The Intimacies of Four Continents

Duke University Press

Contents

THE INTIMACIES OF FOUR CONTINENTS

My study investigates the often obscured connections between the emergence of European liberalism, settler colonialism in the Americas, the transatlantic African slave trade, and the East Indies and China trades in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Cuban Counterpoint (1940), Fernando Ortiz described "peoples from all four quarters of the globe" who labored in the "new world" to produce tobacco and sugar for European consumption. Observing that sugar linked the histories of colonial settlers, native peoples, and slave labor, followed by Chinese and other migrants, Ortiz commented that sugar was "mulatto" from the start. C. L. R. James asserted in The Black Jacobins (1938), that the eighteenth-century slave society in San Domingo connected Europe, Africa, and the Americas. He declared that the fortunes created by the slavery-based societies in the Americas gave rise to the French bourgeoisie, producing the conditions for the "rights of man" demanded in the Revolution of 1789. These understandings that the "new world" of European settlers, indigenous peoples, Africans, and Asians in the Americas was intimately related to the rise of liberal modernity are the inspiration for my investigation. Yet I work with the premise that we actually know little about these "intimacies of four continents," despite separate scholarship about single societies, peoples, or regions. The modern division of knowledge into academic disciplines, focused on discrete areas and objects of interest to the modern national university, has profoundly shaped the inquiry into these connections. Even the questions we can ask about these histories are influenced by the unevenly inhabited and inconsistently understood aftermath of these obscured conditions.

Historians, philosophers, and sociologists have written quite a lot about the origins of liberalism in modern Europe, whether they focus on the French Revolution of 1789 as a key event in the shift from feudal aristocracies to democratic nation-states, or whether they emphasize the gradual displacement of religious explanation by secular scientific rationalism, the shift from mercantilism to industrial capitalism, the growth of modern bureaucracy, or citizenship within the modern state. Yet these discussions have more often treated liberalism's abstract promises of human freedom, rational progress, and social equality apart from the global conditions on which they depended. I join scholars like Cedric Robinson, Saidiya Hartman, Uday Singh Mehta, Paul Gilroy, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Saree Makdisi, Walter Mignolo, Susan Buck-Morss, Jodi A. Byrd, and others, in arguing that liberal philosophy, culture, economics, and government have been commensurate with, and deeply implicated in, colonialism, slavery, capitalism, and empire. There is a distinguished historiography of the Atlantic slave trade and slave economies, which documents slavery throughout the Americas, but it is rare for these scholars to discuss the relationship between slavery and settler colonialism or imported indentured labor. There is work on indentured labor systems utilizing Europeans and Africans, with some attention to the role of Chinese and Indian migrations to the Americas, but there is less work that examines European colonial conquest and the complex history and survival of native indigenous peoples in the Caribbean, and scarcely any that considers the connections, relations, and mixings among the histories of Asian, African, and indigenous peoples in the Americas.

In examining state archives out of which these historical narratives emerge, I observe the ways in which the archive that mediates the imperatives of the state subsumes colonial violence within narratives of modern reason and progress. To make legible the forcible encounters, removals, and entanglements omitted in liberal accounts of abolition, emancipation, and independence, I devise other ways of reading so that we might understand the processes through which the forgetting of violent encounter is naturalized, both by the archive, and in the subsequent narrative histories. In a sense, one aim of my project is to be more specific about what I would term the economy of affirmation and forgetting that structures and formalizes the archives of liberalism, and liberal ways of understanding. This economy civilizes and develops freedoms for "man" in modern Europe and North America, while relegating others to geographical and temporal spaces that are constituted as backward, uncivilized, and unfree. Liberal forms of political economy, culture, government, and history propose a narrative of freedom overcoming enslavement that at once denies colonial slavery, erases the seizure of lands from native peoples, displaces migrations and connections across continents, and internalizes these processes in a national struggle of history and consciousness. The social inequalities of our time are a legacy of these processes through which "the human" is "freed" by liberal forms, while other subjects, practices, and geographies are placed at a distance from "the human."

