Literature Incorporated: The Cultural Unconscious of the Business Corporation, 1650-1850 9780226291260

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Literature Incorporated

Literature Incorporated

The Cultural Unconscious of the Business Corporation, 1650–1850

John O’Brien

The University of Chicago Press chicago and london

John O’Brien is associate professor and the NEH Daniels Family Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Harlequin Britain and the editor of Susanna Centlivre’s The Wonder. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16

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ISBN-13: 978- 0-226-29112-3 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978- 0-226-29126- 0 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226291260.001.0001 The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the University of Virginia toward the publication of this book. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data O’Brien, John, 1962– author. Literature incorporated : the cultural unconscious of the business corporation, 1650–1850 / John O’Brien. pages ; cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-226-29112-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-29126-0 (ebook) 1. Corporations in literature. 2. Businesspeople in literature. 3. Business literature—Great Britain. 4. Corporations—Great Britain—History. 5. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 6. English literature—18th century—History and criticism. 7. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. I. Title. PR149.C667O37 2016 820.9'3553—dc23 2015017769 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Introduction: The Corporation as Metaphor

1

1.

John Locke, Desire, and the Incorporation of Money

28

2.

Wonderful Event: The South Sea Bubble and the Crisis of Property

64

3.

Insurance and the Problem of Sentimental Representation

106

4.

“Bodies of Men”: Abolitionist Writing and the Question of Interest

136

Held in Reserve: Banks, Serial Crises, and the Ekphrastic Turn

186

Coda: The Entrepreneur as Corporate Hero

218

Acknowledgments

227

Notes

229

Index

257

5.

v

Introduction

The Corporation as Metaphor

L

iterature, political economy, and law: these are the touchstones of this book, which focuses on the figure of the corporation from the middle of the seventeenth to the middle of the nineteenth century in the Englishspeaking world. I consider the corporation as a historical entity, a creature of law and a vehicle for commerce, and also as an imaginative construct. The corporation is a fiction that not only informs other fictions but also has gained autonomy and power on its own right in the world. Figuratively extending the human body, the corpus, into the sphere of social life, the corporation has become one of modern culture’s most prominent means for mediating between the public and the private, the collective and the individual. Literature Incorporated is not a history of the business corporation, though such a thing— a massive undertaking!—would be valuable, if it were possible.1 Nor is this book by and large a history of literary works that are explicitly about corporations. Very few such animals exist in this period. Rather, I explore points of intersection between literary texts and other kinds of writing— economic, political, polemical, legal—that respond to the emergence of the business corporation in Anglo-American culture in this period. This was an era when joint-stock companies were organized for colonial trade, when the institutions of fi nance capitalism such as insurance and banking reorganized commerce, and when Adam Smith began the systematic study into the sources of national wealth that became the foundation of the discipline now known as economics.2 This was also the period when John Locke offered the fi rst codification of empiricist philosophy; when Joseph Addison’s Cato, often credited as the last great tragedy in English, was fi rst performed and gave oppositional politics a potent and enduring figure of resistance; when narrative fiction reorganized itself as “the novel” by embracing a new understanding of probabil1

2

Introduction

ity; when abolitionist writers conducted an intense media campaign to interest readers in the cause of people whom they could not see, and when literature as such was emerging as a category of knowledge, study, and aspiration for writers and readers. I pursue the trope of incorporation as it appears in texts written across many separate domains that attempt to imagine the relationship between human bodies— as readers, as protagonists, as property— and larger social systems like the nation and the domain of fi nance, trade, people, and things that was not yet called “the economy.”3 The concept of “incorporation” as applied to social entities like a business venture is a figure of speech; more specifically, it is an instance of a rhetorical trope known as catachresis. Derived from the Greek for “abuse” or “misuse,” catachresis results when language fails to offer an obvious word choice to describe something. Henry Peachum, in his rhetorical handbook The Garden of Eloquence (1593), calls catachresis an “abuse” by means of which “we give names to many things which lack names, as when we say, the water run, which is improper, for to run, is proper to those creatures which have feete, and not water which hath none.”4 The modern critic Lynn Festa eloquently observes that catachresis is “distinctive” among all rhetorical figures because “whereas other tropes involve the substitution of figurative for literal meaning, the exchange of one word for another (part for whole, like for like), in catachresis the substitution of figural for literal meaning— exchange itself—breaks down.”5 That is to say that the oddness of the figure of the corporation inheres in the fact that businesses, cities, colleges, and other entities that are said to be incorporated do not actually have bodies and therefore are obviously not persons. Does some of our discomfort with what corporations do inhere in the language that has for centuries been used to conceptualize them? As the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “Peter Pendulum” (1840) put it, banks are “not individuals, but corporations; and corporations, it is very well known, have neither bodies to be kicked, nor souls to be damned.”6 For Poe’s narrator, whose own body has been battered in the course of the story as he tries out the various forms of business undertaking that seem available to individuals in a society dominated by companies, the unaccountability of banks and other corporations renders their difference from human beings suspect and scandalous. That scandal has not abated. It reemerges sometimes when, for example, jurists do what they have done since at least the seventeenth century, when Sir Edmund Coke in the Sutton Hospital case (1612), describing the corporation as a “fiction . . . which resteth only in intendment and consideration of the Law,” saw the corporation as a convenient way to enable courts to describe the rights and responsibilities of collective groups. But when the

Introduction

3

U.S. Supreme Court extended the First Amendment right of free speech to corporations and other kinds of associated bodies in the Citizens United case in 2010, critics often followed Poe in picking up on another section of Coke’s decision in Sutton Hospital, where he remarked that corporations “have no soul,” and saw that as the point at which the figure breaks down and should in effect be ruled inadmissible. Legal scholar Joel Bakan, in his book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, gives a kind of ironic homage to the power of the figure when he describes the corporation as a “pathological” agent, an “institution” that destructively acts out its deepest internal contradictions like a crazed person, with destructive consequences to everyone and everything around it.7 Both the utility of and the discomfort with the figure of the corporation have been recurrent themes in its history. In Britain from the Middle Ages onward, towns, guilds, charitable organizations, universities, and the church were all understood to be “incorporated” institutions, bodies politic that transcended the limits of individual human bodies and persisted beyond single human life spans. The historian Ernst Kantorowicz traced how the thirteenth-century church began to make a distinction between the physical body of Jesus as made present in the Eucharist and the imaginary, metaphorical “body” of Christ’s church: “Now  .  .  . The Church, which had been the mystical body of Christ, became a mystical body in its own right . . . a mystical corporation.” The monarchy was reconceptualized by this logic to create what Kantorowicz memorably described as “the king’s two bodies,” the one fleshly and mortal, the other imaginary and immortal, occupied by a real person in the present tense but representing a collective interest (that of the state and its people) and aspiring always to transcend the here-and-now and reach toward eternity.8 From there, the monarch was able to authorize corporations that acted as extensions of his or her own sovereignty and that enabled collective institutions to be represented in courts of law, to collect taxes, to extend the monarch’s interests at home and abroad: universities, charities, municipalities, and, starting in the late sixteenth century, commercial and trading entities.9 In Of Corporations (1659), probably the fi rst legal treatise in the English language on the form, William Sheppard offered this defi nition: “A Corporation, or an Incorporation (which is all one) is a Body, in fiction of law; or, a Body Politick that indureth in perpetual succession.”10

But the peculiar doubleness of the concept often prompted complaint in the early modern period, as it has ever since, and particularly so as the

4

Introduction

business corporation gained increasing autonomy and power. A genius in his own right at formulating compelling figures of speech, Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651) called corporations “lesser Common-wealths in the bowels of a greater, like worms in the entrayls of a naturall man.”11 Hobbes presciently understood how such entities could become rivals to the state, attaining a kind of sovereignty of their own that would be hard to dislodge. And Henry Polloxfen, arguing against the British East India Company in the 1690s, addressed his complaints to “the invisible EastIndia Merchant.  .  .  . Dealing with you is a kind of dealing with Spirits, an Invisible Body subsisting only in intelligentia legis.”12 From its origins, the corporation has been a kind of offense to representation, a legal fiction whose abstraction seems to mystify as much as it defi nes the relationship between individuals and larger social entities. Near the outset of his Grundrisse, the enormous series of notebooks that he compiled in order to systematize his study of political economy, Karl Marx ponders the utility of abstract concepts in political-economic thought. Concepts like population, exchange value, production, and labor (among others) seem necessary if the theorist aims to say anything specific at all. Hence Marx admires how Adam Smith took “an immense step forward” in isolating and objectifying “labour as such” as an “abstract universality” that enabled economists to imagine national wealth in terms more useful than those offered by the physiocrats, with their focus on the productivity of land, or by the adherents to the “Mercantile System,” with its focus on money in the form of bullion.13 But economists evoke such abstractions, Marx also immediately reminds himself, at the cost of obscuring the ways in which labor, say, is a very different thing at different moments in time, because labor is always embedded in a complex, historically specific network of social relationships and material determinants. So, for example, Marx observes that “one of the latest forms of bourgeois society, joint-stock companies,” also existed at the start of the bourgeois era in the shape of “the great, privileged monopoly trading companies,” entities that occupied what Marx describes as a very different “position” in relation to the rest of the economic system than they did at the time of his writing.14 Just when he was beginning to fi ll the notebooks that are now known as the Grundrisse, Marx had every reason to be freshly aware of the centrality of companies to the transatlantic economic system. The Panic of 1857, a fi nancial crisis that Marx welcomed as the spark that might lead to a revolution, was frequently seen at that time to have been set off by the failure of the New York City office of the Ohio Life Insurance and

Introduction

5

Trust Company in August of that year. The fi rst historian of the Panic, J. S. Gibbons, observed in 1858 that the failure of Ohio Life “struck on the public mind like a cannon shot.”15 For his part, Marx was gratified to see that the Panic had begun just as he had in 1850 predicted it would, with a fi nancial crisis starting in New York, but he was also the fi rst to observe that such an explanation oversimplifies the vastly more complex chain of causality that leads to any such event. To the (very considerable) extent that the Panic prompted Marx to draft the Grundrisse, begun in August 1857 within days after Ohio Life’s failure, we could plausibly say that his allusion to the joint-stock form here at the book’s outset is an oblique reference to the prominence that such entities as Ohio Life had attained as central actors in the bourgeois economic system that Marx was so eager to see supplanted.16 And to the (again, considerable) extent that the Grundrisse formed, as it was designed to, the foundation for Capital (1867), we can also observe that the abstraction “Marxism” owes some debt to a corporation’s failure. What is striking, then, is how little Marx has to say about corporations in either text. It is as if, avidly reading and in turn contributing to the newspaper accounts in 1857 about the failures of insurance companies, banks, and other corporate institutions, Marx was determined to rise above the fray of the moment and conceptualize political economy in terms that were equally abstract but in his thinking more foundational: money, capital, labor. Corporations as such have very little place in Marx’s classic descriptions of the economic system. The passing reference to them that we have seen in the Grundrisse, where he talks about modern joint-stock companies, suggests that Marx did not, at least at that point, understand the corporation very well. By 1857 the term “joint-stock,” which dates to the late seventeenth century, was an anachronism, as the corporations of the mid-nineteenth century well outstripped the joint-stocks of the past in sophistication, capitalization, reach, and independence from the authority and supervision of nation-states. And (to go out on a limb here) it is perhaps one of Marxism’s shortcomings as a practical political program that its foundational thinker underconceptualized the business corporation in his own works. (A key exception would be central banks such as the Bank of England and the Crédit Mobilier, about which Marx writes in great detail in his essays for the New York Tribune in these years.) A possible result is that his program has not always had the tools it needed to anticipate or reckon with the corporation’s growing puissance since the middle of the nineteenth century. Thomas Piketty, whose desire to follow and transcend Marx is expressed in the very title of his 2014 book Capital

6

Introduction

in the Twenty- First Century, underplays the role of multinational corporations, even though, as he says (surprisingly compounding Marx’s anachronism) “most private economic activity today is organized around corporations, or, more generally, joint-stock companies.”17 Even one of Piketty’s few explicit references to modern multinationals is framed as an issue of national affect: “In the series Mad Men, which is set in the early 1960s, the New York advertising agency Sterling Cooper is bought out by distinguished British stockholders, which does not fail to cause a culture shock in the small world of Madison Avenue advertising: it is never easy to be owned by foreigners.”18 If part of the pleasure in reading Piketty’s work comes from his willingness to use the feeling states evoked by a television series as evidence, part of the weakness of his analysis may be his underarticulation of the corporations that, since Marx’s time, have played an increasingly large role in the economic system. Where Marx, at least, is surely correct is in his recognition that we must use any such abstract term as corporation with great care, recognizing that the concept bears the traces of complicated social, political, and material change. The corporation as it exists today is an abstraction that gathers up a long history of institutions and practices as varied as city governance, guild organization, state-sponsored colonial exploration, money lending, insurance, slave trading, and university founding. This book explores several of these practices and institutions as they were imagined at different moments in the two centuries before the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company provided Marx with his occasion. My primary point of orientation will be the business corporation as it has been described in the English language and articulated in literature since the late seventeenth century. To undertake such a study is necessarily to engage with what has become known as the New Economic Criticism, an object that is difficult to pin down. Voltaire famously quipped that the entity that called itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire, and I am tempted to joke that much the same could be said of this somewhat nebulous but consistently interesting body of work. It is at least worth accepting at this point that the movement is no longer new, since it traces its beginnings at least as far back as Marc Shell’s The Economy of Literature (1978). The movement got its name in the early 1990s, fi rst as the subject of a panel at the annual meeting of the Midwest Modern Language Association in 1991 and then as the subject of a fullscale conference in its own right at the Society for Critical Exchange in 1994; expanded versions of papers given at that conference were published in a volume entitled The New Economic Criticism in 1999.19 That collec-

Introduction

7

tion is wide-ranging, its topics as varied as Montaigne’s essays, the marketing of Tennyson’s poetry, the theme of debt in The Great Gatsby, and the theoretical relationship between money and other systems of signs. But the studies there and those that have followed in their wake most typically defi ned their object of study as the relationship between imaginative literature and the economic conditions under which it is produced: the fi nancial situation of the author, the points of overlap and exchange between the language deployed by a poet and that deployed by an economist, the homologies between registers of symbolization in the rhetoric of fiction and the rhetoric of fi nance capitalism. Most important, such studies assume that texts written in the register of the literary encode within them ways of describing our shared life that can be understood by thinking in the way that economists do and that also might have something to say to economists that they would not think of on their own. Notable monographs in the field that have been inspirations to this book include, in addition to Shell, Kurt Heinzelman’s The Economics of the Imagination (1980), Walter Benn Michaels’s The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (1986), James Thomson’s Models of Value: Eighteenth- Century Political Economy and the Novel (1996), Ian Baucom’s Spectres of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (2005), Catherine Gallagher’s The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (2008), and Mary Poovey’s Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth- Century Britain (2008). The evidence of these works proves, I think, that at least the third term in “New Economic Criticism” is safe: these are consistently excellent works of criticism, offering new insight on writings that we thought we knew well. Now for the hardest question: to what extent does this mode of criticism merit the term economic? None of the critics mentioned above have advanced training in modern economics as an academic discipline. Professional economists would probably see this as a significant and even a crippling problem, and there are surely moments in many works by literary critics (and in the present volume) that would benefit from a more nuanced understanding of modern economic theory. But I would argue rather that the distance from the discipline of economics has proved to be more enabling than disabling, that it has permitted writers whose disciplinary training is in literary studies to gain leverage on economic logic by treating it as a kind of imaginative form in its own right. What literary critics have emphasized is the extent to which the medium through which economics and other social sciences describe the world is inevitably metaphorical,

8

Introduction

that such writers are using a language that was developed for no discipline in particular to give figural form to an aspect of the world. This is even the case when economic and other social scientists turn to mathematics. Over the past few decades in particular, economists have gained tremendous authority by describing their discipline as a science, increasingly turning to mathematical models that give their work the appearance of incontestable fact. But however much numbers offer the hope of escape from the bonds of language, such models still often remain framed by linguistic choices. Jonathan Schlefer, for example, has recently made the case that the figure of the “invisible hand,” used by Adam Smith to describe how individuals work for the greater good while unconsciously pursuing their own self-interest, has proven to be extraordinarily powerful, a “metaphor” that “underlay the misguided thinking that helped to cause the 2008 fi nancial crisis.”20 The metaphor has been absorbed to become an unconscious assumption that the market operates to maximize social good when it is allowed to be most free. The assumption persists, Schlefer observes, in the absence of any model that could prove that this is the case or, for that matter, evidence that any such thing as a completely free market exists. Like the “invisible hand,” the “market” is a figure of speech, an abstraction derived from what was once and sometimes still is a physical location. There is nothing necessarily sinister about economists’ use of figural language; it is simply true that all of the ways of producing knowledge about the world have to share a language that was invented for none of them in particular, and each must reach for analogies in domains of language that have developed historically strong associations elsewhere. The value of literary studies, and perhaps, to invoke an economic term, its comparative advantage among the disciplines, is its self-consciousness about that fact, its awareness of the historicity and contingency of its medium. To use the tools of literary analysis to understand issues studied by economists is not simply or even primarily a matter of being interdisciplinary, no matter how much that mode of scholarship remains a professed desiderata, particularly in the lives of academic institutions, which these days love few things so much as the ability to advertise their interdisciplinary initiatives.21 Rather, in fact, this book sees economics as a way of modeling the world that is more like literature than it is willing to let on. Literary studies thus has a kind of leverage over economic writing that suggests that the prefi x for “disciplinary” we should use is less “inter-” than “supra-,” that attention to language, rhetoric, and figuration can provide us a point above or outside the economic from which we might critique it. To be sure, such a critique has been mounted from within the

Introduction

9

discipline of economics itself, most famously by Deirdre McCloskey. McCloskey’s book The Rhetoric of Economics (fi rst published in 1986, with a revised edition issued in 1998) argues that the modern discipline of economics has gone into denial about the fact that, at its core, it is describing social reality by means of metaphor, argument, and storytelling. In such denial, economists are going against the grain of the history of their own discipline. For there is an almost novelistic degree of coincidence in the fact that the founder of modern economic writing, Adam Smith, was a professor of rhetoric at the University of Glasgow, for whom the extension of habits of thought formed to understand what he, like most eighteenthcentury intellectuals, called “belles lettres” to economic subjects was so natural that it required no defense. McCloskey has described the turn to mathematical evidence as the standard of proof within the discipline as a mistake that threatens to unmoor economics from reality, producing “unscientific rubbish” that is “worthless as science,” producing little that might be described as “actual inquiry into the world.”22 Literary scholars take economic concepts to be in the fi rst instance imaginative constructs, figures of speech that lend themselves to the same kinds of analysis as all other modes of discourse. That is the goal here. The use of economic logic on the part of literary critics probably speaks, too, to the desire to give their work the authority of a discipline that in our time has vastly more public stature and influence than their own, its claim to the status of objective science buttressed by its frequent recourse to the hard evidence of numbers. Eighteenth-century studies have the potential to intervene here in a particularly powerful way, not only because the origins of the discipline of economics are generally traced to this period, but also because so many important eighteenth-century writers were also significant political figures with direct or indirect influence over the nation’s fi nances. John Locke (the subject of chapter 1 of this book) wrote important essays on the subjects of interest and coinage; Joseph Addison (a central figure in chapter 2) served as secretary of state; Jonathan Swift served as a key adviser to Robert Harley, the chief fi nance minister of a Tory government in the 1710s and then, in Ireland in the 1720s, organized a campaign in the print media—the “Drapier’s Letters”—to repel an attempt by the London government of the day to foist what he saw as an illegitimate form of currency on Ireland; Daniel Defoe (who shows up in several chapters) wrote tirelessly on trade and fi nance, often at the bidding of political paymasters, and so on in an itinerary that includes Benjamin Franklin, David Hume, and Adam Smith as well. Before economics emerged as a discipline in its own right, it was a branch of statecraft, one

10

Introduction

that many writers whom we now think of as philosophers, essayists, and even poets understood to be under their purview. But economic theory has found itself reaching, almost in spite of itself, for models of the form that we now class as literary. Consider, for example, the origin story that Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz tell at the outset of their book A Monetary History of the United States, 1867– 1960, fi rst published in 1963. This book, perhaps more than any other work of economic history, helped establish the ascendency of monetarist economics in the discipline in the United States, certainly as a mode of explanation for historical crises such as the Great Depression; by the end of the 1960s, Friedman himself had become the public face of monetarism and to no small extent of the field of economics tout court. Monetarism is by necessity quantitative, and A Monetary History of the United States is accordingly fi lled with charts, graphs, and tables in which the authors record the quantity and flow of money through the period of their study, a period defi ned by the fact that at the time of their writing, the most reliable data about money was available only for the period beginning just after the U.S. Civil War. Yet numbers alone turn out not to be enough to make their case, and Friedman and Schwartz explain at the outset that the need for such a book, a history, arises from the fact that statistics are insufficient to prove their point about the centrality of money to understanding economic crises. An “analytical narrative,” they realized, was needed to “add a much needed dimension to the numerical evidence.”23 It is as if narrative represents a fall from an Edenic state where numbers alone could tell the story, that Friedman and Schwartz are writing sentences and paragraphs against their better judgment, as a concession to readers who, alas, still need them. This might be considered an example of the rhetorical figure known as ekphrasis, or the speaking picture; the numbers form a picture of the economic system, but one that requires the supplement of language to be fully understood; we will have more examples of what I will call an ekphrastic turn in writing about economics in chapter 5. In A Monetary History of the United States, money is cast as a kind of hero, the central agent of history. That is to say that money is not, as Friedman and Schwartz put it, “a passive factor which chiefly reflects the effects of other forces”; rather, the supply of money is “an independent factor which exerted a powerful influence on the course of events.”24 One important effect of their analysis is that their narrative greatly downplays the importance of political actors like, say, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt— and raises the importance of banks as institutions that have decisive historical impact. But an important if unacknowledged

Introduction

11

premise of their study is that money has itself become the great man of history, which they conceptualize from the start as a narrative genre, and that very fact is a testimony to the power of story. This turn to narrative history and the construction of money as an agent within it is an unconscious, rather than a conscious feature of monetarist economics, a feature of the subdiscipline that it has never articulated to itself. And, too, the turn to money as a way of explicating a shared logic of symbolization in literary texts, which was undertaken by critics like Marc Shell at roughly the same time as monetarism’s ascendancy in economics, suggests that the two disciplines shared an unconscious affinity in this period. To speak of disciplines or the culture as a whole as having an unconscious is to engage in the practice of catachresis oneself, projecting a figure of speech used to conceptualize the individual psyche in directions that its great popularizer Sigmund Freud never imagined. And, given that figure’s origins in the world of nineteenth-century German philosophy, using it to describe English writings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would seem to be particularly anachronistic. But such a conception of a collective unconscious has proved to be an extremely useful and durable one in the hands of critics such as Fredric Jameson, Eric Lott, and Bill Brown, who have written of “political,” “racial,” and “material” unconsciousness, respectively, deploying the figure of the unconscious to describe the ways in which cultures construct domains of ideas and feeling that reach articulation only in displaced and oblique forms, and in places where social scientists do not often look, such as poems, novels, songs, and paintings. And it is precisely this degree of obliquity that renders such works particularly important, because they help identify a culture’s taboos, fears, blind spots, and conceptual impasses. So, for example, even though there is almost no literary work in this period that is explicitly about the corporation as such, the questions that the corporations of this period raise— about the relationship between the state and commerce, about cause and effect, about the individual and the collective— address important ideas that appear as well in works of poetry, fiction, philosophy, and drama. Or, perhaps more in keeping with the spirit of a study that begins, as I do here with John Locke, the goal is to bring this period’s unconscious political-economic ideology into the realm of the “idea,” what Locke calls ‘the object of the Understanding when a man thinks,” in order to render it available for critique.25 Even more importantly, I follow these critics in insisting on the centrality of history, on returning to what we might call the very long eighteenth century to investigate the interbraided relationship between eco-

12

Introduction

nomics and imaginative writing in a period when both were being refitted for modern uses.26 This insistence on the importance of the history of economics distinguishes literary studies from the direction that economics has taken over the past few decades, when economic history has seen its place in the larger discipline of economics steadily diminished. Mary Poovey has observed that it is very typical for economists to “repudiate” their predecessors, with the result that “if they do not explicitly deny that the discipline of economics has a history, they deny that its history matters.”27 The discipline is intensely presentist, only infrequently admitting historical evidence, and the status of economic history has correspondingly declined. The economic historian Peter Temin, using the case of MIT’s Economics Department, where he taught for decades, has recently lamented the decline of economic history from its equal place as one of three legs underpinning “a stool” that constituted the subject as it was taught at MIT for decades after World War II (the others being economic theory and econometrics) to neglect, to, now, virtual banishment. MIT graduate students are no longer required to take any courses in economic history, a fact that Temin deplores, in part because, he argues (as a longtime student of the Great Depression of the 1930s), studying history would help economists and the policymakers they influence to avoid making mistakes that have already been proved to be such in the past.28 Pierre Bourdieu suggested in the mid-2000s that the excesses of economic writers like Gary Becker and Jon Elster, who advanced rational-actor theory against “the best established fi ndings of the historical sciences of human practices,” would result in a reaction that could eventually “restore economics to its true vocation as a historical science.”29 This book might perhaps be part of such a reaction, one that takes advantage of the continuing importance of historical evidence to literary studies. That importance has stayed constant even while the study of literature has integrated theory and even, in the past two decades, quantitative methods. If economics is the major theme of this volume, a minor but important theme is the law. Corporations are legal fictions; each act of incorporation requires an act of law, and legal historians and theorists have been intrigued by the relationship between them virtually since the start of the discipline of legal studies itself. We have already seen how Sir Edward Coke was prompted by the Sutton Hospital case (1612) to assert that “a Corporation aggregate of many is invisible, immortal & resteth only in intendment and consideration of the Law.”30 All of the categories that Coke invokes—visibility, temporality, intention—have continued to resonate with writers both inside and outside the field of legal studies who grapple

Introduction

13

with the questions raised by the kinds of agency that corporations have in the world. It is when corporations are challenged— by the claims of individuals, by the state, by the need to adapt to new circumstances, by the forces of history itself—that new cases emerge where the relationship of corporations to other aspects of the culture come into articulation. I have made use of some of those cases and the ways they have been analyzed at various points in this book, such as in my discussion of the eighteenthcentury understanding of insurance in chapter 3 and, in chapter 4, of what constitutes a “man” in the face of the challenges to the trade in human persons made by the fi rst abolitionist movement in the 1770s and 1780s. Perhaps most importantly, legal studies has a much greater place for history than does economics, because so much of it is attempting to understand how the precedents of the past can help us manage the complexities of the present. And, like literary studies, it attends closely to language, to detail, and to the significance of the individual case in the context of larger arcs of cultural change. A look at one case that has proved to be very significant to the history of the corporation in the United States will demonstrate, however, how I want to supplement questions of legal history with those of literary history and form. I refer to the Dartmouth College case, adjudicated by the U.S. Supreme Court under the chief justiceship of John Marshall in 1819– 20. Marshall’s opinion contains one of the most famous articulations of the corporation, much quoted even today in court decisions as well as histories. His decision offers a poetics of the corporation that has endured in part because of the ways it draws on and extends the most resonant terms from the past centuries of writing on corporate bodies, and it forms a kind of relay point between Coke’s decision in Sutton Hospital and Anthony Kennedy’s opinion for the majority of the Roberts court in Citizens United (2010): “A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law.”31 Marshall’s lovely formulation echoes his own previous description of the corporation in the 1809 case Bank of the United States v. Deveaux, where he had described the bank (referring to the “English books” that have given Americans their “ideas” of what a corporation is) as an “invisible, intangible, and artificial being.”32 Given that this earlier case involved the Bank of the United States, it seems certain that Marshall has appropriated the term “artificial” from Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 opinion given to President Washington in favor of founding the bank. Asserting that the U.S. Constitution establishes “the Supreme law of the land” and that the federal government is therefore “sovereign,” Hamilton answers “the abstract question—Whether the United

14

Introduction

States have power to erect a corporation?” in the affirmative, and he aligns the state’s law with artifice: “To erect a corporation is to substitute a legal or artificial to a natural person.”33 Hamilton’s source here is no doubt Hobbes’s Leviathan, the “English book” that fi rst explicitly distinguishes the “natural” from the “artificial person,” imagining the latter as someone who is “representing the words and actions of another.”34 The famous frontispiece to Leviathan offers an image of incorporation, of the people of a realm incorporated into the sovereign, embodied here in the image of the monarch (fig. I.1). Hobbes notably puts his discussion of the artificial person at the point of Leviathan where he is going to make the transition from conceptualizing the individual to articulating the state, the end of section one, “Of Man,” and leading into the beginning of section two, “Of Commonwealth.” That is to say that whereas Hobbes saw this concept as in effect the hinge from thinking about the relationship between the individual and his delegated representation in the state, Hamilton and then

Fig. I.1. Thomas Hobbes, detail from the frontispiece to Leviathan, or, The Matter, Forme and Power of A Common-wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill (1651). Here the sovereign Leviathan is imagined as the corporate body of his subjects. Photograph: Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.

Introduction

15

Marshall add another tier of representation, seeing how this concept can be used to delegate authority from individuals to government, to a thirdorder entity. For all that Hobbes, as we have already seen, saw the incorporated bodies of his day, the chartered companies like the Hudson’s Bay Company or the East India Company, as dangers to the commonwealth, he nonetheless unwittingly provided the language through which Hamilton successfully overcame Thomas Jefferson’s strident objections to the formation of a national bank. Hamilton, for his part, downplays the power that such an incorporated body might wield. “Imagination,” he writes, “appears to have been unusually busy concerning it”: “an incorporation seems to have been regarded as some great, independent substantive thing— as a political end of peculiar magnitude & moment; whereas it is truly to be considered as a quality, capacity, or mean to an end. Thus a mercantile company is formed with a certain capital for the purpose of carrying on a particular branch of business.  .  .  . The importance of the power of incorporation has been exaggerated, leading to erroneous conclusions.”35 But his appropriation of Hobbes’s formulation provided the terms with which Marshall was able to bring the corporation into protection under the contracts clause of the Constitution. Hobbes’s word “artificial,” its trochaic four syllables offering a 50 percent premium on the trisyllabic “natural,” seems to have been not a limit to the imagination, but rather a spur, enabling writers in authoritative positions like Hamilton and Marshall to confer upon the corporation a kind of autonomy that only grew over the next two centuries. Leviathan, so negative toward the corporation as Hobbes knew it, records a primal moment in mid-seventeenth-century England when sovereignty was being newly conceptualized politically, legally, and commercially. The most important practical effect of Marshall’s decision was ultimately to change the nature of the link between the state and the corporation in the United States. Individual states continued formally to license corporations, but, since they were now considered in the first instance as private entities under the Constitution, they were to be seen less as an extension of the state than as private entities that had the protection of the state’s laws. In his essay “The Personification of the Business Corporation in American Law,” Gregory A. Mark traces the process by which the Dartmouth decision led to the emergence of “free incorporation,” whereby the right to incorporate was imagined as “an individual’s natural tool,” and it became a matter for businessmen more of having the state recognize and register the existence of a corporation than of requesting that the state create it.36 The Dartmouth decision also underscores that the modern business

16

Introduction

corporation shares an important institutional genealogy with the university. There is some irony in the discovery that Hamilton’s opponent in the establishment of the Bank of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, believed that the Dartmouth College decision was a threat to the founding of the University of Virginia (where I teach), because the decision seemed to affirm the rights of private corporations over against the state. One of the minor but still significant premises of Marshall’s argument was that a contract like Dartmouth’s original charter needed to be respected particularly because colleges were primarily charitable, “eleemosynary” institutions that would not likely come into being any other way. In particular, colleges and universities carved out a place in society that would never be, in Marshall’s opinion, “occupied by government”: “They are complete acquisitions to literature  .  .  . a donation to education.”37 Joseph Cabell, Jefferson’s liaison with the Virginia legislature, described the Dartmouth College decision as the university’s “greatest danger,” and he and Jefferson exerted great efforts to strong-arm (and perhaps to buy the support of) legislators in order to overcome any thought that Dartmouth had now rendered state-created institutions like this one obsolete even before its doors were opened. 38 Marshall’s invocation of “literature” in his decision almost certainly refers not only to the imaginative writing that forms the fi rst object of study for literary scholars today, but to the full range of humane letters, the liberal arts that constituted the core subjects of higher education in the early nineteenth century. This is the same sense in which the state of Virginia used the term when, in its constitution, passed in 1831 with the participation of Marshall, it earmarked that part of its annual budget that went to education as the “Literary Fund.” But it is a striking coincidence that “literature” comes to rhetorical prominence at almost the same time that the disciplinary scission between imaginative writing and economic writing takes place. Here we can imagine the university as the place where, to quote the North American Review’s essay on the Dartmouth College case, a “literary institution” has “a local habitation and a name” to be positioned as a refuge from authorities like the state and the pressures of the economic system.39 This is certainly the sense that Daniel Webster aimed to promote in his closing peroration in behalf of the trustees in the Dartmouth College case. Webster, a Dartmouth alumnus himself, by all accounts found describing the combination of private property and educational aspiration to be emotionally overwhelming: The question is simply this, ‘Shall our State Legislatures be allowed to take that which is not their own, to turn it from its original

Introduction

17

use, and apply it to such ends and purposes as they in their discretion shall see fit! “Sir, you may destroy this little institution; it is weak, it is in your hands! I know it is one of the lesser lights in the literary horizon of our country. You may put it out! But if you do so, you must carry through your work! You must extinguish, one after another, all those great lights of science which for more than a century have thrown their radiance over our land! It is, Sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it!” Here the feelings which he had thus far succeeded in keeping down, broke forth. His lips quivered; his fi rm cheek trembled with emotion; his eyes were filled with tears; his voice choked; and he seemed struggling to the utmost, simply to gain that mastery over himself which might save him from an unmanly burst of feeling.40

Webster’s extraordinary outburst demonstrates that Marshall’s ultimate ruling was merely a formality. The college had clearly already been brought into the domain of the private as it was constructed in the eighteenth century by the emergence of the sentimental mode in literature, a mode that authorized Webster’s self-presentation as a man of feeling. The sentimental literature of the eighteenth century plays an as yet unheralded role in the secret history of American constitutional law. Even if that is not strictly the case, it seems very likely that the central means of transmission for the sentimental man that Webster is demonstrating himself to be in relation to Dartmouth was literature in the more narrow sense in which it has come to be used in the years since Webster’s closing peroration worked to ensure that this college would be free from incursion of the state. Webster’s sentimentalism helps identify this as a moment when the “literary horizon” was becoming as liberated as the business corporation, conceivable as a thing in itself, an imaginative resource that came to be associated in the fi rst instance with the college or university. The tears that Webster shed at the prospect of Dartmouth’s being made into an extension of the state of New Hampshire stand as a remarkably public example of how affect has been deployed in the service of making legal and economic arguments. Affect has a complicated status in modern economic writing, which is often divided about how and where to admit it at all. The split is most obvious in the domain of fi nance, where theorists divide themselves between those who believe that markets are “efficient,” setting prices according to information that actors in the marketplace assess rationally, and those who adhere to what is now generally called “behavioral economics,” which sees limits to rationality in the marketplace

