Other Englands
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Other Englands

Utopia, Capital, and Empire in an Age of Transition

Sarah Hogan

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Other Englands

Utopia, Capital, and Empire in an Age of Transition

Sarah Hogan

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Other Englands examines the rise of the early English utopia in the context of emergent capitalism. Above all, it asserts that this literary genre was always already an expression of social crisis and economic transition, a context refracted in the origin stories and imagined geographies common to its early modern form. Beginning with the paradigmatic popular utopias of Thomas More and Francis Bacon but attentive to non-canonical examples from the margins of the tradition, the study charts a shifting and, by the time of the English Revolution, self-critical effort to think communities in dynamic socio-spatial forms.

Arguing that early utopias have been widely misunderstood and maligned as static, finished polities, Sarah Hogan makes the case that utopian literature offered readers and writers a transformational and transitional social imaginary. She shows how a genre associated with imagining systemic alternatives both contested and contributed to the ideological construction of capitalist imperialism. In the early English utopia, she finds both a precursor to the Enlightenment discourse of political economy and another historical perspective on the beginnings and enduring conflicts of global capital.

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CHAPTER 1
THOMAS MORE’S “PENINSULA MADE AN ISLAND”
There is a history in all men’s lives,
Figuring the nature of the times deceased,
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life, who in their seeds
And weak beginnings lie intreasured.
William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I, 3.1.80–85.
[T]he suspension of the present form of production relations gives signs of its becoming—foreshadowings of the future.
Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 461.1
In 2006, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies assembled a special issue titled “Utopias, Medieval and Early Modern.” In the introductory essay, the medievalist Patricia Ingham advances the following statement of purpose: “we are interested in understanding why, despite repeated testimony to those “medieval” inspirations that survive in [Thomas More’s Utopia], the narrative of More’s revolutionary newness still seems to be unassailable.”2 Ingham goes on to question the tendency toward supersessionary thinking within utopian studies, especially the variety that represents the early modern utopia as a newly secular mindset, while caricaturing the medieval as irredeemably religious. Ingham counters this periodization by asserting that invention, play, and worldly wonder—defining characteristics within her definition of utopia3—are as common to medieval literature as they are to More’s text.
The case for medieval utopianism is made just as emphatically by Karma Lochrie in her contribution to the same journal issue and in her recent book Nowhere in the Middle Ages.4 Lochrie takes aim at the literary tendency to ghettoize utopia to the realm of mere genre, calling on Ernst Bloch’s theories to assert the higher purpose of a more timeless utopian function. She claims, “The scholarly master narrative of More as the father of all utopias worries me for its circular way of reinforcing the novelty of More’s work, the epistemic break between the medieval and the early modern, and the narrowest concept of what utopia is and does.”5 As their remarks indicate, Ingham and Lochrie gesture toward larger problems of method than period turf wars: the question of how to define utopia—as form, content, impulse, or function—occupies this special journal issue throughout, but their critiques zero in on the narrative approach to literary historiography. In particular, they suggest that the modern and, mainly, Marxist tradition of utopian studies has chronically overemphasized More’s novelty, rupture, and difference at the expense of survivals, seams, and continuities within the history of utopian thought.
Lochrie’s and Ingham’s theses should themselves be contextualized within a larger movement in medieval studies that owes a great deal to James Simpson’s influential Reform and Cultural Revolution. Simpson probes the passage from the medieval to the early modern, troubling dominant periodic terms and the contemporary scholar’s tendency to draw too sharp a line between the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. But if Simpson critiques the “constrained memory” of periodized thought,6 he also to a large extent reproduces it, despite his own venture beyond the frequent chronological rift—the coronation of Henry VII in 1485. For example, he begins his massive study by advancing the claim that the sixteenth century was not a period of literary innovation so much as one of generic narrowing and simplification. In the introduction, he goes on to maintain that early modern literature