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Racism, Imperialism, and the Traveler's Gaze in Eighteenth-Century England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Margaret Hunt
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Extract

These creative acts compose, within a historical period, a specific community: a community visible in the structure of feeling and demonstrable, above all, in fundamental choices of form.

I had become convinced … that the most penetrating analysis would always be of forms, specifically literary forms, where changes of viewpoint, changes of known and knowable relationships, changes of possible and actual resolutions, could be directly demonstrated, as forms of literary organization, and then, just because they involved more than individual solutions, could be reasonably related to a real social history. [Raymond Williams]

In the waning years of the seventeenth century Sir William Petty, F.R.S., a talented statistician, champion of trade and commerce, and “projector” of schemes for national betterment, drew up a plan to cope with what he, at least, saw as a major problem. Petty had observed that there were large numbers of English youth from respectable families who had not the leisure, money, nor opportunity to travel to foreign countries. He was concerned that these worthy young men would miss the chance to develop the expansive faculty of mind and commercial acumen that foreign travel provided and national progress demanded. The crux of his scheme was that these youths would repair to London, where they would encounter businessmen around the Royal Exchange “who have fresh concerne & correspondance with all parts of the knowne world & with all the Commodityes growing or made within the same.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 32 , Issue 4: Making the English Middle Class, ca. 1700-1850 , October 1993 , pp. 333 - 357
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1993

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References

1 Williams, Raymond, Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London: Verso Books, 1980), pp. 25–26Google Scholar.

2 Petty, William, The Petty Papers: Some Unpublished Writings of Sir William Petty, ed. Marquis of Lansdowne (London: Constable & Co., 1927), 1:40–42Google Scholar. It is not clear exactly when Petty wrote this plan, though it was probably late in his life (he died in 1687). Petty also called for the teaching of geography, map reading, and “analysis of the people,” by which he presumably meant statistical demography and ethnography, in the schools: the first two did move strongly into school curricula in the eighteenth century.

3 Hutchinson, Terence, Before Adam Smith: The Emergence of Political Economy, 1662–1776 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 27–28Google Scholar.

4 Though unusually large, the library of Samuel Jeake, a provincial merchant, commodities dealer, moneylender, and investor in the Bank of England, is probably fairly typical in terms of the types of books it contained. See the excellent overview of Jeake's reading preferences by Hunter, Michael and Gregory, Annabel in An Astrological Diary of the Seventeenth Century: Samuel Jeake of Rye, 1652–1699, ed. Hunter, Michael and Gregory, Annabel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 40–49Google Scholar.

5 On propagandists for commerce and trade, see Appleby, Joyce, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

6 Williams, p. 25.

7 Kaufman, Paul, The Community Library: A Chapter in English Social History, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1967), n.s., 57, pt. 7:30Google Scholar.

8 Ibid., p. 38.

9 Ibid., pp. 26, 27.

10 Kaufman, Paul, Borrowings from the Bristol Library, 1773–1784: A Unique Record of Reading Vogues (Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1960)Google Scholar.

11 Ibid., pp. 121–22.

12 Ibid., p. 122. Oliver Goldsmith's contribution to racist theory is discussed in Jordan, Winthrop, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 248Google Scholar. Other travel books popular among Bristol readers included Alexander Dow's enlarged translation of Firishtah's, Muhammed KasimHistory of Hindostan (London, 1770)Google Scholar, with seventy-four borrowers; Long's, EdwardThe History of Jamaica; or, General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of that Island (subtitle of Long) (London, 1774)Google Scholar, with sixty-five borrowers; de Bougainville's, LouisVoyage round the World (London, 1772)Google Scholar, with forty-eight borrowers; Ives, Edward, A Voyage from England to India in the year 1754 (London, 1773)Google Scholar, with forty-two borrowers; and Chandler's, RichardTravels in Asia Minor (Oxford, 1775)Google Scholar, with thirty-seven borrowers. (See Kaufman, , Borrowing from the Bristol Library, pp. 28, 31, 35, 41, 43Google Scholar.)

13 Large numbers of published and unpublished eighteenth-century travel accounts are listed in Matthews, William, British Diaries: An Annotated Biography of British Diaries Written between 1442 and 1942 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1950)Google Scholar, and British Autobiographies: An Annotated Bibliography of British Autobiographies Published or Written before 1951 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955)Google Scholar. More have come to light since these valuable reference books were published.