18

Introduction

and attempts to bring other kinds of explanation— social and psychological and therefore often classed as emotional—to bear on its models.41 Yet even in behavioral economics, the baseline or norm seems to be what would happen if actors in the marketplace really were perfectly rational and the markets they formed perfectly efficient, and the goal of the researcher is to figure out why and how that norm does not hold. The discipline remains largely predicated on the assumption that people are normatively rational actors who pursue their individual interests and that it is possible to extrapolate much about how the “economy” as a whole works based on that assumption. But “self-interest” as economists use it is not itself necessarily a rational category, though it may seem to be so. For the most part, economics equates self-interest with desire, specifically the desire to acquire things. That it may be in the interest of people not to acquire things— that they may see their interests served by giving things away, by denying themselves things, by deferring things—is understood as an exception to a general rule that the desire for acquisition is at the heart of most people’s social behavior. Again and again, economists confront anomalies in their models— speculative bubbles, for example— and struggle to fi nd rational explanations for events and behavior that seem to be motivated far more by emotion. Even the subfield behavioral economics offers the term “irrational exuberance”—fi rst used by Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve System in 1996—to describe behavior that goes against what is still assumed to be a norm of rational behavior.42 The close relationship between the self-interest that motivates economic activity and the sentimental interest that individuals have in the well-being of others has its most famous convergence in the oeuvre of Adam Smith, author of both An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), in so many ways the foundational text for the modern discipline of economics, and The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), the book that constitutes the best handbook on the workings of sympathy in the eighteenth century. As it happens, the corporation occupies a place of great interest in The Wealth of Nations, which identifies it not as the happy resolution of the confl ict between individual self-interest and the interests of the state, but rather as the means by which that confl ict is exacerbated. When Smith explicitly refers to a corporation in The Wealth of Nations, he most frequently is thinking of a municipal corporation, or a guild that has monopoly rights over a particular trade, or the established church and the universities. Indeed, “university,” Smith reminds us, in terms that anticipate Dartmouth College, “is the proper Latin name for any incorporation whatever.”43 And in almost every case, he fi nds cor-

Introduction

19

porations like these to have deleterious effects on the economic system. They are an “obstruction” to “the free circulation of labour” as well as the source of the “restraints upon the importation of foreign goods which secure to them the same exclusive privilege which they generally possess against the inhabitants of their respective towns.”44 Smith has nothing but contempt for the incorporated English church and its extension in the universities of Cambridge and Oxford because of the way they restrict access to learning and thereby distort what would be the natural vocational possibilities for educated men. And he reserves his harshest criticisms for the most powerful British business corporation of all in the period, the British East India Company, “the mercantile company which oppresses and domineers in the East Indies” (1:91). The East India Company, Smith argues repeatedly, has devastated the Indian subcontinent and damaged British trade as well: “Such exclusive companies, therefore, are nuisances in every respect; always more or less inconvenient to the countries in which they are established, and destructive to those which have the misfortune to fall under their government” (1:641). The contrast Smith draws, one of particular salience in 1776, is between India, dominated by a corporation, and colonial America, whose political restiveness Smith takes as a healthy sign of the freedom of trade that he advocates. Smith notoriously downplayed the possibility that the American conflict would lead to political independence (though he advocated for British withdrawal once the costs of trying to suppress the revolt became clear), and in part that is because he idealized America as the opposite of the corrupt “company-state” that was governing India. The problem posed by all of the examples of corporations in The Wealth of Nations is that when groups such as these act in their own selfinterest, they serve neither the interests of individual persons nor the interests of the state as a whole. The corporation thus might be said to occupy the space of the famous Adam Smith problem, to be the entity that comes between the individual sensibility at the heart (in every sense) of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the questions of national prosperity that are the focus of The Wealth of Nations. Some of the most scathing language in the latter book is reserved for these entities, which Smith consistently mocks for pursuing a form of self-interest that impedes the workings of the invisible hand of the market. To a great extent, the corporation shapes Smith’s economic theories, as the entity that he is reacting against when he imagines how individual self-interest and collective self-interest might harmonize— and why they often do not. But the corporation does so only by negation. The model of the economic system that Smith offers in

20

Introduction

The Wealth of Nations is often not of the system as it is but of the system as it could be if such collective bodies could be willed out of existence. And this, he acknowledges, is “as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should ever be established,” since corporations have created interests of their own that are politically difficult to displace (1:471). For all of Smith’s attacks, the corporation is underarticulated in The Wealth of Nations, becoming neither an object of inquiry in its own right nor a vehicle for theoretical model-building. Smith seems to think of corporations as vestiges of the feudal past that might be disposed of in a more enlightened order of political-economic management under the control of informed statesmen. This may well have had unfortunate effects on the shape of the discipline of economics for which The Wealth of Nations has been so foundational, because the business corporation came to exercise not a smaller, but an ever greater role in the economic system, and Smith does not provide much in the way of resources for conceptualizing its emergence or managing its relationship to persons or nations. To get a sense of how the corporation impressed Britons as an emergent formation in this period, and one that prompted thought about the relationship between the value of money and the value of sentiment, we can supplement Smith by examining a play that appeared on the London stage about a year after the publication of The Wealth of Nations. In Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1777), Sir Oliver Surface has just returned from years abroad in India with the enormous wealth that those who traded there as agents of the British East India Company were often able to acquire in this period. Since Robert Clive, leading the company’s own army, had defeated Siraj ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, and taken Calcutta in the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the company had consolidated its power over much of the Indian subcontinent, and Bengal had become what a recent popular historian of the company calls a “corporate state,” its economy and its tax revenues alike controlled by the company and its agents. Sir Oliver Surface is one of these, and Sheridan is relying on the fact that his audience knew that such men did not hesitate to exploit the abundant opportunities for collective and individual profit-taking that the company’s ascendancy in India now offered.45 Sir Oliver’s nephew Charles identifies him (whom Charles believes still to be in Calcutta) as a “nabob” in his own right—the Urdu word for a regional ruler was just then, in the late 1770s, switching from referring in the fi rst instance to South Asian figures like Siraj ud-Daulah to designating Englishmen like Sir Oliver who had assumed their powers, had used them to gain enormous wealth, and were now returning to the metropolitan center.46 There

Introduction

21

was a lot of worry in the popular press of the period that English nabobs would use their great wealth to amass political power, purchasing seats in Parliament, for example, and constitute an interest of their own that would alter the balance of the legislature. But Sir Oliver’s interests (like those of most of his cohort, as it turned out) are more personal, local, and patriarchal than they are political; he wants to see which of his two nephews, Joseph or Charles, will prove to be the worthy heir to his fortune and will thereby carry the Surface family fortunes forward into posterity. Disguising himself as a moneylender, he visits Charles, whose libertine ways, dissolution, and general air of improvidence recall those of the last British monarch of that name (while Oliver shares a name with the man whom Charles II replaced). This Charles, as pressed for funds as his namesake, is happy to auction off all the portraits in the gallery of the family’s ancestral home, representations of “the family of the Surfaces, up to the Conquest.”47 In a riotous scene of frenzied auctioneering— a parody of the marketplace, here constructed to set a price on the family’s entire history— Sir Oliver buys them all. All except one, that is—the portrait of Sir Oliver himself, a portrait done so long ago, before Oliver’s time in India, that Charles is unable to recognize it as the image of the man who is at this very moment standing right in front of him. Charles refuses to sell it because, he says, “the old gentleman has been very good to me” (56). To Sir Oliver, Charles’s attachment to this picture—which is either so bad a portrait in aesthetic terms that it is completely unrecognizable as his own or so good that it serves mainly to reveal how much Sir Oliver’s experience in India has changed him beyond recognition—is enough to counterbalance Charles’s willingness to discard the portraits of the rest of the family. To both Charles and Sir Oliver, this particular portrait has value that exceeds the economic. That we would have every reason to call this a form of sentimental value is invited by the play’s repeated ironic use of the word “sentiment” in its older sense, as a morally freighted sentence or statement. At the outset of the play, Charles’s brother Joseph is, in the eyes of many, a “a man of sentiment,” a person who has such moral statements at his fi ngertips: “To smile at a jest which plants a thorn in the breast of another, is to become a principal in the mischief” (8), “the man who can think of his own happiness, while his friend is in distress, deserves to be hunted as a monster to society,” and so on (56). The joke, of course, is that Joseph’s sentimental side is, as the family name suggests, skin deep; Joseph is, in truth, a mean-spirited, conniving wretch. The true “man of sentiment” here is Charles, who turns out to have no sentiments in the sense of pithy moral sayings at all, a

22

Introduction

point made clear in his introductory scene with the disguised Sir Oliver, where he raises a glass and offers “a sentiment— Here’s success to usury” (47). Charles demonstrates himself to be a man of authentic, rather than feigned feeling precisely because his loyalty to his uncle goes beyond both language and economic value. He is thus the rightful heir of the Surface family fortunes, which have received a new injection of riches in the form of East India Company extracted wealth, and which he consolidates for the future at the end of the play by marrying Maria, the play’s ingenue figure. Their union is sealed, significantly, in a wordless exchange of looks, as if this romantic union, too, is beyond expression in a language that is still gained by the now-discredited understanding of sentiment as embodied by Joseph. Henceforth, the sentimental will, as we shall see, frequently mark a place that stands apart from, or even at odds with, the purely mercenary. Sheridan’s satire on the hollow rhetoric of sentiment and the corrupting role of money fi nds its point of condensation in the figure of the nabob, the onstage embodiment of the British East India Company—what we might call the corporation’s incorporation. Directing his audience’s sympathies toward Charles, the man of few words but authentic feeling, Sheridan stages just enough of an act of satirical resistance to the value-form of finance capital for us to forget that it is the company’s wealth that is going to prop up the Surface family fortunes. The British East India Company is not the topic of Sheridan’s play, but it forms a significant part of the context that shaped the system of characters he articulated and the plot into which he inserted them. The School for Scandal functions as a wonderfully entertaining and revealing play in which central questions of agency, affect, language, historicity, and the place of the business corporation in contemporary British life become intelligible in a way that never reaches articulation in legal decisions or economic tracts. Literature Incorporated thus takes as its central texts a wide variety of works in English from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries: economic tracts, legal cases, poems, plays, essays, novels, and short stories. I also attend to significant images—medals, prints, emblems—that, like the charts of Friedman and Schwartz’s book, also can be coaxed to speak truth about the past. I read texts from both sides of the Atlantic: from the British Isles, colonial America, and the early republic of the United States. This is because the history of the early modern corporation, the history of the slave trade, and the imaginative literature of this period are so frequently inextricable, and there is no way of conceptualizing this period without thinking about the entire transatlantic world, including western Africa. Each chapter is oriented around a corporation or a type of corporation

Introduction

23

and a constellation of texts—philosophical essays, poems, novels, plays, stories—that address particular questions at the intersection of economics, law, and literature: what is the place of desire in human motivation? does emotion dominate reason? how do we reckon the balance of chance and determinacy? is sentimental interest the same thing as economic interest? The story I tell is discontinuous and, while arranged in chronological order, less a narrative with a classical Aristotelian beginning, middle, and end than a series of snapshots, depth soundings, or archaeological digs that aim to describe particularly significant moments when key features of corporate culture become intelligible. My first chapter, “John Locke, Desire, and the Incorporation of Money,” centers on the writings of Locke, writings that cut across the modern disciplines of philosophy, political theory, and economics. Locke was also a theorist of corporate colonial governance as adviser to his patron Lord Ashley, who was the chief proprietor of the Carolina Company, chartered in 1663 to establish a colony in what is now North and South Carolina. Locke played a role—how large is impossible to determine at this remove—in the drafting of the colony’s Fundamental Constitutions, a governing document designed to create a permanent settlement based on agriculture rather than the plunder and extraction economies that characterized the fi rst wave of English colonization. He also played a role— a large and public one—in the recoinage that the English government undertook in the 1690s, a recoinage that has often been understood as exemplifying a “mercantilist” understanding of the necessity for sovereign states to maximize their stocks of precious metals. And, as the author of the Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke has long been considered to be a founder of empiricist philosophy. In this chapter, I read Locke’s writings on money as being deeply informed by his experience as a colonial administrator, and his writings on the mind as sharing what I call, following the work of Jean-Joseph Goux, a “symbolic economy” similar to that structuring the English coinage. Across these domains of thought, Locke consistently imagines a regime of scarcity, an economy fundamentally limited by the same scarcity of the natural world that the founders of the Carolina Company imagined themselves overcoming through permanent agricultural settlement. Empiricism incorporates a symbolic economy, a money of the mind, that refracts the corporate colonial economy of the moment as it resists the will-to-desire that underpins modern economic thought. Chapter 2 turns to the example of the South Sea Company, the famous rise and fall in whose stock in the spring and summer of 1720 has been

24

Introduction

the historical example of the speculative bubble ever since. The South Sea Bubble was understood at the time in theatrical terms, as either a national tragedy or even a comedy depending on the perspective of the observer. But in any case, the event was described then in the terms of the example as formulated by neoclassical literary theory. In this chapter, I examine how this theory was put into material form in writings by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, whose plays Cato and The Conscious Lovers, a tragedy and a comedy, happen to bracket the emergence of the South Sea Company in 1713 and the Bubble of 1720. It is not as though Addison and Steele were writing about the South Sea Company, but we shall see that their works bring dimensions of the historical situation that prompted the South Sea Company’s invention into intelligibility; this is part of the reason why, for example, Addison’s hero Cato became, in the wake of the Bubble, the signal example of an individual resisting the tide of modernity. In the case of Steele, The Conscious Lovers was quickly perceived by critics such as John Dennis to turn on the same kinds of paradoxes about the nature of property that Steele confronted when he wrote on the question of the South Sea Company’s plan to absorb large parts of the nation’s debts and when he attempted to defend his rights in the patent to the Drury Lane Theatre Company. That the South Sea Bubble remains an example of the speculative bubble in the age of fi nance capital, still a resource for debate by economic historians who want to know whether it was the product of rational decision making or evidence that irrationality pervades the economic system, suggests that the neoclassical models of the drama are still active in our understanding of the theater of the world. One of the most important corporate forms in the modern era is that of the insurance company. More than any other aspect of the economy, insurance engages the imagination, as it prompts people to imagine disasters that need to be hedged against: the catastrophic fi re, a loss via theft, the death of a family’s fi nancial provider. Chapter 3 explores what François Ewald has called the “insurantial imaginary” of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, primarily by reading examples of fiction associated with insurance, from the serial fictions published in the pages of journals issued by early insurance companies to the risk-fi lled world imagined by Tobias Smollett.48 Evolving from a technology deployed to mitigate risk on losses at sea to one that embraced hazards in the terrestrial world and then, fi nally, the loss of human life, insurance seems to assume the position in relation to the rest of the economy that Derrida described as the supplement, the essential other that silently enables the larger system to function.

Introduction

25

Chapter 4 turns to the abolitionist writers of the late eighteenth century, the members of the London Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade who waged what was ultimately a successful campaign to end Britain’s involvement in the slave trade between Africa and the Americas. I argue in this chapter that the society became a corporate voice that found itself emulating the very entities that it sought to attack. I read the famous abolitionist emblem produced by Josiah Wedgwood as a corporate seal or logo, the identifying mark of a text in which a reader should claim an “interest,” as well as a mark of copyright. Chapter 5 orients itself around the fi nancial crises that beset Britain and the early United States from the 1820s to the 1840s, crises that were understood at the time to have been provoked and exacerbated by the corporate institution known as the bank. This chapter reads several works of fiction from these decades that put the bank at the center: Harriet Martineau’s Berkeley the Banker, from her series Illustrations of Political Economy; Robert Morris’s “The Banker’s Daughter”; and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold Bug.” These works collectively make the case for the significance of art as against the economic, as artist figures in each story reflect on the fi nancial crisis of the moment. And in so doing, each deploys the rhetorical figure of ekphrasis, the speaking picture, a trope that has become common to economic writing as well. I have no doubt that my own interest in the corporation owes a great deal to the moment when this book was conceived, researched, and written. Every book, even one that takes as its topic the culture of the past, records its own moment, and one of the rules of this book is to be explicit in making some connections between the historical events and literary texts that I trace here and the concerns about the place of the corporation in the present tense. The period of this book’s composition has been an era of intense and prolonged economic upheaval in the United States. That upheaval could be traced to several points of origin, depending on how you look at it, but it has without any doubt been particularly acute since the fi nancial crisis of 2008. Casting a wider view, we are clearly living within an even longer period when the corporation has ascended to become a central agent in the economic system, one endowed with an assertiveness and power that probably would have surprised its early modern inventors and theorists. In the past few decades, the corporation has frequently been imagined in very different ways than it had ever been before, as the collective interest of its shareholders alone. This conception was not invented by Milton Friedman but is often associated with him because he offered an early and

26

Introduction

very public articulation of it in the New York Times in 1970. Writing in the midst of the era’s wave of criticism from the Left that business had failed its responsibilities to American society in general (by, for example, polluting the atmosphere or discriminating against minority groups), Friedman returned to Hobbes’s formulation that a corporation was an “artificial person” (though he does not acknowledge his source) and used it to argue that, as such, the business corporation could have only “artificial responsibilities.” This is tantamount, it turns out, to saying that corporations have no social responsibilities at all.49 Friedman in effect turns Hobbes upside down; whereas Hobbes had (as we have seen) understood incorporated bodies to be dangerous threats to the sovereign, Friedman takes that very threat as a mark of the corporation’s liberation from the state and social collectivities other than itself. The goal of a businessman, Friedman argued, should be to create value for the corporation’s owners, which he defi ned as its shareholders. Businesspeople who do otherwise are merely “unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.” Friedman’s understanding of the corporation as essentially a vehicle for promoting shareholder value has become very influential in the four decades since, during which it has been deployed as part of a neoliberal agenda of weakening the power of labor and the interference of governments. There is a kind of bracing pragmatism to Friedman’s argument, and it is hard, in an era when some corporations try to don a veneer of social responsibility by, for example, public acts of charity that represent a minuscule fraction of their profits, not to sympathize with his claim that it is foolish to think we should look to corporations to solve social problems. But it is also hard not to see how Friedman’s claim that the corporation’s only goal is to increase the value of its own shares has served to license the very kinds of (professedly) antisocial behavior that Bakan thinks of as pathological. As the course of this book will show, Friedman’s is a particularly idiosyncratic formulation, one that advances a notion of privacy far more absolute than any that could have been imagined in the period covered by this book. Since the onset of the fi nancial crisis that began in the fall of 2008 and has continued to depress employment and productivity in the transatlantic economic world ever since, this understanding of the corporation has come under suspicion, both in the popular media and in the economics profession itself. In a survey of economists’ assessments of what the field has learned since 2008, Justin Fox (the editor of the Harvard Business Review) suggests that “economists’ extremely influential grip on a key component of the economic world—the corporation—may be loosen-

Introduction

27

ing.” The notion that “shareholder value” can or should be the only goal of the corporation is, even in the business world, being questioned, though there is, as yet, no consensus about what kind of shared understanding of the corporation’s goals or its place in society has emerged to displace the position that Friedman articulated most publicly and forcefully more than four decades ago. “We’re all still waiting,” Fox observes, “for some other framework with which to understand the corporation— and economists may not be able to deliver it.”50 This is a remarkable confession, given that the business corporation has existed for four centuries: how much longer can we expect it to it take? Creating a new “framework” for understanding the business corporation is not the goal of this book (and Fox seems to give sociologists rather than literary critics the inside track on this task). I would argue, in fact, that the evidence amassed in the pages that follow shows that this is a fool’s errand, anyway; the corporation can never be comprehensively understood, because it is bound up in larger systems of sovereignty, affect, and figuration that change over time. Still, the moment of history that we live in now offers a good opportunity to rethink some basic assumptions about the relationship between commercial entities like the corporation and other social institutions. The ascendancy of the business corporation has been driven by the seemingly inexorable rise of fi nance capitalism since the seventeenth century, and it has shaped the possibilities for thought and feeling throughout that period while offering itself as an inevitable, unavoidable fact that asks that we understand it, rather than the other way around. As Wittgenstein put it, “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”51 The goal of Literature Incorporated is to discover some of the ways in which language has “repeated” the influence of the corporation to us, given it form in our imaginations.

Ch apter One

John Locke, Desire, and the Incorporation of Money

A

t the outset of his Essay concerning Human Understanding, John Locke identifies the Idea as “the Object of the Understanding when a Man thinks.”1 The statement is admirably simple, but it compresses within it so much implication that it is not much of an exaggeration to say that much of the book that follows serves in large measure as its gloss. Over the past three centuries, writers have expended tremendous energy erecting glosses upon Locke’s own, unpacking the genealogy and implications of what he meant by the Idea, its intellectual history, and its significance to the philosophical movement that became known as empiricism.2 Locke identifies the significance of his own intervention in terms of what we might now call its value added. In two introductory epistles, one to his patron and one to “the Reader,” Locke asserts that the “value” of the Essay owes everything to the fact that it has nothing to do with labor, exchange, and careerist ambition. For its dedicatee the Earl of Pembroke, the Essay serves as a gift or a “Present” that, like a “Basket of Flowers, or Fruit,” from a poor man to a rich, accrues “Value” by virtue of its being offered as acknowledgment for a “long Train of Favors” that it can never hope to equal (1.1.4). For the general reader, Locke goes on, the Essay should serve as the kind of “Diversion” (1.1.7), “Entertainment,” “Pleasure,” or “Sport” (1.1.6) that Locke claims it was for him. The writing of the book, he says, was the “diversion of some of my idle and heavy Hours” (1.1.6). Locke disavows the Essay’s status as an item in the marketplace, but he does so through negation, by defi ning the Essay in negative relationship to a market that the same epistles elsewhere recognize positively. For Locke also assures the general reader that his “Money” will not seem “ill bestowed” on the Essay if he has “but half so much Pleasure in reading, as I had in writing it,” challenging the reader to put a cash value on his own pleasure. 28

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To Pembroke, Locke asserts that the novelty of the Essay’s claims is no argument against their validity: “Truth, like Gold, is not the less so, for being newly brought out of the Mine. . . . And though it be not yet current by the publick stamp; yet it may, for all that, be as old as Nature, and is certainly not the less genuine” (1.1.4). What appears at fi rst blush to be Locke’s modesty about the Essay’s claims appears on closer scrutiny to be his supreme confidence that the marketplace of ideas—the “public stamp” that will authorize his theories as fit for general circulation— can serve only to ratify rather than to determine a value that is understood to be natural. So, too, what appears to be a dissociation between the philosophical and the economic reveals itself to be an intimate and complementary relationship. And the horizon within which this relationship was nurtured is surely the Americas, the place where the gold that serves as Locke’s metaphor for truth would have been mined.3 The surprisingly intimate relationship in Locke’s writings between money, the mind, and the corporate colonialist economy of lateseventeenth-century England is the topic of this chapter. This is the only chapter in this book that focuses largely on the work of a single author. But John Locke is no ordinary author. He is extraordinary for the range of his interests and the scope of his writings, which embrace economics, political theory, medicine, philosophy of mind, and education— and more. To the modern scholar, writing at a time when knowledge has become hyperspecialized, and when it takes the better part of a decade to be accredited at the highest levels of even a single discipline, the scope of Locke’s interests, knowledge, and influence is humbling. Yet surely no small part of the reason for this is not only that Locke was extraordinarily intelligent—though he was—but that he lived at a time when the quantity of what was known and knowable about many topics was still modest enough for a single intelligent man, one with curiosity, time, and access to the means by which information was disseminated (primarily through universities, salons, correspondence, and print periodicals) to gain what was at the time fairly advanced degrees of knowledge in many of them. This is no longer the case, and the pragmatic manner in which we have dealt with the explosive growth of knowledge and information since then, by forming specialized disciplines, has had a tremendous impact on the ways we have come to understand Locke, a late-seventeenth-century polymath whose writings long precede the emergence of separate disciplines like economics or philosophy. In our time, Locke’s corpus has generally been split across disciplinary lines, with philosophers concentrating on the Essay, political theorists on the Second Treatise, and economic

30

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historians the only people who are even aware of the texts on money. But Locke’s work has become central to philosophy of mind and political theory. As Richard Rorty put it, “with Lockean empiricism, foundationalist epistemology emerged as the paradigm of philosophy,” its attention to the relationship between the mind and the things in the world it observes forever displacing the theological orientation that the domain of thought we now call philosophy had up to that point.4 And political theory has credited Locke’s Second Treatise with an extraordinarily influential articulation of the origins of private property, an articulation that (as we shall see in the coda to this chapter) is in many ways in excess of anything that Locke himself wrote. To many modern writers, Locke has become the general equivalent of the early modern intellectual, a figure as symbolic as he is real, and one who organizes and gives value to domains of thought and expression like empiricism and politics. This process of elevation and exclusion mirrors, I hope to show, the way in which Locke organizes the economy of the mind by importing a version of the money economy of late-seventeenth-century Britain, placing the Idea itself as the general equivalent of thought. More to the point here, it is worth noting that the edifices of commentary and analysis that writers in multiple disciplines have produced on Locke’s original texts have grown to be large and elaborate, and the investments in Locke’s arguments have become so great as to make it particularly challenging to use the previous readings when they are helpful but also to peel them away when they have become encrustations, concealing more than revealing his language and its historical setting. My goal is to begin this task by placing Locke’s works in the context of the corporately organized political economy of his day, of which he was a major observer and participant. For I take John Locke’s essays—philosophical, political, and economic —to be the place in seventeenth-century English writing where the relationship between the economic and the philosophical becomes acutely intelligible. The analogy between thought and money, as Marc Shell argued in the 1970s, goes back to the origins of this mode of inquiry itself; it was attempting “to account for the internalization of economic form in their own thinking” that, Shell argues, led Heraclitus and Plato to invent what we now think of as philosophical discourse.5 What follows is indebted to Shell’s articulation of the relationship between money and the mind, but my emphasis will be on how that relationship developed in the context of the corporate colonial economy of the late-seventeenth-century Englishspeaking world, a world in which Locke was involved as an adviser, theorist, investor, and administrator. Beginning in the mid-1660s, Locke be-

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came an adviser to Anthony Ashley Cooper, at that moment a central member of Charles II’s government. Ashley became one of the Lords Proprietor of the Carolina Company in 1663 and was also an active investor in the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Royal African Company.6 Locke was intimately involved with the administration of the Carolina Company in particular, and he played a role (how large a role will be an object of discussion shortly) in the drafting of the colony’s Fundamental Constitutions; he had a fi nancial stake in the company, and he invested as well in the Royal African Company.7 Colonial administration led almost inevitably to addressing issues of fiscal policy in the metropolis, not only because Ashley was, from 1661 to 1672, chancellor of the exchequer, but because the colonial ventures of all the European states, England included, were having measurable impact on the flow of persons, commodities, and national treasure, impact that found expression in the money form. Locke wrote what we might now call position papers for Ashley on topics like the rate of interest and the coinage as early as the late 1660s, when these topics were being discussed in Parliament and the court; as we shall see, those papers were repurposed, revised, and then printed in the 1690s to intervene in debates that had become more public and, in the case of the English currency, more urgent. Locke was the secretary to the Council for Trade and Foreign Plantations from late 1673 until the end of 1674, and he became a member of the Board of Trade, which had responsibility for supervising Britain’s colonial ventures, in 1696; he remained a member until 1700.8 For decades, then, Locke had a remarkable position at a crucial moment in the interbraided histories of European colonialism and AngloAmerican corporate capitalism. There are other English writers of philosophical texts who were involved with colonial and corporate entities: Thomas Hobbes (as we have seen) invested in the Virginia Company, John Stuart Mill was an administrator in London for the East India Company, and Wallace Stevens was for decades an officer of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. But no canonical writer in English was so deeply involved, for so long, in so many different aspects of both private and public aspects of English political economy, as was Locke. It has for this reason not proved difficult for scholars in recent years to argue that Locke’s political theories, in particular the crucial Second Treatise on government, owe a great deal to his involvement in colonial administration. As Jennifer Greeson has recently written, for example, “modern slave capitalism” can be understood as “the requisite prehistory of Locke’s Second Treatise” and in particular its articulation of what has come to be known in our time as “possessive individualism,” the argu-

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ment that every man has “a Property,” as Locke puts it, “in his own Person.”9 Conceptualizing persons as property was fundamental to the slave system that European companies developed to support the colonial project. It is also critical to the development of modern property rights, which proceed from the claim, best expressed in the English tradition by Locke, that the right to own other things proceeds from the absolute right to own one’s self. And the academic discipline of economics itself, as it has developed out of the work of Adam Smith in the late eighteenth century, is indebted to a strong misreading of the Second Treatise as well as of Locke’s writings on money. Locke’s writings on property and money, I will argue, became a foil against which Smith defi ned his own stance. It has proved less easy to identify how the experience of the colonial economic system shaped central or, better, constitutive aspects of the Essay concerning Human Understanding; that part of his corpus has been classed as being in the discourse of philosophy rather than political economy. But as we have seen, Locke’s own disavowals of any relationship between the economic and the philosophical are richly suggestive of the colonial context in which all of his writings were produced. Most fundamentally, European philosophical and economic thought in this period shared an abiding interest in the relationship between scarcity and desire, an interest that emerged from the environmental situation. Scarcity was widely understood by many Europeans to be a basic condition of the environment in which they lived. Whether they understood it to be a sign of the postlapsarian state of the world, evidence that humanity was on the downslope of the classical cycles of corruption and rejuvenation, or whether, more in keeping with the empiricist spirit to which Locke contributed, they had begun to notice the environmental degradation of northern Europe caused by centuries of deforestation, overfishing, mining, and other demands on the common resources of the earth, seventeenth-century English people were motivated to undertake colonial ventures in no small part because they were after goods that they believed or knew to be scarce. For his part, writing in the wake of the social, economic, political, and ecological crises that scarred England in the seventeenth century, Locke raises scarcity to be a fundamental aspect of the human condition and a constitutive part of the self.10 To Locke, desire, the will to overcome the limits of the natural world, poses a threat to the integrity of the social order and the individual alike. In this chapter, I fi rst look at how Locke has functioned as a key figure in the construction of political economy as an object of study. Then I examine more closely his role in the colonialist project, and then his position in the late debates over money, debates that are contemporary with

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the fi nal drafting of the Essay. Correlating Locke’s writings on the English economy with the Essay, I delineate what we may think of, following the French philosopher Jean-Joseph Goux, as the Essay’s “symbolic economy.” As Goux puts it, “Throughout the entire history of Western philosophy we fi nd an insistent comparison of money and language in what is not merely a surface phenomenon but a localized, isolated perception of a real sociohistorical coherence.  .  .  . The ‘common cause’ of philosophical idealism and the monetary economy will become evident.”11 In the Essay concerning Human Understanding, this common cause gets a name through Locke’s use of a single concept, the Idea, as the general equivalent of thought, the single concept that serves to order and evaluate all phenomena in the mind, much as he insisted that only silver bullion could represent the value of commodities in the world outside the self. The Idea becomes the central term in the Essay’s symbolic economy; it is the term that Locke uses to refer to all the contents of the subjective mind, pains and pleasures, uneasinesses and desires, abstract concepts constructed in the mind and “the natural and regular productions of Things without us” alike (4.4.4). Locke incorporates the money economy within the subjectivity of the individual, founding empiricism on the model of the early modern colonial system of corporate trade, exchange, and accumulation. This homology between the economy of Ideas and the economy of money is an unconscious rather than a conscious feature of Locke’s work, a correspondence that is nowhere articulated explicitly. Yet the significance of the Idea as the cornerstone of the science that Destutt de Tracy invented a century later and called, with explicit reference to Locke, Ideologie, underscores the long influence of Locke’s formulations on the unconscious, as well as the conscious, assumptions underpinning modern identity.12 We have become outraged at the idea that a corporation can be considered as a person for many purposes under the law, but Locke’s writing demonstrates how money, the value form of capitalism as it emerged in this early age of corporate colonial ventures, had already shaped his highly influential model of the person, becoming in effect the unconscious of Locke’s understanding of the human mind.

