Explaining the Genetic Footprints of Catholic and Protestant Colonizers

S. Barter

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137594297
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137594303
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This book points out a novel pattern in colonial intimacy - that Catholic colonizers tended to leave behind significant mixed communities while Protestant colonizers were more likely to police relations with local women. The varied genetic footprints of Catholic and Protestant colonizers, while subject to some exceptions, holds across world regions and over time. Having demonstrated that this pattern exists, this book then seeks to explain it, looking to religious institutions, political capacity, and ideas of nation and race.

1

Introduction

Abstract: Why did Catholic colonizers leave behind deep genetic footprints, while Protestant colonizers seemingly did not? This chapter outlines the book’s chapters, defines some key terms, such as “genetic footprint,” and provides some caveats. The Catholic/Protestant divide is not absolute—there are exceptions and grey areas, but the tendencies identified are global and enduring. One must also not attach moral significance to colonial behavior, as Catholic mixing does not suggest racial equality. We must be careful in using terms such as “mixing” and “miscegenation” that we do not pretend that races exist as biological categories. This chapter then turns to the impressive literature on colonial intimacy. Consistent with other writers, this book seeks to break down stark dichotomies of colonizers and the colonized.

Keywords: colonialism; intimacy; intermarriage; miscegenation; race

Barter, Shane Joshua. Explaining the Genetic Footprints of Catholic and Protestant Colonizers. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. DOI: 10.1057/9781137594303.0003.

While observing elections on the remote western coast of Aceh, Indonesia, countless coffee shop conversations turned to the same topic—that I must visit Lamno, a village where many residents are particularly attractive Portuguese descendants. Acehnese friends had long told me of Lamno’s famed mata biru (blue eyes) and mata hijau (green eyes). Although the Portuguese presence was limited to some traders and marooned soldiers four centuries ago, its effect on the local population remains, and “one of their most enduring legacies has been their contribution to the local gene pool.”¹ Lamno’s identity is distinct from nearby Batee, where American traders dominated the pepper trade in the late eighteenth century, as well as far more substantial British influence in Bengkulen and the Dutch presence in Banda Aceh and North Sumatra, which did not produce an equivalent genetic footprint. Weeks later, I found myself in Malacca, Malaysia, where a Portuguese community remains today, but no equivalent Dutch or British communities. I began thinking of the Canadian context, of French métis, other mixed communities around the world, and some common linkages among them.

Throughout the colonial world, European colonizers initiated liaisons with local women and sired mixed communities, but they did so at different rates and understood it in different ways. Observers have long noted the Portuguese proclivity to produce mixed families, while Spanish and French colonizers literally spawned métis and mestizo populations. Meanwhile, the British, American, German, and Dutch colonizers worked to limit intimate contacts with the colonized in a variety of ways; although never as successful as they believed, the rate of unions and offspring with local women were comparatively low. Some scholars have explained these distinctions in broad civilizational terms, speaking of Latin and Anglo-Saxon approaches. Less noted is the fact that colonizers that did and did not mix can be grouped according to faith. To my knowledge, this global pattern has yet to be observed, let alone explained.

Why did Catholic colonizers leave behind deep genetic footprints, while Protestant colonizers seemingly did not? This study begins by providing some important caveats and definitions. It then looks to relevant academic work, supporting the claim that religious patterns of sexual encounters have somehow escaped dedicated scrutiny. This groundwork laid, Part II shows that this broad pattern of Catholic mixing and Protestant reluctance exists on a global scale. I provide regional comparisons between Catholic and Protestant colonizers first in Southeast Asia, home to especially enduring and diverse forms of colonial rule, and then East Asia, South Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. Although I note some important exceptions, it is generally true that Catholic colonizers left behind mixed communities, as well as creole languages and cultures, whereas Protestants typically did not, instead leaving behind legacies of segregation. This section also draws out some fascinating corollaries, finding that when Protestants did mix, they tended to do so with mixed Catholic communities, and that within Protestant colonies, individual Catholics were more likely to establish local families.

After showing that this pattern generally holds across world regions, Part III assesses five potential explanations that I have found in the academic literature. The first is that the distinction is entirely religious. The Catholic faith entails a transnational identity and a Papal hierarchy, while Protestantism is more fragmented among small flocks and many are exclusivist, evident in the Calvinist concept of the elect. A second potential explanation relates to geography and historical contact. Perhaps the dominant explanation for varied civilizational patterns of mixing, Mediterranean countries are said to have longer histories of mixing with world cultures, while northern nations tend to be more isolated and exclusivist. Another potential explanation is rooted in political economy, in that native communities necessary for labor are kept apart while those with ownership of land are suitable for mixing. A fourth explanation revolves around the varied political capacities of different colonial powers, a factor that shapes the ability of colonial administrators to police interracial liaisons as well as to send European women and forestall the need to mix. A final explanation is rooted in the emergence of ideas such as nations and then race among colonial powers. Protestant communities tended to be at the forefront of these ideas, namely scientific ideas of race, whereas Catholics typically lagged behind. This best explains not only the “miscegenation” gap between Catholic and Protestant colonizers, but also temporal trends away from mixing for all colonizers.

