The Racial Biopolitics of Sex in the Work of Henry Neville

This essay argues for the inclusion of seventeenth-century political thought, and particularly the writings of English republican thinkers, in the growing body of scholarship on the early modern biopolitics of race. Taking the republican Henry Neville's fictitious travel narrative, The Isle of Pines, as a case study, this essay considers Neville's political satires in conjunction with two republican texts written by Neville's contemporaries: James Harrington's The Commonwealth of Oceana and John Streater's Observations Historical, Political, and Philosophical, upon Aristotles First Book of Political Government. While Harrington's Oceana and Streater's Observations each propose policies for shaping the political and racial future of the nation, Neville's work illustrates the political threat of what is perceived to be sexual mismanagement-the failure to regulate interracial sexual reproduction. Perhaps best read as a republican cautionary tale, The Isle of Pines situates reproduction at the center of government, proposing that the regulation of sex and marriage are necessary biopolitical techniques for the management of a population's race and the preservation of political stability. [M.W.]