ADAM SMITH, LOCKE, AND THE INVENTION OF MERCANTILISM Locke and his writings on money, interest, and other topics that we now classify as “economic” have long been crucial texts in the development of political economy, fi rst as a discipline in the hands of Adam Smith and

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then, two centuries later, as part of the poststructuralist reorganization of sciences in the hands of Michel Foucault. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith puts John Locke fi rst among the English authors that he cites as adherents of what Smith dubbed “the Commercial or Mercantile System.” Smith writes that Locke “remarks a distinction between money and other moveable goods,” which are “of so consumable a nature that the wealth which consists in them cannot be much depended on.” Money, by contrast, is a “steady friend”: “Gold and silver, therefore, are, according to him, the most solid and substantial part of the moveable wealth of a nation, and to multiply those metals ought, he thinks, upon that account, to be the great object of its political oeconomy.”13 This is the “mercantile system” in a nutshell: to a theorist like Locke, money in the form of gold and silver bullion is the only stable source of value in a world where everything else wears out, spoils, or is consumed and should therefore be the primary means by which nations amass wealth. Although he does not name them, the texts of Locke that Smith is referring to here are probably the Second Treatise of Government (1689), particularly its famous chapter 5, “On Property,” and Locke’s essays on coinage and interest rates, first privately circulated as early as the late 1660s but then revised and printed for publication in the 1690s. Though Smith names other English writers, such as Thomas Mun, the author of England’s Treasure by Foreign Trade (1664), as key contributors, Smith gives Locke pride of place in his description of the “mercantile system,” I suspect because doing so serves to demonstrate how even so great a thinker as the quintessential philosopher of empiricism could be so wrong, could put bias, theory, and discredited notions ahead of experience. Smith uses Locke to raise the seventeenth-century writings on money, trade, interest, and other topics that we now defi ne as “economic” to the level of a system, a reasonably coherent and autotelic worldview that also carried with it the programmatic implication that nations should accumulate precious metals. The point of creating something known as the “mercantile system” becomes immediately clear as The Wealth of Nations goes on: Smith wants a stable object of study that he can attack and discredit. He does so characteristically by means of a narrative of periodization, of eras succeeding one another. Much as The Wealth of Nations as a whole advances a stadial theory of history, which imagines civilization as proceeding through ages of hunting, herding, farming, and commerce, the “mercantile system” emerges as a kind of substage within the age of commerce that Smith wants to mark as superseded by a modernity to which he wishes to lay claim. Here, the mercantile system is replaced by a modern understanding

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of political economy in which autonomous economic agents participate in a free market, which, according to Smith, “never fails to supply” enough precious metals to permit trade. One of the effects of Smith’s argument is to have successfully discredited Locke’s economic writings, relegating them to the status of minor works that are to some degree unaccountable, ill-fitting the author’s status as a leading theorist of government on the one hand and the human mind on the other. In History of Economic Analysis (1954), Joseph Schumpeter put himself in the role of a good empiricist to refute the great Locke’s efforts at economic argument, noting ruefully that a “sorry picture  .  .  . unfolds itself before the eyes” of the modern reader of Locke’s economic writings because of his outdated positions. Hence, whatever Locke thought about economics “stand[s] in no relation to either his philosophy or his political theory,” both of which undertake the kind of decisive break with encrusted tradition that Schumpeter sees Locke as incapable of when he turns to the topic of money.14 Historian Joyce Oldham Appleby, writing in the 1970s, described the victory of Locke’s position at the close of a currency debate in 1696 as “the ironic triumph of mind over matter by one of the major architects of empiricism,” imagining a split in Locke’s writings that follows the fault lines of modern academic disciplines: Locke as an architect of empiricism but an embarrassment to economics.15 More importantly, in inventing the “mercantile system” and using Locke as a stalking horse for it, Smith created a coherent object of knowledge that has had extraordinary longevity, becoming in effect a foundation stone of modern economics. It is now a standard stage in narratives of economic history, the name for the system that the modern capitalist free market displaced. But the creation of “mercantilism” as a stable object of study did not happen immediately, and it is indebted to an itinerary of translation and reappropriation that is significant, even if it is rarely appreciated. Nineteenth-century German translators of Smith translated the term “mercantile system” as Merkantilismus. In 1931, the Swedish economic historian Eli Heckscher, who may well have known Smith through those translations, appropriated that term and published a two-volume study on the history of European economic thought from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries in Swedish under the title Merkantilismen in 1931.16 At a time when the relationship between the market and the state was a matter of urgent concern, and when “-ism” was widely used to denote the ideology undergirding mass social movements (Nazism, Fascism, Communism, Taylorism), Heckscher’s study was quickly translated into the other European languages and entered English as Mercantilism in

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1935, there concretizing a name and a status it has held for economic historians writing in that language ever since. When John Maynard Keynes, in his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, also published in 1935, endorsed what he saw as “the element of truth in mercantilist doctrine,” in its call for the state to intervene in markets in money and interest, he called upon “Professor Heckscher’s great work on Mercantilism” as his supporting source material.17 (Meanwhile, Keynes praises “the great Locke” for being “perhaps, the fi rst to state in abstract terms the relationship between the rate of interest and the quantity of money” but argues that “he never, I think, proceeds to a genuine synthesis,” because he was “standing with one foot in the mercantilist world and one foot in the classical world.”)18 It was as “mercantilism” that the concept entered twentieth- and twenty-fi rst-century textbooks, where, slightly battered by critique, it remains as the name for economic thought avant la lettre. But the very fact of the name has made it seem more like a coherent system or ideology than it ever was. From Smith, via Heckscher and Keynes, economic history has come to defi ne modernity, which is to say the era within which its own rules about how the economy works are dominant, as in effect the transcendence of mercantilism’s simple-minded focus on the accumulation of national wealth, primarily through seeking and hoarding precious metals, and its replacement by a free market of goods traded by autonomous actors who best serve the state by serving their self-interest. The entrenchment of the concept and its association with a superseded past is so strong that “mercantilism” is also the term that so otherwise skeptical a writer as Michel Foucault uses in The Order of Things when he describes the seventeenth century’s “considered articulation that makes money the instrument of the representation and analysis of wealth, and makes wealth, conversely, into the content represented by money.”19 Foucault displays some reluctance to use the term “mercantilism”—he calls it a “somewhat approximate term” (173), notes that its stereotypical characterization is “doubly unjust” (176), and occasionally uses scare quotes around it to distance himself—but it serves his purposes, too, in helping to inscribe a discourse, a unified field of representation that crosses several domains of intellectual inquiry. Unlike Smith, Foucault does not see mercantilism as the anticipation of political economy as such, and the science of “archeology” that The Order of Things announces is expressly designed to forestall such teleology by extending its gaze in effect laterally, identifying contemporary correspondences across European intellectual writing, here in what Foucault calls the “Classical” period. But like Smith, Foucault invokes Locke’s essays on economics, which he sees as partici-

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pating in a “rigorous and general epistemological arrangement” in which “the analysis of wealth is to political economy what general grammar is to philology and what natural history is to biology” (167). The classical episteme that Foucault describes Locke participating in is, in essence, a system of representation, in which language and money, say, are two manifestations of the same impulse, the desire to identify how symbols (words, coins) signify something else (meaning, wealth) in a correspondence that aims to be exact and reversible. Foucault calls upon Locke when he reaches what must have been a tricky point in the argument of The Order of Things, where he has to account for the fact that the value of specie goes up and down fast enough that humans can experience obvious changes in their lifespan, and that by the late seventeenth century, still in the heart of Foucault’s “Classical” period, Europeans were able to investigate the historical record to identify broader shifts in the price of money. To give the most salient and obvious example, it was obvious to any European observer that the influx of specie from mines in the Americas had made silver and gold less valuable relative to other goods, such as land or grain, so that a long-standing correspondence between them seemed to be breaking down. Here is Foucault acknowledging the point and then citing a passage from Locke’s Some Considerations upon the Lowering of Interest (1692) that also acknowledges the point and attempts to contain it: More metal— and immediately any commodity existing in the world will have slightly more representative elements at its disposal; more merchandise— and each metallic unit will be slightly more heavily mortgaged. One need only take any given commodity as a stable reference point and this phenomenon of fluctuation is clearly revealed. As Locke says: That supposing wheat a standing measure, that is, that there is constantly the same quantity of it in proportion to its vent, we shall fi nd money to run the same variety of changes in its value, as all other commodities do. . . . The reason whereof is this, that there being ten times as much silver now in the world, (the discovery of the West-Indies having made the plenty) as there was then, it is 9/10 less worth now than it was at that time; that is, it will exchange for 9/10 less of any commodity now, which bears the same proportion to its vent as it did 200 years since. . . . The drop in the value of precious metal invoked here does not con-

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cern a certain precious quality which it is thought of as possessing in itself, but its general power of representation. Money and wealth are to be thought of as twin masses, which necessarily correspond with one another. (182–83)20

Locke’s quotation shores up Foucault’s claim by asserting that even in spite of the tenfold increase in the quantity of silver in circulation, the “proportion” between it and other commodities remains the same. But it also cracks open a window that will let us see outside Foucault’s “Classical” system of correspondences. In its invocation of “the West-Indies,” which here as often in seventeenth-century English writing typically stands in for the Americas tout court, Locke’s passage is one of a number of places in this section of The Order of Things where Foucault gestures, fleetingly, elliptically, and here through citation, to the colonial horizon. To a far greater extent than Foucault accounts for in The Order of Things, anything we might call an “economy” in seventeenth-century Europe is inextricable from the colonial system; every aspect of trade and fi nance, domestic as well as international, was increasingly being shaped by the relationship between Europe and its colonies in the Americas and Asia. The colonial system also shaped the course of language and thought in this period. The passage that Foucault cites from Locke provides a telling example in Locke’s idiosyncratic use of a term that seems designed to contain the desire that most other economic writers of the period saw as being unleashed by the potential riches of the New World. The term is “vent.” “Vent” is in effect a recoinage of Locke’s, an appropriation of a word that had generally, in other hands, meant something slightly but significantly different. The word had been in use, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, since at least the 1540s, when it signified the ability of things to be sold or traded. Locke defi nes his use of the term more narrowly to describe the act of sale itself, and he makes a point of offering his defi nition lest he be misunderstood; he says that he uses the word “Vent” when he means to signify the “passing of Commodities from one owner to another in Exchange.”21 What it does not mean is what later economists meant by “demand” or “desire,” which is something that they often fi nd disappointing. Thus Karen Iverson Vaughn, in the only book-length study on Locke as an economist, laments that “although his classification of various kinds of goods implies the concept of elasticity, his development of it is understandably deficient”: the modern theory of demand that would enable Locke to serve her goals of making him a founder of rational-choice theory is not there. Quite to the contrary, in fact, as Patrick Hyde Kelly,

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the editor of Locke’s economic writings, puts it, Lockean vent is “conceived of in terms of the disposal of goods by the seller, which is a function of buyer’s demand, rather than demand itself”; because it can theoretically never exceed the amount of goods available to be desired, the vent of any commodity remains essentially an expression of its scarcity rather than of the desire for it.22 Locke demonstrates both the ways in which Foucault is right (he insists that the value of the thing must correspond to the name used for it) and the ways in which Foucault is wrong (to insist on this was to fly in the face of an amount of evidence about the fungibility of value that had made it an active topic of debate). The effect of the Lockean conception of vent is to keep desire out of the field of representation. It is perhaps no surprise, then, to discover that desire is also what upends Foucault’s classical episteme, shifting the ground decisively into a new era. “The law without law of desire,” Foucault notes, is what disrupts the representational analogies of the Classical era for good (208). Foucault locates and dates this shift as taking place about a century later, in the late eighteenth century, and he uses the works of Sade as his prime example: “It is no longer the ironic triumph of representation over resemblance; it is the obscure and repeated violence of desire battering at the limits of representation” (209). Erotic and economic desire fuse here in ways that (we shall see) are not unusual. But Foucault’s timing is off; the disruptive force of desire, its power to motivate selves and shape global systems, was felt much earlier, in the heart of the “classical” period itself, the seventeenth century. Writers on trade were for the fi rst time promoting desire as a positive good, the spur to trade and a flourishing state. Here, for example, is a section of Nicholas Barbon’s A Discourse of Trade (1690), a pamphlet issued in part to oppose Locke’s position that the government should not tamper with the rate of interest. Wares, that have their Value from supplying the Wants of the Mind, are all such things that can satisfie Desire; Desire implys Want: It is the Appetite of the Soul, and is as natural to the Soul, as Hunger to the Body. The Wants of the Mind are infi nite, Man naturally Aspires, and as his Mind is elevated, his Senses grow more refi ned, and more capable of Delight; his Desires are inlarged, and his Wants increase with his Wishes, which is for every thing that is rare, can gratifie his Senses, adorn his body, and Promote the Ease, Pleasure, and Pomp of Life.23

With Barbon’s extraordinary hymn to desire, we seem at last to have identified an economic thinker sharing assumptions that Smith, Schum-

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peter, and Vaughn might recognize, the primacy of human demand as the main agent of economic activity. According to Appleby, economic writers of the 1680s and 1690s in England were the fi rst for whom “the undeniable subjectivity of desire had been turned into an objective and measurable force by assuming a constancy in human beings’ market behavior,” and it was this shift that made it possible for them to found economic discourse as a discipline of study.24 Desire, for so long condemned as mere avarice, was now widely heralded as the force that drove the trade upon which the social order depended, and, naturalized into an irreducible constant that motivated all participants in the marketplace, it lent economic thought a degree of coherence that guaranteed its systematicity. Dudley North asserted in 1691 that “the main spur to Trade, or rather to Industry and Ingenuity, is the exhorbitant Appetites of Men, which they will take pains to gratifie.”25 What has summoned this forth, however, is not philosophical musing, but rather the collective interests of the East India Company, of which North was a defender and Barbon an investor, and which was at this time mounting a campaign in print to lower the rate of interest for government borrowing to lower the cost of its own operations. Barbon’s and Locke’s works on interest are themselves deeply interested texts, produced from within the heart of the corporate colonial political economy. In this context, Locke is more concerned with the scarcity that puts limits on human desires than in licensing their full expression, a fact that renders him an outlier to economic discourse rather than a founder of it. This was shaped, I argue, by Locke’s experience as an administrator of the Carolina Company and contributor to its Fundamental Constitutions, a fact that serves to remind us, too, that one other component of the “mercantile system” that Smith does not fully account for is how thoroughly it was organized, not by the state itself, but by companies that were its extensions. It is the Carolina Company as a crucial influence on Locke’s understanding of the relationship of scarcity, desire, and the rights of individuals to which we now turn.

CONSTITUTION: LOCKE AND THE CAROLINA COMPANY British colonialism was a corporate enterprise. From the sixteenth century onward, Britain’s long-distance trade with the rest of the world was organized through companies that were chartered by the government. Starting with areas with which Britain had long had sporadic trading relations, such as the Baltic and what we now call the Middle East, corpora-

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tions (which had been organized under the respective corporate umbrellas of the Muscovy Company in 1555 and the Levant or Turkey Company in 1581) were formed to embrace ever more distant regions. The companies’ names and their years of incorporation begin to tell their story: the East India Company (chartered in 1600), the Virginia Company (chartered in 1606), the Royal African Company (chartered in 1660), the Carolina Company (chartered in 1663), the Hudson’s Bay Company (chartered in 1670), the South Sea Company (chartered in 1711), and many more, each new company dividing the earth into zones of trading rights. By extending the corporate form from established trading relationships to colonial enterprises, the British government may very well have been following a path of little resistance rather than pursuing any overarching plan. That path was also cleared by the fact that England was in concert with most of the other European nations with colonial ambitions. Whereas the Iberian states, which had been the fi rst to set up large-scale expeditions of exploration and extraction in the fi fteenth century, had done so primarily through the state apparatus itself, the Dutch, who led the next wave of colonialism, created institutional structures like the Vereenindge Oost-Indische Companie, or VOC, the Dutch East India Company, chartered in 1602. The most successful of all the European corporations for at least the next century, the VOC, with its corporate emblem spread from the Cape of Africa to the western Pacific, was to other European merchants the object of the twinned feelings of rivalry and emulation that constitute mimetic desire. Arriving to colonialism a little later than most of its rivals, England built its empires through an institutional form that had both indigenous precedents and international peers. There were advantages to organizing international and colonial operations through the form of the corporation rather than the state itself. Private resources could be pooled, an advantage reflected in the adjective “joint stock,” which entered the language around 1600 and seems to have been popularized by Josiah Child’s Discourse upon Trade, published in 1690.26 The phrase “joint stock” gives this contrivance of collective human imaginations the aura of the natural by way of Old English monosyllabism, projecting an image of tree trunks fused for greater strength onto the collecting of money for the purposes of expanded trade. In addition, the corporate form pooled risk, collectivizing the substantial hazards of far-flung colonial ventures by spreading them among many shareholders. (In chapter 4, we explore more fully the related imaginative structure known as insurance, which became the necessary supplement to the period’s expansion of colonial and international trade.) Perhaps most im-

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portantly of all, the corporate form promised that the institution would enjoy a longer life than that of any of its human proprietors. That fact is underscored by the typical practice of setting up rules limiting the terms of the principal officers of companies. The corporate body was expressly designed to endure past the life span of the individuals who were its administrators. To be sure, many companies were themselves set up for limited terms, subject to renewal by their chartering governments. But such charters were renewed far more often than not (renewal perhaps providing an occasion for a monarch to exact tribute from the shareholders), and others were incorporated in perpetuity, such as the Carolina Company (about which more shortly), which insisted that its control over its colonial domains was “perpetually established.”27 Corporations were given the imagined permanence of the nation-state itself. This had far-reaching results that to some extent have never fully been assimilated to our usual understandings of either the state or the corporation, but for now it is worth noting that colonial corporations themselves often quickly realized that their charters gave them the potential for asserting sovereign claims over territory and for performing many functions of government. As the historian Philip J. Stern, writing in particular about the English East India Company, has recently put it, such an early modern corporation “did what early modern governments did: erect and administer law; collect taxes; provide protection; infl ict punishment; perform stateliness; regulate economic, religious, and civic life; conduct diplomacy and wage war; make claims to jurisdiction over land and sea; cultivate authority over and obedience from those people subject to its command.”28 In The Wealth of Nations, Smith describes the combination of trading and sovereignty manifest in colonial companies as a “strange absurdity” that merchants themselves failed fully to comprehend.29 But the evidence suggests rather that many corporations had no trouble exercising sovereignty abroad, and we shall see that the Carolina Company imagined from the outset that using its charter to create a government with a permanent structure was essential to the project of colonial settlement. At home, companies like the East India Company and, later, the South Sea Company involved themselves in every aspect of the state’s economy. Child’s Discourse upon Trade, while presenting itself as an objective work of knowledge-production, was in truth propaganda arguing for the government to lower interest rates, which would have the effect of lowering the East India Company’s borrowing costs. Child, the leading figure in the company for a generation (who foiled the rules regarding term limits for directors by wielding equivalent power while shuttling between several

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positions), wrote several works in the 1680s and 1690s on trade designed to promote company objectives by putting public pressure on the government. And John Locke found himself drawn into writing about, and ultimately publishing on, the questions of the interest rate and the English coinage following his involvement in his patron’s most significant colonial project, the Carolina Company. So overlapping were the contours and interests of states and companies that when William of Orange arrived in England in late 1688 to take the throne, bringing with him a team of advisers experienced in Dutch methods of fi nance who proceeded to inaugurate fiscal changes sweeping enough that modern historians have described them as constituting a “fi nancial revolution,” we might plausibly cast this less as a political coup d’état than as a corporate takeover. 30 William saw England less as territory to be governed than as an underleveraged entity, ripe for taking on much more debt than previous governments had imagined, and therefore a prime funding source for his military adventures. In 1694 a new corporate entity was created to float a loan of 1.2  million pounds that the government used to build naval ships; in return, the loan’s subscribers, now incorporated as the Bank of England, received 8 percent interest on the loan and had the exclusive right to issue bank notes. Chapter 5 analyzes the peculiar corporate institution of the modern bank more thoroughly, but what is worth noting here is how the invention of a permanent national debt involved agreement between the state and a private corporation that shared the same presumption of perpetuity. Certainly the Carolina Company thought of itself as an entity wielding political, as well as economic, authority. The Carolina Company was intended to take the place of or, better, to correct the mistakes of, earlier English ventures to colonize that part of the North American mainland. Walter Raleigh had received a grant from Queen Elizabeth to found a colony in the enormous area that the English called Virginia. Raleigh sent expeditions to Roanoke Island in what is now North Carolina in the 1580s, fi rst a small group in 1585 and then a larger group in 1587, with an eye toward establishing something like a permanent presence. But Raleigh’s conception of what he was doing was clearly situated far more within an economy of extraction and plunder than one of continuous trade, much less self-sustaining manufacturing or agricultural production. This becomes clear when we note, for example, that a key figure in the 1585 exploratory group was the Bohemian-born metallurgist Joachim Gans, who had already introduced new methods for the efficient smelting of copper into the native, and technologically backward, English mining industry. Gans was sent to assay silver (which is often found with copper) and other

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precious metals, which were still, as they had been for almost two centuries, the treasure that Europeans sought most eagerly in the Americas. And even the larger expedition that Raleigh dispatched two years later was imagined more as a base for capturing Spanish treasure ships bringing silver from Mexico and Peru to Europe than as a self-sustaining settlement. That venture, as is well remembered, collapsed as the natives either killed or assimilated the settlers. By the time a supply ship showed up in 1590, all of the settlers had disappeared, and efforts to trace what happened to the “Lost Colony” continue to this day. In 1629 Charles I gave Robert Heath a grant to what was to be called “Carolina,” in honor of him and to distinguish it from the area to the north, now administered by the Virginia Company. Heath visited the area around the Cape Fear River but failed to organize a colony. Charles II’s grant in 1663 was, in keeping with the move away from individual adventure-seeking to corporate models, bestowed upon a group of eight loyal courtiers, who organized themselves as the Proprietors of the Carolina Colony. This colony’s territory extended south from the 38th parallel, which was the southern border of Virginia, to the (fungible) border of the Spanish possessions in what is now Florida, and west from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. Unlike Raleigh or Drake, or the other members of the generation of swashbuckling privateers who had roamed the coasts of North America at the turn of the seventeenth century, the proprietors of the Carolina Company planned from the outset to establish a governance structure and a settlement that would, under its corporate umbrella, endure in perpetuity. That much is clear from the colony’s founding document, its Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, fi rst written and issued in 1669. There is something more than a little absurd about the Fundamental Constitutions of the Carolina Company, a document seemingly so determined to establish the company’s everlasting authority over the land it had been granted that it betrays rather the awareness on the part of its drafters that such power would be difficult to claim and sustain. The worry is tangible in the overkill of the document’s title, which seems to acknowledge that identifying something as a constitution is just not fundamental enough. And the colonists seem to have felt free to ignore the Constitutions from the outset, prompting the proprietors to undertake several revisions over the next few years in the apparent hopes of coming up with a workable document. It never seems to have taken hold as a blueprint for governance, and the colonists eventually were able to break free of company control altogether by the 1720s; in 1729, the heirs of seven of the eight original proprietors sold their shares to the Crown, and the

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Carolinas, now divided into North and South provinces, came under the direct administration of the British government. Still, in spite of its failure as a governing text, and although it lacks verbal panache, the Fundamental Constitutions is remarkable for its existence alone. No other colonial company of the period wrote out so fully its intentions, specified its goal, and articulated so fully the structure of property holdings, governance, and jurisprudence it wished to enact throughout its holdings. The Fundamental Constitutions is thus one of the most telling documents of this era of colonialism, because it reveals the key interests and desires of the corporate bodies that organized trade and settlement patterns. The very lack of style or individuality in the Fundamental Constitutions testifies in its own way to the collective nature of the document and has frustrated attempts by scholars to assign individual authorship to it, either in whole or in part.31 There is no doubt that Locke was involved, in his capacity as an adviser to Ashley. Locke came to have an extensive portfolio and also, as the secretary to the proprietors, a position he probably held by virtue of his intimacy with Ashley, who was at this time the company’s most active patent-holder and investor. Locke had fairly recently become a member of Ashley’s household, originally joining as a physician in 1666; his most significant act in that role was to supervise an operation that drained a large and painful abscess on Ashley’s liver in 1668. Medical studies, which had dominated Locke’s intellectual activities at Oxford in the preceding years, were clearly a spur to Locke’s understanding of the centrality of sensory experience to knowledge. In his essay “Anatomie,” Locke observes that “what we know of the . . . constitution of health, and the operations of our own bodies, is only by the sensible effects.”32 Empiricism, that is, not only starts with the body’s organs as the means for acquiring all knowledge, but takes the body as itself the object of study. The capaciousness of Locke’s interests and talents seems to have made fairly seamless the move from supervising the “constitution” of the health of Ashley’s body to collaborating on the Constitutions for the corporate body of which Ashley was now a leading part. Ashley was the most involved of the proprietors in the company’s fi rst years, and he took the lead in organizing its affairs. This called for writing a text of governance that, Ashley advised potential colonists, should be taken as “the compasse ye are to steer by,” and it is certain that there is little if anything in the document of which Ashley did not approve.33 Still, the Fundamental Constitutions presents itself as an example of corporate authorship, and while this later became typical for foundational texts of government (think of the U.S. Constitution of 1787, drafted initially by James Madison but revised by

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members of the convention and presented to the public and the individual states for ratification anonymously) and of legislation more generally, it is not typical of literary or philosophical writings and therefore creates frustration for scholars who desire to associate a text with an individual person. Moreover, the Constitutions, whose fi rst issue is a manuscript dated July 21, 1669, was revised several times over the course of the next three decades (revised versions, now printed, were issued in 1670 and twice in 1682, with a fi nal version coming in 1698), and we know from documentary evidence that others, such as Sir Peter Colleton, another of the original proprietors, joined in making at least some of those revisions. But if the full extent of Locke’s role in drafting a document that was clearly intended to be the voice of a collective institution rather than an individual can never fully be known, it does seem clear that the investors and several contemporary outsiders to the project gave Locke some credit. Colleton praised Locke’s role in constructing “that excellent forme of Government in the composure of which [he] had soe great a hand,” cunningly deploying a metonym that has sometimes been taken to indicate that Locke is largely responsible for the work’s content but could readily also perhaps narrow his role to that of more of a scribe to Ashley and other proprietors than a central contributor. The beginning of the fi rst version of the Constitutions is indeed in Locke’s “hand,” his autograph handwriting.34 Others, such as Locke’s French correspondents Nicolas Toinard and Henri Justel, referred to “vos constitutions,” and Locke joked with Toinard about moving to Carolina. 35 The principle of thrift that Foucault has identified as being characteristic of the emergence of the “author-function” in this period was clearly already at work here; Locke accepted the way others granted him the role of the Constitutions’s author; it became published as part of his works as early as 1720, and he remains the individual most frequently associated with its composition. 36 In what we might think of as the political economy of authorship, Locke became the general equivalent of the late-seventeenth-century English theorist, a position that, as we shall see in the coda to this chapter, he still holds. Yet what the collective nature of this document and the fact of its frequent revisions underscores more than anything else is that all of Locke’s works emerge from situations of collective debate, if not, as here, collaborative authorship, and that there is no such thing as a fi xed and settled text. For writers who want to associate Locke with the Fundamental Constitutions, and particularly those who start from the premise that Locke is a champion of liberty, what has proved most embarrassing is the docu-

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ment’s institution of the permanent enslavement of people captured in Africa and brought to the Americas: “Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever.”37 The provision is less surprising once we remember the extent of Locke’s fi nancial investment in the Royal African Company. It is also less surprising if we consider it in the context of the entire document, which is remarkably feudal in a number of ways. The Constitutions imagines a permanent landed aristocracy, with (no surprise here) the eight original proprietors and their descendants as the highest rank and the eldest among them holding the title of “palatine.” (By the terms of the original Crown grant, the proprietors had to use titles other than those in use in England.) Each county would have a “landgrave” (Locke was granted one of these) and two “caciques.” Both the beginning and the end of the Fundamental Constitutions emphasize that the political system thus instituted was designed to be “perpetual . . . the sacred unalterable form and rule of the government of Carolina for ever.”38 The Constitutions also establishes a judicial system and a bureaucratic apparatus of county registries for recording land transactions and births; a parliament that was to meet every second year, elected by freeholders of property; and fairly broad religious toleration that was compromised to some extent in 1670, when the Constitutions was amended to establish the Church of England as the official, state-supported faith. (Pierre Des Maizeaux, the 1720 editor of A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr John Locke, which fi rst printed the Fundamental Constitutions as essentially Locke’s work, claimed that Locke told friends that he objected to this addition, but this is the only printed evidence we have for that disavowal.) In their mix of the feudal, the absolute, the republican, the tolerant, and the brutal, the Fundamental Constitutions embodies the crosscurrents of its time, the particular nexus of residual and emergent impulses characteristic of late-seventeenth-century European thought. It may not have ever functioned as a workable plan of governance, which may be a sign of the fullness of the Constitutions as a utopian document, the drawing up of an ideal social order and economic system from scratch. For the Constitutions seems to imagine more what Carolina might look like many years down the road, with a large population, rather than at the start, with the relatively small number of colonists who could even under the best-case scenarios be expected to emigrate. In reality, the colony was in its early years never able to fi ll the many ranks and roles that the Constitutions had outlined, and the colonists resorted, as could be expected, to more improvisatory systems of governance until

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they relinquished the proprietorship model altogether and went under direct governance from the Crown. But chattel slavery of African subjects stayed in place, as the Constitutions’s fi rmest and most lasting legacy. 39 The Constitutions’s institution of a permanent labor force of African chattel slaves is also less surprising than it might be once we recall that by the late seventeenth century, this had become the normative economic structure for English colonies in the Americas. For what is perhaps most fundamental about the Fundamental Constitutions is that it is a work not only of politics, but of political economy. The Constitutions, with its system of tiered hereditary ranks and elaboration of governance procedures, makes it clear that the company’s goal was to provide the conditions for a permanent settlement that would extend to the New World the system of what Neal Wood has called agrarian capitalism.40 In response to a “rapid population increase since the end of the fi fteenth century, Neal writes, far-reaching changes were slowly transforming rural England. Productivity was being raised and cultivation extended by crucial agricultural techniques such as convertible husbandry, floating water meadows, the use of new fallow crops and selected grasses, the drainage of fens and marshlands, manuring, and the development of stock breeding. Fundamental to these alterations were the reorganization of farms and the emergence of a new farming mentality. Estates were enlarged by engrossment and enclosure. Traditional family subsistence farms, at least in the south and east, were slowly being replaced by efficiently operated agrarian enterprises producing for the market, utilizing wage labor, and reinvesting profits in the expansion of production.41

Ashley was the holder of several large estates in England, and Locke became involved, less in the day-to-day management of Ashley’s estates than in theoretical and technical issues of agricultural development, both in England and in Carolina. In the late 1670s, when Locke spent a threeyear sojourn in France (partly for reasons of his own health; Locke suffered from chronic issues with his lungs that were exacerbated by the concentration of coal fi res in London), he made a point of learning as much as he could about viniculture, olive-growing, and silk production, modes of agricultural production less appropriate for England than for the Carolinas. He wrote a short essay on the subject, dedicated to Ashley and for his benefit, in 1679: Observations upon the Growth and Culture of Vines and Olives; The Production of Silk; The Preservation of Fruit; it was not printed until 1766, by which time the occasion and its original purposes had been

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forgotten. In France, Locke also attempted to recruit Huguenots, particularly those with experience in growing grapes and silkworms, to become colonists in Carolina. The goal was for the colony to become productive enough to be self-sustaining through the kinds of agricultural production that relied on a large, permanent labor force. The Fundamental Constitutions and Locke’s Observations mark the Carolina Company and the colony it attempted to launch as participating in a new stage of colonialism, much different from the extraction-and-plunder economy imagined in the era of Raleigh a generation or two earlier. When, in 1671, Ashley got word that some of the colonists had discovered that one of the native tribes in the region had contacts with Spaniards and that this might lead colonists to imagine that there was gold and silver to be found just beyond the frontier, he told William Saile, the governor, to do what he could to keep the information to himself. “Neither doe we think it advantageous for our people to live by rapin and plunder which we doe not nor will not allow Planting and Trade is both our designe and your interest. . . . If you fi nd that any such report is got amongst the people that farther up in the country there are mines of gold and silver I desire you would endeavor to suppresse it and put it out of their heads by all means you can.”42 As in Locke’s introductory epistle to the Essay two decades later, mines for bullion are here just over the horizon; they are not the matter at hand but rather help to defi ne the goals of permanent large-scale agricultural productivity and philosophical truth, respectively. Yet both the casualness of Locke’s reference and the intensity of Ashley’s discouragement here attest to the significance of bullion to both the real and the theoretical economies of the period. The place where Locke brings money, the American colonies, and questions of governance together at the most abstract level is the Second Treatise of government, to which we now turn.

SCARCITY AND MONEY “In the beginning all the World was America,” writes Locke in the fi fth chapter, entitled “On Property,” of the Second Treatise, published in 1689 but largely drafted in the early 1680s, when Locke was still involved on a regular basis with the Carolina colony. The echo of Genesis is just wry enough to specify that Locke sees himself writing in a world that is postlapsarian in both a biblical and an economic sense. We can imagine Eden but cannot return there; neither can the denizen of the 1680s return to the America that existed before Europeans, driven there by the need to replenish their diminishing resources, began to colonize it. Locke’s reasoning

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for why that is the case, though, is striking: “for no such thing as Money was any where known. Find out something that hath the Use and Value of Money amongst his Neighbours, you shall see the same Man will begin presently to enlarge his Possessions.”43 Money emerges here as an agent of history, the instrument by which the accumulation of property becomes possible and through which the modern economy begins. Locke’s association between modernity and money testifies to the central place that money had in the thinking of his time. More immediately, it underscores how insistently the Second Treatise as a whole depicts an imagined regime of scarcity, a world where labor, private property, and a political order that will ensure the just distribution of goods are needed because there are not enough commodities to go around. Locke’s Second Treatise offers a myth of the origins of scarcity, a fall from a “golden age” that was characterized by sufficient abundance so that all are entitled to possession of enough property to meet their needs without having to compete for those rights with others. What marks the end of this harmonious regime, and even in a sense destroys it, is the introduction of money: “This I dare boldly affirm, That the same Rule of Propriety, (viz.) that every Man should have as much as he could make use of, would hold still in the World, without straightning any body, since there is Land enough in the World to suffice double the Inhabitants had not the Invention of Money, and the tacit Agreement of Men to put a value on it, introduced (by Consent) larger Possessions, and a Right to them” (§36). With money come scarcity and confl ict, the conditions that call for the invention of politics as a way to allocate limited resources and adjudicate disputes. The elaborate political and juridical apparatus constructed through the Fundamental Constitutions assumes less that all the world was once America than that now, with English colonization and settlement, America will become more and more like all the world, with money as the sign and instrument of accumulation. Yet even though money seems to be endowed with a kind of agency, one that seems to wipe the fi ngerprints of individual persons off the crime of ending the golden age, we should also observe that the Second Treatise seems to imagine some kind of political activity as going on even prior to the introduction of money, since money is understood to be an “Invention” rather than a chance discovery or a gift from God, an item with value that has been produced by means of an “Agreement.” Moreover, Locke’s state of nature, while it seems to have endless amounts of land for settlement, nonetheless also has its limits, because Locke, like many of his contemporaries, believed that it is ethically wrong for an individual to

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possess more of the world’s goods than he or she can use before they spoil. Money’s positive side is that it solves this problem; now that “a little piece of yellow Metal, which would keep without wasting or decay” can represent “a great piece of Flesh, or a whole heap of Corn” (§37), nothing need go to waste through spoilage. However, money’s negative side dominates this part of the Second Treatise, for the upshot of the invention of money is not only that it grants a “Right” to larger possessions, but that it creates the desire for them. The prospect of untrammeled desire makes Locke decidedly uneasy; later in the Second Treatise, he speaks of the “amor sceleratus habendi, evil Concupiscence” that followed the fall from the “Golden Age” (§111). This association between the “desire of having more than Men needed” (§37) and the invention of money carries over into his writings on the problem of the currency. For if the after-effect of the fall from the golden age is the establishment of a regime of scarcity, Locke’s prescription to contain the desires that would lead to conflict within it is simple: keep gold— or, in contemporary England, silver— scarce.44 Locke was making into principle what most contemporary writers on trade believed to be empirical fact, that money, like all other commodities, was in short supply. Kelly has observed that seventeenth-century English writers on economics consistently identified the country’s most serious economic problem as what was termed a “scarcity of money.”45 The term conflated what we can identify as several different kinds of shortfall. For one thing, the term helped describe the general sense of fi nancial and ecological crisis felt by most seventeenth-century English writers on trade, the belief that resources were stretched to their limits. They had reason to worry; besides the obvious pressures created by an expanding population and the costs of a generation of civil upheaval, England’s systems for allocating its resources, its tax codes and collection systems, its methods of public fi nance, were deeply antiquated and inadequate to the task of funding an emergent modern nation-state. Even though the population of England had doubled between 1500 and 1650, tax revenues had not kept pace; Charles I, for example, had only about 10 percent more revenue available to him than had Elizabeth I a half century earlier.46 The result was a felt shortfall in public funds. This general sense of scarcity was conflated, localized, and concretized for late-seventeenth-century writers in the problem of the shortage in circulating specie. The most recent issue of English coins had come shortly after the Restoration, so by the late 1680s the coinage was worn; and there was a disparity between the rate at which the Royal Mint took in silver to be coined and the rate it could be sold for if sent overseas.

