does not examine English Christian relations with Jews (she mentions Jews only in a brief discussion of limpieza de sangre). It is precisely Christian-Jewish relations, after all, that has commanded the most scrutiny on the subject of inventing race in medieval or early modern Europe. María Elena Martínez, for instance, has followed a long history of scholarship by persuasively arguing in her Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011) that the massive, medieval system of limpieza de sangre (it extended from Europe to the Americas) was nothing less than a system of race rooted in Christian dominion over Jews and Muslims. If scholars like Martínez (who explicitly defines what she means by “race”) are wrong, this will need to be demonstrated by engaging with their account of what race is. Again, the very nature of Goetz's central thesis demands specific guidance for the reader concerning what she thinks race actually is. But none is forthcoming.

For these reasons, Goetz's volume is sure to generate spirited debate. It will stand, nevertheless, as a valuable work of archival detail from which admirers and critics alike have much to learn.