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

Ahmed, Siraj

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804775222 ISBN 13: 9780804775229

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2011

Synopsis

By systematically linking eighteenth-century European writing to the colonial history of India, The Stillbirth of Capital argues that the Enlightenment's vision of empire calls our own historical and theoretical paradigms into question, especially our premise that capitalism is the basis of modernity.

About this title

About the Author

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

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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: 978-0-8047-7522-9

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 armed force to their circumscription: not merchant capital but rather the monopoly state.

If we follow Amboyna and relocate modernity's commercial origins to the Indian Ocean, we will need to rethink literature's response to those origins accordingly. Literary scholars habitually discuss whether late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts took sides with the landed classes against the commercial classes, or the reverse. But social scientists—Wallerstein and Wood among many others—have argued that capitalist modernity was in fact nowhere the outcome of this conflict: in England, capitalism's origins lay, ironically, with the landed aristocracy; in France, the bourgeoisie was a political and juridical class, not a particularly capitalist one. In both cases, aristocracy and bourgeoisie depended on each other and became increasingly hard to disentangle. If the conflict between aristocracy and bourgeoisie was "in the last resort shadowboxing," as Hill argued, an analysis of early modern literature in terms of its alignment with one or the other can never delve very far into history.

Superficially, Amboyna does present a conflict between aristocratic and bourgeois characters and, in line with Dryden's public position, sides with the former. But on a deeper level, the play alludes to the birth of the European interstate system and the parallel development of the East Indian colonial economy. This level registers the rise of a new state-form that aimed to monopolize global trade, rendered all other sovereign forms obsolete, and consequently created a vortex into which the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie alike were ineluctably drawn. Amboyna dissolves the conflict between aristocracy and bourgeoisie into the more historically compelling logic of mercantile state formation and global monopoly trade. In still more artful ways, the play insinuates that its own aristocratic values are merely a front for the material interests of English mercantilism. But Amboyna's self-reflexive subtlety becomes apparent only when we understand its Indian Ocean context. Hence, this chapter first explores how Amboyna understands the birth of the modern state system; then how it represents the simultaneous elaboration of a colonial political economy; and finally, how it designs an aesthetic form to respond to these epochal events, one that attempts not to restore the sovereign but rather to partake in his execution.

The Conflict of Orders

Amboyna's plot turns on two explicitly tragic moments. The climax of the play is the execution of its hero, the English captain Towerson, by Ambon's Dutch governor Harman. But before that, the governor's son, Harman Junior, rapes Tower son's fiancée, the native noblewoman Ysabinda. However common rape has subsequently become as a metaphor of colonial expropriation, when we return this scene to its own history, the commonplace fades away. What comes into focus instead is a historically specific tenor: Amboyna uses the rape to capture the conflict of sovereign forms that seemed to define the period. Ysabinda stands for an increasingly obsolete feudal order; Harman Junior, for the mercantile state that brings a new political economy violently into being. Prefiguring the execution—in which Towerson will stand for the nobility and Harman Senior for the merchant classes—the rape crystallizes the plot's general tendency.

The rape also exemplifies the trope of degeneration, which will constantly recur in eighteenth-century writing about imperialism. Confessing his crime to the Dutch revenue officer, Harman Junior describes the rape in terms of his own degeneration:

Dutch Fiscal. Where have you left the Bride?

Harman Junior. Ty'd to a Tree and Gagg'd, and—

Dutch Fiscal. And what? Why do you stare and tremble? Answer me like a man.

Harman Junior.... I have nothing of Manhood in me; I am turn'd Beast or Devil; have I not Hornes, and Tayle, and Leathern wings? methinks I shou'd have by my Actions—... I have done a Deed so ill, I cannot name it. (4.4.35–42)

The Fiscal's final response to Harman Junior resituates his personal degeneration within European political history: "Those Fits of Conscience in another might be excusable; but, in you, a Dutchman, who are of a Race that are born Rebels, and live every where on Rapine; Wou'd you degenerate, and have remorse?" The Fiscal refers here to the United Provinces' eighty-year rebellion against the Spanish Habsburg monarchy, which gave birth not only to the Dutch state but also to the modern interstate system in the Peace of Westphalia (1648). To understand the significance of that rebellion—of which the rape, the Fiscal implies, is merely the logical extension—we need to return it to a longue durée that the play has continuously in mind.