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This meant that London goldsmiths found a profitable business in clipping coins, slicing off silver from around the edges and melting down the gathered shavings for export. Such facts meant that most of the English currency was “light,” possessing less silver than the value stamped on its face indicated; William Lowndes, the secretary of the Treasury, estimated in 1696 that the currency in circulation contained only half of the value by weight of its precious metal content. Inconvenience became crisis when the demands of fi nancing William III’s military adventures began affecting international money markets; the English military’s need to translate pounds into bills of exchange in order to meet payments on the Continent meant that the value of the pound dropped, providing even more incentive to export silver from England.47 Both the Treasury and a parliamentary committee assigned to investigate the question agreed that a general recoinage was needed, but there was no consensus on the terms under which that recoinage was to be conducted. Should the Treasury issue new coins containing a silver content that was worth less than their face value and thereby endorse by law a status quo under which “light” money circulated freely? Such a devaluation of the currency was known, through an alchemy of political discourse that Locke considered to be merely an instance of rhetorical sleight-of-hand, as “raising” the coin, and it had the advantage of ensuring that there would be more money in circulation, since the government could set whatever mint rate it thought the market would bear. Or, on the other hand, should the new coins be minted so that they contained the full value by weight of their face value? Under this scenario, the silver currency would be extremely sound, because the precious metal of each coin would correspond precisely to its face value, but the shortfall in the currency would continue since far fewer coins could be minted. The consequences of the government’s decision were political as well as economic: devaluation, for example would be to the advantage of borrowers and would hurt lenders, since loans could be paid back in “light” money, and although it might harm landlords by decreasing the value of their rent rolls through inflation, it was also a boon to anyone with government debts or taxes to pay, landowners included. Parliamentary committees solicited Locke’s opinion on the question of the rate of interest and that of the recoinage, both of which were understood in this period as essentially questions of the proper value of money. Locke started writing papers on the questions of money and interest in the late 1660s, soon after he joined Ashley’s employ and as he was becoming involved in the Carolina project. In the 1690s, he revised these notes and memoranda for print, publishing a series of pamphlets intended

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to influence the parliamentary debates on the interest rate and the impending recoinage. In 1691, he published Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest, and the Raising the Value of Money to counter the demand of the East India Company that the government should mandate a decrease in the legal rate of interest from 6 to 4 percent. At the end of 1695, he published Further Considerations concerning Raising the Value of Money to oppose Lowndes’s argument that the value of the currency could be set at a rate the government chose, largely because, as Lowndes had painstakingly demonstrated, this was precisely what had happened over the previous two hundred years. Lowndes’s pamphlet A Report Containing an Essay for the Amendment of the Silver Coins (1695) showed that there had been a gradual but continuous decline in the amount of silver contained in English currency; the clear implication was that it would be possible to reduce that amount again without incurring disaster.48 Locke asserted rather that the “intrinsick value” of the silver currency must be maintained, and therefore that any recoinage had to restore an exact correspondence between the face value of the coins and the value by weight of their precious metal content, a position at odds with the Second Treatise’s claim that money is a sign whose value derives from human convention. What explains this inconsistency? In the pamphlets on money and interest, Locke actually makes a point of noting that money’s value is conventional, the product of mutual agreement; but he does so precisely in order to dismiss the notion that its standard can now be altered. As he puts it in Further Considerations concerning Raising the Value of Money: “The intrinsick Value of silver consider’d as Money, is that estimate which common consent has placed on it, whereby it is made Equivalent to all other things, and consequently is the universal barter or Exchange which Men give and receive for other things they would purchase or part with for a valuable consideration.”49 However, as in the Second Treatise, “common consent” seems to have been arrived at prior to the emergence of the political order wherein money is “consequently” used, and the difference in the nature of the polis before and after the introduction of money seems as profound in Locke’s writings on interest and currency as it does in that text. For once an agreement about the use of money has been achieved, Locke can imagine no mechanism through which the value of the precious metals composing it might legitimately be altered. As he states in the original memorandum that was recast as Some Considerations, although the intrinsic value of silver “be not naturall but only in the opinion of men consenting to it,” once it has been established and made “universall,” that value has “the same effect

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as if it were naturall,” so that it is impossible for generations coming after this establishment to renegotiate its value.50 Much as in the Second Treatise, Locke here understands the social order after the invention of money as a regime of scarcity, a place characterized by its limits rather than by its plenitude, where the newly licensed “desire of having more than [one] needed” means that individuals will have to compete for limited resources. Hence, when, in Some Considerations upon the Lowering of Interest, Locke attempts to refute the argument that lowering the interest rate would make money easier and cheaper to borrow, he claims that because only the “want of Money” motivates people to borrow in the fi rst place, it is impossible to regulate the price at which they will borrow it since “proportionately to this Want, so will every one have it, whatever Price it cost him.”51 Locke universalizes his own historical situation, imagining that the scarcity of money under which late-seventeenth-century England suffered was so general a condition as to be a natural one; because that scarcity precedes any particular historical circumstances or political decisions, it cannot be rectified by them. Locke’s bullionist position fulfi lls rather than contradicts his political theory. Both assume that scarcity and want explain political and economic behavior and that they overcome the ability of consent and contract to refashion the social order in response to circumstances. Locke combats the fall from the state of nature by installing the “same effect” of nature as a new standard. In An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke articulates a symbolic economy of the self, one that constructs human subjectivity as a site of exchange, a marketplace of the mind; but like that symbolic economy of late-seventeenth-century England known as money, the Essay’s system of government was forced to negotiate with the problem that desire poses to the sovereignty of the self.

“THE WEAK AND NARROW CONSTITUTION OF OUR MINDS” A contemporary critique of the Essay’s fi rst edition posits a relationship between money and Locke’s theory of moral judgment that is particularly salient here. William King, the Anglican archbishop of Dublin, complained that Locke “will allow no idea innate but such as a man brings coined in his mind like a shilling. So that an innate idea is an actuall thought with him which no body, that I know of, ever said. [A]ll that any one means by an innate idea is a thought that the natural frame of the mind and circum-

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stances in which God and nature has placed us[,] will bring it into our minds, if we do not do violence to our minds to keep it out.”52 Like many clerics, King objected to Locke’s attack on the widely held belief that God had endowed human beings at birth with innate ideas of good and evil, or at least with the predispositions necessary to recognize good and evil moral choices when they arise.53 To King, Locke’s defi nition of the Idea discredited the dispositionalist theory only by casting it in such absurdly literal-minded, materialistic terms that no one could ever have been expected to believe in it. King identifies what we might call the unconscious of Locke’s model of the unconscious mind, its buried incorporation of a symbolic economy that is structured much like the one advanced in Locke’s writings on money, themselves the product of the colonial economy. The homology between Locke’s symbolic economy of the mind and the economy of the English coinage is not exhaustive, nor could it be; rather, I offer it as an analytical model, a means of measuring the overlap— and thus the difference as well—between Locke’s philosophical and economic theories. To the degree that Locke’s concept of the Idea functions as the general equivalent of thought in the same way that coined bullion functions for him as the only acceptable general equivalent of commodities, we may, for example, turn to Locke’s economic writings to render more intelligible problems that the Essay’s own rhetoric works to obscure. In this section, I want to focus on the question of desire, a question that Locke’s contemporary critics identified as being underdetermined in both his economic and his philosophical writings. For instance, James Hodges, one of Locke’s shrewdest opponents in the currency debate of the 1690s, claimed that the central mistake of Locke’s Further Considerations concerning Raising the Value of Money was its narrow focus on the material integrity of the coinage, a focus that inevitably foreclosed discussion of any factor extrinsic to the currency itself: “What is to be expected to the Purpose from a Discourse of Coin,” Hodges scolds, “which standeth wholly upon such a fundamental Point, as considereth Silver only in respect of it self, and not in respect of any of those Ends for which it is desired, and for which it is only needful or useful?”54 Henry Lee, like King a cleric highly critical of the Essay, lamented in his 1702 treatise Anti- Scepticism that Locke had offered only a “scanty defi nition of desire” in it, one able to deal with desire only in negative rather than positive terms. The Essay’s textual history strongly suggests that Locke was aware of the need to articulate a theory of how desire in-

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fluences moral judgment. Motivated by the criticism of King and others, Locke revised the Essay’s longest chapter, “Of Power,” and his revision— hesitantly, ambivalently, uneasily—installs desire at the center of an economy of moral judgment.55 In each edition of the Essay, Locke claims that the “hinges on which our Passions turn” (2.20.3) are nothing other than the “simple Ideas” of pleasure and pain and that a kind of calculus constructed from these concepts provides the basis for an adequate accounting of morality. “Things then are Good or Evil, only in reference to Pleasure or Pain,” he begins: “That we call Good, which is apt to cause or increase Pleasure, or diminish Pain in us; or else to procure, or preserve us the possession of any other good, or absence of any Evil. And on the contrary we name that Evil, which is apt to produce or increase any Pain, or diminish any Pleasure in us; or else to procure us any Evil, or deprive us of any Good” (2.20.2). In the fi rst edition, published in 1690, Locke argues that a natural and infallible “Preference” for good, engaged prior to any reflection or work on our part, is a sufficient basis for moral judgment, since it directs us to proper action: “Good then, the greater Good is that alone which determines the Will” (2.21.31n). The problem, as King and others pointed out, was that Locke’s system permitted the subject very little freedom of action and also failed to explain how people could fail to follow a moral course, since Locke assumes that the will has no choice but to comply with the good. Locke notes in the second edition that this problem was the result of “a very easy, and scarce observable slip” of the pen that derived from his “putting one seemingly indifferent word for another” (2.31.71), namely, writing “will” where he would have been better off using the word “desire.” From the second edition on, Locke draws a distinction between the will and desire, a distinction mediated by a third term, “uneasiness.” As he describes the sequence of events that results, he says, “I am forced to conclude, that good, the greater good, though apprehended and acknowledged to be so, does not determine the will, until our desire, raised proportionably to it, makes us uneasy in the want of it” (2.21.35). Locke’s professed mistake in the fi rst edition is surprising, because the term “uneasiness” and the more elaborate hedonic calculus it brought with it was hardly something he had to work out from scratch in 1694. Desire and its partner uneasiness had been a central part of Locke’s thinking on ethics since the late 1670s, when he met students of the neo-Epicurean philosopher Pierre Gassendi during his sojourn in France from 1675 to 1678, the same sojourn during which he took notes on French viniculture and recruited Huguenot colonists for the Carolina project.56 In his note-

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books from that period, Locke began to integrate Gassendi’s hedonism into his own theory of moral judgment. A notebook entry of 1676 states the basic formula that Locke retained in each edition of the Essay: “In voluptus and dolor, pleasure and pain, I mean principally that of the mind, there are two roots out of which all passions spring, and a centre on which they all turn.”57 Later in the same entry, Locke introduces the concept of uneasiness in the process of defi ning desire as a mode of pain that arises when the mind becomes aware of pleasures that it does not have: “The mind fi nding in itself the ideas of several objects, which, if enjoyed, would produce pleasure . . . observes in itself some uneasiness or trouble or displeasure till it be done, and this is that we call desire, so that desire seems to me to be a pain the mind is in till some good, whether jucundum or utile, which it judges possible and seasonable, be obtained.”58 Why did Locke not integrate some of this discussion into the Essay in 1690? James Tully, in effect endorsing Locke’s claim that he had simply made a mistake, suggests that Locke simply printed material derived from some even older notebook (one perhaps indebted to the influence of Hobbes rather than Gassendi) “without much thought” when assembling the Essay’s fi rst edition.59 However, Tully also observes that Locke had a great deal of difficulty working out the concept of uneasiness, which opens up the possibility that Locke’s simplification of his own model for the fi rst edition of the Essay may have been in some measure strategic. Certainly, the revised Essay’s discussion of moral judgment displays discomfort with its own figurative language, as if Locke seems ruefully aware that by using “pleasure,” “pain,” and “uneasiness” as the figures for various dispositions of the mind, he is calling on physical, material states to serve as metaphors for what he wants to claim are immaterial conditions. Hence, while he says that he can “comprehend” the “several instances of Delight and Joy . . . and Torment and Sorrow” under the names of “Pleasure and Pain” because there is “pleasure and pain of the Mind, as well as the Body,” he also immediately asserts that “to speak truly, they are all of the Mind” (2.21.41). In this way, Locke affirms the priority of the mind over the body but also reveals the mind’s dependence on the body to figure its own operations. Of these figures, “uneasiness” seems to be imagined by Locke as the one for which the gap between the literal and the metaphorical is the narrowest, which perhaps is why it is among the most complicated, vexing, and useful terms in the revised Essay’s lexicon. But if uneasiness of the mind is particularly hard to distinguish from uneasiness of the body, so too is it difficult for Locke to make a clear distinction between uneasiness and desire. Locke offers several formulations seem-

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ingly intended to specify a relationship between the two concepts: “This Uneasiness we may call, as it is, Desire . . . with this [pain of the body . . . and disquiet of the mind] is always join’d Desire, equal to the pain or uneasiness felt; and is scarce distinguishable from it . . . desire being nothing but an uneasiness in the want of an absent good . . . the desire and uneasiness is equal . . . so much as there is any where of desire, so much there is of uneasiness” (2.22.31). “Desire is a state of uneasiness” (2.22.32). The figure of “uneasiness,” shuttling between physiological and psychological registers of language, creates uncertainty as to whether it is to be taken as the same thing as desire or simply as its necessary supplement. Either way, however, Locke’s formulation consistently associates desire with negativity, both in the sense that it foregrounds uneasiness rather than pleasure as desire’s most salient characteristic and because it undercuts any possibility of defi ning desire in positive terms, without the immediate introduction of uneasiness as its partner. The revised Essay relies on a disciplinary narrative that separates uneasiness from desire, and it similarly uses a rhetoric of value to describe the autonomous subject enabled by that story, positing a time-lag during which the uneasiness that ultimately determines the will is “raised” to a sufficient level of intensity that desire may direct the will to act. This time-lag, or, as Tully terms it, “deferral mechanism,” allows Locke to preserve his hedonic calculus while also allowing that the will is not simply determined by observing what is good: “upon a stricter enquiry” than that which he had made in the fi rst edition, Locke admits, “I am forced to conclude, that good, the greater good, though apprehended and acknowledged to be so, does not determine the will, until our desire, raised proportionably to it, makes us uneasy in the want of it” (2.21.35). During the interval between the fi rst experience of an uneasiness and its being raised to a level of desire where the will is engaged, moral judgment, Locke argues, is “suspended,” thereby permitting the subject the liberty to perform a “due Examination” (2.21.47) in order to determine the proper course of action. Such “judging,” says Locke, “is, as it were, balancing an account, and determining on which side the odds lies” (2.21.67) by comparing the Ideas of pleasure and pain and reckoning which course will lead to the greater pleasure and hence the greater good. This capacity for suspension and examination is for Locke “the source of all liberty” (2.21.47), the guarantee of the free will that King had seen Locke’s earlier formulations as foreclosing. As Locke puts it now, “moral knowledge is as capable of real Certainty, as Mathematicks” (4.4.7), a formulation that, like the figure of

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an account book, sponsors a conception of judgment as a rational and passionless activity, one wholly removed from the influence of desire and the stress of temporal flux. In the role of moral accountant, the human subject transcends a world of particularity, multiplicity, and confusion, ordering desires against ethical demands in order to produce a fully balanced character to present to God on the day of fi nal reckoning. Figures of speech drawn from the lexicons of fi nance and money provide Locke with the most confident and authoritative formulation of his claim to be offering a new and comprehensive model of moral judgment. However, the figure of accounting also confesses a problem that inheres in Locke’s hedonic calculus, for by imagining moral judgment as capable of assuming symbolic form, Locke also exposes morality to the same threat of wear, devaluation, and error that, as we have seen, can befall other systems of symbols. If the subject is free, she or he must also be free to make mistakes, and it is clearly the case that people do not always, as it were, tally up the account correctly; often they do perform acts that are opposed to the “greater good.” To explain how this happens, Locke posits a kind of regime of scarcity in the subjectivity of each individual. Because of what he calls “the weak and narrow Constitution of our Minds” (2.21.64), we can only assess a limited number of “uneasinesses” at any one moment; and this is a likely source of error, since the present tense is the only moment in the Essay when appearance and reality coincide: “Things in their present enjoyment are what they seem; the apparent and real good are, in this case, always the same” (2.21.58). Given the “narrow scantling of our capacity,” the scarcity of our attention, objects that are not present but are “absent good[s]” are incapable of moving us to undertake action and are likely to mislead us into a diminished sense of their importance. Thus even the “lively representation” of heaven, not being “present,” would be unable in itself to move us to undertake good actions “till it raises our desire, and the uneasiness of that has the prevalency in determining the Will” (2.21.37). To rescue itself from the charge of too narrowly determining the scope of free will, Locke’s Essay needs to incorporate desire, but the constitutional limits of our apparatus for thought rations even “uneasinesses,” installing them in a regime of scarcity that, like the economy of money, is imperiled by a process of representation that is both necessary and prone to debasement. Hence, what we might think of as a common structure of signification informs Locke’s texts across the domains of ethics, epistemology, and political economy; he consistently expresses a dogged loyalty to a single concept—uneasiness, Idea, silver—that unifies and organizes the par-

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ticularity of its designated domain. Such a structure owes a great deal to Locke’s historical moment, when the conventionality and therefore the negotiability of such standards was becoming apparent, yet the desire for some such standard had not passed; no one suggested doing away with silver currency. Locke was thus in a position to translate an idealized version of the symbolic economy of late-seventeenth-century England into his model of human subjectivity.

CODA: FOUNDATIONAL SPEECH AND THE CRISIS OF REPRESENTATION The modern-day state of North Carolina is home to the John Locke Foundation, a self-described “think-tank” and advocacy group that, since its foundation in 1990, has advanced conservative goals by holding events and publishing papers on topics that Locke himself would recognize well: taxation, medicine, the environment, education. Its president, John Hood, describes the foundation as presenting conservative arguments to “those for whom political debate is their job” and thus serving as a counterweight to what he calls “the liberal establishment. The conservatives thought the liberals had the universities, so we had to balance that with think tanks.”60 The Locke Foundation was founded and remains largely supported by a family foundation run by Art Pope, who, in the patriarchal tradition of the original proprietors to the Carolina colony, is heir to and now chairman of Variety Wholesalers, a holding corporation consisting largely of what were once called nickel-and-dime stores, largely in the American South.61 Pope and a number of political action committees affiliated with him have put far more than loose change into the political system of North Carolina, donating money to conservative candidates in many state legislative races as well as the successful 2012 gubernatorial candidacy of Pat McCrory, who then appointed Pope as the state’s budget director. The ability of Pope and others to donate money through corporate entities like Variety Wholesalers and other collective organizations has been greatly facilitated by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizen’s United decision, which held that corporations have the same rights of free speech as individual persons under the U.S. Constitution. In his often sardonic dissent to the majority opinion on that case, Justice John Paul Stevens observes that the Constitution’s authors “had little trouble distinguishing corporations from human beings,” and at that point in his argument he cites an article invoking the linkage between free speech and the individual person that was “clearly manifest in the writings of Locke, Milton, and others on whom the fram-

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ers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights drew.”62 This misrepresents Locke, since he never wrote explicitly on the topic of free speech (though Milton did), but it testifies to Locke’s continuing importance as an author associated with freedom and the individual subject, the general equivalent, we have to say, of the English philosopher as symbol of individual liberty. I have tried in this chapter to suggest that such an association is more complicated than it has often seemed, that the constitution of the individual is not wholly separable from the constitution of collective entities. The U.S. constitutional crux for which he is being enlisted here points, too, to the continuing confusion of individual rights and desires with corporate forms that, I also have suggested, well predates the Constitution’s framers. As its name implies, the Locke Foundation takes John Locke as its inspiration and icon; its website describes him as an “intellectual titan, one whose thoughts and ideas can be found throughout our country’s earliest political documents, including and especially the Declaration of Independence.”63 The Locke who is represented through the foundation’s website does not entirely resemble the Locke presented in this chapter or, for that matter, in most academic studies. Nor, in spite of Hood’s metaphor of the foundation’s arguments as offering a counterweight to the liberaldominated academy, could it be said to balance off the predominant ways in which Locke and his work are understood there. Rather, particularly in the section entitled “Who was John Locke?,” designed to introduce Locke to those interested in the foundation’s work (some of whom have apparently been sufficiently ignorant of his place in history that they have called the office asking to speak to him directly), the website offers what we might better imagine as a fun-house mirror version of the historical John Locke, exaggerating some areas of his writing and ignoring others. This is to some extent true of any study (including this one, of course), but the part of Locke’s intellectual legacy that matters here, it seems, is the notion of the absolutism of individual property rights as fundamental to the American government that he is taken to have inspired. So, for example, an essay on the site by George M. Stevens, a “private economics and real estate consultant,” claims that “the basis of Lockean thought” is “commonly-accepted Natural Law, under which man had Natural Rights, not given to him by any ruler. Under Natural Rights the right of property is paramount.”64 The essay goes on to trace the degree to which the U.S. Supreme Court has followed or deviated from this Lockean legacy over the years (the takeaway: in the era of the Roberts court, things are looking up!). For an institution promoting political interests that have their basis in economic goals, the Locke Foundation website includes less than one

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might expect about Locke’s economic writings, with the exception of an excerpt linked to an essay by Murray Rothbard, the late libertarian economist who was an American follower of the Austrian school of economics founded by Ludwig von Mises. Curiously, Rothbard goes against the grain of Adam Smith’s account by describing Locke as a libertarian foe of “mercantilists,” by which Rothbard means Barbon, Child, and other writers, many of whom were associated, Rothbard correctly notes, with the East India Company and were arguing on its behalf for cheap money in the form of a debased coinage and a low rate of interest.65 Rothbard, who advocated a return to the gold standard, admires Locke for upholding the integrity of the coinage and standing against the state’s lowering the rate of interest, and, like George Stevens, he praises Locke’s foundational belief in the authority of nature, which Rothbard associates with the market. In these and in all the other materials about Locke that the foundation includes or links to, the figure of Locke that emerges is, perhaps not surprisingly, an advocate of absolute private property rights, the free market, and individual liberty, ideas that, in turn, are supposed to be fundamental to the American political entity for whose Constitution he is, in some attenuated sense, the author. That entity would be the United States of America, however, not the Carolina Company. The Locke Foundation is part of the modern U.S. ecosystem of privately run and supported foundations, largely on the Right, that form what Julie Ellison has described as a “parallel universe” to academia, one that has succeeded to no small extent in providing a stock of arguments in support of conservative economic policies that the public sphere tends to register as abstractly intellectual rather than self-interested.66 In the larger picture, the foundation is perhaps construable best as a provincial cousin to the Cato Institute, a more established organization that is better known because its base is in Washington, D.C. The Cato Institute was founded in 1974 by (as it happens) Murray Rothbard, Ed Crane, and Charles Koch, the latter of whom provided its initial funding and continues to support it through the Koch family foundation.67 Rothbard came up with the name, which he took not from the historical Roman statesman Cato, nor from the eighteenth-century tragedy by Joseph Addison about him, but from Cato’s Letters, a periodical series by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, fi rst issued in the early 1720s in London and then much reprinted throughout the Anglo-American world in the eighteenth century. Cato’s Letters is now often considered to be a classic of libertarian thought, and the popularity of the series with the American elite of the eighteenth century is

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taken as a sign that the U.S. political system is, at its heart, libertarian as well. An irony that I suspect is not appreciated by anyone in this universe is that Cato’s Letters emerged in the fi rst instance as a critique of the power of corporations, which it understood to be in a position to steer politics in perverse directions. Its occasion was the collapse of the South Sea Bubble in 1720, which Trenchard and Gordon took to be not only an economic crisis but a political scandal, because the South Sea Company’s manipulation of its stock price was enabled by its prior manipulation of the political process in both the court and Parliament. Cato’s Letters starts there to mount a critique of the political-economic nexus of the parliamentary system with corporate capitalism, premised in large part on a claim that the South Sea crisis symptomized the way that association created a crisis of representation. Hidden behind the “screen” of the company, actors were free to exert on the political system undue influence that failed to be represented in the public sphere and could not be part of the usual political process. Read in a certain way, Cato’s Letters is for that reason also available as the support for a modern liberal critique of the conservative American think tank as a scandal to representative democracy. This is one reason why a return to the originary scandal of the South Sea Company and its famous bubble in the spring and summer of 1720 is worth undertaking. That is the subject of the next chapter.

Ch apter Two

Wonderful Event: The South Sea Bubble and the Crisis of Property

O

f the printed artifacts that have come down to us from the event known to historical memory as the South Sea Bubble, two images form a striking pair. Published by the London printmaker Thomas Bowles in 1720, the year of the Bubble, The Bubler’s Mirrour: or England’s Folley and The Bubblers Mirrour: or Englands Folly are a set of two prints, one of a happy investor holding a bag of gold, the other of a sad investor weeping over his losses (fig. 2.1). Surrounding each of the images, so as to constitute the frames of the mirrors, are lists of the various companies that proliferated in that period, each with an accompanying verse: the Royal African Company, the Fish Pool Company, the Hemp and Flax Company, the London Assurance Company, and so on, more than fi fty in all between the two prints. By putting the viewer in the position of identifying with either the happy or the sad investor, the prints perform an act of interpellation in the Althusserian sense, calling the subject to imagine himself as an actor in the ideological apparatus of corporate fi nance capital, here at the fi rst moment of its full and inescapable emergence into public intelligibility in Britain. I use the word “actor” by design, because, taking a cue from Althusser’s description of his “little theoretical theatre,” I further see this act of interpellation as essentially theatrical in nature.1 Early-eighteenth-century viewers would readily have understood it that way, not only because, as writers like Richard Steele never tired of saying, “The World and the Stage  .  .  . have been ten thousand times observ’d to be the Pictures of one another,” but specifically because these images, when considered together, readily lend themselves to being read as modern avatars of the classical masks of comedy and tragedy.2 The metaphor whereby these generic categories were figured as mirrors was current in this era, as, for example, in the works of 64

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Lewis Theobold, who observes in his journal the Censor in 1715, “I consider Tragedy and Comedy as Two Opposite Glasses, in which Mankind may see the true Figures they make in every important or trifling Circumstance of Life.”3 The prints encourage viewers to identify themselves with the event in terms of the two genres that contemporary dramatic theory recognized. The Mirrour images reverse the convention that the age mirrored the stage; in the act of looking at the images, contemporary Britons are being induced to mimic the drama in order to interpret “England’s Folley,” the Bubble that the prints remember, as a dramatic event. The images affirm the place of the theater as a realm mediating the relationship between individual subjects and the nation, both of which are visually framed here by the historical moment through which they have just passed. Crises tend to bring things into relief, to clarify relationships that otherwise would stay beneath the threshold of intelligibility. The South Sea Bubble is no exception, as it called forth a flood of texts that were intended to help contemporaries understand the novel structures of fi nance capitalism that led to the boom and bust in the shares of the South Sea Company. But the relationships I want to inspect and the lessons I want to draw are not the same as those typically offered by economic theory or history. An important strain of modern economic theory would hold that such bubbles are impossible. When asked by a reporter for the New Yorker about whether the fi nancial crisis of 2008 was caused by a bubble in mortgage-lending credit, Eugene Fama, who shared the Nobel Prize in 2013 for his work on what is called the “efficient-market hypothesis,” said “I don’t know what a credit bubble means. I don’t even know what a bubble means. These words have become popular. I don’t think that they have any meaning.”4 Fama’s words are not (quite) as philistine as they seem. The efficient-market theory for which Fama has made his reputation is credited with demonstrating that securities markets are very good at pricing in information about the value of companies and can do so quickly enough that it is virtually impossible for any observer to beat the market. Fama’s work and the substantial literature that has developed from it have probably saved many people from being cheated by charlatans who claim to have magic formulas that enable them to exceed the returns of the overall marketplace. But raised beyond the “hypothesis” that Fama fi rst used to describe his idea to a bedrock principle that markets always and everywhere are guided by rational decision making, Fama’s claims have been demonstrated to be wrong. The reason why the word “bubble” has remained popular since its association with the South Sea Company in 1720 is that sudden increases

Fig. 2.1. “The Bublers Mirrour: or England’s Folley” (Joy) and “The Bubblers Mirrour: or Englands Folly” (Grief). Published by Thomas Bowles in 1720, these broadside satirical prints memorialize the experience of the South Sea Bubble as either a comedy or a tragedy, allowing the viewer to project himself into the event, framed here by the corporate entities that contributed to the frenzy of speculation. Photographs © Trustees of the British Museum.

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and subsequent collapses of prices in securities, booms and busts that happen too fast for “the market” to adjust to them, do indeed happen. One of Fama’s colaureates for the 2013 Nobel, Robert Schiller, has spent his career demonstrating how and why markets are frequently deeply inefficient and often display what Schiller calls, following Alan Greenspan, the longtime chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve System, “irrational exuberance.”5 Markets in securities— and everything else— often move wildly and unpredictably before generally reverting to some kind of mean. Those who went through the drama of the South Sea Bubble understood what

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happened in terms that would be familiar to Schiller, who has sometimes referred to that event as an example of what he is talking about. They saw the role of raw emotion as central to explaining what had happened. What is more, they understood, too, that one of the main problems was that the market had far less information about the “real” value of South Sea Company stock than advocates of the efficient-market hypothesis generally imagine. Britons came up with the metaphor of the “Screen” and the literary genre of the “secret history” to figure how they believed key relationships, in particular the bribes and graft engaged in by central members of the company and the court and Parliament, had influenced the boom in the value of the stock in ways that could never fully be brought into the light of day. They understood well that there could be no such thing as a rational decision given the way the economic was— and is— so deeply interfused with the political and the social, less a neutral mechanism than an extension of human relationships more generally. The South Sea Bubble has long been used as an example, a case study of excessive speculation, an instance of collective mania that must be remembered so that it will not recur.6 Of course it has recurred, though, over and over again; speculative bubbles appear and burst with great frequency in the era of fi nance capitalism. They are a feature, not a bug, and the fact that they are typically seen as anomalies rather than as part of the internal logic of the system is a sign of a historical amnesia that seems to be a constitutive part of our economic imaginary. The South Sea Bubble, its very name a kind of absurd combination of metonymy and metaphor, has been remembered, when it has, as a figure standing in for an attractive option that we keep following in spite of ourselves. Each time a speculative bubble occurs, someone invokes the South Sea Bubble as the example from which we should have learned but which we somehow forgot about; rinse and repeat. The project of this chapter is to use the South Sea Company and the exemplary fi nancial crisis it provoked as a tool to pry open questions of historical memory and representation in literary texts, while at the same time using those texts as evidence for understanding the affective relationships, the joy and grief, generated by this kind of event. JeanChristophe Agnew’s study Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 asserts that the growing performativity of social life in the face of a credit economy in which the nation itself could seem to be “an explicitly speculative venture” had come to “intensify rather than subdue the simultaneous anxiety and exhilaration that this cultural crisis had inspired.”7 Although he describes richly the expansion of the world-as-stage metaphor across multiple domains of

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Anglo-American culture in this era, Agnew, curiously, does not engage at all with the actual theater or drama of the eighteenth century (neither, for that matter, does Althusser). Which is a shame because, as we shall see, texts like Joseph Addison’s Cato and Richard Steele’s The Conscious Lovers, as well as other texts like Cato’s Letters and Eliza Haywood’s Memoirs of a Certain Island, Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia (two works explicitly occasioned by the South Sea Bubble), offer much evidence of their own, not just about anxiety and exhilaration, but about the crises in historical memory, representation, and property that the South Sea event exposed. And the neoclassical literary theory underpinning all of these works is the theory that—the evidence of the South Sea Bubble suggests— still informs popular understandings of historical events, the theory of the example. The extension of dramatic theory outward to construe the South Sea Bubble as an exemplary event figured it as a scandal: this is the take on the Bubble that John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, the authors of Cato’s Letters, and Eliza Haywood inaugurate. Meanwhile, the economic transformations that the Bubble exposes, particularly transformations in the nature of value and property, put pressures on the concept of the exemplary character that prompted authors like Addison and Steele to fi nd new and interesting solutions, solutions that took the form of heroes that would be remembered long after the occasion of their fi rst production. Addison and Steele may not have invented the kind of corporate writing wherein a group of individual authors subsumes their individuality behind a collective name, but they are remembered with some justice for having perfected it, establishing the template for the periodical essay issued in the name of a virtual person. “Mr. Spectator,” an eccentric bachelor antiquarian, silent in person but expressive on the printed page, remains the icon of the eighteenth century’s most successful and characteristic periodical project, the very symbol of the emergence of what Jürgen Habermas termed the bourgeois public sphere.8 The prominence of Addison and Steele’s Mr. Spectator, the narrator of the 565 issues of the Spectator that appeared between March 1, 1711, and December 6, 1712, demonstrates the possibilities and pleasures of what Michael Warner has termed the “prosthetic person” in the era when print disaggregates the relationship between the individual and the word. Although Addison marked his contributions with the letters C, L, I, and O—identifying himself with the muse of history—the point of the venture was to enable either writer to speak in and through the same persona.9 Less well remembered is how thoroughly Addison and Steele were simultaneously involved in the workings of the actual theater, where spectatorship was a central

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part of the lived experience of performance. Simon Shepherd has offered the term “Spectator drama,” seeing Addison and Steele’s dramatic work as offering a unified program of theatrical reform, a Whig attempt to reclaim the stage as a place for moral uplift. It is a program that, as Shepherd puts it, “entails a theory of dramatic identification,” in which the theater offers positive models that audience members might be able to imitate.10 What Spectator drama does is extend the prevailing model of the example from tragedy, where it had long been normative, to comedy, where it had not been. The goal of tragedy was to create models for emulation, examples on which the spectator could model his own character. The goal of comedy was to create repulsive models, characters so ridiculous as to impress upon spectators the kinds of behavior that they should avoid. And here the multiple valences of character, the way spectators and perhaps particularly readers were accustomed to attending to literal as well as metaphorical understandings of the term, counted.11 A well-drawn protagonist formed an intelligible character that was able to impress meaning upon the minds of spectators, much as a die impressed a blank to make a coin, or a letter marked a page. A poorly drawn character confused the spectator, its meaning illegible by virtue of its muddled design. This is the obverse of John Locke’s assertion that the mind is like a tabula rasa, awaiting the impressions of the senses; the point of literature was to design character-centered experiences that entertained the mind while conveying moral ideas. The theater, where the spectator was brought into a particularly immediate experience, one that engaged all of the senses, had the greatest potential for combining moral instruction with pleasure, the utile with the dulce. This was the theory; the reality was (not surprisingly) much messier, subject both to the material distractions of the world—for example, English playgoers were notorious for ignoring the action on stage in favor of the interesting social drama in the playhouse— and to the biases that individual spectators brought with them. Comedy was particularly problematic once it became clear that audience members (and then readers) were often inclined to admire the ridiculous protagonists of plays, to think of scandalously bad characters such as Horner, the sociopathic rake at the center of William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675), for instance, as an example that might well be worth following. Around the turn of the eighteenth century, critics called for the reformulation of comedy so that it would be more on the model of tragedy, offering unambiguously good models to follow. It is no coincidence that the most important examples of Spectator drama bracket the South Sea Company’s rise and fall: Addison’s verse tragedy Cato, staged in 1713, the year the company was able to begin trad-

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ing operations in earnest, and Steele’s comedy The Conscious Lovers, fi rst staged in 1722, after the collapse in the shares of the company’s stock price and the scandal associated with the Bubble’s aftermath. The complexities of Spectator-like identification in this era of corporate speculation are the matter of this chapter.