My study could be considered an unlikely or unsettling genealogy of modern liberalism, which examines liberalism as a project that includes at once both the universal promises of rights, emancipation, wage labor, and free trade, as well as the global divisions and asymmetries on which the liberal tradition depends, and according to which such liberties are reserved for some and wholly denied to others. In this sense, the modern distinction between definitions of the human and those to whom such definitions do not extend is the condition of possibility for Western liberalism, and not its particular exception. This genealogy also traces the manners in which the liberal affirmations of individualism, civility, mobility, and free enterprise simultaneously innovate new means and forms of subjection, administration, and governance. By genealogy, I mean that my analysis does not accept given categories and concepts as fixed or constant, but rather takes as its work the inquiry into how those categories became established as given, and with what effects. Genealogical method questions the apparent closure of our understanding of historical progress and attempts to contribute to what Michel Foucault has discussed as a historical ontology of ourselves, or a history of the present. By modern liberalism, I mean broadly the branches of European political philosophy that include the narration of political emancipation through citizenship in the state, the promise of economic freedom in the development of wage labor and exchange markets, and the conferring of civilization to human persons educated in aesthetic and national culture — in each case unifying particularity, difference, or locality through universal concepts of reason and community. I also include in this definition the literary, cultural, and aesthetic genres through which liberal notions of person, civic community, and national society are established and upheld.

In this sense, my study involves connecting what we might call an "archive of liberalism" — that is, the literary, cultural, and political philosophical narratives of progress and individual freedom that perform the important work of mediating and resolving liberalism's contradictions — with the colonial state archives from which it has been traditionally separated, and the anticolonial intellectual traditions infrequently considered alongside the imperial one. In this effort, I do not treat the colonial archive as a stable, transparent collection of facts. Rather, I regard its architecture of differently functioning offices and departments as rooms of the imperial state; they house the historically specific technologies of colonial governance for knowing and administering colonized populations, which both attest to its contradictions, and yield its critique. As Ann Laura Stoler argues, the colonial archive is "a supreme technology of the ... imperial state, a repository of codified beliefs that clustered (and bore witness to) connections between secrecy, the law, and power." As a material bureaucracy of rule, and the historical trace of imperial activities, the colonial archive portrays colonial governance as a strategic, permeable, and improvisational process: the tireless collection of tables, statistics, measurements, and numbers; the unending volumes of records and reports; the copied and recopied correspondence between offices; the production of legal classifications, cases, and typologies — these actively document and produce the risks, problems, and uncertainties that were the conditions of imperial rule. Inasmuch as Colonial Office and Foreign Office papers, India Office Records, War Department memoranda, and Parliamentary Select Committee reports constitute the very media of colonial administration, they likewise conjure what the colonial bureaucracy did not and could not know — its equivocation, ignorance, and incoherence — even as it performed the agency of an imperial will to know. In other words, the colonial state archive both mediates and subsumes the uncertainties of liberal and imperial governance; in it, one reads the predicaments, both known and unknown, that give rise to the calculations, strategies, forms, and practices of imperial rule.

The vast collections of the Great Britain National Archives, formerly the Public Records Office, hold the papers of the British Colonial Office, the Foreign Office, the Slave Trade and African Department, the War and Colonial Department, the Records of the Treaty and Royal Letter Department, and others. Within these, there are separate records of the settling of territories around the world, the transatlantic slave trade, the governing of colonies, the abolition of slavery, and the emigration of Chinese labor to sites in the Americas. The papers are organized into distinct departments for Trade, Laws, Correspondence, Sessional Records, and so forth, with divisions within each for the administration of regions: for example, Africa and colonial exploration, America and the West Indies, Asia, the Atlantic, Australia and New Zealand, and so forth, and then individual series for each British colony within each area. There are separate files for acts, treaties, ordinances, taxes, and other specific subjects and functions. The National Archives are organized to preserve government records and information for the public; its imperatives are classification, collection, and documentation, rather than connection or convergence.

Hence, it is fair to observe that there is scarce attention to the relationships between the matters classified within distinct stores; the organization of the archives discourages links between settler colonialism in North America and the West Indies and the African slave trade; or attention to the conjunction of the abolition of slavery and the importing of Chinese and South Asian indentured labor; or a correlation of the East Indies and China trades and the rise of bourgeois Europe. In order to nuance these connections and interdependencies, one must read across the separate repositories organized by office, task, and function, and by period and area, precisely implicating one set of preoccupations in and with another. It has been necessary both to examine the events that are well documented in the collected papers, as well as to heed those matters that are entirely absent, whether actively suppressed or merely deemed insignificant. I notice the aporia in the archives, often belied by discrepant tone or insistent repetitions, and remark the rhetorical anomalies that obscure omissions, tensions, or outright illogic. While such reading practices deeply respect the primacy of material conditions, they also often defy or disrupt accepted historical chronologies. This approach does not foreground comprehensiveness and teleology, in either a historical or geographical sense, but rather emphasizes the relationality and differentiation of peoples, cultures, and societies, as well as the convergence and divergence of ideas, concepts, and themes. In pursuing particular intimacies and contemporaneities that traverse distinct and separately studied "areas," the practice of reading across archives unsettles the discretely bounded objects, methods, and temporal frameworks canonized by a national history invested in isolated origins and independent progressive development.