14 Friends Library, London, MS vol. S 193/5, fols. 185–89.

15 Long, 2:353–54. Quoted in Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966), p. 462Google Scholar.

16 Gates, Henry Louis Jr., ed., “Race,” Writing, and Difference (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 5Google Scholar.

17 By “metonymic” is meant the ways that parts of the above equations stand in for, mark, and even “become” other parts. For instance in racist discourse black skin is said to “mark” sexual immorality, along with other undesirable traits, and the fundamental unalterability of both is confirmed by Scripture (“Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the Leopard his spots?” [Jeremiah 13:23]) and later by science.

18 Bordieu, Pierre, “Social Space and Symbolic Power,” Sociological Theory 7, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 23Google Scholar. He writes, “A group, a class, a gender, a region, or a nation begins to exist as such, for those who belong to it as well as for the others, only when it is distinguished, according to one principle or another, from other groups, that is, through knowledge and recognition (connaissance et reconnaissance).” Historians will not be greatly surprised to find that the lineage of Bordieu's own thought includes Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (London: Random House, 1963)Google Scholar. See also Said, Edward W., Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979)Google Scholar.

19 On the history of European racist beliefs, see esp. Jordan, and Davis. For a much more essentialist view of racism (and apparently of race) than that of Gates, Jordan, or Davis, see Washington, Joseph R. Jr., Anti-blackness in English Religion, 1500–1800 (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1984)Google Scholar. On the preoccupations of the business classes, see Hunt, Margaret, “Writing, Accounting and Time Management in the Eighteenth-Century English Trading Family: A Bourgeois Enlightenment?” Business and Economic History, 2d ser., 18 (1989): 150–59Google Scholar. See also Hunt, Margaret, “Middling Culture in Eighteenth-Century England” (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994)Google Scholar, in press.

20 For Kelsall's writings, see Friends Library, London, Diaries and Journals of John Kelsall, MSS vol. S 193/3, fols. 45–46; vol. S 194/1 fols. 179, 205, 233–34; vol. S 194/2 fols. 172–73.

21 See Davison, Lee Krim, “Public Policy in an Age of Economic Expansion: The Search for Commercial Accountability in England, 1690–1750” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1990)Google Scholar, for an excellent overview of white-collar crime.

22 The Oxford English Dictionary, tellingly, references seven representative uses of the term “thievish” from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, of which four come from travel books. The “thievish” peoples variously referred to there are Mexican Indians (in Eden's, Richard translation of The Decades [London, 1555]Google Scholar), Rajputs (from Herbert's, ThomasA Relation of Some Yeares Travaile [London, 1634]Google Scholar), an unidentified group of indigenous peoples encountered during George Anson's travels (Anson, , Voyages round the World [London, 1748]Google Scholar), and Mongols (Gilmour, James, Among the Mongols [London: Religious Tract Society, 1883]Google Scholar).

23 Davidson, Caroline, A Woman's Work Is Never Done: A History of Housework in the British Isles, 1650–1950 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1986), p. 136Google Scholar.

24 I am grateful to John Styles for sharing some of his research findings with me. See his unpublished paper “Clothing the North, 1660–1800,” which reports that in York in the 1770s some 65 percent of pledges were in the form of items of clothing.

25 See Hecht, J. Jean, “Continental and Colonial Servants in Eighteenth-Century England,” Smith College Studies in History (Northampton, Mass.: Smith College History Department, 1954), 40:6–9, 12–23Google Scholar.

26 See, e.g., A Lamentable Ballad of the Tragical End of a Gallant Lord and Vertuous Lady: Together with the Untimely Death of their two Children, wickedly performed by a Heathenish and Bloodthirsty Black a-Moor, their Servant: the like of which Cruelty and Murder was never before heard of (printed and sold at the Church-yard) (London, ca. 1750). The ballad includes a long-drawn-out black-on-white, servant-on-mistress rape and murder scene, mutilated children, and the like. There is a copy in the Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

27 “[Merchants'] conversation is much to bee valued, for many of them are very gentile and knowing men in the affaires of the State, by reason of their long sojourne and actuall negotiations and [law] processes in the Countrey: and in a short time, one may suck out of them, what they have been many yeares a gathering.” See Howell, James, Instructions for Forreine Travell (London, 1642), p. 40Google Scholar.