CATO, MIMETICISM, AND HISTORICAL MEMORY Addison and Steele’s shared interest in the theater underscores the degree to which, for all its seeming abstraction in the print media, the fact that we never see Mr. Spectator himself in the flesh, the figure of the “spectator” as they conceived it was always closely tied to the human and the material. Steele, in his preface to the fi rst print edition of The Conscious Lovers, expresses some concern about offering a work that was (he says) performed so well by its cast that he must “keep up the Spirit in the Representation of the Closet. . . . It must be remember’d that a Play is to be Seen, and is made to be Represented with the Advantage of Action, nor can appear but with half the Spirit, without it; for the greatest Effect of a Play in reading is to excite the Reader to go see it; and when he does so, it is then a Play has the Effect of Example and Precept.”12 Even The Spectator’s medium of print, which here seems lacking by comparison, was also conceived in material terms from the outset. The Horatian epigram at the top of issue number one, March 1, 1711— Non fumum ex fulgore, sed ex fumo dare lucem Cogitat, ut speciosa dehinc miracula promat. (He does not dwell on the smoke from the flame, but the light from the smoke, so that he can bring forth wonders)

— describes the very situation in which Addison (the author of this essay) imagines the journal being read aloud, its insights piercing through the tobacco smoke of the coffee house. So too, when Mr. Spectator, at the end of the essay, hauntingly imagines that he intends to “Print myself, if possible, before I Die,” Addison imagines his figure literally becoming one with the printed page, which now stands as his embodiment.13 For all that the corporate authorship of the periodical and the emergence of print at this moment seem to push in the direction of virtualization and disembodiment, at the heart of the Spectator project is a stubborn desire to retain and refigure the human body. Here the concept of “entertainment,” which in eighteenth-century usage referred to the mechanism of the mind, the

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process of mentation conceived as a material practice, extends itself from the page to the stage, and both are understood to be scenes of performance. To be sure, and importantly, here Addison and Steele distinguished themselves from each other, a point made clear at the outset of Steele’s unfi nished comedy The School of Action, where a character readily identified with him jokingly accuses a character readily identified with Addison as having “standing as if you were a thinking statue, a case for a spirit to reflect in, and not a mind and body acting together. You improve the soul only in your Colleges—you neglect the body.”14 Ever the scholar, Addison seems to have been more comfortable in print, Steele with the stage. The relationship between a material embodiment, be it print, human, or, I want to suggest, fi nance capitalist, and what Addison, following Locke, calls the “Ideas” that can be transmitted through it is the very occasion for the emergence of the figure of Cato. That emergence seems surprising in part because of how alien Cato is to our sensibilities; the difficulty, for example, of imagining a stage revival of Addison’s Cato in our time testifies to the distance between ourselves and eighteenth-century conceptions of tragedy. English comedies of the Restoration and the eighteenth century occasionally get revived; tragedy of the period almost never does. In The Death of Tragedy, George Steiner pointed to Addison’s play as marking the end of tragedy itself, the point at which it became impossible to represent authentic tragic action and heroism: “The tragic poets, still in the grip of neo-classic conventions, would countenance no descent to the prosaic. Hence even their noblest efforts, Addison’s Cato and Johnson’s Irene, are cold, lifeless stuff. . . . The gap between tragic drama and the vital centers of imaginative concern widened and were never again completely bridged.”15 Yet eighteenth-century audiences took great pleasure in Cato experienced as a live performance—it was revived again and again in the eighteenth century— and the play was also widely reprinted, enabling readers for generations to, as in Alexander Pope’s prologue to the play, “Live o’er each scene” again in the form of the mental performance that eighteenth-century writers called “entertainment.”16 Part of the pleasure of this character lies in the way he does in fact come at the end of something: not necessarily tragedy, but the end of a relationship between the individual and political action that, I argue, has everything to do with the emergence of the particular form of fi nance capitalism that coalesced around the South Sea Company in the  same decade. For it is not only the case with Cato that, like most early modern tragedies that were based on familiar historical events, the audience already

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knew the outcome, or even the case that, with tragedy, we know that the protagonist is going to die. Rather, the specific situation that Cato fi nds himself in as the curtain rises is one in which he is irrevocably doomed. Cato is in Utica, on the northern coast of Africa, waiting with the remnants of the Roman Senate for the arrival of Julius Caesar and his army, to whom they will surrender or by whom they will be crushed. A civil war, that is, is almost concluded, and while the play creates a small measure of suspense by suggesting that Cato might team up with the local Numidians to oppose Caesar, the die is cast; the Roman republic is over, and Caesar is poised to become dictator. Cato is on the losing side, not of just any confl ict, but of History itself, of the great historical turn wherein Rome turned its back on its inheritance of republicanism and reached for empire. To the early modern political mind, this was something like the original sin of politics, the decisive, scandalously willed move from integrity to corruption. Yet to say that Addison’s Cato is aware that he has already lost is not really accurate, because that would be to grant him a kind of interiority that the character never really demonstrates. Cato, as Addison constructs him, is incapable of meditating on his own situation. Rather, what Addison offers is a character whom the spectator and reader are meant to assess from the outside. This Cato does not so much reflect as, to cite the verb that characters in the play constantly use to describe him, “shine,” figuring forth an essential core of incorruptible stoic virtue that is unmoved by the negative turn of events that has befallen him. Thus Cato’s son Portius on his father: “His sufferings shine, and spread a glory round him”;17 and Juba, the Numidian prince in love with Cato’s daughter Marica, notes how virtues like these Make human nature shine (18),

observes how Cato’s soul Shines out in everything [Marcia] acts or speaks (24),

and also attests to Marcia that his dearest wish is to gaze for ever on thy godlike father, Transplanting, one by one, into my life, His bright perfections, till I shine like him. (25)

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Even John Hughes, in one of the many poems praising the play that Addison and his publisher Jacob Tonson bundled in early printings of the play, picks up the figure, attesting that Cato “shines” forth as an example of stoic incorruptibility in the face of overwhelming historical change. The expansion of the play’s metaphorical register outside its bounds testifies to the impression that Cato made on its early audiences and readers and anticipates how Addison’s protagonist soon gains a life beyond the play itself, entering into the public sphere as a kind of mythological figure with a life of his own. And the fact of this poem, and the poems like it that Tonson bound into the many print editions of the play called for by its early success, testifies to the degree to which that attention was the product of conscious design. The full significance of Addison’s conception of Cato is best realized by looking more fully at what we can best describe as a coordinated media campaign that he planned at the time of the play’s premiere in 1713; his campaign was to be conducted in the media of print and theater, to be sure, but more fundamentally, it speaks of the relationship between economic, historical, and literary mediation themselves. The eighteenth-century reader of Joseph Addison’s play Cato (1713) would have come across two images before reaching the play’s text: woodcuts of Roman medals, the fi rst an image of Cato and the second an emblem of “Victory” (fig. 2.2). The images reproduce actual medals, issued during the time—the fi rst century BCE—when the historical Marcus Portius Cato served as a Roman quaestor, a public office that held fiscal responsibilities, including such tasks as supervising the very same mint that coined these medals. Inelegantly executed as they are, the images nonetheless direct us to broad questions of interpretation, representation, historicity, and political economy that we can begin to address by unpacking the implicit pun they make on the concept of “character.”18 Marc Shell and Diedre Shauna Lynch have been the most eloquent modern guides to the rich complexity with which the eighteenth century apprehended the term, the way in which, as Lynch puts it, “character” unfolded “a semantic complex that . . . linked the personal with the typographic and even the numismatic.”19 The engraved face of Cato, the stamp on the metal of the coin and its second-order impression on the printed page, constitutes a literal character, a physical object that owes its etymology to the Greek word for the stamp that ancient mints used to mark raw metals as coin.20 When Juba says repeatedly, then, that he wants to “shine” like Cato, adopting the virtues of the man he wants to be his father-in-law as his own, and when others inside and outside the play use the same word, they are punning on the literal, numismatic and the ethical, figurative senses of char-

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Fig. 2.2. Woodcut images of Roman medals of “Cato” and “Victrix” from the fi rst text page of Joseph Addison’s Cato. Addison always considered the images to be an essential component of his text, as did his publisher Jacob Tonson, for whom they also served as de facto copyright notices, distinguishing authorized editions from the many spurious piracies and reprints of the play that followed its fi rst production in 1713. Photograph: Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.

acter.21 When Addison and Tonson printed and disseminated those medals in the early texts of Cato, they were putting the reader in the position of being impressed—literally and figuratively—with the force of Cato’s incorruptibility. Had Addison’s initial publication plans for 1713 come to pass, the year would also have provided readers of the time a rich gloss on the relationship between circulating emblematic characters and historical under-

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standing. In that year, Addison reached agreement with Tonson to publish his Dialogues upon the Usefulness of Precious Medals. For reasons that remain unknown, the publication of the Dialogues fell through; it was fi nally published in a posthumous collection of Addison’s collected Works issued in 1721 (Addison had died in 1719). Still, the Dialogues upon the Usefulness of Precious Medals is an essay that, read along with Cato and in the context of the moment both works shared, articulates a way of mediating word and image, ideas and materiality. It also advances an argument on the utility of art as a means of historical knowledge that can help us identify Addison as offering, with Cato, a nostalgic view of public virtue, an embodied character who emerged at the moment when the abstracting quality of the corporation was rendering it obsolete. The Dialogues outlines a new “science” of numismatics that construes medals as compact, portable, and legible forms of “knowledge.”22 As Addison’s representative “medallist” Philander—more or less his mouthpiece throughout the Dialogues— explains, ancient medals “are the best epitomes in the world, and let you see with one cast of an eye the substance of above a thousand pages” (2:289). Philander understands medals to be a composite medium, a fusion of text and image that enables the medallist to bring sister arts into dialogue: the “great affinity between Coins and Poetry,” he says, permits the two arts to “serve as Comments on each other (2:297): “A reverse often clears up the passage of an old Poet, as the poet often serves to unriddle a reverse” (2:294). Philander observes that one can often fi nd an emperor on a Roman coin armed with a shield and also discover where “the same metaphor” appears “in ancient poets to express protection or defense” (2:296). From this, the numismatist is entitled to believe that the coin praises the emperor “in the same sense” as the poem does. Much of the Dialogues consists of similar interpretations of ancient coins, many of which are paired with citations of passages from Roman authors that illustrate a similar “Idea” (2:324) to that represented on the medal. Here Addison picks up the concept of the Idea as articulated in Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding, where, as we saw in chapter 1, it functions as “the Object of the Understanding when a Man thinks.” I suggested there that for Locke, the Idea serves as a general equivalent of thought in much the same manner as silver bullion functioned in the English economy as the general equivalent of value, and that the goal of this homology, never brought to the level of explicit articulation in Locke’s writing, was to restrict the scope of desire in the mental economy as Locke wished to see it restricted in the broader economy. Addison brings

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the association between Ideas and coinage into the light of day. And, like Locke, he deploys the relationship in the direction of restriction, using the coins to narrow the range of the viewer’s imagination. For Philander predicates the utility of the modern science of numismatics on the claim that, in any medal, image and inscription, picture and text mutually refer each other to a single Idea. Numismatic study as he conceives it is designed to restrict any free play that we might want to see in the medals’ fields of reference. Philander steers the medallist to an exclusive focus on a contained set of historical facts and abstract concepts: the Ideas that the coiners of the medals had originally intended to commemorate and disseminate. On the register of language, this feature negates the possibility of the pun; as Philander puts it, “A pun can more be engraven than it can be translated. When the word is construed into its idea the double meaning vanishes” (2:363). The “false wit” of the pun, also the target of one of Addison’s most famous Spectator essays on poetry, is objectionable not just because it might lead to confusion but because it makes the materiality of language, the arbitrary relationship of sound to sense, all too apparent: because a pun is “a Sound, and nothing but a Sound,” Addison classes it as a low form of “imitation,” one whose duplicitous meanings all but call for the discipline offered by a well-struck medal.23 So too with the multiple associations that might proliferate from an image; if, as Roland Barthes puts it, “all images are polysemous; they imply, underlying their signifiers, a ‘floating chain’ of signifieds, the reader able to choose some and ignore others,” the necessary inclusion of text in the art of interpretation serves the function of what Barthes terms “anchorage,” linking the image with one and only one possible Idea.24 Such an idealization of the medals dematerializes the object of study as an object, referring the medallist away from the physical medal to the unique meaning that it conveys. For if, as Philander asserts, “a cabinet of Medals is a body of history” (2:288–89), that is because the medallist does not much consider the material body of each medal itself. For Addison, the value of ancient medals as a vehicle for historical information derives from the way they are a class of objects whose materiality can be subordinate to the ideas that they convey from the past to the present. Philander mocks the “mystical antiquary” who, rather than seeking an analogue in classical poetry for the image on a medal, emphasizes things like the roundness of the shield as a figure for either an emperor’s “perfection” or his “immortal reputation” and will discover meaning in any medal’s “least wrinkle or flourish” (2:296). What distinguishes the antiquary from the historian like himself, Philander argues, is that the former class of

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“visionaries . . . fancy an interpretation vulgar when it is natural” because they reach for meanings that the coiner never intended. But on closer inspection, the fault of such antiquaries seems to be less that they overinterpret than that they are too impressed with the “visible objects” (2:295) themselves, so interested in the materiality of the medals (the roundness of a design, the rust around the edges) that they ignore the abstract concepts that Philander sees as constituting their value as vessels of historical knowledge. The medals of Addison’s Dialogues have their objecthood suspended; they are now dematerialized so that the ideas they convey can be transmitted without the interference of wear or clipping or the rust and dirt that have accrued during their passage from antiquity to modernity. Philander’s argument begins with an even greater gesture of restriction, as he insists that his interlocutors be convinced that ancient medals realize their value through epistemological rather than economic exchange. He stresses that they are a “treasure” of “knowledge” rather than of “mony” (2:283): “The intrinsic value of an old coin does not consist in its metal but its erudition” (2:282). Addison attempted to put this claim into practice, again in 1713, when he published a plan in the Guardian for a recoinage of English small change—farthings and half-pence—that would emulate the Roman model. Having little economic value, these coins would be given a new form of value as objects preserving and broadly disseminating the memory of great historical events, particularly the events of the recent past, which would now be transformed from news to historical memory. So, for example, Addison calls for coins to be struck with “Devices and Inscriptions alluding to all the most remarkable Parts of her Majesty’s Reign.” Circulating in small transactions, “the ordinary commerce of life,” the coins would “perpetuate the glories of her majesty’s reign, reward the labours of her greatest subjects, keep alive in the people a gratitude for public services, and excite the emulation of posterity.”25 Addison’s coinage proposal went nowhere, but, with Cato, with the projected publication of the Dialogues, it forms part of, and illustrates the dimensions of, Addison’s programmatic attempt to disseminate historical memory through media that were impressed with Ideas. Reading this all back into Cato itself, it becomes clear that Addison is trying promote his hero as an objectification of the Idea of stoicism that, much as the medals in the Guardian’s recoinage scheme might do, prompts imitation on the part of spectators. But there is mediation involved in this as well, since we are invited not so much to imitate Cato as to imitate others, like Juba, whose strongest desire is to imitate him. Julie Ellison captures this construction well in her book Cato’s Tears and the

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Making of Anglo-American Emotion when she observes how the mimetic structure inscribed in the play— and, by extension, in the media campaign around it that I have outlined here— demonstrates how “‘the classical republican’ is not a figure but a plot, not a position but a relation.”26 Cato’s stoicism and Juba’s sensibility call each other forth, each position most construable in terms of the other as their relationship is mobilized through a romance plot. Ellison reads their relationship through oedipal and racial terms, which intersect as Juba, the Numidian, from an area in north Africa roughly coterminous with parts of modern-day Algeria and Tunisia, makes himself more like Cato in order to be a worthy match for Cato’s daughter Marcia: “If Cato is the real object of Juba’s desire, then the stories of cross-racial cultivation, of courtship, and of Cato’s suicide are wholly connected. . . . In the transformation of Juba into a Roman, we witness the conversion of race into subjectivity.”27 Ellison’s reading of the play as an early exercise in using racial difference to figure unequal, sentimental relations between men provides an essential genealogy of structures of feeling that continue to permeate political discourse and have the virtue of making Addison’s play relevant to contemporary thinking about the effects of emotion (her examples are liberal guilt and conservative surliness) on public life. My emphasis here will be not so much on the permanence of the sentimental imitative structures that Cato makes particularly clear, but on the ways in which such relations were summoned forth by the play’s historical situation. Ellison remarks in passing that “a key historical shift occurred around 1713,” when sentimental discourse settled on “scenes of inequality” rather than relationships between socially equal men as a central topos. But she does not offer any particular explanation for why 1713 might be so important, or, for that matter, explain why she dates so precisely such a momentous shift—involving a thoroughgoing reorientation of class-related sensibilities.28 Here Ellison is a lot like Addison, for nowhere does he make the case for the particular significance of the moment of publication for Cato, his coinage plan, or the Dialogues upon the Usefulness of Precious Medals either. But the moment is everything, the events of that year so striking to contemporaries that Addison had no need to make explicit the things to which his works were referring: 1713 saw the end of the War of Spanish Succession and the conclusion of the Treaty of Utrecht. This is surely why Addison would have chosen a medal of “Victory” to accompany the emblem of Cato himself on the title page of his play. It also explains why Addison describes his recoinage scheme in the Guardian as an “art of peace,” newly relevant now that peace had been declared for the fi rst time

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in a generation. The fi nal terms of the treaty had been negotiated on the British side by the Tories, who came to power as the peace party, eager to put an end to the war’s enormous drain on the treasury and ready to substitute commercial interests for territorial conquest. They demonized John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, the general who had repeatedly led British forces to victory in the 1700s, as a self-aggrandizing threat to English liberty as well as to the public treasury. Cato’s early audiences frequently tried their best to interpret the play as a kind of allegory of Marlborough’s career, dividing themselves along partisan lines over the question of whether Cato or Caesar best represented him—Whigs linked Marlborough to Cato, the defender of liberty; Tories identified Marlborough with the rising absolutist ruler Caesar. This interpretative split, the fact that Cato could be claimed by what in the moment were such diametrically opposed positions, testifies to the way the play refuses to be read as a personal allegory. We need to take this not as a sign of Cato’s failure or the audience’s partisanship, but as expressing a deeper truth about how the nature of political-economic authority was changing in this period more than contemporaries fully understood. Attempting to fi nd an alternative to military intervention on the European continent, Tory politicians aimed to outflank their rivals through colonial trade, an enterprise that called for the specialized skills of the London business community rather than the leadership of political or military figures. In the place of military conquest, they substituted the distinctly less charismatic, but ultimately far more powerful form of the corporation: the South Sea Company. Which, as it happens, conducted a business, the African slave trade, that was fundamental to the colonial economy while it relied on Britons’ putting racialized persons almost out of representation altogether.

THE SOUTH SEA COMPANY AS REPRESENTED AND RESISTED The South Sea Company was incorporated in 1711 in expectation that the British government would gain the contract known as the asiento as one of the key concessions in the peace negotiations that would result in 1713 in the Treaty of Utrecht. Much like the Carolina Company, the South Sea Company was organized under the logic that governed most early modern companies involved in international trade, as a state-licensed monopoly with exclusive rights over a particular region of the globe. In the South Sea Company’s case, that region was Latin America and the eastern Pacific Ocean, the “South Seas” of the early-eighteenth-century English imagi-

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nation.29 The company’s founding charter granted it “the sole trade and traffick, from 1 August 1711, into unto and from the Kingdoms, Lands etc. Of America, on the east side from the river Aranoca [Oroonoko], to the southernmost part of the Terra del Fuego, on the west side thereof, from the said southernmost part through the South Seas to the northernmost part of America, and into and from all countries in the same limits, reputed to belong to the Crown of Spain, or which shall hereafter be discovered.”30 From the start, the company was affiliated with the Tory faction, which had assumed power in late 1710, promising to end the long war with France and also to check the power of the Whig fiscal-military complex centered on the Bank of England and the East India Company. (The reason Addison and Steele had time to begin the Spectator in early 1711 was that, as Whigs, they found themselves displaced from office and power at this moment.)31 In the hothouse world of Westminster politics, the South Sea Company formed as a Tory counterweight to the Whig-dominated bank and the East India Company. More comprehensively, the incorporation of the South Sea Company extended the British Crown’s corporate ventures to embrace the main exploitable region of the globe that was not available to established entities like the Carolina Company, the East India Company, the Royal African Company, the Virginia Company, the Muscovy Company, and the Hudson’s Bay Company. But the South Sea Company was different from most of those companies in that its initial resources, the fund of capital through which it could begin to fi nance its operations, was not in the fi rst instance the resources of its proprietors or shareholders. Rather, the South Sea Company was capitalized to the tune of 9 million pounds by converting that much of the government’s long-term debt into its stock. The holders of that debt, much of it accrued in the previous two decades of almost continual continental war, and all of it in the form of long-term annuities for which the government had never earmarked any kind of specific revenue, would now have their bonds serviced by the company. The annuitants had no choice in the matter; their bonds were simply converted into South Sea stock, a fact that, after the Bubble had burst and the value of company shares had fallen dramatically, Richard Steele saw as a scandalous imposition on their property rights, as we shall see. In return for relieving it of this burden of unsecured debt (which still represented only perhaps a quarter of the overall national debt at this moment), the government made an explicit promise to pay 6 percent interest on the debt that was converted, plus fees (£568,279 10s), which represented a significant saving for it, since many of these annuities were at rates higher than 7 percent (a sign of how

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desperate William  III had sometimes been for funds). 32 The government was also making an implicit promise to back up the asiento with the force of the British Navy. Spain had contracted out the business of supplying its colonies with African slaves to other European countries with larger navies, and there is a sense in which it was inevitable that Britain, having developed its navy over the past two generations of warfare, would end up with the contract; an increasing proportion of the trade in slaves was already handled by British ships even when the Dutch held the contract in the 1680s, the British acting here as in effect subcontractors. 33 The asiento called for the South Sea Company to transport 4,800 piezas de Indias— adult males—from Africa to slave factories that it was entitled to construct in Latin America. The company’s monopoly trade in human bodies and its annual payments from the government were designed to make it an attractive investment to the former annuitants, many of them Tory landholders who were the basis of the parliamentary party’s support in the nation at large. It also had the desired effect of removing a significant share of the government’s long-term debts from its balance sheet, a move that we might call a transfer of debt from the public to the private but for the fact that the South Sea Company, like all corporate entities of the period, was so intertwined politically and fi nancially with the state that drawing such a distinction is a fiction that muddies as much as it clarifies. We will, however, need to return to this fiction later in this chapter. The particular configuration of fi nancial and trading capacities, government-sponsored and privately funded interests, made the South Sea Company a new kind of hybrid entity, one that, to be sure, resembled the other companies of its era enough to be classed with them, but for which the specific emphases and patterns of power mark it as a new kind of corporate entity. As a creditor of the government, the South Sea Company was more like the Bank of England than most of the other chartered companies; as an entity with both a broad license to trade in a region and specific rights that would be backed by the state, the South Sea Company resembled the Carolina Company or the East India Company more than it did the bank. The origins of the South Sea Company in partisan infighting and the inflation and then collapse in its stock price in the Bubble of 1720 have made it difficult for economic historians to decide whether it was ever a going concern as a fi nancial and trading venture in the fi rst instance, or if it was always designed largely as a pretense for stock manipulation.34 It is probably fair to say that the latter interpretation is more commonly held now, in part very likely because this is what many con-

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temporaries writing in the months and years immediately after the Bubble believed. And, too, to imagine that the company was involved in all seriousness in a trade that might have been profitable in its own right is to be forced to recognize in a particularly inescapable way how lucrative the slave trade was, since the South Sea Company brought that trade into the orbit of the state even more thoroughly than the Royal African Company had done. Addison’s figure of Cato does not represent the South Sea Company in any direct or allegorical way. Rather, we need to take the very resistance to signifying economic value that Addison mounts in the numismatic texts that support and surround his play as a gesture of resistance to the incursion of economic logic into the domain of politics. We can read Cato’s static passivity, the fact that his inability to change history is the condition of his glamour, as a way of marking the advent of the kinds of political-economic relations that the play cannot represent. Cato became a useful figure for oppositional politics throughout the eighteenth century because he fulfi lled a desire to make political authority fully visible once more, a desire felt most acutely by those who were most threatened by the emergence of the institutions that would increasingly, inexorably, yet (to them) invisibly advance the power of capital against that of the state. Responding to the withdrawal from visibility of ever-broader sources of power, Cato preserved as entertainment what was being destroyed as historical fact. The French historian Pierre Nora has nominated sites that preserve “a residual sense of continuity” in the face of historical change as les lieux de mémoire; these are places that condense social memory precisely because the lived experience of collectivity has disappeared: “Lieux de mémoire exist because there are no longer any milieux de mémoire, settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience.”35 I think of Cato, then, as a personne de mémoire, a figure who is summoned up to represent a moment that belongs to a subsumed and superseded past. Here, too, the relationship with Juba can be read as a kind of fantasy whereby racial difference has already been dissolved, comprehended within a figuration of virtue that even at the moment of its origin is nostalgic for itself. Addison’s science of numismatics seems to offer itself as a medium for historical knowledge, but Cato as embodied in the play became equally a medium for historical feeling, offering audiences and readers the pleasure of inhabiting a position of proleptic nostalgia. Cato was thus available, ready-made, to serve as the emblem of a particularly emotionally charged critique of the South Sea Company after the collapse of the Bubble in 1720.

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INTERPRETING THE SOUTH SEA BUBBLE The South Sea Bubble is one of the most famous and striking occurrences of the eighteenth century in Britain, and, as we have seen, it continues to resonate as a precedent for every fi nancial bubble since. Which is to say that it, like Cato himself, is figured through a complex structure of memory, amnesia, and interpretation that constitutes the historical phenomenon known as the event. Interpreting the South Sea Bubble has been a critical exercise to rival the exegesis of Hamlet or the Dead Sea Scrolls, as contemporary observers then and historians and economists since have pored over the documentary evidence to understand questions of motivation, intention, and reception. Was the South Sea Bubble the result of a fi nancial manipulation that was intended from the start, from the moment of the inception of the company itself in 1711? Were the company’s slave-trading operations undertaken with the license of the asiento ever conducted with seriousness, or were they always merely a cover story to divert attention away from mere stock manipulation? Did the company’s directors believe they had discovered a way to create wealth that would be shared by the company’s stockholders and the nation at large? Or were they essentially criminals who were out to maximize their own gains with no regard to anyone else? Were the company’s investors, those who purchased its stock, exercising their reason, making good decisions based on the best evidence available to them? Or was the entire thing a sign of collective madness, the mania of a crowd infatuated by emotions and making irrational decisions? There is a substantial economic literature debating these questions, a literature in which the Bubble is frequently compared to other moments of fi nancial speculation in intangible assets, models derived from those events being used to inform the South Sea Bubble, and vice versa. But that these questions have persisted since the moment of the Bubble’s collapse in 1720 suggests that they are always going to remain to a great degree irresolvable, that our knowledge of this event is always going to be partial in several senses. One the one hand, the evidence left behind by the company is incomplete; many records were destroyed; key participants died (in one case by suicide), fled the country, or were protected from testifying; the company’s substantial bribes to key members of Parliament and to the Court (including the King himself) were covered up. Contemporaries immediately complained that the truth of the South Sea Bubble was being hidden behind a “Screen,” blocked from the kind of view that would enable a full accounting (see fig. 2.3). In The Brabant Screen, published in 1721, conspirators hide behind a screen with the face

Fig. 2.3. The “skreen” of the South Sea Bubble’s aftermath visualized (1721). On the screen is what the text below describes as “Fryer Bacon’s celebrated Metallick Visage,” also known as the Brazen Head and said to have been possessed by Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century. This was a statue that could answer questions. But the face on this bust is that of Robert Walpole, who rose to power as the “Screenmaster General” for his deft handling of the Bubble’s aftermath, which included covering up the involvement of key members of the government and the royal court. Walpole’s head is surrounded by images of places of punishment, like Tower Hill and the Tarpeian Rock, both sites of execution. Behind the screen cower politicians whose actions are being screened by Walpole’s assumption of power; the Duchess of Kendal, George I’s mistress and the recipient of gifts of South Sea Company stock, is either emerging from behind the screen or trying to hide. Photograph © Trustees of the British Museum.

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of Robert Walpole on it; we see them through a mirror on the left wall, though one woman—probably supposed to be the Duchess of Kendall, the mistress to King George, who apparently received a large amount of South Sea stock as a bribe in the summer of 1720—is exposed on the right side. 36 From the fi rst weeks after the collapse of the Bubble, it was clear that there was enormous cover-up going on, with key evidence hidden or destroyed, and that has inevitably shaped how and how fully historians can understand what really happened. On the other hand, and as a result of the loss of key evidence, interpretations have become partial in that they tend to reflect the goals of the interpreter. Charles Mackay, in his Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), offered the South Sea Bubble as an exemplary instance of a national delusion, the case of “a whole people shaking suddenly off the trammels of reason, and running wild after a golden vision.”37 This characterization has continued to be influential in the popular imagination ever since. But modern economic historians have sometimes tried to argue for the rationality of investing in the company in 1720, since that supports the assumption at the heart of modern economic theory that people are essentially rational actors.38 Peter Garber, for example, describes the Bubble as the result of “speculators working on the basis of the best economic analysis available.”39 What I emphasize here is how this event was understood in its immediate aftermath and what those interpretations tell us about the complex relationship between persons, property, and historical memory at the moment of the early modern corporation’s most public crisis. One thing does seem clear if we recall the colonial horizon within which, as have already seen, so much late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century English writing must be placed: the timing of the Bubble had something to do with the fact that the company’s trading operations were interrupted by the return of war, this time with Spain, in 1718, a war known to history as the War of the Quadruple Alliance. In retaliation for Britain’s joining with France and Austria over what began as a dispute over Sicily, Spanish forces seized the South Sea Company’s trading outposts in South America. The company was for this reason unable to exercise its primary contractual right, the asiento. Though it is very hard to come up with precise figures for how many ships and how many slaves the company was bringing from Africa to the Americas at this time—the documentary evidence is incomplete and those records that do survive are inconsistent—the best recent estimates make it clear that, after year-after-year increases in both from 1714 to 1718, the bottom essentially fell out of this part of the com-

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pany’s business. In 1718 just under forty ships carrying more than four thousand slaves on behalf of the company arrived in Spanish America; in 1719 there may have been as few as two ships, with only a couple of hundred slaves.40 Daniel Defoe’s Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, takes this situation as at least part of its occasion. Crusoe is shipwrecked on a private voyage from Brazil to West Africa with the intention of purchasing slaves there, something that British traders would have been forced to do that year. While it is true that this part of the novel is nominally set in the seventeenth century, well before the advent of the South Sea Company, the idea of a private voyage outside the company’s purview had a particular kind of relevance in 1719 with the interruption in the company’s normal trade. Whatever else is the case, the most important thing of all screened by this event and the way that it has been remembered is how central the slave trade had become to the normal operations of the commercial system and how readily its interruption could precipitate crisis. Many accounts of the South Sea Bubble assume that the company had little interest in its nominal trading business and that the Bubble needs to be explained wholly within the framework of European fi nancial markets. But the extent to which the scope of the company’s operations were narrowed at the end of the 1710s has everything to do with the fact that the recurrence of warfare forced them to turn inward. With the loss of cash flow from the disruption of the slaving operations, even those in the company who took slave trading, rather than financial manipulation, as the organization’s main business had reason to want the company to fi nd other resources. Almost simultaneously, John Law, a Scottish-born fi nancier who had gained control of the national fi nances of France, was exchanging a substantial portion of the French national debt for shares of the Companies des Indes, popularly known as the Mississippi Company, leading to a quick rise in the price of its stock. At least a faction, perhaps the majority, of the South Sea Company’s managing directors steered it toward returning in effect to the original terms of its incorporation by offering a plan to convert more of the national debt into its stock. In early 1720, the South Sea Company offered the government a huge settlement of cash and future considerations (and also offered munificent bribes to key decision makers, almost certainly including the king) for the right to absorb the entirety of the national debt, something on the order of 31.5 million pounds, largely in the form of short- and long-term annuities, as well as other debt instruments. The government transferred these government securities to the company’s control in exchange for the right to issue stock up to the value of the debts it was assuming, which would be

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offered to the public in several stages of subscription. The company thus had every incentive to engineer a short-term increase in its stock price, since the more debt that was exchanged, the more stock it could issue, which would attract more investors for the next round of debt exchange, and so on. If the company was able to take in the entirety of the debt, it would pay the government 7.6 million pounds; in return the Treasury would pay the company interest on the amount it was able to subscribe. The company floated loans and offered stock on the installment plan in an effort to promote sales. The Bubble inflated as the demand for that stock increased over the spring and summer of 1720 and then deflated quickly as demand dried up. In February 1720, as the company’s plans were being formulated, its share price was 130 pounds; by midsummer, this had risen to 1,050 pounds, before falling throughout late summer and early fall. By mid-October, shares were going at 170 pounds, still more than at the start of the year, but many of those who entered the market for the sole purpose of making money off the South Sea Company were caught with shares that were worth far less than they had paid for them. The Bubble had ended, and the recriminations and therefore the interpretations began.