The consideration of the colonial archive as intrinsic to the archives of liberalism permits us to understand that as modern liberalism defined the "human" and universalized its attributes to European man, it simultaneously differentiated populations in the colonies as less than human. Even as it proposes inclusivity, liberal universalism effects principles of inclusion and exclusion; in the very claim to define humanity, as a species or as a condition, its gestures of definition divide the human and the nonhuman, to classify the normative and pathologize deviance. In this study of how liberal ideas of political emancipation, ethical individualism, historical progress, and free market economy were employed in the expansion of empire, I observe that the uses of universalizing concepts of reason, civilization, and freedom effect colonial divisions of humanity, affirming liberty for modern man while subordinating the variously colonized and dispossessed peoples whose material labor and resources were the conditions of possibility for that liberty. These processes that comprise the fifteenth-century "discovery" of the "new world," consolidate themselves through modern liberal political economy and culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. We see the longevity of the colonial divisions of humanity in our contemporary moment, in which the human life of citizens protected by the state is bound to the denigration of populations cast in violation of human life, set outside of human society. Furthermore, while violence characterizes exclusion from the universality of the human, it also accompanies inclusion or assimilation into it. Such violence leaves a trace, which returns andunsettles the apparent closure of the liberal politics, society, and culture that establish the universal. Race as a mark of colonial difference is an enduring remainder of the processes through which the human is universalized and freed by liberal forms, while the peoples who created the conditions of possibility for that freedom are assimilated or forgotten. The genealogy of modern liberalism is thus also a genealogy of modern race; racial differences and distinctions designate the boundaries of the human and endure as remainders attesting to the violence of liberal universality.

To observe that the genealogy of modern liberalism is simultaneously a genealogy of colonial divisions of humanity is a project of tracking the ways in which race, geography, nation, caste, religion, gender, sexuality and other social differences become elaborated as normative categories for governance under the rubrics of liberty and sovereignty. Elaborations of racial difference were not universal or transhistorical; they did not occur all at once but were local, regional, and differential, articulated in dynamic, interlocking ways with other attributions of social difference within various spaces in an emerging world system. The operations that pronounce colonial divisions of humanity — settler seizure and native removal, slavery and racial dispossession, and racialized expropriations of many kinds — are imbricated processes, not sequential events; they are ongoing and continuous in our contemporary moment, not temporally distinct nor as yet concluded. To investigate modern race is to consider how racial differences articulate complex intersections of social difference within specific conditions. We can link the emergence of liberties defined in the abstract terms of citizenship, rights, wage labor, free trade, and sovereignty with the attribution of racial difference to those subjects, regions, and populations that liberal doctrine describes as "unfit for liberty" or "incapable of civilization," placed at the margins of liberal humanity. Over the course of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, liberal and colonial discourses improvised racial terms for the non-European peoples whom settlers, traders, and colonial personnel encountered. Settlers represented indigenous peoples as violent threats to be eliminated in ways that rationalized white settlement and African slavery; they discounted native people as uncivilized or non-Christian, conflated the inhabitants with land and nature, imagined them as removable or extinguishable, or rendered them as existing only in the past. Colonial administrators, traders, and company agents cast captive Africans as inhuman chattel, as enslaveable property. Colonial governors conceived the Chinese as if they were a plentiful, tractable form of labor that could alternately oppose, replace, or supplement slavery; colonial police and criminal courts represented the Chinese as diseased addicts, degenerate vagrants, and prostitutes. These distinct yet connected racial logics constituted parts of what was in the nineteenth century an emergent Anglo-American settler imperial imaginary, which continues to be elaborated today, casting differentiated peoples across the globe in relation to liberal ideas of civilization and human freedom. The safekeeping and preservation of liberal political society, and the placement of peoples at various distances from liberal humanity — "Indian," "Black," "Negro," "Chinese," "coolie," and so forth — are thus integral parts of the genealogy of modern liberalism. Not only differentiated racial classifications, but taxonomies that distinguished between continents and civilizations have been essential to liberal, settler, and colonial governance. In this book, I suggest that the "coloniality" of modern world history is not a brute binary division, but rather one that operates through precisely spatialized and temporalized processes of both differentiation and connection.