The nation/race argument is not totally distinct from rival explanations, nor does it stand at their expense—this is not an exercise in falsification. These factors are obviously interrelated, though some are more convincing than others and their effects are felt through interaction. Elements of Catholicism mitigated the development of concepts such as nation and race, while Protestantism emerged in tandem with and embraced them. Meanwhile, more developed Protestant colonizers slowly established the political capacity to police color lines. This explains the ability to police sexual liaisons, however identifying as a nation and race explains the will to do so.

Caveats & definitions

At the heart of this study lies the observation that Catholics mixed with colonized societies, whereas Protestants typically did not. This argument is relative, not absolute. I do not deny that Protestants created some mixed communities or pretend that Catholic colonizers did so uniformly. Below, I pay attention to exceptions such as New Zealand, early colonial experiences in southern Africa, India, and Indonesia, and late Portuguese colonialism in Angola, all of which I later use to help develop explanations. Second, I do not attach moral significance to these divergent behaviors. Catholic mixing was hardly due to a sense of racial equality—it was often a result of rape and abuses of power. Catholic colonizers developed complex racial hierarchies and were far from color-blind. In fact, some Catholic colonizers supported mixing for racist reasons, to “elevate” native gene pools. And although Protestant reluctance to raise and recognize mixed families was sometimes due to racism, it was also sometimes due to an effort not to interfere with native societies and to protect local women from European men. Following Ann Laura Stoler, “Racism is an inherent product of the colonial encounter [however] the quality and the intensity of racism have varied enormously.”² Catholic and Protestant colonizers were both racist, but in distinct ways that created enduring legacies for the colonized as well as colonizer, and that must be explained.

Third, many of the terms used in this study, such as “mixing” and “miscegenation,” are of course contested. There is no such thing as race as a biological concept. Race is an “imagined collectivity based on pigmentation” used to classify humans into discrete groups based on physical appearance, possessing qualities considered to be immutable.³ Race suggests far more than the idea that people are different, which of course we are. It suggests that discrete groups of humans have different origins, are biologically distinct, and possess innate superiorities over other types. It is unfortunate that, in using terms such as mixing or miscegenation, one may appear to reify race.⁴ I use such terms not only because they were used at the time, by the colonizer and sometimes by the colonized, but also because I wish to emphasize visual and ethnic differences between communities. Later, I will return to the importance of refusing the concept of race, since asking why Catholics mixed presumes that they understood humanity in terms of races in the first place.

Another caveat relates to the emphasis on the colonizer rather than the colonized. This is at odds with the dominant trend in historical studies of colonialism, which rightly seeks to overcome legacies of Eurocentric research. Focusing on the colonized represents an important corrective to previous studies, but this should not come at the expense of studying patterns among the colonizers. One shortcoming in many studies of sex and empire is that colonizers are largely seen as similar, whereas this study emphasizes a wide and enduring, though not absolute, distinction between Catholic and Protestant colonizers. The literature is far better at charting changes in colonial behavior over time. Temporal changes are also crucial in my study, as all colonizers, Protestant and Catholic, slowed mixing across the colonial era, although as I hope to show, the religious divide is greater than changes over time.

Clearly, colonized societies possess preferences and social norms that shaped rates of mixing. Muslim societies tend to resist mixed unions with non-Muslims (although they applaud conversion for the sake of coupling), various Hindu and Buddhist societies may see foreigners as a polluting presence, and indigenous peoples may practice endogamy by marrying within clan systems. It has been emphasized that West African societies varied in their levels of exogamy; those with patrilineal descent led to fewer mixed offspring, who were regarded as outsiders and subsequently clung to European identity, whereas those with matrilineal descent saw mixed offspring integrating with local society.⁵ Native kinship patterns had important effects on how mixed unions and their offspring were understood. These patterns, although interesting, are not the focus of this already broad study. Although I discuss native practices to explain some specific cases, namely the complexities of cross-racial and ethnic marriages in North Sumatra and New Zealand-Maori unions, I am primarily concerned with a systematic difference toward mixed unions and offspring among Catholic and Protestant colonizers, variation that persists regardless of local societal norms. If my study looked at a small number of cases or a single world region, then host society norms would be more salient, since patterns of mixing could be falsely attributed to the colonizer instead of the colonized. However with the global focus of this study, the effects of host society norms should in part cancel each other out, since I have no reason to believe that Protestant societies systematically colonized peoples with endogamous sexual practices. In fact, many of the regions discussed below saw multiple colonial powers over time, helping to hold native kinship patterns at least partially constant and allowing for the effects of colonial culture to be laid bare.

This leads to an important discussion of case selection. It is likely that historians will balk at the global reach of this project. Leading historical scholarship, especially those studies focusing on sex and race, tends to consist of rich, in-depth ca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Exploring the Religious Divide
• 3  Explaining the Religious Divide
• 4  Implications
• Bibliography
• Index