The global has become an important framework for understanding Britain's imperial past, initiated by eighteenth-century scholars like Srinivas Aravamudan, Betty Joseph, Suvir Kaul, and Felicity Nussbaum. Ashley Cohen joins this conversation with her new monograph, The Global Indies: British Imperial Culture and the Reshaping of the World, 1746–1815, in which she clarifies not just what we as academics mean when we say the “global eighteenth century” but also, building on the work of Ayesha Ramachandran and other scholars of the medieval and early modern periods, to reconceptualize what people at the time saw when they imagined the globe. To do that, Cohen takes seriously the use of the phrase “the Indies,” referring to Britain's disparate colonies in the Caribbean and in South Asia, not as geographical sloppiness by parochial Brits but as a way of conceptualizing the interconnectedness of growing imperial networks, “a shorthand for one particularly well-traveled web, or network, that linked the two most important colonies in Britain's empire” (21). Cohen branches these two registers by invoking mentalités from the French Annales school, a way of thinking about the historical past through the conceptual frameworks developed by contemporaries. These references to “the Indies” across poetry, history, travel writing, newspapers, and other media were not mistakes or purely metaphorical but “sustained, self-conscious attempt[s] to theorize the present” (16). This theorization is “the Indies mentality,” a contemporary way of thinking through nascent global capitalism.
In chapter 1, Cohen shows how the Indies mentality emerged from the radical reimagining of the world order begun in 1756 with the Seven Years’ War and refined again with the American Crisis twenty years later. Using Samuel Foote's The Cozeners (1774) and Frances Burney's Evelina (1778), she shows how the perceived failures of aristocratic political leadership and class anxieties around the culture of metropolitan sociability were represented through the Indies mentality on stage and in the novel. The Cozeners features a Black macaroni, a racialized version of the archetype of fashionable yet empty masculinity, whose real-world counterpart, Julius Soubise, is the focus of chapter 2. Soubise was born in Saint Kitts and spent much of the 1770s as a fop in the London beau monde until controversy and a loss of aristocratic patronage forced him to flee to Calcutta, where he lived until his death. Soubise's movements between the two Indies via the metropole serves as an important case study that highlights the continuities and ruptures in the way he was racialized across the empire.
Chapters 3 and 4 arguably have the largest potential reach outside of eighteenth-century studies, for in them Cohen reframes debates about and comparisons between chattel slavery and colonialism. In chapter 3, Cohen shows how the American colonists’ claims of enslavement were not just hypocritical metaphors but instead invoked a discourse of political slavery that associated unfreedom—a term increasingly used by scholars—with dispossession, as defined by encounters with the Ottoman Empire. Unfreedom would come to be defined exclusively with chattel slavery with the American and Haitian revolutions. In chapter 4, Cohen shows how this restricted definition of unfreedom ended up reinforcing the colonial project in India instead of leading to decolonization more broadly. While contemporaries juxtaposed the cruelty of plantation slavery with the seemingly more benign indentured servitude of India, Cohen instead shows the continuities between forced labor in both Indies. Refreshingly, she is unafraid of calling out other scholars’ often overly charitable readings of the motivations of imperialists: Indian immiseration and starvation was literally the means of enslavement, showing how the abolition of chattel slavery merely shifted the geographical orientation of forced labor.
In chapter 5, Cohen looks at how the Indies mentality was reinforced by colonial administrators who rotated through positions in both the East and West Indies. Through the diary of Lady Nugent, whose husband was governor and commander in chief in Jamaica and Calcutta, respectively, Cohen centers sociability as a form of colonial governance. Looking at individual colonial lives is not a means of defanging the structural critique of empire, rather it serves to highlight the monetary and social benefits of the imperial project that saved ancient families from financial ruin, “an aristocratic social safety net” (195). The anxieties that Cohen discusses in chapter 1—that imperial wealth would destabilize social hierarchies—are shown in chapter 5 to have been disproven: imperial wealth reified previous hierarchies, allowing Britain's aristocratic power to survive for the next century.
One of the many strengths of this monograph is Cohen's transparency in discussing her methodologies, clearly delineating what critical conversations she is intervening in and what are the stakes of these choices. The other impressive aspect of this book is Cohen's ability to engage seriously with eighteenth-century Britons’ vision of the world without for a moment sacrificing her moral clarity that, regardless of the personal motivations that may be ascribed to individual actors, chattel slavery and colonialism violently subjugated people across the globe to enrich the aristocracy in particular and British society more broadly. I would also recommend Cohen's book to early career researchers as an example: ethical scholarship is not in opposition to rigorous scholarship but is, indeed, necessary to it.
This book will be essential to scholars of British imperial history and eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature and culture. But beyond this scope, this work is exemplary for showing how the work of postcolonial and Black feminist theorists can enrich work done in early modern periods, even in ostensibly traditional studies of imperialism. In this current climate in British and North American academia where these theories are being attacked and literally censored by governments, The Global Indies shows just how imperative it is for scholarship to resist them.
