The Alchemy of Empire

Abject Materials and the Technologies of Colonialism

Rajani Sudan

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780823270682, 9780823270675
• eBook ISBN: 9780823270699
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Named 'Top 6' South Asia studies publications of 2016 by the British Association for South Asian Studies The Alchemy of Empire unravels the non-European origins of Enlightenment science. Focusing on the abject materials of empire-building, this study traces the genealogies of substances like mud, mortar, ice, and paper, as well as forms of knowledge like inoculation. Showing how East India Company employees deployed the paradigm of alchemy in order to make sense of the new worlds they confronted, Rajani Sudan argues that the Enlightenment was born largely out of Europe's (and Britain's) sense of insecurity and inferiority in the early modern world. Plumbing the depths of the imperial archive, Sudan uncovers the history of the British Enlightenment in the literary artifacts of the long eighteenth century, from the correspondence of the East India Company and the papers of the Royal Society to the poetry of Alexander Pope and the novels of Jane Austen.

ONE

The Alchemy of Empire

For lo! The Board with Cups and Spoons is crown’d,

The Berries crackle, and the Mill turns round.

On shining Altars of Japan they raise

The silver Lamp; the fiery Spirits blaze.

From silver Spouts the grateful Liquors glide,

While China’s Earth receives the smoking Tyde.

—ALEXANDER POPE, The Rape of the Lock (1712)

Alexander Pope’s infamous coffee break of Canto III is inflected with just enough irony for his readers to wink and nod knowingly to one another, as they no doubt did at Button’s coffeehouse after reading Joseph Addison’s two-line review of the poem in The Spectator. Although coffee was good for the development of the literati and perhaps contributed to the transformation of the public sphere, Pope’s account of this “grateful Liquor” in The Rape of the Lock is cautionary.¹ Coffee levels the political playing field by making all politicians “wise”; its vapors suggest new “stratagems” to the Baron to carry through with his nefarious plans while its fanned fumes distract the belle Belinda from her doom. Pope’s admonition, however, extends beyond the parameters of poetic couplets, beyond Lord Petre’s antics and Arabella Fermor’s anger, beyond John Caryll’s pacific pleas, and even beyond Bernard Lintot’s pirated publication. Pope’s warning even survives Pope himself who, not content to leave well enough alone, revised the original two-part poem of 1712 to the five canto epic beloved by readers from its final publication in 1717 to the present day. Enthusiasts of imperialist critique agree that the description of coffee and its attendant accoutrements corral spoils from the far corners of the earth and place them squarely in the middle of Hampton Court revelry. Just as Ellen Pollak complicated the figure of Belinda and Laura Brown and identified Belinda’s dressing table, scattered with the booty of colonial conquest, as a showcase of British imperial power, so this scene of “rich Repast” similarly represents the commercial might of “Great Anna.”² Admirers of Pope’s irony would suggest that this inflated scenario expresses Pope’s scorn, albeit veiled, for the whole business, citing the notorious “Great Anna” zeugma as proof positive of this disdain. As one of the most useful annotated editions of The Rape of the Lock suggests, “England began to secure its trading empire, and new materials and luxuries poured in from around the world.”³ More recently, Suvir Kaul argues that poets of the long eighteenth century were conscious of the unique capacities poetry provided to articulate what he terms a “vocabulary of nation,” and Pope certainly stands as one of the more powerful voices of this work in progress.⁴ Thus, the groundbreaking readings of Pope Laura Brown and Ellen Pollak offered in 1985, readings that heralded the inception of studies of nation anchored in the acknowledgment of imperialism had become, a sparse fifteen years later, an interpretative assumption.⁵

But what if Pope’s caution responds to something quite different from either the careless consumption of an indulgent aristocracy or the deliberate display of British imperial power? The key to this lock is in “China’s earth.” Obviously, Pope’s fanciful figure refers to the china cups on the “Board,” and the meal spread out to entertain Belinda and her cohort is enriched not only by the coffee—a relatively new commodity—but also by the china and the silver service, all of which is quite fitting for an afternoon of royal entertainment. These lines enunciate sotto voce a shift of monarchical power. “Great Anna’s” authority, put into question by two insistent zeugmas that conflate her effective counsel with tea and her majesty with an “Indian screen,” is figuratively dethroned. Pope replaces her crown with china teacups and silver spoons. Far from being the relatively simple components of a relatively domestic scene, these cups and spoons are metonyms of other sovereign powers: on the one hand, the Ming and Qing dynasties controlling the production and traffic of silks and china, and, on the other, the Spanish empire of the New World controlling its putatively inexhaustible supply of bullion.⁶ Sandwiched between the powerful imperial terminuses of “China and Peru” is Britain that, at the time of The Rape of the Lock’s first appearance in 1712, was still engaged in Queen Anne’s War, its eventual victory not yet secured.⁷ Pope, himself on the brink of establishing a prominent poetic and political voice, was similarly poised between two versions of the poem. One version, characterized by “the satirical delicacy of its self-sufficient world,”⁸ and the other that tackles “the power of mercantile and colonial modernity to reshape individuals and nations,”⁹ between which he revised, at Queen Anne’s behest, his 1704 pastoral, to celebrate the Pax Britannica and produce Windsor-Forest.