was organized by “unity” and “novelty” as measures of cultural worth (a shift in some ways traced to the development of the printing press), as opposed to the heterogeneity and “complication” which characterized medieval cultural production. In Simpson’s account, historians and cultural critics who study early modernity tend to misguidedly reproduce these same neat divides, the same desire for a “cleanness of line” and “original purity” in cultural traditions7—or in a word, for cultural revolution rather than reformation. When he reckons with More’s fictional society (an imagined commonwealth based on “draconian repression of the body politic in the name of centralized reason”), he treats Utopia rather straightforwardly as a textual fantasy of the “end of history.”8 Simpson here poses a question that arises again in Lochrie’s and in Ingham’s work: “Can More slice across history so cleanly?”9
The question seems pointed, but in reality, it is loaded; Utopia in all these studies becomes a symbolic text of early modernity. It sets the cultural standard of novelty and revolution (in Simpson) and the generic, utopian literary standard (in both Lochrie and Ingham). Ironically, More’s little book again emerges as a uniquely pivotal, seminal text even as this status is denied it. Here, I’ll argue that Utopia is moored in a transitional moment, looking both backward and ahead, internalizing its transitional, transformative context as content. The work is certainly perturbed by past survivals and adapts older forms, then, but it also signals historically novel circumstances and initiates a culturally novel form.
While Ingham and Lochrie offer valuable reminders that a utopian impulse exceeds literary formations and that something akin to utopian wonder or collective dreaming was indisputably present in medieval culture and texts, and while Simpson’s work needs no praise given the influence it exerts, I will here maintain that the study of the genre of utopia demands an approach that is uniquely attentive to historical shifts and departures within its history. The search for origins and ruptures within the study of utopia—however fraught that project will be—seems a necessary one, given utopia’s own probing desire for social difference and historical becoming.10 This is certainly not an attempt to fortify disciplinary boundaries, or to shut down conversations between literary critics who have much to glean from each other; instead, it is to defend and join two of the most lively, and to my mind, seminal sites of critical innovation on More’s work in recent decades: the New Historicist and postcolonial influenced strains of More criticism and the Marxist and Freudo-Marxist set of interpretations.
What these two already cross-pollinated fields share—in the study of utopias and culture more generally—is an interdisciplinary concern with culture’s sociohistorical embeddedness. In addition, both strains of criticism suggest that More’s work is definitively “early modern,” shedding light on the historical development of modern institutions, from the nation state and empire to the nuclear family and capitalism. Yet in the end, they arrive at remarkably different conclusions on the political nature of More’s book. In most new historicist, Foucauldian, or post-structural studies on More, Utopia is less than a radical text, emptied out of its good intentions by its colonial form and policies and its fantasy of instrumental rationality, state power, regulation, and repression.11 Alternatively, in the Marxist tradition of utopian literary studies—anchored as it is in Fredric Jameson’s elaborations on Louis Marin’s structuralist study Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces—the form of Utopia tends to be celebrated (against the content of King Utopus’s social order) as a challenge to ideological thought.12 In Marin’s and Jameson’s readings, Utopia is a kind of formal thought mechanism, orchestrating a radical play of perspectives that estranges the current social system and thus presents readers with a way of recognizing the limits of ideology and history. The Left, then, is no closer to a consensus on Utopia’s political orientation than it was in the Cold War–era debate with virulent anti-communists.13 By some accounts, More’s work is draconian; by others, it is saintly, much like the views in the debate about Thomas More the man.
What this chapter will attempt is a kind of reconciliation of these assessments, or a reading that draws from both critical practices to consider the complicated, overdetermined, and certainly multiple origins of Utopia within a historical process that was both regressive and progressive, or as Walter Benjamin would have it, barbaric and civilized.14 As is always the case with More, part of the difficulty of locating his politics is a matter of the book’s dialogue form, its self-effacing neologisms, and its self-contradictions and satire. Yet I would like to propose that this difficulty is also a consequence of the book’s effort to reexamine localized social upheavals in their abstract, non-placed relationship to transnational forces—a circumstance of deterritorialization15 or displacement that is in tension and also in explicit debate with Utopia’s nation-state formations. If, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari argue, the “problem of the nation is aggravated in the two extreme cases of a land without a people and a people without a land,” (begging the question, “How can a people and a land be made . . . a nation—a refrain”),16 Utopia, in its dialogical encounter between a “new” continent and a kingdom of vagrants, offers a fiction that aspires to resolve this riddle.