In the late fifteenth century, Venice's and Genoa's respective monopolies on spices and silk enabled them to exert an influence within Europe out of all proportion to their size. In response, European rulers attempted to appropriate the city-states' power by seizing their long-distance trade. All the participants in this contest—including Spain, Portugal, the United Provinces, France, and England—developed radically more expensive military and administrative apparatuses. Spain was the most successful among these states and attempted to contain the others within a medieval system centered on the papacy and the Habsburg Empire. But the contest had unleashed forces much too powerful for any suprastate authority. Hence, when it rebelled against Spain, Holland led a revolution against the medieval system and its principle that there must be a sovereign entity above the state.

The Fiscal encapsulates the historical significance of Holland's rebellion when he asks rhetorically, "What makes any thing a sin but Law?" (4.4.52). The Fiscal implies that with the medieval system's disintegration, sovereignty no longer expresses divine will but instead a wholly secular agreement between states. The Fiscal's rhetorical question becomes even more historically acute: "What law is there here against it? ... If there be Hell, 'tis but for those that sin in Europe, not for us in Asia." The state system's international law applied only inside Europe, within the so-called lines of amity. The world outside Europe was "an internationally defined zone of anarchy," where Europeans could engage in violence against each other, as well as against natives, with impunity. Even when European states signed a series of bilateral treaties during the 1680s, they placed limits only on the former violence, not on the latter. Westphalia officially replaced the idea of "Rome," as Foucault has observed, with the concept of "Europe": a system of states that relates to the outside world in terms of economic utility and hence violence without limit. From Amboyna's perspective, the Dutch rebellion against the feudal order turned "rapine"—capital accumulation outside the constraints of any preexisting religious or political principle—into the very basis of modern sovereignty. World-system theorists agree: Wallerstein has noted that the "Revolution liberated a force that could sustain the world-system"; Arrighi, that "this reorganization of political space in the interest of capital accumulation marks the birth not just of the modern inter-state system, but also of capitalism as a world system." Marx referred to Holland simply as "the capitalist nation par excellence."

Amboyna locates in Holland's rebellion, most profoundly, the historical rupture that collapsed the theoretically separate spheres of politics and economics. Their conceptual segregation had been immemorial: the Lex Claudia, for example, denied Roman senators the right to engage in maritime commerce precisely in order to quarantine sovereignty from the corrupting influence of profit making. The most insightful English character, Beamont, condemns the Dutch in a form that makes sense only within the terms of classical thought, referring to them as "an infamous Nation, that ought to have been slaves ... [but] had cast off the Yoke of their lawful Soveraign" (5.1.166–68). He implies that because the merchant, like the slave, is incapable of thinking outside his own interests, he is bereft of public character and unfit to exercise sovereign powers. The Dutch inappropriately join the sovereign sphere of rule to the subordinated sphere of commodity exchange: "You shew'd your ambition, when you began to be a State: for not being Gentlemen, you have stollen the Arms of the best Families of Europe ... and call'd your Selves the HIGH and MIGHTY" (2.1.370–74). Beamont's jibe critiques not merely the merchant's seizure of sovereign power but also, more provocatively, the very origins of the modern "state" in the sudden and unprecedented combination of trade ("not being Gentlemen") with the prerogatives of military power ("you have stollen the Arms of the best Families"). According to Amboyna, "Monarchys" (i.e., England) segregate commercial exchange and sovereign power; "states" (i.e., Holland) collapse the two.

In sum, Amboyna presents an account of modernity's origins that appears to resemble our own narrative of bourgeois revolution but is in fact fundamentally different. The play's opposition between England and Holland seems to correspond to the now conventional antithesis of aristocratic and bourgeois orders. But where we associate the bourgeoisie with the liberation of capital, late seventeenth-century writers instead identified Holland with global monopoly. For example, one of the pamphlets about the Amboyna massacre Dryden read insisted that the Dutch "will never be satisfied until they have subjected the trade [of all] nations upon earth to their unlimited East-India arbitrary government." Amboyna emphasizes, accordingly, that Holland's modern innovation is the conjunction of merchant capital and military power, and the play's subversive force lies here: where our own narratives about the birth of capital feed Eurocentric ideologies of progress, Amboyna's allusions to the militarization of trade resist such ideologies. But the full extent of Amboyna's heterodoxy becomes visible when we study the play's allusions not only to the history of state formation in Europe but also to colonialism in the East Indies. The next section takes Amboyna's historical vision to its limit, where it turns back on the play itself, calling into question the play's own ideology.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE STILLBIRTH OF CAPITALby SIRAJ AHMED Copyright © 2012 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804775222
• ISBN 13: 9780804775229
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 277