The “Cups and Spoons” enter the poem as discrete commodities but quickly transmute to the material with which they are made. Spoons become silver and cups return to “China’s earth.” In a poem where a “Goose-pye” speaks and a “Pipkin” walks, this transformation shouldn’t be that surprising. But unlike the sly, sexual innuendoes that playfully echo in the Cave of Spleen, these cups and spoons represent something far more anxious. The silver spout empties a “smoking Tyde” into “China’s earth.” Dismantling the china cup and rendering it back to its original substance, earth, has the curious effect of robbing the cup of its function: as “earth,” the cup absorbs the tide and its silver rather than acting as a mere receptacle. Putting a little pressure on the word “Tyde” for a moment, we can read another tide, born of the proud “Silver Thames,” upon which ships laden with silver bullion sail to China to exchange this precious political cargo for the trivial commodities that litter Belinda’s dressing table and delight the gossips at Hampton Court Palace. André Gunder Frank’s study of global economy provides interesting statistics on the amount of silver flowing into continental Asia. Frank claims:

over the two and a half centuries up to 1800, China ultimately received nearly 48,000 tons of silver from Europe and Japan, plus perhaps another 10,000 tons or even more via Manila, as well as other silver produced in continental Southeast and Central Asia and in China itself. That would add up to some 60,0000 tons of silver for China or perhaps half the world’s tallied production of about 120,000 tons after 1600 or 137,000 tons since 1545.¹⁰

These numbers endow Pope’s figurative representation of China’s “earth” with impressive materiality, even to the support offered by Japan’s “shining Altars,” gilded, perhaps, with 10,000 tons of silver it was able to export to China. Kenneth Pomeranz’s influential study, The Great Divergence, similarly attests to Chinese interest in silver:

When Westerners did arrive, carrying silver from the richest mines ever discovered (Latin America produced roughly 85 per cent of the world’s silver between 1500 and 1800), they found that sending this silver to China (whether directly or through intermediaries) yielded large and very reliable arbitrage profits—profits so large that there was no good reason for profit-maximizing merchants to send much of anything else.¹¹

Thus the capacity of Chinese mud to incorporate most of the world’s liquidity and retain the power commanded by bullion poses a very real threat to a culture like Britain, newly addicted to Eastern commodities but, unlike Spain, lacking a reliable source of bullion. The glittering spoils veneering The Rape of the Lock may not unilaterally represent Britain’s imperial power. Whirring in the background of chat and “all that” is the inexorable “Mill” that slowly grinds distracting and destructive vapors for “Heroes” and “Nymphs” at play, and provides a machine of eternal damnation for errant sylphs (“The giddy Motion of the whirling Mill”).

Interestingly, Pope deploys a reversed alchemical trajectory to give heft to his cautionary tale. Rendering china back to its original base substance may seem to rob it of its immense value and recast it as a trivial item, part of a long conceit of silly pleasures indulged by coquettes and beaux. Ultimately, however, such a rendition demonstrates British helplessness in the face of Chinese power. As a mock-heroic epic, we are meant to take this caution with a grain of saltpeter, but Pope’s insistence on trivia and the triviality of poetic action suggests that far more is at stake. Even Windsor-Forest expresses ambivalence toward the putative pax Queen Anne had created with the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht. Under Granville’s command the timber, for example, from which ships including East Indiamen were made leaves the forest forsaken of half its trees. Pope ends the poem somewhat melancholically with a wistful reminder that his “careless Days” were much more profitably spent singing “Sylvan Strains” to “list’ning Swains” than celebrating nautical power.

“The Same Wind”

I now want to identify the ways in which Pope harnesses the movement between substance and commodity to articulate his critique. Kaul points out that Pope’s focus on the trivial stabilizes and domesticates the “historically transformative force of imported commodities.”¹² But equally important to the narrative of nation making is the acknowledgment of other sovereigns and other empires which Pope addresses in his early eighteenth-century anthems.