28 Howell, a considerable linguist himself, took it for granted that his traveler would already know Latin and that the main language he would want to learn was French, followed in importance by “Courtly Italian” and “Lofty Spanish” (ibid., p. 71).

29 A fine introduction to sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century travel writing can be found in Wright, Louis B., Middle Class Culture in Elizabethan England (1935; reprint, New York: Octagon Books, 1980), pp. 508–48Google Scholar.

30 On reports from the Royal Society, see Houghton, John, A Collection for Improvement of Husbandry and Trade, revised and indexed by Bradley, R. (London, 1692–1703), p. 172Google Scholar. Houghton was a fellow of this incalculably influential early scientific society along with his contemporaries, Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley, Robert Boyle, and numerous others. The Collection repeatedly makes reference to experiments carried on by fellows of the Royal Society and at Gresham College. For an important discussion of the connections between late seventeenth-century science, the Royal Society, and early capitalism, see Jacob, Margaret C., The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976)Google Scholar.

31 Houghton, pp. 104–21.

32 Ibid., p. 457.

33 Ibid., pp. 307–28.

34 Tucker's main attack on slavery is to be found in his A Letter to Edmund Burke, Esq …. (1775), reprinted in Josiah Tucker: A Selection from His Economic and Political Writings, ed. Schuyler, Robert Livingston (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), pp. 382–84Google Scholar. Tucker opposed slavery on moral, political, and economic grounds. Slave-holding was against the law of God; it promoted sedition in the colonies (it had not escaped Tucker that slaveholders in the New World were often the most pertinacious defenders of their own rights against the mother country); and it was, taken in the aggregate, uneconomical by comparison with free labor, especially since West Indian planters expected to be supplied with military aid from England to keep down their large slave populations.

35 Ibid., pp. 19, 27, 29–30.

36 Pratt, Mary Louise, “Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen,” in Gates, , ed. (n. 16 above), p. 139Google Scholar. For a lengthier discussion of these and other topics, see Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Ibid., p. 144.

38 Seventeenth-century economists and “projectors” had already produced an important body of writing devoted to efficiently utilizing the labor of their own less fortunate countrymen and women. An excellent overview of this material can be found in Appleby (n. 5 above), pp. 129–57.

39 Tucker, Josiah, The True Interest of Great-Britain set forth in Regard to the Colonies; and the only Means of Living in Peace and Harmony With Them (London, 1774)Google Scholar, reprinted in his Josiah Tucker: A Selection from His Economic and Political Writings, p. 364n.

40 Mizuta, Hiroshi, Adam Smith's Library: A Supplement to Bonar's Catalogue with a Checklist of the Whole Library (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society, 1967)Google Scholar. See also Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Cannan, Edwin (New York: Modern Library, 1937)Google Scholar, index 2, “Table of Authorities Cited,” pp. 971–76.

41 For a useful overview of Smith's views on colonial matters, see Stevens, David, “Adam Smith and the Colonial Disturbances,” in Essays on Adam Smith, ed. Skinner, Andrew S. and Wilson, Thomas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 207–17Google Scholar. See also Smith, Adam, “Of Colonies,” in his The Wealth of Nations, ed. Cannan, Edwin (New York: Modern Library, 1937), pp. 523–606Google Scholar.

42 Ibid., p. 556, or, as Smith puts it at one point, “rather from accident than from any thing in the nature of those events themselves [that is, the arrival of Europeans]” (p. 590).

43 Smith, Adam, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. Meek, R. L., Raphael, D. D., and Stein, P. G. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 192Google Scholar.

44 Ibid., p. 186.

45 I am especially indebted here to JanMohammed, Abdul R., “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature,” in Gates, , ed., pp. 78–106Google Scholar.

46 But see Smith, , Wealth of Nations, p. 535Google Scholar, where he remarks that, “in spite of the cruel destruction of the natives which followed the Conquest, these two great empires [Mexico and Peru] are, probably, more populous now than they ever were before: and the people are surely very different; for we must acknowledge, I apprehend, that the Spanish Creoles are in many respects superior to the ancient Indians.”

47 Raynal, Guillaume, A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, trans. Justamond, J.O. (London: W. Strahan & T. Cadell, 1783), 5:1–2Google Scholar.

48 Said (n. 18 above), p. 169.