Watson has written a carefully argued book that explores how accusations of indigenous cannibalism were essential to the justifications of conquest embedded in the process of European colonialism from its earliest moments to the middle of the eighteenth century. The book’s first chapter examines the place of cannibals in the intellectual history of Europe. Watson describes how, long before Europeans interacted with peoples of the Americas, “new lands and strange peoples were quite often already believed to be savage and cannibalistic” (48). Central to Watson’s analysis is her assertion that a binary that opposed “civilization” to “savagery” was at the core of European thought and action. Europeans clearly considered themselves to be firmly civilized, while placing the indigenous peoples whom they encountered on a sliding scale on the “savagery” side of the ledger.
In order to “uncover the imperial context … [and how it] affected the discourse of cannibalism …...