THE SOUTH SEA BUBBLE AS SCANDAL The interpretations of the South Sea Bubble that construe it as a form of national madness reached print as soon as the mid-1720s. Eliza Haywood’s Memoirs of a Certain Island, Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia, published in two volumes in 1725–26, explains the Bubble as the consequence of a national infatuation with money that had displaced the desire for romantic love.41 Memoirs of a Certain Island is now often classed as a scandal chronicle because of the series of erotic affairs—most of them thinly disguised stories of real aristocrats, based on contemporary gossip—that it describes. The occasion for telling them together is the bursting of the Bubble, which Haywood sees as a parallel and equivalent scandal that she figures as an “Enchanted Well” around which the people of her island have gathered. The book’s narrator, Cupid, then narrates the individual stories of aristocrats engaged in sexual affairs; a few of these involve fi nancial crises or involvement in the South Sea Company, but most do not. The Bubble is far more the occasion for the stories told in Memoirs than their cause. In the course of a single day, Cupid displays the scandalous actions of the Well’s “votaries” for the benefit of the young man’s education, so that individual stories of vice, corruption, and sexual misconduct become intelligible as though they are happening simultaneously, all brought into

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the youth’s— and the reader’s—prospect by the “wonderful Event” of the South Sea Bubble. Haywood here invokes a traditional literary genre on the art of government, one that had combined statecraft and pedagogy by offering itself as “advice to a prince,” the form best exemplified by Machiavelli’s The Prince but much imitated afterward.42 The more immediate precedent for Haywood is Delarivier Manley’s The New Atalantis (1709), which had framed itself as a text designed to offer advice to the young prince who was going to become George II, as the feminine triumvirate of Virtue, Astrea, and Lady Intelligence survey the corrupted state of (Whigdominated) Britain in the interests of, as Astrea says, rendering the young prince “a hero truly such.”43 As Catherine Gallagher has argued, Manley exploits the normative exclusion of women from politics to produce a biting and effective satire on the current partisan scene while also constructing a work of fiction that satisfies in its own right. But Haywood’s rearticulation of this genre is both less partisan and less feminocentric than Manley’s, because the young male “hero” is not identifiable as any actual figure, and the role of guide is taken by the male deity Cupid rather than Manley’s triumvirate of women. Her critique is thus conducted less in terms of issues of state than those of the genre she was of course most skilled in and identified with—that of amatory romance fiction. As Cupid tells the young man, the islanders’ mistake is that they have directed their desires to mere phantoms of love rather than the legitimate and authentic love that he represents: No Incense now burns on my neglected Shrine!—no Offerings are paid!—my Temples are defaced!—my Altars broke!— and, in my stead, the mistaken Wretches, with sacrilegious Worship, idolize a Fiend!— ’Tis true, the Demon has usurped my Name!—my Face!—my Voice!— they still revere and call on Cupid,— Cupid they still adore— But not a Cupid accompany’d with Innocence, Virtue, Constancy; but a Cupid, ushered in by Wild Desires, Impatiencies, Perplexities, and whose ghastly Train are fi lled with Shame, Disgrace, Remorse, and late Repentence and Despair!44

Haywood offers corrupted sexual desire as a figure for the avarice and greed, the desire for money, that had brought on the Bubble. Like many contemporary critiques, Haywood’s sees the Bubble as evidence of collective madness, the indulgence of desires, fi nancial and sexual. Similarly, The Secret History of the South Sea Scheme, an anonymous tract that seems to have been written by someone involved enough with the South

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Sea Company to have insight into its central actors, describes the Bubble as a kind of “general madness” that beset the entire nation at once. Affiliating itself with other “secret histories” in the genre of the scandal chronicle, the author claims that “Appius”—his pseudonym for John Blunt, the company’s director—was affected by this collective insanity when he decided to imitate the example of John Law’s Mississippi Company, which was undertaking a similar, indeed even larger project of assuming the national debt to form the capital of a joint-stock company: The progress of the Mississippi Company about that time having intoxicated, and turned the Brains of most people, Appius’s mind was thereby wonderfully affected, and from his natural inclination to Projects, so inflamed, that he could brook no longer the narrow thoughts he had entertained before, of engaging for one or two branches of the public Funds only; but carried on his views for taking at once all the national Debts, the Bank and East India Company included: often saying, “That as Mr Law had taken his pattern from him, and improved upon what was done here the year before in relation to the Lottery of 1710, he would now improve upon what was done in France, and out-do Mr Law.” Unhappy Emulation!45

The author’s view into Blunt’s psychic apparatus exchanges his entertainment for ours, as we get the rare pleasure of seeing into the thought process of the man who was widely believed to be the architect of the company’s operations. The structure of emulation that is described here is of identification, whereby Blunt takes Law as a positive example for emulation and France’s fi nancial arrangements as a positive model for Britain. This is the same structure that we have already seen in Addison’s Cato. The national crisis is explicable here as the result of an emotional cathexis that originated in the mind of Blunt, whose subjectivity is now exposed through the medium of the scandal chronicle. The most enduringly influential contemporary critique of the Bubble is the one that was mounted in the texts that became known as Cato’s Letters. The series began in the pages of the London Journal in October 1720, just as the South Sea Bubble was coming to an end and the desire for explanations for what had happened was beginning. Like the author of the Secret History, the coauthors of Cato’s Letters— John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon— see the crisis as originating in the company itself, and the series’s essays on the Bubble aim, like the Secret History and like Haywood’s Memoirs, to expose the mechanisms that enabled the company to

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inflate the Bubble. But the rhetorical power of Cato’s Letters is based less on its understanding of the event as a sign of a shared delusion, insanity, or even emotional cathexis, than on a view of it as a conspiracy for which the only appropriate response is rage. The vehemence of Trenchard and Gordon’s attack on the South Sea Company and on the members of the government, the court, and Parliament who colluded with it is extraordinary even for the period, when political discourse as conducted in print periodicals was frequently bitter and vituperative. (One of the reasons that the Tatler and the Spectator have remained part of literary history is that they are so temperate, disguising their partisan affiliations behind a tone of suave moderation; even Addison and Steele, in other journals like the Guardian, the Free- Holder, the Old Whig, and the Theatre, are considerably more aggressively partisan and vehement about their positions.) In Cato’s Letters, the company’s directors are members of “the dirty race of money-changers,” “vermin,” “harpies and publick robbers,” “monsters,” “pick-pockets,” “blood-suckers and traitors.”46 Issue after issue calls for “vengeance” and “revenge” against those who have perpetrated a crime and deserve the legal punishment for all crimes against property: “What would you do with them? The answer is short and at hand, hang them; for, whatever they deserve, I would have no new tortures invented, nor any new death devised. In this, I think, I shew moderation; let them only be hanged, but hanged speedily.”47 There is a remarkable degree of violence at the heart of Cato’s Letters, a revenge fantasy the force of which even Julie Ellison’s excellent account in Cato’s Tears understates. This is worth remembering, given the enduring popularity of the series. Cato’s Letters was widely held in the libraries of prominent families in colonial America, where it formed part of the intellectual support for construing the actions of the London government in relation to its colonies as tyranny exercised from a distance against coastal stalwarts of enduring and incorruptible virtue. The series continues to have relevance because Cato’s Letters, more than either Addison’s play or the original historical figure to which they all refer, is in effect the foundational document of the libertarian Cato Institute. “Founded in 1977,” states the institute’s website, “Cato owes its name to Cato’s Letters, a series of essays published in 18th-century England that presented a vision of society free from excessive government power.”48 This is only partially true; the original series, particularly in its early issues, is much less concerned with the excesses of government power than with the ways the nation was threatened by a conspiratorial collusion of government and corrupt private interests that in the moment had taken the form of the chartered corpora-

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tion: “O Companies, Companies! ye bane of honesty, and ruin of trade; the market of jobbers, the harvest of managers, and the tools of knaves, and of traitors.”49 The series’s affect is generated by its sense of futility, Trenchard and Gordon’s apparent belief that in the face of such a powerful conspiracy of forces, the only appropriate response is petulant withdrawal, a self-imposed retreat to a position of isolated critique, a Utica of the mind. Spoken with the authoritative voice of Cato, the series encourages readers to identify, Juba-like, with a persona whose self-professed incorruptibility is matched by the violence with which he will defend it. The signatory “Cato” attempts to claim common cause with Addison’s play, a point that became particularly clear when the series moved from the London Journal to the British Journal in September 1722. From this point on, Cato’s Letters was headed with the same Roman medal that had headed Addison’s print editions of almost a decade before (see fig. 2.4). We might read the British Journal’s use of this emblem as a moment when the conception of character that informs Addison’s Cato is being overlaid and ultimately displaced by the conception of a corporate brand, an icon that signifies the presence of a collective identity, here Cato and all he stands for as the symbol, the corporate seal through which Trenchard, Gordon, and (by 1722, the late) Joseph Addison express themselves. The series continued until 1723, and as the event of the South Sea Bubble became less immediate, Trenchard and Gordon’s attention turned to other contemporary political topics, such as the Atterbury crisis, when Francis Atterbury, the bishop of Rochester, was accused of participating in a planned Jacobite coup. The fungibility of Cato’s attention— as though, roused to expression by the South Sea Bubble, he discovers more and more targets for his rage in the corrupt political culture into which he has awakened—is enabled by the strategy of abstraction that the series uses from its beginning. Rather than going into the details of the company’s fi nancial operations, or offering political analysis of the players and forces involved in the crisis, Cato’s Letters raises this event to the level of what we might as well call ideas. Abstractions like “avarice,” “ambition,” “vengeance,” “honesty,” “slavery,” “tyranny,” “liberty,” “justice,” and “property” become the prime agents of history here, comprehending the specifics of current events in sweeping generalizations. One cause for this may well be government censorship. Robert Walpole came to power in early 1721 on the basis of his skill at reorganizing the state’s fiscal affairs in the wake of the Bubble, and a constituent part of his regime in its fi rst years was control over the London print media, a role that got him the title of “Screenmaster General” because he took it as one of his fi rst orders of business to cover up the role

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Fig. 2.4. Medal of Cato as published in the British Journal, September 29, 1722. This emblem, adapted from the medal published with Addison’s play, became the identifying mark for Cato’s Letters, which the British Journal began publishing on this date, taking the series over from the London Journal, which had been bribed to cease publication. Photograph © The British Library Board.

that key courtiers and members of Parliament had in promoting the South Sea Company’s scheme. In some cases, Walpole’s government censored outright; in many other cases, it bought compliance, which is why Cato’s Letters stopped running in the London Journal; the editor accepted a bribe to stop publishing the series, which moved to the British Journal.50 Whatever the cause of the series’s turn to abstraction, the effect seems clear: the generality of Cato’s Letters, its insistence on putting all events in terms of timeless political principles, is one reason for its continued circulation well past the original occasion. Readers since then have been able to read themselves into the situations that the letters describe, to identify them-

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selves as their intended audience even at the remove of three centuries, because they are so general. Probably the most notable subseries of Cato’s Letters to modern libertarian readers is the set of nine essays that began December 30, 1721, on the subject of “liberty.” “By liberty,” writes Gordon, in the persona of Cato, I understand the power which every man has over his own actions, and his right to enjoy the fruit of his labour, art and industry, as far as by it he hurts not the society, or any members of it, by taking from any member, or by hindering him from enjoying what he himself enjoys. The fruits of a man’s honest industry, are the just rewards of it, ascertained to him by natural and eternal equity, as is his title to use them in the manner which he thinks fit: And thus, with the above limitations, every man is sole lord and arbiter of his own private actions and property.51

Although it is never identified by name here, the intellectual support for much of the above is Locke’s Second Treatise, which famously claims that property derives from an individual’s labor, his mixing of his own work with the raw materials of nature. Property rights are the foundation of the liberty that these essays go on to expound, as well as the basis of the limited system of government that they sketch. But the concept of an individual’s absolute right to property is riven with complexities. How are such rights to be enforced? What happens when one person’s use of his or her property impinges on the rights of another person’s property? Or upon the rights of the broader society? Over the long term, questions like these are resolved through the emergence of an enormous body of case law, a body of law that is permanently under construction and reconstruction. The vehemence with which “Cato” here and as the eidolon of the modern institute that claims Trenchard and Gordon as its intellectual support testifies to the libertarian’s sense, ever since the South Sea Bubble, of an ongoing crisis, of the need constantly to defend individual property rights against the incursions of the state or the commons. But some of the complexities of individual property rights became apparent in the South Sea crisis itself, and one particular site of intelligibility emerged at the intersection of the state-licensed theater and the Bubble. As it happens, the key figure around whom this particular crisis precipitated was Richard Steele, Addison’s collaborator in the Spectator, whose work in the theater at the time of the Bubble brought some of the complexities of property that Cato’s Letters avoids into public debate in a particularly clear way.

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COMEDY, STEELE, AND THE CRISIS OF PROPERTY Tragedies end in death, and comedies end in marriage: that is the shorthand way that students have long been taught to mark the difference between these two modes. To say that comedy ends in marriage is also to say that it is about property relationships and gender, about the orderly transmission of property from one generation of men to another, with a young woman serving as the intermediary to the transaction. Early-eighteenthcentury English dramatists were acutely aware of this, a fact that becomes perhaps most clear in examples that deviate from the norm and therefore expose the system’s central features. So, for example, in Susanna Centlivre’s 1718 play A Bold Stroke for a Wife— a play with a scene set at a coffee house where stockjobbers offer shares for sale, including those of the South Sea Company—the protagonists’ path to marriage is blocked by the heroine Anne Lovely’s dead father, who “hated posterity” and therefore set up an elaborate system whereby each of her four guardians had to give assent to her union. What is more, he deliberately attempted to frustrate any agreement by making the men he chose to be her guardians such complete opposites: a Quaker, an antiquarian, an aging fop, and a stockbroker.52 The “bold stroke” of the title is performed—in every sense—by the hero, Colonel Fainwell, who dupes each of the guardians in turn into signing the marriage papers, flattering them into compliant moods by imitating them, taking on their quirky personae in the manner of a polished stage actor. The play’s clever and original take on the blocking mechanism of comedy underscores that everything else is meaningless unless the marriage does in fact result in obtaining the older generation’s property: neither Fainwell nor Lovely is interested in merely a love match, and both state quite explicitly that the whole point of the venture is to get both a spouse and the money. Centlivre’s play satirically exposes the injustice in patriarchal claims to absolute control of property, indeed suggesting that traditional patriarchy cannot be trusted with perpetuating itself. In the modern era, patriarchy needs the infusion of new personality types who, like actors, can justify their right to money by their adaptability to new situations. What Centlivre leaves unexamined, even as she gestures toward the existence of new forms of mobile property such as stocks and bonds, is the way that in this moment, the complexities of absolute property rights were being revealed in new ways. For that, we need to turn to Steele’s comedy The Conscious Lovers (1722) and the writings that he issued on both the South Sea and the Drury Lane theatrical companies as that play was being readied for the stage.

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The most thorough, even exhaustive, immediate critical response to The Conscious Lovers was that of John Dennis, and it’s no surprise in this context to discover that Dennis’s critique involves both the play’s problematic handling of the generational transfer of property and its author’s problematic relationship to corporate forms. Dennis complains about what he calls the “improbability” and “inconsistency” of The Conscious Lovers, problems that center in the behavior of Bevil, the hero and a character who, in Dennis’s words, is “made up of Contradictions” that are primarily exposed by a relationship to his family’s property that is to Dennis unintelligible.53 Even though he has inherited a good deal of money through his late mother’s will, Bevil promises his father, Sir John, that he will not marry without his approval. It is this promise that in fact sets much of the play’s plot in motion, because it leads Bevil to feel that he must keep his love for Indiana secret (since his father would never approve of a poor woman like her as a suitable match). The consequence of that secrecy is that he is wrongly believed by his friend Myrtle to be in love with Lucinda Sealand, the daughter of the wealthy India merchant Mr. Sealand; Lucinda is the woman whom Sir John wishes Bevil to marry (Bevil is dressed as if for his impending wedding throughout the play). But she is also the woman whom Myrtle is in love with and wants for himself. Dennis turns (where else?) to Locke’s Second Treatise to back up his claim that Bevil, having come of age, cannot consider himself as “being subjected to the Will or Authority of any other Man” (D, 264, quoting Locke) and should therefore not let any promises to his father get in the way of advancing his own interests. Bevil’s “unreasonable” promise to his father annoys Dennis because it seem to lack sufficient motivation and therefore makes the central character too incredible to serve as a site for audience engagement. Whereas Addison’s Cato became a character—in all senses— so readily intelligible as to become a kind of brand name for oppositional politics, Steele’s Bevil fails by this logic because he is an unintelligible character by virtue of his inexplicably ambivalent relationship to property. From the point of view of a certain understanding of property rights that continues to the present, Dennis has a good point. But what is more interesting in this context, I want to suggest, is how Bevil embodies, and thereby points to, contradictions in the concept of property that were also exposed by the simultaneous crises in South Sea Company stock and the Drury Lane Company patent. Here again Dennis furnishes a useful point of entry. For Dennis also objected that Steele had marketed The Conscious Lovers in the print media before its premiere in ways that to him contradicted the reformist premises under which Steele had originally been granted his

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license to supervise the Drury Lane Company in 1714. At that time, Steele had promoted himself as the “Censor of Great Britain,” appropriating a title held at one time by Cato the Elder, the great-grandfather of Addison’s hero, to underscore his claim that he would use his license to promote the reform of public morals through the theater.54 But Dennis asserts that Steele’s play is a “double Cheat” upon the both the “Pockets and the Understandings” of the “Town,” a “Bubble” promoted by Steele and the Drury Lane Company, which has manipulated the press to build anticipation for The Conscious Lovers and then raised ticket prices to profit from the demand created by that manipulation (D, 253). Dennis does not fail to follow up his accusation with the analogy that would probably already have come to the mind of any reader of 1722: that between Steele’s theatrical company and the South Sea Company. Dedicating his “Remarks on a Play, call’d The Conscious Lovers, a Comedy” to Robert Walpole in admiration of the latter for having “oppos[ed] that desperate Scheme” (D, 251) in 1720, Dennis portrays himself as following Walpole’s example by exposing the efforts of Steele’s theatrical “Cabal” to dupe the “Publick” through a “Poetical Cheat” (D, 253). What enables Dennis to intervene in behalf of the public interest, it seems, is that Steele and the actor-managers at Drury Lane have abused the “publick Authority” (D, 254) conferred upon them in the royal patent of 1714 and privatized the public stage in much the same fashion as the South Sea Company privatized the public debt, turning it into a property holding that was organized exclusively for their own profit and aggrandizement. The members of the “Cabal” have, Dennis says, “secured the Stage to themselves alone, which they regard as their proper Domain, and therefore every Stranger who for the future comes upon their Ground, is to be esteem’d a Trespasser” (D, 262). Yet, for Dennis to accuse Steele of secretly running Drury Lane as a kind of landed estate is overkill, because Steele was himself so forthright in claiming that he thought of his right as “Governor” of the company as a form of property, a “Freehold” granted to him outright by the king.55 When, in 1720, Steele found his license to run the theater revoked (as an act of political revenge for Steele’s vote against the Peerage Act the year before) by order of the Duke of Newcastle, the Lord Chamberlain, he claimed that because the “King is Lord Paramount of all Property,” any grant that he had made could not be countermanded by another subject.56 Steele’s confl ict with Newcastle over the Drury Lane patent raises the question of the nature of such a property right, a question that persisted at least through the rest of the century. In 1793 a lawyer named Francis Hargrave offered a private opinion that “this delicate and peculiar species of Prop-

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erty” could probably never be secured against “effectual hostility from the Crown” unless it could be proved that no monarch would be able to damage the value of such holdings by, for example, creating new theatrical patents.57 But this would be to restrict the power of the current monarch, who could no longer be, to use Steele’s term, “Lord Paramount of all Property,” because he was hampered by claims initiated under a previous monarch. If the king had the power to grant property, so too must he have the power to take it away or otherwise restrict it, or else his ability to grant it in the fi rst place would be meaningless. In which case he would not be king. Hargrave demurs discussing the point any further, claiming that the lack of judicial precedent makes it a waste of time to “scrutinize and probe into the nature and qualities of this species of property.”58 But what we might call the royal paradox is only a pronounced version of a problem that inheres in all absolute property claims. As Robert W. Gordon has put it, “Absolute dominion is paradoxical at the core. The freedom to do anything one likes with property implies the freedom to create restraints on it, and thus to bind one’s own hands or the hands of one’s transferees.”59 Gordon identifies eighteenth-century Britain and America as the time when and the place where this paradox was both acutely felt and systematically suppressed, as the absolute right of an individual person to possess and alienate property was progressively abstracted from the collective aspects of property. Locke’s Second Treatise has frequently served as intellectual support for this position ever since. Steele’s attempt to assert that his patent rights over the Drury Lane Theatre constituted a form of property over which he had sole and complete authority is merely one local episode of a broader historical development, a collective effort to reify property as an “absolute dominion,” a wholly private right. The early modern company, licensed by the government but owned by private individuals, exposes the tensions inherent in claims to absolute property holdings. So, for example, the fact that the London theater was authorized, like other companies, by government patent meant that it was possible to assert public rights against individual claims. This is demonstrated by an anonymous pamphlet of 1720 that was written to support Newcastle’s side of the dispute. Arguing that Steele had in effect forfeited his right to the patent by his mismanagement of the theater, the pamphleteer recalls that the Crown had appointed Steele as governor because of the latter’s expressed desire to advance only “the Interest of his Country” by using the patent to reform the British stage.60 But Steele and the actormanagers of the Drury Lane Company have, he claims, put their profits ahead of that reform agenda and have merely recycled the same Restora-

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tion repertory—he mentions The Man of Mode, The Country Wife, and The Rover as examples of older immoral and/or profane plays that Drury Lane has revived in spite of Steele’s pretensions to be reforming the repertory— that was the very reason why the king had granted the patent in the fi rst place: “It is certainly Impracticable to Reform the Stage by making use of those very Plays, which have all along Corrupted it.”61 To Dennis, Steele’s patent was less a private freehold than a kind of public trust, one obligating him to respect an intricate web of traditional property rights pertaining to the author, to the monarch, and to the public at large. Any attempt in eighteenth-century Britain to use public authority to carve out and exercise private property rights was likely to stir up countervailing claims of traditional and collective rights that aimed to negate the autonomy of individual property owners to do what they wished. It is perhaps no more than an accident of history that the South Sea Bubble was being inflated at precisely the same moment when Steele was fighting a battle over his property rights in the Drury Lane Company with the Lord Chamberlain. Steele presses the analogy, however, in what amounted to his last flurry of print publication. One component of this was a series of essays in the pages of Steele’s last journal, the Theatre, published from January to April 1720, which begins as a venue to continue his fight with Newcastle and comes to devote more and more issues of that journal to attacking the South Sea Company’s scheme to absorb much of the national debt; to add to the sense of issues converging around Steele, the entire run of the Theatre is supposedly written in the persona of “Sir John Edgar,” who, it emerges in one essay in the series, is the very same character under another name as Bevil Senior of The Conscious Lovers, then apparently awaiting its fi nal revisions before being staged two years later.62 Steele amplified the Theatre’s ongoing critique of the South Sea Company with pamphlets entitled The Crisis of Property and A Nation a Family, which were both published in February 1720, the month when the South Sea Company’s proposal became public.63 In these texts, Steele portrays himself as chivalrously coming to the aid of the “Annuitants,” the holders of the long-term Treasury notes that the South Sea Company was hoping to convert into its own shares. Crucially, Steele understands their annuities as a form of property, one so “irrevocable and absolute” that Parliament has no right to interfere with it.64 Steele casts this in terms of national sovereignty, arguing that the annuitants are in effect now beyond the reach of British law: “These Persons are Purchasers for a valuable Consideration, and that in the most absolute Terms imaginable; for which Reason I have and do aver, that the Parliament has no further

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to do with them, than if the Purchasers were of another Nation” (570). Yet Steele also wants to inspire sympathy for “these Persons” by casting them as British patriots, people “who stept out of the Rank of common Subjects” (567) in the nation’s hour of need and whose right to absolute dominion over their property should therefore be given particular respect.65 But good intentions do not mean that you own property any more absolutely than the next person, as an anonymous pamphlet opposing Steele, entitled The Crisis of Honesty, was quick to point out. Indeed, The Crisis of Honesty observes that many of the original purchasers of those annuities had almost certainly exercised a fundamental right of all property owners by selling their notes to someone else: “How very few are there of the Original Adventurers in those Annuities, who are possess’d of them? They have from Time to Time been alienated, for valuable Considerations, according to the Market Price.”66 The absolute right to own property must also confer the absolute right to alienate it. Steele can only overlook this by, in effect, alienating the property holders themselves, imagining them as “Foreigners” insofar as they hold British government securities that they were originally motivated to purchase in order to defend the nation against foreign aggression. In A Nation a Family, Steele puts forth his own plan for repaying the nation’s debts, a counterproposal to the South Sea Company’s scheme that he claims will be sufficiently attractive to the holders of the long-term national debt for them to give up a form of property that they hold “absolutely.”67 Steele based his scheme on the concept of the tontine, an obsolete form of debt instrument that was more popular in France, where it originated, than Britain, but continued to be resorted to throughout the eighteenth century. The teenaged Benjamin Franklin, in his fi rst publication, the series of letters he published in the persona of a woman called “Silence Dogood” in the New England Courant in 1722, proposed a variation of a tontine as a means of providing life incomes for widows; near the end of the century, Alexander Hamilton proposed one to pay off the Revolutionary War debts of the individual states.68 The key feature of the tontine is that annuities were collectivized into pools in which the payments would be linked to the lives of the members of each pool; as individuals died, their shares would be divided among the survivors. In Steele’s plan, the public debts would be converted into thousands of life annuities, whose investors would each contribute one hundred pounds as an initial offering; Steele estimated that forty thousand investors might be attracted this way, and the total of 4 million pounds would become South Sea Company stock. The annuitants would be organized into groups of

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ten, and each group would receive an annual interest payment of 10 percent of the group’s collective investment from the company. As members in each group died off, the amount going to each survivor would increase; the company’s liability to each group would end with the death of all the members of that group, and its total liability would end with the death of the last member, which Steele estimated would take place around 1788. Steele’s proposal went nowhere, not only because the company had already purchased enough support in Parliament in favor of its own scheme, but because it is fi nancially and actuarially unsound. A single fi xed rate of 10 percent interest for all members of the tontine was too generous and failed to take into account the fact that a tontine is much more valuable to younger subscribers; later, more successful tontines in France had higher interest rates for older subscribers and lower ones for the younger subscribers who would be receiving benefits for decades. The problem had in fact been pointed out by Edmond Halley, whose “Estimate of the Degrees of the Mortality of Mankind” (1693), the fi rst attempt to produce an actuarial table of life expectancies based on empirical data, was designed to counter the mistakes he identified in the only previous, failed English attempt at a tontine, which had been offered in 1692.69 Steele never identifies how he made his own estimate of the rate of mortality, but he seems to have ignored Halley’s statistical tables of life expectancy, which use much the same methods as those used by modern demographers.70 Steele had a lot of company here; few English writers were willing to apply statistical methods to life annuities and tended to substitute, as he does, conjecture and guesswork; as we shall see in the next chapter, this is one of the reasons that insurance policies on lives were so rarely written in the eighteenth century, even though Halley himself pointed out that “the Price of Insurance upon Lives” could readily be “regulated” by using the kind of calculations he had performed.71 Steele’s tontine plan to preserve the absolute property rights of the annuitants who would soon be coerced into exchanging them for South Sea Company stock was, in political-economic terms, a failure, and the tontine form has faded into history and the pages of fiction, where the possibilities it offers for intrigue (particularly as each pool dwindles down to a small number of persons, who have every reason to be suspicious of each other), have occasionally been a prompt to the novelistic imagination. Far more important than the merits or demerits of Steele’s proposal is the power of the metaphors that are its real support, those of the family, the body, and the patriarch. Steele’s tontine scheme follows through on the title of his essay by imagining the nation as a family, with the king

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as its patriarch, whose “Popularity, Greatness, and Safety” will be “incorporated with the Happiness of his People.”72 The small groups of ten in each class of annuitants restore a kind of intimacy to the abstractions of the national debt, a familial scale that is the same as that at the center of contemporary European comedies like A Bold Stroke for a Wife and The Conscious Lovers. The political-economic becomes like the theatrical; the business of the state mirrors the business of comedy. But Steele’s use of the figure of the body, which as we have seen is central to his understanding of the importance of life performance, is more equivocal. Referring to the state, Steele asserts that the “Body Politick is supposed immortal,” which is why there is no need to rush to pay off the debt and why such a long-term plan as his tontine might make sense. That plan depends on “the Mortality and Decay of Particulars,” which is to say the fact that the bodies of the persons investing in his scheme would expire, each one liquidating part of the national debt, and part of her own property, at the moment of death. Here Steele seems to overcome the problem of the alienability of property by affixing it to the mortal persons of investors. But that literal sense of the body is what is being forgotten when Steele describes the state metaphorically as a “Body Politick . . . which is to live for ever.” The state’s immortality is what makes it least like a body; it is the point at which the figure should rightly lose all applicability.73 No one ever expected Steele to be a master of logical consistency; in defending his legal rights in the Drury Lane Company, he was arguing for his own, highly interested position, and when he pivots to talking about the South Sea Company, it is clear at all turns that he is out of his depth. Steele is, in something close to a literal sense, confused, understanding the South Sea Company in terms that seem more appropriate to theatrical comedy. But the confusion is symptomatic of the way that for both kinds of corporation, the fi nancial and the theatrical, the state still served as a kind of guarantor of property rights even as their corporate surrogates aspire to autonomy. The South Sea Company’s asiento rights continued to be supported by the British Navy’s control over the shipping lanes it needed to conduct its trade, a control always backed by the ultimate threat of military force; in what was known as The War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739–42), Britain went to war with Spain (in part) to enforce the asiento. For Steele, the state imitates the familial structure of comedy, with the monarchy as the ultimate patriarch. This is also to call upon the same kinds of affective relations as the unknown artist who drew The Bubler’s Mirrour and The Bubbler’s Mirrour did in his own interpretations of the Bubble, the emotions of grief and joy that the event unleashed. There are moments in

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the textual record of the moment when representing emotion brings even the bodies of the slaves who were the object of the asiento’s trading rights, yet otherwise all but invisible, into the public sphere. In The Conscious Lovers, two patriarchs, Bevil’s father, Sir John, and Mr. Sealand, a wealthy India merchant whose long-lost daughter turns out to be Indiana, Bevil’s lover, meet and try to clear the air that is tense between them because at this point Mr. Sealand does not yet know Indiana’s true identity and is angry that Bevil is paying attention to her rather than to Lucinda, his other daughter, whom the fathers had agreed Bevil would marry. “Very wise men have become so enslaved” to beautiful women like Indiana, Mr. Sealand cautions, worrying that Bevil’s emotional attachments cannot be overcome by his father’s will.74 Sealand’s figure of speech here is not original or idiosyncratic. The figure of slavery is used fairly frequently in eighteenth-century English writing to signify erotic attachment; as we shall see in the next chapter, Tobias Smollett is particularly fond of the metaphor, using it repeatedly in his early fictions. But in the context of Mr. Sealand’s career as a global trader, in the wake of a crisis in the share value of the company specifically charged with the mission of supervising the slave trade to Latin America, the casualness with which the metaphor is tossed off, the fact that in describing the central erotic attachment of the play’s plot it does not refer in any way to actual slaves, is stunning. Here The Conscious Lovers reveals the degree to which the slave trade had become part of the era’s unconscious life. That the South Sea Company has become the paradigm of the speculative bubbles that have become a regular feature of the economy since then confi rms Karl Marx’s joke that history repeats itself, “the fi rst time as tragedy, the second as farce.”75 And the continued salience of Marx’s joke reminds us of how readily we still understand corporate fi nance capitalism through the frame of the same theatrical genres that so impressed those who fi rst experienced the South Sea Bubble.

CODA: THE SOUTH SEA BUBBLE IN MEMORY Crises tend to be forgotten. Although Adam Smith includes the South Sea Company as part of a general discussion in The Wealth of Nations on companies, he has nothing to say about the most famous and notorious event in its history, the 1720 Bubble. As a discipline, economics has similarly tended to downplay the significance of speculative bubbles, understanding them to be disruptions to a system that ordinarily enjoys a fairly steady state, rather than constitutive parts of a system that is far more volatile

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than theory usually imagines. Speculative bubbles thus often come as a surprise to even the most seasoned economists. That the South Sea Bubble is reinvoked and dusted off as the example of an earlier speculative bubble from which we should have learned something when a new one occurs is a sign of how fully it is forgotten the rest of the time. Or at least it is forgotten in the collective intellect constituted by economic logic as it has evolved over the past three centuries. Yet the South Sea Bubble is remembered in other places, other ways. It was recalled in the history of corporate formation in Britain through the consequences of 6 Geo I, c 18, passed on June 9, 1720, known to popular history since the early nineteenth century as the Bubble Act. The act forbade the chartering of new companies; it was this that put an end to most of the ventures listed on the frames of The Bubler’s Mirrour and The Bubbler’s Mirrour as it was designed to do. The best evidence is that the act was passed at the desire of the South Sea Company, which saw other companies entering the market in 1720 as rivals for investors’ funds and wanted to ensure that resources would be steered toward enhancing the price of its own stock. If there was to be a bubble that summer, it would be in South Sea Company stock. Though it was passed with immediate goals in mind, the act had long-term consequences. While it was not the only reason that it became difficult for British ventures to incorporate, it was a contributing factor in the comparatively smaller number of businesses incorporated in Great Britain compared with the early United States. Until the act was repealed in 1825, British business ventures more often took the form of partnerships, as testified, for example, in the novels of Charles Dickens, home of Scrooge and Marley and Dombey and Sons. The South Sea Company may have come to regret pushing its allies in Parliament to get the act passed, since it arguably accelerated the crash of the Bubble, but its goal of restricting the extension of the state-chartered corporate form beyond those already incorporated by 1720 was probably more successful and enduring than its directors could have imagined. With one exception: insurance companies. The full title of the act reads: “An Act for better securing certain Powers and Privileges, intended to be granted by His Majesty by Two Charters, for Assurance of Ships and Merchandize at Sea, and for lending Money upon Bottomry; and for restraining several extravagant and unwarrantable Practices therein mentioned.” The last clause of the title constitutes the South Sea Company’s attempt to do away with potential rivals; the bulk of the title refers to the positive thing that the act did, namely to incorporate two insurance companies, the Royal Exchange and the London Assurance (the London

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Assurance, mentioned in The Bubbler’s Mirrour, exists in a way to this day, as it is one of the ancestors of the modern RSA Insurance Group). These companies retained monopolies in marine insurance until well into the nineteenth century. The act itself was a legislative compromise, a fusion of initiatives from two separate directions: two new insurance companies with their own interest at court (they agreed to contribute toward paying off part of the king’s debts) were incorporated, while the South Sea Company got what it wanted in that these were to be the last such companies chartered for the foreseeable future. It may be just a coincidence, but it is intriguing to note, too, that the fi rst insurance enterprise in British America was founded in the spring of 1721. John Copson, a merchant in Philadelphia, opened an office there in early June for the purposes of providing “Assurances from Losses happening at Sea.” Copson’s professed reason for opening an office in this place at this time is that it has been not only so “tedious and troublesome” but also “very precarious” for merchants in Philadelphia to rely on insurance policies issued in London.76 Looking broadly, Copson’s move testifies to the growing maturity and self-assurance of the colonial merchant class, its emergent felt need to rely on its own resources rather than to depend on the institutions of the metropolis. But given the timing, in the wake of the scandalous collapse of the Bubble in London and the establishment of a marine insurance duopoly in the midst of that event, it seems also fair to speculate that Copson and others in colonial America were concerned that the London fi nancial community might be dangerously volatile while also having the price-setting power of a cartel. They therefore had every reason to feel that their interests would best be served by establishing their own insurance office, so as to have more control over the underwriting of their own ventures. Perhaps more than anything else, the foundation of insurance companies on both sides of the Atlantic at this moment identifies how insurance needs to be understood as a unique case, and insurance companies as something different from other kinds of chartered companies. In chapter 3, we consider insurance as a kind of supplement to the economic system, a seeming subsidiary that turns out to be essential.

