The Stillbirth of Capital: Enlightenment Writing and Colonial India - Softcover

Ahmed, Siraj

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804775230 ISBN 13: 9780804775236

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

This book targets one of the humanities' most widely held premises: namely, that the European Enlightenment laid the groundwork for modern imperialism. It argues instead that the Enlightenment's vision of empire calls our own historical and theoretical paradigms into question. While eighteenth-century British India has not received nearly the same attention as nineteenth- and twentieth-century empires, it is the place where colonial rule and Enlightenment reason first became entwined. The Stillbirth of Capital makes its case by examining every work about British India written by a major author from 1670 to 1815, a period that coincides not only with the Enlightenment but also with the institution of a global economy.

In contrast to both Marxist and liberal scholars, figures such as Dryden, Defoe, Voltaire, Sterne, Smith, Bentham, Burke, Sheridan, and Scott locate modernity's roots not in the birth of capital but rather in the collusion of sovereign power and monopoly commerce, which used Indian Ocean wealth to finance the unfathomable costs of modern war. Ahmed reveals the pertinence of eighteenth-century writing to our own moment of danger, when the military alliance of hegemonic states and private corporations has become even more far-reaching than it was in centuries past.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Siraj Ahmed is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Lehman College, City University of New York.

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THE STILLBIRTH OF CAPITAL

Enlightenment Writing and Colonial IndiaBy SIRAJ AHMED

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7523-6

Contents

Acknowledgments.........................................................................................ixIntroduction: The Enlightenment and Colonial India......................................................11 Sovereignty and Monopoly: Dryden's Amboyna............................................................252 Conversion and Piracy: Defoe's Captain Singleton......................................................513 Sentiment and Debt: Sterne's Bramine's Journal and Foote's Nabob......................................774 Free Trade and Famine: The Wealth of Nations and Bentham's "Essay"....................................1065 Nation and Addiction: Burke's and Sheridan's Speeches in the Hastings Impeachment.....................1346 Orientalism and the Permanent Fix of War: Voltaire contra Sir William Jones...........................1617 History, Anachronism, Violence: Morgan's Missionary and Scott's Guy Mannering.........................189Notes...................................................................................................223Bibliography............................................................................................253Index...................................................................................................281

Chapter One

SOVEREIGNTY AND MONOPOLY Dryden's Amboyna

Perhaps now the most widely read piece of Restoration writing, Aphra Behn's masterful novella Oroonoko (1688) is an ideal starting point for almost any survey of the long eighteenth century. It presents, among much else, an ingeniously neat account of the interrelated rise of modern literature and the global economy. The narrative begins as a self-consciously stilted romance set, typically, in an Old World court. But when slave traders enter the court, lure the noble prince Oroonoko onto a slave ship headed for the New World, and imprison him in chains, the narrative undergoes as abrupt a transformation as its hero has. En route from Old World court to New World colony, it replaces romance conventions with the novel-form (avant la lettre): the fabulous with the scientific, a feudal economy with a commercial one, nobility with merchants, honor and fidelity with profit and duplicity, and sovereign character with private interest. Published in the year of the Glorious Revolution, Oroonoko not only reflects that rupture but also manages uncannily to capture its historical significance. For Anglo-American literary histories, Oroonoko could not be more exemplary. They have assimilated its remarkably prescient narrative to a concept of modernity whose roots lie in Europe, where capitalist economics first gained the upper hand over feudal politics.

Aravamudan opens his excellent study in this way: "A book on colonialism and eighteenth-century literature cannot begin without invoking Oroonoko." And so I have. Yet, before Oroonoko, there was John Dryden's Amboyna, or the Cruelty of the Dutch to the English Merchants (1673), which dramatizes an event at the British Empire's very origins: the Dutch East India Company's execution of ten English East India Company servants at Ambon in 1623. Dryden returned to the massacre fifty years after the fact in order to provide the English state propaganda during the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–74). Though now little remembered and generally discredited when it is, Amboyna prefigures Oroonoko in essential ways. It represents a merchant colony contested by England and Holland, Europe's primary commercial empires; homes in on conflicts between feudal and merchant classes; and culminates in the merchant class's betrayal, abjection, and ultimate execution of a noble character who embodies the very idea of sovereignty. In both texts, the execution marks the historical chasm between feudal and mercantile worlds.

But Amboyna's salient difference from Oroonoko is that it takes place not in a New World supposedly bereft of long-distance trade before its European discovery but rather in the Spice Islands, the legendary archipelago near present-day Indonesia's far eastern boundary that had long been the focus of exceptionally wide-ranging and complicated exchange networks. This chapter asks a paradigmatic question: What would happen if we were to follow Amboyna and dislocate our narrative of modernity's commercial origins from the transatlantic world to the Indian Ocean?

First, we would need to rethink the very terms of this narrative. It would be careless to consider the first Europeans who arrived in the Indian Ocean by way of the Cape passage "merchants" or "traders" in any conventional sense. Unlike the merchants who had traded from time immemorial across what contemporary economic historians describe as a genuine mare liberum, or "free sea," these sailors came armed, using the backing of sovereign power to break preexisting trading arrangements and subject them to their own monopoly control. Portuguese sailors arrived on India's Malabar Coast at the turn of the sixteenth century, intending to replace Arab predominance in the spice trade by any means necessary; the Dutch and the English East India companies' first ventures were sent to India and the Spice Islands at the turn of the seventeenth century to prey on the Portuguese Empire with similar ruthlessness. Hence, from an Indian Ocean perspective, European modernity originates not with the revolution of capitalist economics against feudal politics but with their collusion: merchant capitalists and absolutist rulers joined forces in the armed pursuit of trading monopolies. Dryden's description of Amboyna's setting—the Dutch East India Company's colonial fort on Ambon—as a "Castle on the Sea" is, therefore, particularly apt.

I would suggest that the essence of "modernity" lies here, in the difference between the trade that followed European colonialism in the Indian Ocean and the trade that preceded it there. Since at least the Roman Empire, European traders had offered precious metals in exchange for Asian commodities, since their goods did not interest Eastern consumers. In contrast, East Indies spices were the exotic commodities most desired in European markets. By the time they arrived there—by way of "prahu, dhow, camel caravan, oared galley, wagon, pack-horse and river barge" across the countless exchanges that linked the Spice Islands to western Europe—they were literally thousands of times more expensive than they had been at the point of production, possibly the most profitable commodity anywhere on the globe. European statesmen watched the spice trade exhaust their bullion reserves and understood that if they could wrest the trade from its Arab and Venetian intermediaries and control it all the way from production to consumption, they would acquire unheard-of profits and, by extension, the source of global hegemony. They foresaw, in other words, the interdependence of the military and administrative elaboration of the European state, on one hand, and the monopoly control of immemorial Indian Ocean networks, on the other—hence the pathbreaking voyages of Columbus, Gama, and Magellan. Simply stated, what distinguishes European modernity is not the uniquely free circulation of commodities and capital but the unprecedented application of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804775230
• ISBN 13: 9780804775236
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 303
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande