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Conrad's Critique of Imperialism in Heart of Darkness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Hunt Hawkins
Hunt Hawkins*
Affiliation:
Florida State University, Tallahassee
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Abstract

In Heart of Darkness Conrad explicitly selected two criteria—efficiency and the “idea” of the civilizing mission—to judge imperialism. Although he himself did not ultimately espouse these values (which social Darwinists used to justify European expansion), he chose them because they were popular and well-suited to condemning the peculiar exploitation of the Congo by King Leopold ii. Unlike capital rich imperialism, which could seek long-term development, Leopold’s capital-poor imperialism resulted in hasty exploitation of surface resources through forced labor. Conrad’s story powerfully illustrated the special inefficiency and cruelty of such exploitation. As in his other colonial novels, Conrad went on to imply a further judgment against all types of imperialism, even England’s, because of their complicity, belligerence, and arrogant disruption of indigenous cultures.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 94 , Issue 2 , March 1979 , pp. 286 - 299
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1979

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References

Notes

1 Conrad, Letters to William Blackwood and David S. Meldrum, ed. William Blackburn (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1958), p. 37.

2 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1971), pp. 4, 5. All subsequent references are to this edition, and the page numbers are given in the text.

3 Raskin, The Mythology of Imperialism (New York: Random, 1971), p. 151.

4 Hay, The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Study (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 153, n.; 143.

5 Hay, p. 154. Conrad used the phrase “half-shaped resolve” in reference to the African woman's resistance to the “pilgrims” who came for Kurtz. We should note that this resistance was not to European rule but rather to the removal of the tribe's white god.

6 Fleishman, Conrad's Politics: Community and Anarchy in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), p. 98.

7 Lee, Conrad's Colonialism (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), p. 10.

8 Stone, “Review of Conrad's Colonialism,” Journal of Modern Literature, 1 (1971), 754.

9 Kidd, Social Evolution (London: Macmillan, 1894), p. 327. Kidd's importance in the development of social Darwinism is discussed by Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social-Imperial Thought, 1895–1914 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960), pp. 20–24. Gertrude Himmelfarb's Victorian Minds (New York: Knopf, 1968) analyzes “Varieties of Social Darwinism,” pp. 314—32.

10 See William L. Langer, “A Critique of Imperialism,” Foreign Affairs, 24 (Oct. 1935), 102–15; Mark Blaug, “Economic Imperialism Revisited,” Yale Review, 50 (Spring 1961), 335–49; Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher with Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Climax of Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1961); D. K. Fieldhouse, “‘Imperialism’: An Historiographical Revision,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 14 (1961), 187–209; D. K. Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966); and Lewis H. Gann and Peter Duigan, Burden of Empire (New York: Praeger, 1967).

11 See Stokes, “Late Nineteenth-Century Colonial Expansion and the Attack on the Theory of Economic Imperialism: A Case of Mistaken Identity?” Historical Journal, 12 (1969), 285–301. Walter Rodney makes the same point in “The Imperialist Partition of Africa,” Monthly Review, 21 (April 1970), 103–14.

12 See Piatt, “Economic Factors in British Policy during the ‘New Imperialism,‘ ” Past and Present, No. 39 (1968), pp. 120–38, and Finance, Trade, and Politics in British Foreign Policy, 1815–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), pp. 249–61, 353–68.

13 See Hopkins, “Economic Imperialism in West Africa: Lagos, 1880–92,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 21 (Dec. 1968), 580–606, and An Economic History of West Africa (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 124–66.

14 See Wolff, The Economics of Colonialism: Britain and Kenya, 1870–1930 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1974).

15 Oliver and Fage, A Short History of Africa, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Penguin, 1966), pp. 198–99.

16 The best general histories of the Congo Free State are Neal Ascherson, The King Incorporated: Leopold II in the Age of Trusts (London: Allen and Unwin, 1963), and Ruth Slade, King Leopold's Congo: Aspects of the Development of Race Relations in the Congo Independent State (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962).

17 Conrad, Last Essays, ed. Richard Curie (London: Dent, 1926), p. 17.

18 For biographies of Conrad's year in the Congo, see Jocelyn Baines, Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960), pp. 101–19, and Norman Sherry, Conrad's Western World (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 9–133. Sherry's wonderfully arduous research discovered the factual basis of many of the details in Heart of Darkness but did not attempt to put them in historical perspective.

19 “Commercial Undertakings on the Lower Congo,” Board of Trade Journal, 8 (Feb. 1890), 221.

20 Miller, Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 23–24.

21 Daiches, White Man in the Tropics: Two Moral Tales (New York: Harcourt, 1962), p. 15.

22 For a history of the railway, see H. R. Fox Bourne, Civilisation in Congoland: A Story of International Wrong-Doing (London: P. S. King and Son, 1903), pp. 122–24.

23 A remarkable man, Williams was a soldier, preacher, lawyer, and historian. In 1883 he published a History of the Negro Race in America, the first full study. He went to Africa representing S. S. McClure's “Associated Literary Press.” After investigating Matadi, he went upriver to Stanley Falls. On his way down, he would have passed Conrad coming up on the Roi des Belges about 6 August 1890. Williams, whose experience in the Congo turned him into the first total opponent of the regime, wrote public letters of protest to Leopold and President Benjamin Harrison. Unfortunately, his death in England in 1891 prevented him from pressing his attack.

I am grateful to John Hope Franklin of the University of Chicago for generously sharing with me his thirty years of research on Williams. His forthcoming book will fully examine the life of this neglected figure.

Williams' unpublished “A Report on the Proposed Congo Railway” is at the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. My quotations are from pp. 9, 6, and 5.

24 See Demetrius C. Boulger, The Congo State; or, The Growth of Civilization in Central Africa (London: W. Thacker and Co., 1898), p. 300.

25 Interview, San Francisco Call, 15 Aug. 1895, p. 1. 26 See “La Monnaie,” Le Congo Illustré, 1 (1892), 34–35.

27 Moncheur, “Conditions in the Congo Free State,” North American Review, 179 (1904), 500.

28 Charles Liebrechts, Souvenirs d'Afrique, 1883–1889 (Brussels: J. Lebègue et Cie., 1909), p. 222.

29 Conrad, Joseph Conrad's Letters to R. B. Cunninghame Graham, ed. C. T. Watts (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969), p. 116.

30 For a more complete discussion of Conrad's pessimism, its expression in Heart of Darkness, and his refusal to join the reformers in 1903, see my “Joseph Conrad and the Congo Reform Movement,” Journal of Modern Literature, in press.

31 Guérard, Conrad the Novelist (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), p. 48.

32 Quoted in Edmund Dene Morel, History of the Congo Reform Movement, ed. William Roger Louis and Jean Stengers (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), p. 205, n.

33 Conrad, Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters, ed. G. Jean-Aubry, 2 vols. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1927), i, 288.

34 Marx, “The British Rule in India,” New York Daily Tribune, 25 June 1853; rpt. in Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization, ed. Shlomo Avineri (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), p. 94.

35 For a description of the opposition, see Bernard Porter, Critics of Empire: British Radical Attitudes to Colonialism in Africa, 1895–1914 (London: Macmillan, 1968).

36 Conrad, “Autocracy and War,” Notes on Life and Letters (London: John Grant, 1925), pp. 113, 112.

37 Leavis, The Great Tradition (London: Chatto and Windus, 1948), pp. 179–80.

38 While Conrad employs the social Darwinist vocabulary of cultural evolution to describe Africans, we should recall that one of his favorite authors was Alfred Russel Wallace, who, although a cofounder of the theory of evolution, adopted a far more positive view of non-European peoples than did Charles Darwin. About the time of composition of Heart of Darkness, Conrad also became interested in Mary Kingsley, whose Travels in West Africa (1897) and West African Studies (1900) challenged evolutionary anthropology by advancing theories of polygenesis and multilinear development (see Life and Letters, I, 267). For a discussion of Conrad's attitude toward non-Europeans, see John E. Saveson, Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Moralist (Amsterdam: Rodopi NV, 1972).

39 This point has been made by Harold R. Collins, “Kurtz, the Cannibals, and the Second-Rate Helmsman,” Western Humanities Review, 8 (Autumn 1954), 299310.

40 Conrad, Lettres françaises, ed. G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1929), p. 64.

41 Conrad, Lord Jim (London: John Grant, 1925), p. 416.

42 Conrad, Nostromo (London: John Grant, 1925), p. 166.