During his eleven years in Jamaica, Long was, like other planters, practising racialization – enacting racial difference in every public and private space, living his whiteness as power. But he was also clearly reflecting on it, observing it, thinking about it. He was horrified by the Somerset trial: slave-owners could no longer rely on the law to secure their rights over enslaved property. Mansfield had discovered, he wrote in his vitriolic polemic, ‘the art of washing the black-a-moor white’. But this could not be: black people could not become white. When it came to the History, his task, as he saw it, was to persuade his audience, and himself, that Africans were essentially, naturally, different from Whites. He utilized the Enlightenment debates on the nature of the human and the animal, arguing with the great French naturalist Buffon and insisting, on the basis of body and mind, that whites and ‘Negroes’ were different species. Yet he insisted that plantation life civilized Africans, that creoles could become good servants to their masters, and he refused to face any contradiction. Similarly, despite his hatred of miscegenation he hoped that ‘mulattoes’ could become a useful bridge between colonizers and enslaved.