By mid-century, however, this circumspect voice was less evident, and no text has been more drafted into postcolonial service than Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), particularly the moment when the protagonist asks of his teacher, Imlac: “By what means are the Europeans thus powerful? Or why, since they can easily visit Asia and Africa for trade and conquest, cannot the Asiatics and Africans invade their coasts, plant colonies in their ports, and give laws to their natural princes? The same wind that carries them back would bring us thither?”¹³ Imlac replies with an object lesson in ideology: “They are more powerful than we because they are wiser; knowledge will always predominate over ignorance … but why their knowledge is more than ours, I know not what reason can be given, but the unsearchable will of the Supreme Being.”¹⁴ Imlac’s invocation of this “will” effectively dismisses Rasselas’s reasonable question. The idea that rational thought was solely the province of Enlightened Europe had assumed hegemonic status by the mid–eighteenth century and Johnson is only ventriloquizing what seems a self-evident reason for European power. Since that time, the reasons that explain Western superiority in the eighteenth century have changed but not the assumption of that superiority. Reason for Johnson unambiguously endows the “great number of the northern and western nations of Europe … which are now in possession of all power and all knowledge,” while postcolonial readers see the impulse of Enlightenment reason in the very the logic of Rasselas’s question.¹⁵ That is, Reason has become the reason for Western domination.

Historians and anthropologists interested in the history of empire have invoked Johnson’s sentiment, using this moment to illustrate variously the ways in which European hegemony operated in the eighteenth century. Jack Goody, for example, uses this exchange to historicize European ethnocentrism: comparing this moment in Johnson to another one in Shakespeare’s Richard II, he demonstrates reason to be the discourse that makes Occidental superiority possible.¹⁶ The same Johnsonian moment functions differently for Niall Ferguson. In his Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, Rasselas’s question appears as a self-congratulatory epigraph to the chapter “Why Britain.”¹⁷ I want to question the assumption of European Enlightenment as it was developed in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, and as it has been extended in academic and cultural work since, particularly the notion that its Reason belonged uniquely to the West. In fact, both Johnson’s assumptions about the unique intellectual attainments of the European Enlightenment and today’s critique of that assumption are consequences of European colonial triumphs. Neither recognizes the colonial sources of what we take to be modern reason.

Ferguson’s account of Western history uncovers the ways in which scientific knowledge, mechanical expertise, and technological development contributed to the increase of material wealth in the West via new forms of commerce. For him, these developments reflect a straightforward progress based on the application of newly discovered models of thought manifested in mathematics, chemistry, economics, and so on. The first beneficiaries of these technologies lost sight of their origin and saw them as the product of a divine gift of Reason. Ferguson clearly reveals the delusions at the heart of Enlightenment privilege, yet his work remains bound to a narrowly Eurocentric model. If, however, we attend to other more global histories, then we may be able to see that there were in fact competing technologies of empire.¹⁸ Although historians have effectively exposed the ideological Orientalism in Johnson’s tale, the rhetoric of that tale reveals an even more compelling epistemological history. When Johnson invokes the power of the “same wind” endowed with the capacity to blow ships of all nations into lucrative ports, when he sees that the potential to establish commercial, technological, and epistemological connections equally among the nations of Asia and Africa and Europe and the east, he raises the possibility only to sweep it away. Without the divine will of an unsearchable intelligence, the east can no more challenge western dominance than a woman can preach. But such a dismissal reveals something about the fears that plagued Johnson’s contemporaries.¹⁹

Uncovering the early history of the shift toward Western scientific hegemony has been traditionally understood as a progress narrative, a chronological succession of accumulated knowledge culminating in a grand imperial telos.²⁰ Reading disparate letters, journals, and diaries, written by various early modern merchants, soldiers, doctors, scientists, and scholars who traveled in the East may help uncover ways to complicate this progression. More important, such recovery may identify different, non-Eurocentric discourses that the British used to make sense of new spaces they encountered in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The ideological lesson Imlac teaches Rasselas is one that has to be rhetorically structured. Even if Rasselas were to convince Imlac of the various capacities for restoring epistemological agency to Asiatic and African nations, the trope doesn’t work. The “same wind,” in fact, does not blow in any static fashion. That “same wind” is subject to different currents, different directions, and harnessing the “wind that carries them back” to bring “us thither” would involve different ways of charting courses, sailing ships, forms of currency, forms of knowledge—in short, a different techne. Rasselas’s question and Imlac’s answer can only be understood through Johnson’s assumptions about commerce, technology, and epistemology: most telling, the larger assumption about the reciprocity of these cultural practices. Johnson therefore articulates his culture’s fears and anxieties about a different techne. The putative ease with which these Europeans navigate the seas to “visit” Asiatic and African nations masks the necessity for trade and conquest. That is, for Britons seeking to supplement their meager island resources with trade—for spices, silks, silver, and such—these voyages are necessary. For those Asiatic and African nations, however, whence these luxuries originate, there is no need for sea-faring exploration because there is no similar need for them. The same structure of desire is not in place; there is no trans...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Mud, Mortar, and Empire
• 1. The Alchemy of Empire
• 2. Mortar and the Making of Madras
• 3. Ice and the Production of British Climate
• 4. Inoculation and the Limits of British Imperialism
• 5. “Plaisters,” Paper, and the Labor of Letters
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index