Of particular concern in the first half of this chapter will be the combinatory, collisional discourses of late medievalism, humanism, and New World writing that structure More’s book and which formally encourage old and new, as well as internal and international, ways of perceiving land, labor, and community in a moment of class upheaval and continental discovery. Specifically, More’s parodic reworking of the medieval tradition of estates satire, as it combines with the philosophical-dialogical tradition of the ideal commonwealth and the emergent discourses of Atlantic travel writing, suggest that Utopia is an effort to reexamine England’s place in a new world. Importantly, these literary forms are also narratives of community formation, both true and fictitious, with various socio-spatial limits: namely, the imaginary polis, the kingdom (as it was and is), and the unknown, expansive, oceanic world. The novel adaptation of the three forms, I’ll suggest, becomes a means for representing diachronic change synchronically and responding to the spatio-temporal dislocations caused by agrarian, mercantile, and imperial changes to the English polity, in ways that emphasize both continuity and rupture with the past, and that seek out figurative means for representing systemic transformation.
In the final section of the chapter, focused mainly on More’s colonial imaginary and Book Two’s story of the island-forming trench, the concern will be to demonstrate Utopia’s own obsession with spatial, geopolitical, and territorial origins. Moreover, an examination of its socio-spatial discourses will highlight Utopia’s nationally circumscribed critique of dispossession. The contradictions that emerge in More’s work will be read not only within the context of an emerging agrarian capitalism, then, but also in relation to an emerging world system, for More’s representation of domestic struggles looks beyond England to consider an alternative that lies across the sea. In essence, this study is an effort to join two threads of criticisms by considering Utopia not as a product of a capitalist and an imperialist moment, but as a genre-pioneering work that attempts to narrate the experience of an at once very immediate and very distant transformation that gave rise to capitalist relations within and beyond England.
On the Origins of Utopia and the Origins of Capitalism
There is a long line of critics of all political and methodological persuasions who treat More’s Utopia as having inaugurated a genre. The most empirical evidence for its ground-breaking status can be found in the number of subsequent works that were explicitly fashioned after the 1516 text. Utopia inspired a host of explicit imitations by fellow English writers like Bacon, Hall, and Plattes, while beyond Britain’s shores, Tommaso Campanella’s Civitas Solis, Johannes Valentinus Andreae’s Christianopolis, and Voltaire’s Candide also paid tribute to More’s book. Perhaps the strongest evidence of More’s invention can be found in the anxiety of influence expressed by some of his pupils. Robert Burton’s Dutch-inspired “Utopia of Mine Owne” (in the Anatomy of Melancholy), for instance, parodically proposes that the source of seventeenth-century England’s troubles is indeed the idleness of commoners.17 Burton nevertheless gives evidence of the paternal pressure More’s text exerted on other writers.18 Interpretive evidence can also be evoked to describe the text’s novelty, from its neologism that coined the contemporary genre’s namesake to its humanist reworking of classical texts and travel narratives. But what marks Utopia apart from earlier classical, pagan, and Christian traditions of the ideal society (within which it should most certainly be contextualized), is the work’s unusually realistic underpinning. Utopia is not just a mythical otherworld; it is also strangely of its own historical world. Unlike the city in Plato’s Republic, where the city is a “pattern” set in the heavens for a “man who wants to see and found a city within himself on the basis of what he sees,”19 and unlike the lands in those myths of a golden age such as Ovid described, where “springtime lasted all the year”20 and the land could go untilled, the Utopian island is a coeval territory where mankind is flawed and desiring, requiring labor and the regulating institutions of society in order to meet human needs.21
Yet the more recent critical tendency chiefly examines More’s novelty in relation to his historical conjuncture. This assertion e...

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