The Stillbirth of Capital

Enlightenment Writing and Colonial India

Siraj Ahmed

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780804775236, 9780804775229
• eBook ISBN: 9780804778114
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

PART I

Commerce (1670–1760)

1	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.¹ 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.²

Aravamudan opens his excellent study in this way: “A book on colonialism and eighteenth-century literature cannot begin without invoking Oroonoko.”³ 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.⁴

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.⁵ 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. ⁶

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.⁷ 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.⁸ 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.⁹ 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.¹⁰

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.¹¹ 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.¹² 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.¹³

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 Towerson’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.¹⁴ 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.¹⁵ 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.¹⁶

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.¹⁷ 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.¹⁸ 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 politic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Enlightenment and Colonial India
• PART I: COMMERCE (1670–1760)
• PART II: CONQUEST (1760–1790)
• PART III: PROGRESS (1790–1815)
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index