Chapter Three

Insurance and the Problem of Sentimental Representation

O

f all the aspects of the domain of social life that we have come to call the economy, the concept that is called insurance might seem to be the blandest, most dismal and unimaginative of all, its limits strictly demarcated by actuarial facts that admit no argument. But this was emphatically not the case in the early modern period, when insurance schemes of various kinds proliferated, when actuarial knowledge was a fluid mixture of science and conjecture, and when the idea of putting a value on the lives of persons in the same manner as one would put a value on things was not so much in question as generally so far beyond the pale of the acceptable as to resist formulation into a question in the fi rst place. In this context, writers on insurance engaged their readers’ imagination in depictions of the horrific possibilities of lives being shattered by events that now had to be foreseen: the fi re that would destroy a home or business, the theft that would take away property, the sudden death that would devastate a family, the pirates who would threaten the success of a voyage. In Daniel Defoe’s fi rst published work, An Essay upon Projects (1697), he offers perhaps his earliest example of a plausible fiction when he asks the reader to imagine a “Merchant Ship coming home from the Indies, perhaps very Rich,” that meets with a “Privateer” strong enough to threaten the merchant ship but not so powerful that it could not be resisted with a concerted defense. What if, Defoe posits in the typical manner of an economic theorist making a hypothetical argument, one seaman, “endow’d with a little more Wit than his Fellows,” should point out to the captain and the rest of the crew that the men on the ship, unlike their employers, have nothing to gain and much to lose (including possibly their lives) by fighting back? Defoe proposes the establishment of “an office of insurance” that would compensate merchant seamen for the risks that they were running.1 De106

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foe’s act of the imagination here reveals how the invention of insurance could produce a risk that had not existed before, encouraging sailors to put themselves in danger in a way that the most rational of them realized was pointless unless it had been given a price. Far from limiting the imagination, insurance spurred it as the possibility of protecting against some contingencies prompted visions of other contingencies that might need to be hedged against in the same way. Insurance burgeoned in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so much so that this period is often taken to mark a turning point in the history of the practice. Defoe, in his Essay, breezily observes that some forms of insurance had been “of use time out of mind in Trade,” but he also says that insurance had become “never so much a Trade as now” and was newly legible as an object of discourse in its own right.2 By the middle of the eighteenth century, as that trade had increased, insurance could be talked about in much the same way as the subject of other kinds of fiction. Corbyn Morris, at the outset of his 1747 Essay Towards Illustrating the Science of Insurance, leaves little to chance as he imagines how readers might mistake his essay for another kind of book, a biography or perhaps a novel: “It may perhaps be thought,” he notes, “that in these Encomia upon Insurances, I am running into the Error of most Biographers, who are remarkable for extolling the Person whose Life they treat of, beyond all other Heroes.”3 Such is the danger of making insurance into an object of study that it becomes an agent in history, the central character in the story of modernity. Morris’s figure is but one instance of many in the eighteenth century that indicate the challenge that writers then and since have faced in coming up with ways to represent, to illustrate— as Morris puts it in his particular use of the ekphrastic turn that we have already seen many writers on economics use—the peculiar field of knowledge that is demarcated by the word insurance. Like other intangibles of the modern commercial economy, such as credit, insurance demands creativity and ingenuity to bring it within the codes of representation, visual and linguistic, that the modern era inherited from the past. But it seems fair to say that insurance stands in a somewhat different relation to representation than do other aspects of the economic. For being made an object of representation, becoming a story, surely represents the failure of insurance, which attempts to contain the possible events of human existence such that they stay beneath the threshold of the event. This is why the very existence of the enormous insurance conglomerate American International Group (AIG) was virtually unknown to the general public until its issues of credit default swaps in support of risky mort-

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gage investments in the United States began to plummet in value in the fall of 2008, becoming one of the major precipitants of the long fi nancial crisis that set in that year. When AIG entered public discourse, its failure was doubled; it had failed as an economic entity (only its effective nationalization by the U.S. federal government kept it from going the way the investment bank Lehman Brothers had the week before) and it had failed to keep faith with one of the central but unspoken assumptions of insurance itself, namely that it be represented only as a concrete, changeless thing without a history of its own rather than being put into narration, shown in dynamic relation to other social or economic entities. Such examples suggest that in the history of the business corporation, insurance forms a special case. For one thing, insurance was practiced both by state-licensed corporate entities and by private, less formal groups. The state entities were those such as the Royal Exchange Assurance and the London Assurance companies, which, as we saw at the end of chapter  2, were both incorporated in the summer of 1720 as part of what later became known as the “Bubble Act.” Here, these two companies were singled out as (in theory) the last companies able to receive government licenses. But insurance also continued to be issued by smaller entities operating without state authorization, private groups of individuals who came together as “underwriters” for a specific purpose or formed themselves into what were called mutual societies. The office that John Copson opened to broker marine insurance in Philadelphia in 1721 that I described at the end of chapter 2 was probably like the former. In all cases, the purpose of such entities, great or small, was to collectivize risk, and thereby to lower the danger of catastrophic accident to individuals by distributing it among a large group. In his 1747 Essay, Morris takes this idea of collectivization to its logical end when he argues that “the whole Body of every People should insure the industrious and useful Undertakings of all their Members.”4 Figuratively incorporating insurance in the “Body” of the nation, Morris here seems to anticipate the kinds of social insurance schemes that were undertaken by states in the twentieth century, in which the population of an entire nation contributes to insurance pools designed to protect people’s health or to provide security in old age. The insurance company, whether as licensed corporation or mutual-fund society, is in some ways the corporation par excellence, tracing its origins back to the start of long-distance commercial shipping in the Mediterranean basin in the late Middle Ages and extending its reach and scope hand-in-hand with the relentless expansion of fi nance capitalism across the globe ever since. Yet insurance stands in an oblique relation to the rest of the capital-

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ist economy, a fact occasionally articulated by observers outside the field of economics. Literary critic Eric Wertheimer observes that insurance is fi lled with “conceptual peculiarities” that make the field of insurance law a “model deconstructive site,” because any attempt to defi ne insurance contracts has created conditions that would seem to void the very concept of a contract: “Insurance underwriting gathers around it a network of legitimating practices that invoke textual authority to conserve an original anteriority that deconstruction calls into question.”5 The historians Aaron Doyle and Richardson Ericson, adopting the language of literary critics, discover that “with insurance in particular there are a number of sources of irony.”6 For his part, Ian Baucom (here using Derrida’s Specters of Marx [1994] as a key reference point and intertext) sees the notorious Zong case of 1781, when the crew of a slave ship tossed captives overboard to collect insurance on their value as commodities, as “exemplify[ing] the advent and triumph of an abstract, speculative, hypercapitalized modernity,” and its consequences as leading to “a recognizably romantic counterdiscourse; a melancholy but cosmopolitan romanticism that sets itself, in Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre’s evocative phrase, ‘against the tide of modernity.’”7 Insurance is, from this perspective, the quintessence of modern fi nance capitalism, the ultimate expression of its desire to embrace everything under its logic. Or, perhaps more precisely, as I suggested at the end of chapter 2, insurance exemplifies the logic of the supplement, serving as an add-on to “real” fi nance capitalist ventures that in theory need its assistance only when they fail to function as they should. As Derrida says of the supplement in Of Grammatology, it is “a dangerous means, a menacing aid, the critical response to a situation of distress.”8 Derrida is specifically thinking of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concerns about writing as the dangerously necessary supplement to speech, a concern that seems not all that far removed from the eighteenth-century English coinage of “underwriting” to describe the positional relationship between an insurance contract and the business activity that it secures. Derrida buoyantly describes the doubled nature of the supplement as both “a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude” and a plenitude “that adds only to replace . . . if it fi lls, it is as if one fi lls a void.”9 Insurance technology has been viewed with some of the same ambivalence, celebrated as a “Hero” of modernity by promoters like Morris, but also viewed with moral suspicion because its logic embraced calculating the worth of human lives, an action that a late-nineteenth-century American writer memorably— and positively— called “the capitalization of affection.”10 The historian Geoffrey Clark observes that “the insurance society of the early eighteenth

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century may thus be seen as the Janus-faced quintessence of the moral and fi nancial revolutions.”11 Quintessence and supplement, realistic and romantic, the exemplification of modernity and symptom of its discontents at once, insurance is not simply another sector of the economy. Rather, what we call “the economy” is only the activity permissible within a much broader realm that has been demarcated by insurance. This explains why, according to Doyle and Ericson, insurance is “the world’s largest industry,” so large that if it were a sovereign state, it would have the world’s third-largest economy.12 In this chapter, I will perforce describe some of the key innovations in insurance technology during this period. But a full account of insurance and the companies that offered it in this period is well beyond the scope of this chapter. Nor would that be the point, anyway. I am much more interested in articulating what François Ewald calls “an insurantial imaginary,” the conceptual universe that supports specific instances of insurance technology at a given place and time.13 Ewald describes insurance as a feature of modernity, of an era in which social calculation and secularization has desacralized the world: “With insurance and its philosophy, one enters a universe where the ills that befall us lose their old providential meaning: a world without God, a laicized world where ‘society’ becomes the general arbiter for the causes of our destiny.”14 The place where I will describe this imaginary is largely narrative fiction, in the forms of a serialized novel published by the house organ of an insurance company and then the midcentury works of the novelist Tobias Smollett, a novelist inured to risk from his earlier experiences as a naval surgeon. Novels and the insurantial imaginary share one common structure in the way they describe events: they organize things by means of the case study. In the 1755 An Essay on Insurances, Nicholas Magens, a director of the London Assurance Company, argues that the proper understanding of insurance demands attention to “some of the most remarkable cases” where insurance technology played a part, and he structures large parts of his book—an enormous history of and manifesto for the insurance industry— as a series of case studies.15 Volumes like Magens’s, Morris’s, John Millar’s, John Weskett’s, and James Alan Park’s histories and case books began the process, which continues to this day, of understanding the nuances of insurance law and liability through particular case studies.16 But works of fiction structured around cases that likewise address questions of play, risk, chance, and determinism are often more revealing of the insurantial imaginary that structures the world in which those cases become intelligible than the legal and economic texts that advertise themselves

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as the bearers of insurantial knowledge. In this spirit, Clark argues, “It is the novel  .  .  . that most fully expresses the eighteenth century’s mental confrontation with the uneasy cohabitation of happenstance and foredetermination.”17 While there exists no work of fiction from the period in which insurance can be ranked as the sine qua non—nothing on the order of James M. Cain’s novel Double Indemnity (published in serial form, like a number of the eighteenth-century examples we will be looking at shortly, in 1936, issued in book form in 1943, and adapted for fi lm in 1944), for example—it is not surprising that insurance would appear as an object of attention in eighteenth-century English fiction. I read the insurantial imaginary as constructed in fiction as surprisingly sentimental, or, perhaps better, as marking a particular place for sentiment in the emergent world of finance capitalism. The first counterdiscourse to the domination of insurance could be described less as “romantic” than as “sentimental,” because it attempted to discover other modes of value than the purely monetary. It will be useful fi rst, however, to sketch out what “insurance” denoted to eighteenth-century English readers of cases of all kinds.

DEFINING INSURANCE The history of insurance has to a large degree been composed from within, often by writers who were once (or are still) employed by and for insurance corporations, writing in the genre now known as the corporate biography, telling the history of the concept in large part as the prehistory of their own institutions.18 The recorded history of insurance has therefore a particularly teleological cast, a Whiggishness that inscribes the modern institution as the fully realized state of something that early modern practitioners were fumbling toward. As a result, the insurance “industry’s” own narratives substantiate insurance as a stable thing, a singular and unproblematic object of discourse. Legal scholars and historians charged with delineating the topic of “insurance law” sometimes express how difficult it is to come up with a coherent and comprehensive defi nition of insurance. As Spencer Kimball noted in a casebook for courses in insurance law that was standard in U.S. law schools from the 1960s through the 1990s, “there is no good defi nition of ‘insurance,’ for any purpose.”19 But from then on, he continues to use the term without reservation or ambivalence; insurance law remains a stable object of course-work and study for students of the law today. This has been the case since the mid to late eighteenth century, when writers like Magens and Morris began writing comprehensive descriptions of the field and when John Millar and James Alan Park began

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assembling what were in effect the fi rst casebooks defi ning a set of precedents for legal students and practitioners. But up until about then, insurance was protean and neither fully defi ned nor fully disentangled from its associations with other discourses such as gambling, annuities, and theology that assessed lives, things, and their relationship to risk. Most importantly, the business of insuring things— shops, houses, property—was considered separately from the business of insuring lives, which to many seemed morally suspect. It was in the eighteenth century that the two began to be conceptualized as different aspects of essentially the same activity. The arc of insurance’s story from the late Middle Ages to the present has been its slow and seemingly inexorable expansion to embrace more and more of the world, extending its imaginative reach from the maritime business, where it began to cover land-based structures, to movable property, to human lives. Some forms of what economic historians generally now label insurance can be dated back to classical times. But most accounts identify a crucial turning point in the late Middle Ages in the Mediterranean basin, as the pace of shipborne trade accelerated, calling forth new strategies to hedge against the risks posed by shipwreck, pirates, smuggling, and other sources of loss. Merchants in ports like Venice and Genoa gathered together to draft contracts that would distribute losses among themselves, a strategy that cost money up front but would induce individual traders to undertake voyages that they otherwise might not, since the possibility of catastrophic loss was now greatly diminished. Such contracts took various forms, some of which resembled modern kinds of insurance. A typical kind of contract, one that in some forms went back to antiquity and, as we shall see when we look at Smollett, was still in use in the eighteenth century, was known in English as “bottomry” because it was a policy taken out against the keel, or bottom, of a boat. A boat’s owner or master would contract for a loan against the integrity of a ship’s hull for the duration of a voyage; if the voyage succeeded, the creditors would get the  money back with a predetermined rate of interest, but if the ship sank, the loan was written off. From the Mediterranean, such practices spread north and west, arriving in England by no later than the sixteenth century. One landmark was the formation in 1601 of the Court of Assurances in London, a standing commission that would adjudicate confl ict between merchants over insurance payments or policies. The preamble to the act establishing the court claims, using exactly the same words that Defoe used at the end of the century, that such policies had been taken out “tyme out of mynde.”20 This was not the case, but both texts’ muddying the insurance’s

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origins have the effect of legitimating it as an essential, well-established, and unquestionable part of business practices rather than the suspicious supplement that it might appear to be, a form of profit-taking on disaster and misfortune. That court does not seem to have had much effect in the world, as insurance became a corporate enterprise whose practitioners most frequently tried to avoid entanglement with the state. The event that more than anything else catalyzed the expansion of insurance in England from maritime to more general uses was the Great Fire of London in 1666, which destroyed a large part of the city. In its aftermath, “mutual societies” proliferated that took as their fi rst order of business the insuring of property, particularly buildings, against the risk of fi re. Nicholas Barbon, one of the land developers who worked most aggressively on the rebuilding of London (and who, as we have already seen in chapter 1, was one of John Locke’s opponents in the interest and coinage debates of the early 1690s), opened an “Insurance office for houses” in 1680, and other self-described insurance “corporations” followed suit: the Phoenix Fire Office (1680), the Hand-inHand (1696), and the Sun Fire Office (1710). The Hand-in-Hand claimed to have thirteen thousand members in 1708 and the Phoenix ten thousand by 1710.21 Fire insurance was established in the provinces by 1720, as offices opened in Bristol and Edinburgh, and by the middle of the eighteenth century, mutual associations offering fi re insurance had spread to colonial America. The best known of these last is the Philadelphia Contributorship for the Insurance of Houses from Loss by Fire (1752), founded by Benjamin Franklin on the model of the London companies that he had perhaps learned about fi rsthand when he spent several months there in 1725 and 1726.22 In the same decades, marine insurance in London coalesced around Lloyd’s Coffee House, which had since its opening in the late 1680s been a center for information about and business relating to merchant shipping; the famous “Lloyd’s of London” insurance market dates largely to the fi rst quarter of the eighteenth century. One thing that distinguishes all of these mutual societies is that they were constituted by a membership that could be personally identified, named, seen. Franklin’s “Deed of Settlement” for the Philadelphia Contributorship calls for an annual general meeting where “all the Members of the Society shall have the Right and Liberty to be Present.”23 A mutual society was nothing more than its members in their willingness to pay quarterly fees to the society to create a fund out of which claims made by any member of the society (including themselves) could be paid. The will to have all the members present, to bring the entire mutual society

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into view, at once, speaks to the desire in this period to bring insurance into representation, make it visible to itself and to the society as a whole. Doyle and Ericson note that an irony of modern insurance is that it is “all but invisible to us sociologists and other academics, as well as to the public”;24 this was not true for eighteenth-century English speakers and readers, particularly those who lived in the cities, where not only were insurance schemes and companies actively debated and promoted in public; they were also, as we shall see, the sponsors of a substantial periodical literature whose topics of interest well exceeded insurance per se and the designers of unique and identifying emblems that were widely disseminated in print and metal (see fig. 3.1). Most insurance societies and corporations identified themselves with visual symbols—hands embracing hands (the Hand-in-Hand), a phoenix rising from the ashes (the Phoenix), the sun (the Sun Fire Office). Seals of some kind were legally required of all English corporations, and the emblems served this purpose. William Blackstone, in his Commentaries on

Fig. 3.1. Sun Fire Office medallion (early eighteenth century). The Sun Fire Office, begun in 1705, issued such marks to its policyholders to identify buildings that were insured by the company. These signs, indicating the company with which the property holders had signed policies, proliferated on buildings in urban centers throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before fi refighting duties were taken over by municipal organizations. Photograph: Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, Division of Home and Community Life.

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the Laws of England, identifies a seal as one of the constitutive features of a corporation: “For a corporation, being an invisible body, cannot manifest its intentions by any personal act or oral discourse: it therefore acts and speaks only by its common seal.”25 All corporations had seals (including the Carolina Company, the South Sea Company, and the other companies mentioned to this point in the book), and we will see in chapter 4 that the famous “Wedgwood emblem” that was so widely distributed by the fi rst generation of British abolitionists owes something to the history of the corporate seal as well. But it is fair to say that the most notable and best-remembered corporate emblems of this period are those produced by insurance companies. Part of the reason for this is that these emblems often had immediate practical use, in the form of the metal signs that policyholders attached to their buildings to indicate that they subscribed to one or another company’s policy. The use of a concrete, tangible thing as a corporate icon has been a feature of the modern insurance corporation too—think of the rock of Gibraltar, the symbol since the 1890s of the Prudential Insurance Company, or the “good hands” that have long symbolized Allstate— as opposed to the tendency of corporate entities in most other areas to reach for more abstract iconography. For all its historical and practical purposes, the consistency with which insurance companies have created visual icons speaks to a particular desire to bring their institutional existence into representation, to render it, literally, an object of display, a thing in the public sphere. These are among the fi rst examples of corporate logos, designed to be instantly recognizable to fi rst responders at the scene of a disaster. Insurance on human lives was organized differently, has a separate trajectory, and is far more elusive and complex as an object of representation and study. Having praised insurance on shipping and against the risk of loss by fi re, Defoe bluntly says, “Ensuring of Life I cannot admire; I shall say nothing to it; but that in Italy, where Stabbing and Poysoning is so much vogue, something may be said for it, and on contingent Annuities; and yet I never knew the thing much approv’d of on any account.”26 Defoe’s scorn was widely shared. Extending the logic of insurance as it was being developed to imagine a new relationship between risk to things and the well-being and mortality of persons—what Clark describes as “bringing the stock of human worth so explicitly within the embrace of the marketplace”—prompted uneasiness.27 To be sure, annuity contracts, such as the long-term annuities that the British government was so eager to see converted into shares of South Sea Company stock in 1711, would now often be classed as a form of life insurance and issued by companies

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identified as such, since they provided benefits to the survivors. The modified tontine scheme that, as we saw in chapter 2, was proposed by Richard Steele as an alternative to the broader conversion that the company undertook in 1720, with the disastrous consequences that ensued, would also in many places be classed as a species of insurance scheme. But as Defoe attests, policies written to insure an individual life were seen as deeply suspect, foreign to English notions of propriety. Which is not to say that such policies were never written; as early as the sixteenth century, there are records of policies taken out in England against the life of a debtor for the duration of the loan, for example. But it is true that most examples that have come down to us of policies that were taken out against the lives of individuals come from the Mediterranean. By the late Middle Ages, traveling merchants there were taking out short-term policies against their own deaths at sea, to have ransom money available in case of capture by pirates, or against the loss of a slave on a trading voyage.28 This last example is crucial, since insuring this particular form of property seemed to allow the issuance of policies on the life of a human being. The French Ordonnance de la Marine, passed in 1681 but largely based on precedents from the previous two centuries or so of maritime practice, codified the terms by which “all seafarers, passengers and others, may take insurance upon the liberty of their persons” for the duration of a voyage, “in the event of capture to cover the ransom and the expenses of returning home.”29 It was the key word “liberty” [liberté] here that enabled traders to insure the lives of slaves; as Clark puts it, “Because a ransom could be seen as a price on freedom, the law could treat insurance against captivity as something different in kind from the money valuation of human life itself. . . . According to this legal fiction, then, slaves acquired on the Guinea coast could be regarded as held in ransom.”30 Life insurance was in that sense an extension of maritime insurance, and the idea of insuring the life of a slave— a human life that was at the same time a form of property—was in due course translated to policies written for the lives of domestic slaves on land. One surprising tendency was to insure the lives of pregnant slaves. Consider, for example, the case of a slave named Maria, who was insured for 50 Catalan pounds in 1467 in Barcelona when it was discovered that she was pregnant; the policy could be redeemed if she died in childbirth or within a few weeks thereafter. 31 Why would such a policy be written? The risks of childbirth were high, well exceeding the risk of simply being alive in fi fteenth-century Barcelona, so the possibility of the loss of a valuable servant may be the motivation here. But there may be more going on,

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once we consider that the law in Catalonia (as in Italy) was that the state levied a fi ne against an owner who had a slave impregnated by another man, a fi ne that was doubled in the event of her death during pregnancy or childbirth; this, as Clark says, “created an incentive to insure a slave’s life for the term of her pregnancy and delivery.”32 Clark suggests that Maria’s owner, a physician named Bernat dez Lor, was preparing to pay just such a fi ne. The state was here taking the position that it had to enforce patriarchal control over a household, over childbirth, over women even when patriarchs themselves did not, an assertion well in excess of the mere protection of property. We shall see that the intersection of insurance and the ownership of human beings continued to lead to surprises, which only grew in their scope and intensity in the English-speaking world as its involvement in the African slave trade deepened. Yet to most seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English writers, taking out a policy on the life of another person largely meant taking out a policy on the life of a free person, and, like Defoe, most resisted this as giving the beneficiary an unseemly stake in the early death of the insured. On these grounds, insurance on lives was banned entirely in France until almost the nineteenth century. Life insurance looked like a form of gambling, which was all the more the case because in this era, English people did wager on the lives of others. Smollett, in his 1753 novel The Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom, has his hero return to England after a series of adventures and misadventures on the continent to discover that “the spirit of play having overspread the land, like a pestilence, raged to such a degree of madness and desperation, that the unhappy people who were infected, laid aside all thoughts of amusement, economy, or caution.” This mania for gaming was epitomized for Ferdinand when he witnessed at a coffee house “a pair of lordlings running their grandmothers against each other, that is, betting sums on the longest liver,” and then seeing a lord offer a thousand-pound bet that a waiter who had collapsed “in an apoplectic fit” was already dead.33 There was no way of preventing someone from taking out a policy against the life of anyone else and therefore in effect gambling that the insured would predecease them, until 1774, when the Life Assurance Act made it unlawful to take out a policy unless you had an interest in the life of the person being insured— say, that you were a woman dependent on your husband’s earnings:34 “From and after the passing of this Act no insurance shall be made by any person or persons, bodies politick or corporate, on the life or lives of any person, or persons, or on any other event or events whatsoever, wherein the person or persons for whose use, benefit, or on whose account such policy or policies shall be

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made, shall have no interest, or by way of gaming or wagering; and every assurance made contrary to the true intent and meaning hereof shall be null and void to all intents and purposes whatsoever.”35 The act efficiently reminds us of how eighteenth-century insurance was the business of both individual persons and corporate entities, as it also addressed and aimed to rectify the conflation between insurance and gambling that had rendered life insurance suspect. What’s more, the act’s recourse to the word “Assurance” in its title and its immediate turn to “insurance” when its text gets down to business offer testimony for the ambivalence about insuring lives that eighteenthcentury English usage demonstrated more generally. It became typical in the eighteenth century for writers to reserve the use of the word insurance for policies designed to hedge against the loss of things and use assurance for policies against human agency— and the end of a human life. The distinction seems to begin toward the end of the seventeenth century; as we have already seen, the Court of Assurance founded in 1601 was largely imagined to adjudicate cases involving marine insurance in London, suggesting a closer conflation between the terms at that point than seems to have been the case a few decades later. The distinction between insurance as the term for things and assurance as the way of referring to policies taken out on human lives served the purpose of reserving to assurance the moral value that it had accrued by virtue of its long use in theological discourse about the salvation of human souls. Theological assurance was the awareness, achieved through prayer, reflection, and the proper reading of signs, that one was saved. This discourse was richly elaborated in Protestant Britain and America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; “assurance” is the topic of hundreds of sermons and theological tracts of the period. Crucially, in this discourse, assurance was frequently presented as a form of knowledge that formed a kind of hedge against the contingency of the postlapsarian world. The prominent Boston Congregationalist cleric Solomon Stoddard’s 1698 sermon “The Tryal of Assurance” asserts that a sinner may only gain “probable knowledge” of his possession of grace, but not assurance, unless he demonstrates his election to salvation through good acts: “If you do not see the acts of grace, your confidence is presumption; men must go upon a sure bottom.”36 Stoddard’s nautical metaphor, which may even allude to the insurance practice of bottomry, tellingly associates salvation with other species of risk; he sees assurance as attainable only at a high price. More optimistically, Samuel Acton claimed in a 1709 treatise containing “several discourses on assurance”—the theological concept, not life insurance—that assurance of salvation enabled a per-

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son not to worry about the “changes and vicissitudes, with their several events, whether prosperous or adverse, whilst in this mortal body.”37 The doctrine of theological assurance can best be understood as a technology for assessing the risk of damnation whose positive associations offered a kind of protection against the compunction of assessing human life in the same way that one assessed material objects. What the history of this distinction demonstrates is a kind of resistance to a fact of insurance usage that we take for granted now, that the same kinds of knowledge can— and should—be applied in assessing risks to persons and to things. This helps explain why English insurance companies were so resistant to using the actuarial information that eighteenth-century demographers were beginning to gather in part as a result of tracking the consequences of early annuity schemes such as tontines. We have already seen that Richard Steele ignored the data offered by Edmond Halley when formulating his own tontine plan in 1720. That kind of avoidance continued even as more empirically based actuarial information became available. It was not until 1762, when the Society for Equitable Assurances and Lives and Survivorships was founded, that a company adjusted its premiums by age based on calculations derived from the analysis of mortality tables. (The Equitable also refused to issue policies unless the policyholder had an interest in the insured, anticipating the Life Assurance Act by more than a decade.) The Equitable’s key claim, though, was that it would now, and for the fi rst time, offer insurance “in the same manner as in the Hand-inHand and Union assurance offices of houses and goods from fire.” That is to say that insurance on lives was being explicitly brought into equation with insurance on things, rendered into a material science that subjected human beings to the status of being aggregated into data from which could be derived a price. But well into the nineteenth century, even as knowledge about mortality was increasing because records were accumulated and tabulated, and even as statistics was itself becoming a more sophisticated practice, actuaries working for insurance companies practiced a mixture of science and guesswork. 38 Still, once the Equitable had established the principle that it was possible for a corporation to insure lives “in the same manner” as they insured things in the world, life insurance began a steady growth. In the early United States, the fi rst company explicitly designed to issue life insurance policies, the Pennsylvania Company for Insurance on Lives and Granting Annuities, was incorporated in 1812; by the 1840s, life insurance policies began to be issued broadly to middleclass families in both Britain and the United States.39 Let the nineteenthcentury New England Congregationalist cleric Henry Ward Beecher mark

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the full moral acceptance of what he endorsed as “life assurance.” After the American Civil War, Beecher appeared in advertisements for insurance companies, as well as for throat lozenges and Pears’ soap.40 What is perhaps most clear about the history of insurance practices in both Britain and America is that the relationship of insurance to the rest of the economy was fi lled with affect that far exceeded simple fi nancial logic. Fear of loss or damnation; desire to assert patriarchal control over the household; anxiety over loss: insurance creates a space of sentimental value that it shies away from representing as its own. The rest of this chapter explores this dimension of insurance more fully by looking at works of fiction associated with insurance practices. Eighteenth-century fiction’s well-known investigations of risk and reward look different when they are read in the context of insurance history. And insurance itself looks far stranger when put into fictional narrative, where cases suffused with sentiment both register and resist the narratives of history.

SERIAL FICTION AND THE TEMPORALITY OF INSURANCE In early-eighteenth-century Britain, insurance companies often distributed newspapers to holders of their policies. Organizations like the Sun Fire Office, Lloyd’s, and the Company of London Insurers published periodicals for their subscribers, printed broadsheets such as Lloyd’s List, the British Mercury (1710–15, succeeded by the British Weekly Mercury), the General Remark upon Trade (1705–10), and the Historical Register (1716– 38).41 Each of these journals had many features in common with other, more familiar periodicals of the period, such as the London Gazette or the Review, periodicals that circulated more generally. They printed events from the court calendar, correspondence from foreign capitals and ports, exchange rates, commodity prices, bills of mortality, and advertisements—in short, the typical categories of information that became classified as “news” in the emergent public sphere. For those who held insurance policies with the companies that published these journals, such information fulfi lled desires that came to be felt as needs; here, in one place, was gathered the data that would help both the company and its policyholders assess the risks of various kinds of action, inaction, and investment. Insurance technology and journalism came into being in England at virtually the same time and, to no small degree, in the same place, on the printed pages of the journals that are coterminous with (if far less well known than) the Review, the Tatler, and the Spectator. What came to count as

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news was shaped by the demands of the insurance business and the need to gather specific orders of political, demographic, fi nancial, meteorological, and other information for the purposes of assessing collective risk and individual liability. To these orders of information were added other kinds of text that we might not expect. For example, in 1707 the Sun Fire Office’s General Remark on Trade, in addition to updates on the progress of the War of the Spanish Succession and tables of stock prices and exchange rates, published the short “Description of the City of York” in its July 30–August 1 issue and “Instructions for Painting on Glass” in its September 15–17 number. This is information of a different kind, related neither to insurance nor to the current events that the traders to whom the journal is addressed might have desired in order to assess the relative riskiness of various ventures. Rather, such texts fall under the category denoted by the General Remark’s subtitle, “Curious Observations done by the Ingenious,” and make their appeal to readers’ desire for strictly nonutilitarian information. From the point of view of the insurance companies who were providing such periodicals, these diversions may have been thought of as value added to the publication, lures for readers to subscribe both to the newspaper and the insurance business that underwrote it. From the point of view of readers, such texts may have leavened the instrumental nature of the periodical, extending at least the potential boundaries of the reader’s knowledge to include all manner of random information. Perhaps the most surprising kind of these supplementary texts, one most associated with the British Mercury, which was issued fi rst by the Company of London Insurers and then by the Sun Fire Office, was serially published narratives, both fiction and nonfiction. In the 1710s, the Mercury published a series of short narratives over the course of several issues: “A Voyage into another World” (October 22– December 3, 1712), an Orientalist tale that surveys contemporary British society by masking it as a “Pre-adamite World” (October 22, p. 1); “A Brief Historical and Chronological Account of all the Empires, Kingdoms, and States of the World” (February 4, 1713), a short history of the world since the creation in Genesis; “The Rover” (July 7– September 22, 1714), a fictional account of the life of a rake; and “A Letter from Madrid” (December 31, 1712– January 28, 1713), a serialized work of fiction chronicling, in the fi rst person, a series of misfortunes in the life of a woman who descends from the aristocracy to slavery (about which more in a moment). The editor of the British Mercury (whose identity remains unknown) spells out the purported relationship between the content of these works and the more typical, news-related

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content of the rest of the periodical. A preface attached to “A Brief Historical and Chronological Account of the Empires, Kingdoms, and States of the World” argues that “News and History are so near ally’d, that the only Difference between them, seems to be, that the one informs us of what was done in Times past, and more remote from us, and the other, of what is so late and fresh, as may be properly enough call’d present, and in being, if any Thing which depends on Time may deserve that Name.”42 There is thus, the preface goes on to argue, nothing inappropriate about the presence of a narrative history in a periodical that more typically describes current events; rather, such a narrative will help establish both the “Connexion” between the past and the present, the parallels, say, between historical rulers and the monarchs of the present as well as the continuity between them, the extent to which then runs seamlessly into now. And the preface fi nds a virtue in the serial form, which will “allow the Work to be run out in length to whatsoever is most material.” Expandable to whatever length is necessary to do the job— and however long readers remain interested— serialized texts have some of the features of “news” itself, which similarly presents a continuous, open-ended story. Advancing a kind of continuity constitutes a plausible reason why the British Mercury would have found serial narrative so appealing. The serial form supports and mirrors the imagined continuity of the publication itself, as well as the insurance company that supported it. Even more than the other incorporated companies that were proliferating in the early modern period, insurance corporations depended on the premise of perpetuity, since subscribers had to have confidence that the company would be there at the undetermined date in the future when its help might be needed. The continuity of serial publication, the same narrative continued over weeks or months, its end never clearly in sight, replicated the imagined continuity of the insurance company itself. The reminders to the company’s subscribers to pay their quarterly dues, reminders that were printed in many of the same issues that published serial narratives, underscored the serial nature of the corporate form, the way its perpetuity relied on continuous, regular infusions of money. In an editorial headnote to the Mercury’s issue of July 30, 1712, an issue that followed the passage of a stamp act that would raise the cost of newspapers and very likely put a few out of business, the editor notes, “It is to be believ’d there will be insuring at least as long as there are Goods and Houses to insure; and this Office having met with sufficient Encouragement, not to question its establishment, the Mercury, which stands upon the same Foundation, may well promise itself a continuance.”43 This is a rare moment when the correspondence

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between the continuity of insurance and the continuity of “news” itself becomes explicit; serial narratives took their place, unconsciously but still tellingly, on the same “Foundation” of presumed immortality as private property and the insurance companies instituted to protect it. The fictional serials that were offered in the British Mercury had to defend themselves on other grounds than their relationship to the news, however, putting themselves forward as “entertainment” or “diversion” rather than emphasizing their similarity to the factual content of the rest of the paper. The narrative entitled “A Letter from Madrid” begins, in fact, by marking the story-to-come’s difference from the “News” that another kind of correspondent might send. The short work of fiction that follows is explicitly not something “which will occur in any of your News-Papers,” because its imagined reader (the recipient of the fictional letter) is “so plentifully supply’d with that Sort of Commodity from all Parts of the World” in, we have every reason to infer, the surrounding pages of the British Mercury itself.44 Our Madrid-based correspondent, seemingly having tired of the news that he has been sending on to London to this point, avers that he has been hoping to come across a “Relation” that would be “entertaining” to his reader and, with this letter, believes that “Fortune” has provided him with just the thing. The next five issues of the British Mercury included installments of “A Letter from Madrid,” a narrative with a story line that resembles the early amatory novels of Eliza Haywood, who began her career as a writer of fiction only a few years later. Like Haywood’s fictions of the 1720s, “A Letter from Madrid” offers its readers both excitement and moral lessons, as its heroine experiences adventures that serve to prove the point that romance is both essential and extremely dangerous for women, a course that they cannot avoid taking but one that has little margin for error. Fortune turns out not simply to be the explanation for the presence of the story, but a key element of the content of “A Letter from Madrid” as well. The story traces the fortunes and, more frequently, the “misfortunes” of its heroine, Donna Isabel Faxardo, a young Spanish woman who, as the story begins, is disguised as a Moorish slave called Zelima. Narrating her story in the fi rst person, Isabel explains how she has fallen from a life of privilege to the position of a slave, in which she wears a brand on her face that, she remarks repeatedly, corresponds to the “Stain” left on her “Honour” by her treacherous lover, Don Manuel.45 A fairly typical rake, Manuel seduces Isabel and rapes her, then loses interest in her. But Isabel remains obsessed with Manuel and, determined to follow him as he travels by sea to Sicily, disguises herself as the slave Zelima and arranges

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to have herself sold into Manuel’s family so that she can be near him. Isabel’s obsession with Manuel is particularly unfortunate since a better man is, in turn, in (unrequited) love with her: Don Philip, who disguises himself as Lewis, a servant, in order to follow her. After a series of adventures (including being captured by pirates), Isabel discovers that Manuel has been keeping a mistress in spite of his hollow blandishments to her; when she confronts him for having ruined her honor and then left her, Manuel professes himself to feel no obligation to a woman who has so debased herself. Enraged, Philip (who has witnessed this scene) kills Manuel, running him through with a sword; Manuel’s mistress then kills herself. Finishing her story to the unnamed frame narrator who is relaying this back to the British Mercury, Isabel/Zelima describes how she decided to have herself sold as a slave in the open market, which is how she reached the household in Madrid where the frame narrator meets her. Having sworn off men entirely (we never learn what happened to Philip after he killed Manuel), Isabel/Zelima vows that she intends to “secure me a heavenly Spouse, by retiring into a Monastery.”46 By what logic might it have made sense for this story to appear in the house journal of the Sun Fire Office? How does the story reflect what Ewald calls an insurantial imaginary? Most obviously, the entire story takes place in the very space, the Mediterranean basin, where insurance developed as a supplement to maritime law and finance, and where many of the news items of insurance journals like the British Mercury were also set. Isabel/ Zelima is captured by pirates, in popular imagination even more than in reality one of the most significant risks of maritime trade, and against which merchants were quick to insure themselves. More particularly, when she brands herself and disguises as a slave, Zelima marks herself as an item of property, like the wall of a house insured by the Mercury’s sponsor, the Sun Fire Office. Or, perhaps more to the point, the brand identifies her as an item of gendered domestic property like Maria, the slave owned by the doctor from Barcelona who hedged against her death in childbirth by insuring her for fi fty pounds. Geographically and physically pulled into the vortex of insurance practice and history, Zelima has, by choice, rendered herself even more subject to the play of chance and contingency than she already was simply by being an unmarried woman. And the story repeatedly emphasizes her subjection to the aleatory. At an obvious level, this story’s frequent invocation of “fortune” and “misfortune” would seem to make chance the major engine of the plot, and to that extent, we can link the prominence of that theme in “A Letter from Madrid” to its importance

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as a precondition of the invention of insurance. Both the story’s plot and the modern insurance industry rely on what we can think of as a modern, scientific understanding of chance, a conception of the aleatory as the product of causes that are, if not visible at the moment, ultimately knowable.47 No longer mere event or the product of divine Providence, chance events may be beyond one’s control, but they are not beyond one’s knowledge, and indeed the whole point of “A Letter from Madrid” is to bring the narrator’s misfortunes into discourse, to make them known and available to the reader for assessing their ultimate causes. That is why the narrator’s invocations of chance are met so frequently by her and other characters’ desire to identify the “cause” of her misfortunes, to identify them as not really chance but as the product of human or natural agency. The tension between chance and causality in this story marks its modernity, as the constant desire for a cause takes the guesswork out of chance, bringing it into the realm of the natural and knowable. As a matter of interpretation, the question of cause bears perhaps most acutely on how we are to evaluate Isabel, whether we see her as the victim of bad luck in men, or whether we are to blame her for being recklessly infatuated with Manuel and therefore at least to some extent the cause of her own undoing. Unlike, say, a sermon, the story passes no explicit judgment. Rather, in the manner of a case study, the story efficiently offers the evidence the reader needs to consider the question, to weigh the causes and probabilities involved. Yet Zelima’s anger at her situation, which causes her to act against what we can readily see is her own self-interest, needs to be accounted for as well. Or, rather, it is what refuses to be accounted for, to be subjected to patriarchy’s control over her life; it is a little as if we get Maria’s account of how it feels to be pregnant with (probably) the child of a man who was not her master and then to have her life insured by that master in case she dies giving birth to that child. Her perspective is lost to history, but fiction exists in no small part to imagine such cases, indeed to preserve and convey to a reader the emotional impact of being a case. This is the space that the editor of the British Mercury marks as the subscriber’s “diversion” and “entertainment”; here, it stretches the readers’ imagination of what can happen in the world beyond the quotidian news that he or she needs to assess the risks of ordinary business. For an even more sustained case of how sentiment intrudes on the logic of ordinary business, and how insurance becomes the instrument for bringing that sentiment into the light of day, it is worth turning to Smollett’s The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle.

