In Strangers in Blood, Jean Feerick offers a persuasive account of the racial system rooted in hierarchies of lineage that, predating and largely discontinuous with modern racialisms, once governed early modern English understandings of human physical and social differences. Feerick frames her book as explaining the “decline” of this robust and long-lived system (6), focusing on the philosophical pressures that colonialism placed on accounts of the physical and moral components of social reproduction. Her book draws on a wide variety of sources, from familiar literary texts by Spenser and Shakespeare to pamphlets, scientific treatises, travel and history writing, and other colonial texts. Most useful in its vivid depictions of the ways in which colonial migrations both troubled and occasionally invigorated entrenched views of the stability of social hierarchy, Strangers in Blood offers an important addition to our understanding of the rise of modern racialism and of the malleability of fictions about human groups and their distinctions.

Feerick is one of a number of recent scholars who have urged historians of race studying the early modern period not to miss the significance of its many components of race alongside those most familiar to modern readers: physical appearance (particularly skin color) and what she calls ethnos, here roughly equivalent to national affiliation. Among the qualities that have been identified as part of early modern racial systems, Feerick asserts the overwhelming primacy of lineage and degree and the material components (blood, spirits, mother’s milk) that led to such differences in birth being imagined as fully embodied distinctions. Here, as she notes, she follows in the footsteps of Foucault, who roughly forty years ago urged historians to consider the root of racialist thinking not in narratives of contact with outsiders but in internal European systems of social hierarchization indexed by what Feerick nicely calls “quasi-immaterial” blood (10).

Feerick explains how such genealogically based systems in England were weakened when the theory and practice of colonialism tested England’s sense of the origins and stability of social ordering. According to the old system, a lineage was a unit “animated across time by the self-same nature of its blood and temperament, constituting a single organic body capable, in theory, of infinite reproduction” (14). Possession of land, thought to imbue elite families with their ennobling quality, was “at the centre” of this theory (15). No wonder that as English groups from the elite to those with low or middling fortunes migrated, seeking profit and power in nonnative lands, their experiences troubled links between geographic place and social position. Colonists and those at home both lamented and capitalized on the “challenge of maintaining an elite identity outside England” (114).

For many, such challenges provided opportunity. Feerick’s first two chapters track the arguments of New English colonists in Ireland who attempted to show to domestic audiences that, away from the homeland, the race of earlier, more aristocratic English settlers had degenerated—the traditional explanation for exceptions to the assumption that genealogical quality bred true. Ambitious colonial administrators like Edmund Spenser had much to gain from the claims that failures of self-management and abuses of power might erode bloodlines, and that human differences were not immutable, but “that achieving the desired state of a temperate complexion would be nothing less than an ongoing production, requiring countless acts of self-discipline” (57). Interestingly, as Feerick shows, even beliefs that continued to tie place to quality of blood might be used against the gentility, via accusations that they had eroded their bloodlines by adopting Irish customs and imbibing the milk of Irish foster mothers. In this way, some premises of the rank- and land-based system could become more culturally powerful at the cost of others, particularly those that preserved the claims of the existing social hierarchy to eminence by definition. Feerick supports her analysis with excerpts from colonial correspondence and tracts, as well as by reading an Irish context diffusely in The Faerie Queene, where she sees the lessons in temperance of book 2 as expanding on the idea that “gentility was properly a practice, rather than a birthright” (34).

When worth and ability could be seen as depending not on birth but on individual and cultural practice, on correct interactions with one’s environment, the way was clear to argue that racial quality might even atrophy in traditional strongholds and by contrast might be restored far from home. The last three chapters of Strangers in Blood explore reconfigurations of race-as-hierarchy worked out in this vein in colonial tracts, natural histories, and plays. Feerick argues that tragicomedy, with its abundance of travel, disguise, and reunion plots, was a fertile location for such thought experiments. She examines Cymbeline for its representation of rugged landscapes as “ameliorative” to modest and decayed bloodlines alike (80) and two “tragicomic island plays,” The Tempest and Fletcher and Massinger’s The Sea Voyage, for their investigation of how proper social hierarchies might best be established on anonymous, foreign soil (113). Feerick argues that these dramas, in presenting miniature societies far afield from troubled courts and homelands, depict both rigorous and hospitable foreign environments as potentially curative of social ills. Her accounts of these plays sometimes downplay their ironies and misdirections—for instance, in one of the most sympathetic readings of him in years, she takes Prospero at his word as self-controlled and well motivated, rather than peremptory and erratically vindictive, and her take on Cymbeline repeatedly cites as evidence the uncorrected testimony of characters who are being deceived. Her larger claims about the plays’ insistence that mettle and true political authority are forged in acts of vigilant self-management seem right, however, and, on surer ground, she shows that such beliefs are echoed in contemporary propaganda that supported the resumption of colonial projects in Virginia for its salutary effect on “racial decline” (112).

In a final chapter on Richard Ligon’s History of Barbados (1657), perhaps her most exciting, Feerick demonstrates the flexibility and staying power of early modern rank-based models of difference even as competing racialisms took hold, enabled by colonialism’s challenges to the old order and the rise of chattel slavery. Ligon describes the natural world around him as containing the identical range of noble to base forms—from royal palmettos to unruly weeds—that he perceived in the people around him, and that for him marked Barbados as itself supportive of natural hierarchies, far more than England had proven to be (Ligon was a royalist). In an arresting revision of how Ligon is often seen as participating in the history of race, Feerick carefully shows that Ligon understood similar “gradated differences” (142) as distinguishing some African slaves as naturally “regal” and criticized slave owners for treating their laborers with harshness not fitted to their real natures (156). This view of human hierarchy was incompatible, Feerick argues, with later regimes that would posit “steep oppositions” of worth between nations, with one nation properly in “absolute subjugation” to the other (167–68). Ligon’s hierarchy-based analysis of the practices emerging with new understandings of racial difference makes for fascinating reading. Since Feerick dwells on how weakening of the older system made way for the new, it would have been nice to see additional examples of the two systems interacting (e.g., in Feerick’s initial Irish case studies).

Although she mainly represents the older system under attack and in transition, Feerick’s clarification of the racialism antecedent to modern forms is an important contribution in its own right. Her treatment has the potential to add complexity to our understanding of the evolution of racialism, as in her new account of Ligon’s beliefs. Strangers in Blood also provides a useful new vantage on colonialism as the chief engine of this transition, largely through colonization’s advocates’ potent claims that seeming lineal stability was in fact vulnerable to individual will and context.