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SMOLLETT AND THE SENTIMENTAL Jesse Molesworth, in his recent book Chance and the Eighteenth- Century Novel, observes that a “central paradox” emerges in the fact that “the rise of modern risk analysis and theories of motivated behavior has been met by a powerful counter-fiction exempting the individual precisely from such analysis.”48 As the sciences of probability began to refi ne and, to use Ian Hacking’s phrase, tame chance in the aggregate, at the individual level, Molesworth points out, people “sought to create risk” through activities such as gambling. Similarly, as actuarial science made it possible to refi ne life insurance premiums and payouts such that relatively crude instruments like tontines were theoretically no longer necessary, Britons tended to resist using that information; the adoption of life insurance lagged well behind insurance on objects in the material world. People resisted being brought into the orbit of the aggregate, rendered into the statistical regularity of an inert thing. Fiction advanced the stubborn exclusivity of the individual both in relation to and against the typical. We can think of this as a kind of sentimental logic, insofar as it resists the homogenizing forces of the marketplace, carving out a domain of value too precious to be assigned a price. My central example here is the work of the novelist Tobias Smollett, whose midcentury fictions are virtual exercises in the relationship between the individual and the aleatory, in the course of which surprising demonstrations of insurance and sentiment emerge. Surprising because of all eighteenth-century British novelists, Smollett— and in particular the early Smollett, the author of Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle—has often seemed to be the farthest thing from a sentimentalist. Rather, Smollett most obviously strikes most modern readers as a particularly hard-hearted case, his novels filled with crude practical jokes and humor that, sometimes cruelly, mock a parade of secondary characters. As Simon Dickie has recently demonstrated, Smollett’s early novels “work almost systematically through the established scenarios” of eighteenth-century English jest books, drawing copiously upon their reservoir of jokes making fun of the crippled, the aged, and the ugly, and women of all ages and classes.49 In this way, Dickie demonstrates, Smollett is representative of his time in a different way from contemporaries like Richardson, Fielding, Lennox, and Sterne; his novels were imagined from the outset as vehicles for bringing both his own experience and the disjointed archive of popular story and jest into the form of fictional narrative and thus into the orbit of the readers who had, in the generation since “A Letter from Madrid” appeared fi rst in the pages of the British Mercury

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and then (probably) in book form, developed a thirst for stories organized around the exploits of a central fictional character. Through such novels, Smollett stages the period’s acute awareness of the inescapability of risk and the challenges to managing it. In his own right, Smollett is a promising example of someone who had close contact with the aleatory, in areas where careful assessment of risk was a life-or-death question. Smollett was trained as a physician, a job that in the eighteenth century, even more than now, relied on reading physical signs and assessing the probabilities that they indicated various types of illness. In the absence of modern clinical testing, the interpretation of signs— an art of weighing probabilities—was all that Smollett or any other eighteenth-century physician had to go on.50 To add an extra layer to his experiences with the aleatory, Smollett was for a time a naval doctor, serving as a surgeon’s mate in the British Navy for about two years. That is, he spent time at sea, the site where chance, fortune, was imagined to have its greatest sway, the perceived place of greatest risk. When he turned to writing fiction in the late 1740s, he began with a book that hints at its hero’s affinity to chance in his name: The Adventures of Roderick Random, published in 1748. And, as is typical of Smollett’s novels, Roderick Random is a book that, it’s fair to say, frequently seems to lack the kind of organicism that would convince us that its constituent parts come together for any reason more likely than random chance; at many points, one damned thing seems to come after another. That is true of Peregrine Pickle as well, which couples Roderick Random’s meandering structure with a central character seemingly designed to repel or annoy readers, rather than appeal to them, as though by retreating one letter back in the alphabet to name his title character, he had traversed a line from sweet to sour (hinted at in his protagonist’s surname), giving Roderick Random a companion piece that seems designed to test the limits of its readers’ sympathies. The book’s comparative surliness is a characteristic of Peregrine Pickle that made it one of Smollett’s least popular works of fiction in his own day and has kept it from securing a stable place in the canon of eighteenth-century novels that are now widely taught, read, and studied. Whereas Roderick Random goes through his various adventures armed with a kind of buoyancy and essentially good nature, Peregrine is cranky, sardonic, and generally unlikable; a plausible case can be made that whereas Roderick Random is designed to be Smollett’s example of a representative Scotsman, Peregrine Pickle represents an Englishman as seen through a Scotsman’s eyes. But Peregrine’s story, rambling as it is, is also fi lled with chance encounters, surprising coin-

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cidences, and risk. Indeed, to “run a risk” is a favorite formulation of the narrator of this novel as he describes Peregrine’s tendency to chafe against any social limits he encounters. Often spelled in the original text “risque” (as it is in Defoe’s Essay upon Projects), as if to identify it as an imported word with Continental, French affiliations, “running a risk” is a figure of speech that still here, given the etymology of the term and Smollett’s personal history, figures its hero as a kind of seaman embracing particularly dangerous narrative currents. The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, then, offers a useful example for thinking about persons, things, and their relationship to insurance. Peregine’s case, his situation as a young man from the country with a giant chip on his shoulder because he has ambition but relatively few resources, owes everything to the fact that his father, Gamaliel, lost the family fortune owing to what the narrator calls “the failure of a certain underwriter,” a failure that so turned Gamaliel off from the urban world of commerce that he retired into the country, where he could live in his reduced circumstances.51 Insurance— or, better, the failure of a specific scheme of insurance to hedge fully against risk—is the motive force behind everything that follows in the novel and the case study it forms. Or, perhaps more to the point, given the famously scattered and meandering nature of Peregrine Pickle, what we might call two subcases, two mininarratives that involve the hero, are of interest for the way they stage what became central questions for the emergent technology of insurance: is the world governed by chance, or can the causes of events be determined? and what causes are more risky, those for which human beings are responsible or those that can be traced to the natural world, the domain of things? For Smollett’s hero Peregrine, the answer seems to be that people constitute a greater risk than physical objects do, or at least that a person runs no less of a risk attempting to ensure against the unpredictability of human actions than against the chanciness of the material world. In the action recounted in chapters 98 and 99 of the novel, Peregrine fi nds himself party to two different insurance policies. In the fi rst, he undertakes to protect a lender against default on the part of the recipient of a loan. In the other, Peregrine takes out insurance to protect his own investment in several maritime ventures. Both policies, it is worth noting, are set against the backdrop of what we can think of as Peregrine’s education by fi re in the perils of the aleatory, as he fi nds the fortune that he has amassed dwindling rapidly because of his bad luck at betting on horses and cards. But Peregrine is both greedy and drawn to risky behavior, and once he has secured a good part of his fortune in a very safe mortgage, he still finds

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him self “seized with the desire of amassing,” which leads him into the world of insurance. I want to take up the second policy, the one on maritime shipping, fi rst, because it is fairly straightforward and successful. Peregrine invests a total of fi fteen hundred pounds “upon bottomry, being tempted by the excessive premium” (611). That is, Peregrine in effect becomes an insurer for what turn out to be two seagoing profit-making ventures, “East-Indiamen” on long commercial voyages. In so doing, Peregrine ventures back to the origins of European insurance itself, which begin with the expansion of Mediterranean trade in the late Middle Ages. The considerable risks involved in such ventures called forth insurance schemes, the most widely used of which was bottomry, an investment not in the merchandise to be carried aboard the ship, but in the ship itself. Here, investors took out a mortgage on the keel (the “bottom”) of a boat that was set to make a long trading voyage; if the boat was lost in the course of the voyage, the investor would lose his money, but if it arrived safely, he could expect to make a large profit; in Peregrine’s case, he receives one thousand pounds in return for the eighteen pounds he has invested in one of the two ships. Even from the start, Peregrine feels that he has little to worry about from either of the two shipboard ventures, perhaps testimony to the fact that such voyages had become routine enough, the odds of their success calculated well enough, that Peregrine has reason to feel confident that things are going to go in his favor. And this remains the case even when Smollett does his best to create some suspense about the outcome, such as when Peregrine’s friend Crabtree has a dream that one of the boats is shipwrecked and then, later, when Peregrine hears that one of them will be delayed for months because it was unable to get around the Cape of Good Hope before weather made the passage impossible. Insurance in the form of bottomry turns out, at least in this case, to be a fairly secure investment; things are a relatively safe bet. The other example is slightly more complicated and considerably less successful. Overhearing an acquaintance of his in a coffee house attempting to borrow money against a legacy left to his acquaintance’s daughter but placed in the trust of a third party, Peregrine volunteers to take out a bond of “assurance,” which would serve as security in case his friend is unable or unwilling to repay the loan. Here, Peregrine goes in with complete confidence in his friend and the safety of his investment, putting up a thousand pounds in a bond that is payable in six months but, the lender attests, unlikely to be called in “unless some accident should happen which he could not then foresee” (614). By this point, the use of the

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word “accident” will fi ll the savvy reader with some foreboding, since unforeseen accidents have been plaguing Peregrine for a while. Sure enough, not long after this— and in fact right after he received the good word about the first of his ventures in bottomry—Peregrine hears that his friend has run off; he had, it turns out, used the thousand pounds to fund an elaborate scam whereby he and an associate tried to extort money from a series of jewelers by pawning jewels, then redeeming the same jewels repeatedly, and then blackmailing the jewelers with a charge of usury. But the scheme blew up in Peregrine’s friend’s face when his accomplice made a separate deal with each of the jewelers, taking the profits, the jewels, and the original thousand pounds with him to France; with his friend turned fugitive, Peregrine must pay the entirety of the loan. That this uses up all of his profits from his venture with the two East-Indiamen underscores the comparison between the two different orders of risk here, the one surprisingly manageable and the other dismayingly unpredictable. And even more, that Peregrine can’t help but suspect that his friend and the lender were in cahoots all along— a suspicion that the novel never decides one way or the other— only makes the unpredictability and ultimate unknowability of human actors all the more obvious. Placed as they are in juxtaposition here, Peregrine’s two ventures into insurance technology are suggestive rather than defi nitive; they are cases from which we have to draw some inferences. What we might as well call the object lesson of the story is that objects, things, are a lot more predictable than people. Underwriting potential losses from trade is not without risk—but these are risks that seem calculable and are subject to the laws of probability. People, however, are almost completely unpredictable. Peregrine will pay the price for this, of course, in that the loss wipes out whatever he gains from his ventures as an insurer of ships. The reason for his lack of success in this instance, his failure to calculate the odds correctly, the narrator tells us, is Peregrine’s sensibility, his surprisingly sentimental nature, which is what motivates him to underwrite the policy for his friend. Such an explanation might surprise anyone reading to this point who has paid any attention at all to the novel’s title character, who is much more obviously a cantankerous kind of character, given more to practical jokes that verge on sadism than to demonstrations of his sensibility. It is indeed what the narrator terms “the unsuspecting integrity of his own heart” that leads Peregrine to provide fi nancial assurance for a man he believes to be his friend; unsuspecting because this kind of show of feeling has been so rare for Peregrine throughout the novel that even he doesn’t know it’s coming.

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In the context of Peregrine Pickle, then, this instance of Peregrine’s good heart’s leading to his fi nancial undoing seems to go against the grain of the character that Smollett has established, which works to underscore the significance of the contrast between the riskiness of persons and things that the plot reveals. To readers who come to Smollett (and many other eighteenth-century novelists in English) expecting to discover characters that feel like fully articulated human subjects with deep interiority, this might seem to be a disappointing inconsistency. But it is actually quite consistent with Smollett’s own argument, articulated at the start of his novel Ferdinand, Count Fathom (1753), that a novel’s central character is a kind of prosthesis to the plot, a principle around which to organize a story and give it the appearance of coherence; as he writes, a work of fiction requires “a principal personage to attract the attention, unite the incidents, unwind the clue of the labyrinth, and at last close the scene by virtue of his own importance.”52 Imagined in this way, the fictional person at the heart of this kind of work resembles the corporation itself, a prosthetic person who helps bring the broader organization of a specific kind of economic activity into representation. In the novel, having the thread of the narrative organized under the sign of Peregrine allows us to see his adventures in insurance technology as a case of repeating the mistake that led his father to abandon the city for the country; thematically, it brings the book full circle and begins to steer Peregrine back to his family and the countryside, where he ends up at the end of the novel. It’s not characteristic of Smollett to underscore this kind of structure—it might be one of his weaknesses that even where he gives his plotting this kind of thematic shape, it still often appears to be haphazard—but one could say that to the extent that Peregrine “unites the incidents,” insurance is the silent mover of the entire book’s plot. More broadly, Peregrine’s story exposes a fault line that insurance opens up in the market’s quest to put everything under its sway. In insurance, people get a value, much as things, commodities, do; they become discursively equated for the purpose of measuring the risks associated with them. Sentiment here serves as the measure of the force that attempts to resist this equation, a name that might be given to the desire to identify a stubborn particularity in the human that defies being assimilated to a technology like insurance— or perhaps to anything at all that we might call a technology. In the uncharacteristic moment of sensibility, in the particularity that complicates but helps defi ne his own case, Peregrine Pickle suggests how the particularity of persons challenges the will-toabstraction that would render persons into things. Viewed from our cur-

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rent vantage point, such resistance might provoke a feeling of sympathy on our part for a moment when such stubborn, cranky particularity could stage that kind of resistance. But Smollett’s novel also serves to outline the vector that would see sentiment suffuse the public sphere to the point where the potential scope of insurance’s sway over the domain of persons and things would become well-nigh unintelligible.

INSURANCE AND SLAVERY As we have already seen, the institution of slavery presented some of the greatest complications faced by insurance technology, from its emergence in the late Middle Ages onward, as the existence of human beings who were at the same time items of property posed cases that challenged the smooth expansion of insurance through the economic system. Smollett’s novels are again useful testimony for how midcentury English people imagined the relationship between slavery and persons, their very confusions symptomatic of the way Britain’s growing involvement in, and ultimate domination of, the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century played out as in part as the intrusion of the slave trade into the metaphorical register. Smollett loved using slavery and its cognates (“slavery,” “enslaved”) as figures of speech, metaphors that most frequently describe the irrational devotion of one of his male protagonists to a woman. Thus Peregrine is struck by love at the fi rst sight of Emilia Gauntlet, who in “a moment riveted the chains of slavery beyond the power of accident to unbind” (96). At the very end of the novel, when Peregrine is ready to end his peregrinations and settle down, Emilia (who knows about his unfaithfulness to her in spite of their bond) begins a rapprochement by writing to Peregrine with what he calls “the most dignified and heroic sentiments”; these have the desired effect of strengthening “the chains to which she held him enslaved.” They marry and retire to his family estate, their adventures ended (760– 61). The figure of slavery, here sentimentalized as romantic affection, serves as a rhetorical way to “unite the incidents” in the manner of a musical motif. The figure recurs elsewhere in Smollet’s work, as in Roderick Random, whose title character attests of his fi rst meeting with a woman called (unpromisingly) Narcissa that “every word that this dear creature spoke, riveted the chains with which she held me enslaved!”; they, too, eventually marry.53 Smollett’s frequent use of the figure is all the more striking given that real slavery is not an abstract proposition in his works. In one of the many inset narratives in Peregrine Pickle, Peregrine is told the story of the

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(real-life) Annesley case, in which James Annesley, who may have been the heir to the title of Earl of Anglesey, was kidnapped in 1727 at the age of twelve by his uncle “and forcibly dragged on board of a ship bound for Newcastle on Delaware river in America, where he was sold as a slave, and kept to hard labour, much above his age or strength, for the space of thirteen years” (717).54 Here, “slave” refers, not to the African chattel slaves for whom the term became normative later in the eighteenth century, but to men and women caught in indentured servitude, which could befall Europeans as well as Africans and was term-limited rather than perpetual. But the African slave trade and its involvement with insurance law appears as well in Roderick Random. Roderick undertakes to serve as surgeon to a voyage led by his uncle Captain Bowling, carrying slaves from the west coast of Africa to Buenos Aires. En route, the ship encounters what the captain believes to be a French privateer, and the crew initially balks at mounting a defense.55 They have a point: even though, as Captain Bowling attests, “my whole cargo is ensured; so that, in case I should be taken, my loss would not be great,” no such “provision” has been “made by the merchants for those poor souls who are maimed in their service.”56 The crew’s situation, in fact, is almost identical to that posed by Defoe in his Essay upon Projects, where he had called for the creation of insurance funds for sailors to encourage them to take the risk of fighting in behalf of the property of merchants even though they had no prospect of sharing in the profit. Almost a half century later, Defoe’s call had gone unanswered. But the crew of Roderick’s ship agrees to fight, anyway, when the captain rouses them with a call to defend the reputation of “English sailors”: “You, that are jolly boys, stand by me, and give me one broadside for the honour of Old England” (348). In the end, they do not have to fight; the “French” privateer turns out to be an English ship in disguise, one in fact commanded by an old messmate of Bowling’s, so their voyage continues; no fighting need occur and no insurance claims need be fi led. They take on more than four hundred slaves in Africa and successfully sell them in Buenos Aires, except for those who are lost, Roderick says, to “an epidemic fever.” The blitheness with which Roderick talks about the slave trade and the death of so many human beings, and the casualness with which Smollett uses “slave” as a figure of speech reaches a kind of ne plus ultra immediately after this, when Roderick expresses relief at the ship’s “being freed from the disagreeable lading of Negroes” since he himself had become “a miserable slave” to them because of the epidemic among them that he had to help treat (349).57 There is no irony being deployed here (especially since Roderick’s fortune ultimately comes from Bowling’s slave trading). The

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conflation is testimony to the way that Smollett, like most midcentury Britons, had an unproblematic relationship with the African slave trade, used “slave” as a metaphor uncritically, felt no surprise at the thought of insuring a cargo consisting of human beings, and sees charm in the idea of a captain offering jingoistic slogans to overcome his crew’s rational fears of being injured or killed without any form of compensation to themselves or their families. The cases of Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle testify to the degree that the slave trade had not yet become intelligible as a moral issue to most Britons and that African slaves had as yet not problematized the relationship between persons and things. But they soon did so, and it was an insurance case that brought the conflict fully into the public sphere. This was the Zong incident in 1781. The Zong sailed from Africa on a slaving mission, carrying 442 slaves from Accra, in what is now the nation of Ghana, to Jamaica. The ship’s captain was Luke Collingwood, who was (like Smollett) by profession a surgeon; this was his fi rst (and last) command. The ship’s cargo of slaves was insured for eight thousand pounds by a group of underwriters based in Liverpool, which had become the center of the British slave trade. As was the case on many slaving voyages (such as the one Roderick Random undertook), both the crew and the enslaved passengers fell ill with what was probably malaria, yellow fever, dysentery, or some combination of them. The crew (Collingwood was at this point very ill, and it is not clear who was in charge of the ship) made a navigational error, mistaking Jamaica for Saint-Domingue, and the Zong continued into open seas for several days before the mistake was discovered. During that time, the ship’s water supplies ran low, and the crew decided to begin jettisoning some of the slaves overboard. Their reasoning was based on the logic of the insurance contract under which the ship was operating. If the slaves died as a result of natural causes, no claim could be filed. But if they died from being thrown overboard under the premise that only this would preserve enough water to save the remaining crew and the ship’s human cargo, the Zong’s owners would be able to file a claim under the maritime principle known as “general average,” described by John Weskett as an event “in which all concerned in ship, freight, and cargo, are to bear an equal or proportionable part of what was so sacrificed for the common good, and it must be made good by the insurers in such proportions as they have underwrote.”58 It is unclear how thoroughly versed the crew of the Zong were in the intricacies of insurance law, but the evidence of Roderick Random suggests that experienced sailors were aware of the essential tenets of the technology as it applied to the sea, and the Zong crew took action on

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their own. Over the course of several days, the crew jettisoned 133 slaves.59 When the owners fi led a claim, however, the underwriters refused it, and the case went to court; the jury found for the plaintiffs, and the insurers were ordered to redeem the contract. The Zong case would very likely have stayed within the merchant and insurance community, since it continued a long practice— begun no later than fi fteenth-century Barcelona— of classifying slaves as items of property. But it became a scandal once an anonymous correspondent to the Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser published an account on March 18, 1783, of his shock at witnessing the jury hand down its judgment in favor of the Zong’s owners. That letter was read by an Afro-British former merchant seaman, resident in London, who still went by his slave name of Gustavus Vassa. He is better known now as Olaudah Equiano. The very next day, Vassa brought the newspaper account of the Zong massacre to the attention of Granville Sharp, who was well known as an abolitionist eager to fi nd test cases with which to advance the status of Africans caught up in the British slave trade. Sharp, Equiano, and other abolitionists made the Zong case into a cause, a public scandal that demonstrated the inhumanity of the slave system and the laws that supported it. The fact that the slaves aboard the Zong had been insured, given a price as though they were an item of property, became the means for arguing rather for their full humanity in a way that had never been argued in the British public sphere before. Sharp did not succeed in prosecuting the surviving officers of the Zong for murder (Collingwood had died shortly after the ship arrived in Jamaica), but this case of insurance was a catalyst for the abolitionist movement of the 1780s. In that movement, the “bodies of men” that joined in protesting Britain’s involvement in the slave trade found themselves in an uneasily mirroring relationship with the corporate entities that supported it. It is to the abolitionist movement and the corporate structure of both it and the slave trade it opposed that we now turn.

Ch a pter Four

“Bodies of Men”: Abolitionist Writing and the Question of Interest

F

irst issued in 1787, the jasper-ware cameo of a kneeling, manacled African slave obliquely beseeching the viewer to recognize the grounds of their common humanity (fig. 4.1) was the central icon of the fi rst wave of abolitionism, the movement in Britain to end the trade in African people who were captured to endure lives of slavery in the British colonies in the Americas.1 The movement ultimately succeeded when, in March 1807, Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act, ending Britain’s involvement in the African slave trade. The United States ended its involvement in the African slave trade at the start of 1808, but commerce in slaves within the United States lasted until the start of the U.S. Civil War. Originally imagined by Josiah Wedgwood as a seal for impressing the wax used to close envelopes, the emblem was used (as we shall see) much more widely, as local currency and even as a kind of de facto copyright stamp. It was distributed in physical form in both Great Britain and the early United States. Wedgwood sent a shipment to Benjamin Franklin, who was the president of the Philadelphia Society for the Abolition of Slavery; Franklin thanked Wedgwood for “your valuable present of Cameo’s, which I am distributing among my Friends: in whose Countenances I have seen such Marks of being affected by contemplating the Figure of the Suppliant, (which is admirably executed) that I am persuaded it may have an Effect equal to that of the best written Pamphlet in procuring Favour to those oppressed People.”2 Franklin immediately grasped how the emblem took part in what Diedre Lynch has called “the economy of character,” the way in which faces, pages, and coins or other emblems shared common cause in a representational system whereby meaning was conveyed by marks on a surface. 3 Here Franklin makes explicit the association between the power of the emblem, the printed page, and the moral character of the viewer whose 136

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Fig. 4.1. Figure of a manacled African man with legend “Am I Not a Man and a Brother” (1787), studio of Josiah Wedgwood. Photograph © Trustees of the British Museum.

“Marks” testified to the extent that they had been impressed by the Wedgwood emblem’s message, to which Franklin attributes significant power. As a composite of image and text that achieved wide circulation in the service of a political-economic message, the Wedgwood emblem even calls to mind the plan that Joseph Addison, as described in chapter  2, articulated in the Guardian in 1713, to issue medals impressed with the “glorious events” of Queen Anne’s reign as a way of keeping them in the collective consciousness. But the ideological differences are even more striking than the formal similarities, because the Wedgwood’s emblem’s message is far more morally vexed than anything that Addison imagined. Here at least some of the facts of the African slave trade, its dehumanizing assumptions and effects, its racism, its brutal incarceration of human bodies, are brought into intelligibility in a way that was thoroughly displaced or elided in the 1710s when Britain fi rst gained the asiento and began the domination of the African slave trade that the Society for Effecting the

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Abolition of the Slave Trade, which commissioned the Wedgwood emblem, was incorporated to abolish. The Wedgwood emblem is my point of departure in this chapter, where what we might still, following Locke and Addison, think of as the Idea that the emblem put into circulation—the construct of thought and affect that the society wanted it to impress upon its viewers—will help us understand the vexed, complex conjunction of aesthetic and economic logics that the abolitionist campaign called upon and advanced. For whatever else the emblem may have been, it was also understood as a corporate sign, the seal of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which was founded in the spring of 1787 to conduct the abolition campaign that led to the end of the slave trade two decades later. To be sure, the society was not a corporation by the standards of contemporary law, since it had not been formally incorporated by an act of Parliament. And unlike most corporations, which take as their prime goal their perpetuation into an indefi nite futurity, the society was designed to liquidate itself once it had achieved its purpose of ending the slave trade; Thomas Clarkson’s enormous two-volume History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament, fi rst published in 1808, thus might be understood not only as a work of celebration but as a kind of epitaph for the society, one that fully deserves the adjective “monumental” that inevitably comes to mind when you hold it in your hands. But the seal takes the corporate emblem as a referent, and its adoption indicates that the members of the society were attempting to emulate some of the public elements of the eighteenth-century British corporation. As we saw in chapter 3, Blackstone’s chapter 18, entitled “Of Corporations,” in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765), asserts that the “common seal” is an essential rather than an incidental feature of the form: “For a corporation, being an invisible body, cannot manifest it’s [sic] intentions by any personal act or oral discourse; it therefore acts and speaks only by it’s [sic] common seal. For, though the particular members may express their private consents to any act, by words, or signing their names, yet this does not bind the corporation; it is the fi xing of the seal, and that only, which unites the several assents of the individuals who compose the community, and makes one joint assent of the whole.”4 The material object has surprising power, as the collective voice of the institution, a metaphor that the abolitionist emblem presses in the direction of literalization, putting language in the mouth of the African slave on whose behalf the society was acting. Here as elsewhere, the abolitionist campaign of the second half of the

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eighteenth century involved decorums of literary, economic, aesthetic, and legal representation against which we have every right to push back. This campaign was limited, we should recall, to ending the slave trade rather than to abolishing the institution of slavery altogether by emancipating those who were currently in bondage. Members of the society calculated that to push for full emancipation at this point was to risk being denied any hearing at all. Even the society’s emblem, its most widely distributed attempt to put the sufferings of African slaves into public intelligibility and circulation, conforms, as Marcus Wood has claimed, to an understanding of “the black as cultural absentee, the black as blank page for white guilt to inscribe.”5 Wood argues persuasively, “This image with its accompanying aphorism laid down the ground rules for how white abolitionists liked to envision their power over prospective emancipated blacks. Kneeling, supplicant and still enchained, the slave must ask for the right  to possess a gender and a human status.”6 Sentimental, sexist, and racist, the emblem arrives now carrying the mixture of familiarity and contempt that epitomizes the cliché. Founded in the wake of the Somerset decision that established common personhood between Africans and other British subjects, as well as the Zong case, in which (as we saw in chapter 3) the owners of a slave ship whose crew had thrown healthy slaves overboard to conserve water were able to make a successful claim with their insurers, the society emblematized its collective purpose in emulation of the kinds of institutions that had undertaken and underwritten the slave trade itself. The transatlantic slave trade has been a part of the backdrop in each of this book’s chapters to this point, and it is time for it to become an object of attention in its own right. For the slave trade is surely the most significant story, economic or otherwise, of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries in the Atlantic world. It reorganized the populations, economies, epidemiologies, and landscapes of Europe, Africa, and the Americas. By the most recent estimates, about 12.5 million Africans were brought by force to the Americas from the late fi fteenth through the midnineteenth centuries.7 Viewed as a matter of demographics, as the forced translation of humans from one place to another, nothing compares to it in human history. But even now, the scale and scope of the slave trade and the degree to which it continues to shape our world is not fully comprehended by our usual narratives of the colonial expansion of the early modern era. As the historian David Eltis has remarked, given the enormous scale of the transatlantic slave trade, “America was an extension of Africa rather than Europe until late in the nineteenth century.”8 The slave trade did what it was supposed to do, providing a labor force that enabled Euro-

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peans and their colonial surrogates, and then their successors, to build an enormous plantation system that exploited a small number of lucrative staple crops: cotton, tobacco, and sugar. At the center of these movements and histories were organized entities, joint-stock companies, partnerships, and corporations that built and commissioned ships, hired or impressed sailors, undertook trading voyages, and fi nanced and underwrote the entire process. And the slave trade is where the metaphor of the corporation, the figurative body that brings the collective energies and desires of the people undertaking this trade into representation, meets its most profound literalization, since this mode of commerce, foundational to the economy of Anglo-America for centuries, was a trade in human bodies, in African people. Here the monstrosity of the catachrestical relationship between the figure of the corporation and the human body would seem to be inescapable. Yet for much of this period, that trade was almost invisible to most Britons, as it has remained underarticulated in our accounts of the economic or literary history of the period. The abolitionist debate of the 1780s took as its fi rst order of business the goal of bringing the slave trade into full public intelligibility for the fi rst time, and the Wedgwood emblem, the society’s corporate symbol, was its most visible public icon. Perhaps more than any other object, the emblem enabled Britons to see what they otherwise would not have seen, to have the brute reality of slavery, which took place thousands of miles from the British Isles, made present. For one of the fundamental facts that enabled the slave trade, from its inception in the sixteenth century through its corporate maturation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was that it was largely invisible to middle-class people in Britain, its operations happening so far away that virtually no part of it could be seen. As William Wilberforce, the society’s leading parliamentary ally, put it on the floor of the House of Commons, the slave trade had continued only “because some among us, receive the profits, and do not see, the sufferings of their fellow creatures; because the objects, as they actually exist, are not allowed to obtrude upon their vision, and interpose the reality of things between these Gentlemen’s consciences and their calculations.”9 The emblem was an obtrusive yet intimate thing that gave shape to the trade that touched upon almost every aspect of British commercial life. The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was something new to public-sphere debate; while there was a long history of individuals petitioning in behalf of causes or interests, formally constituting a group in this way for the purposes of protest was rare. The Society for Ef-

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fecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade strategically adopted key representational and legal forms of the business corporation that came to it from the previous century. The isomorphism between the society and other kinds of corporate institutions, and the relationship between such institutions and the human bodies at issue in the slave trade, reveals itself in what I take to be Clarkson’s unconscious use of the term “body” or “bodies of men” when he describes all such groups that were organized to work collectively toward a common purpose. In his 1808 History, Clarkson offers a genealogy for his figure of speech. In the fi rst volume, he refers approvingly to the example of the Quakers, who “knew more about the trade and slavery of the Africans, than any other religious body of men, who had not been in the land of their sufferings,” and then calls them a “valuable body of men” whose early expulsion from British islands in the Caribbean had removed a good example of slave owners who had the spiritual interests of their human property at heart.10 More generally, Clarkson—who was the son of an Anglican minister and trained for the ministry himself, although he was never ordained—notes that the early Christians had “carried their charity, as bodies of men, into other kingdoms” (1:11). Many of the fi rst members of the society were Quakers, some of whom had been advocating for abolition for years, and Clarkson recognized the degree to which the society represented the expansion and secularization of their faith-based movement. Yet Clarkson also uses the same term to refer to the “worldly interest” that supported the slave trade, which “was not that of a few individuals, nor of one body, but of many bodies of men . . . the merchant; the planter, the mortgagee; the manufacturer; the politician, the legislator; the cabinet minister” (1:23). And, fi nally, he refers to captured African slaves collectively as “vast bodies of men, who had been robbed of their rights” (2:423). Clarkson is not given to plays on words, so it is hard to read his use of the same figure to refer to Christian sects, people interested in the slave trade, and African slaves themselves as a deliberate pun. Rather, this seems to be the consequence of how corporate entities of all kinds have been collectively imagined, an association of which Clarkson is not consciously aware. But the term points to the corporate shape of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which was innovative, for groups formed for the purpose of advancing a commercial cause were far more familiar than were groups organized to advance social causes. In adopting this emblem as a de facto corporate seal, the society was emulating business corporations like the Royal African Company. But they also found new potential in the “voice” that such seals had always

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implied, creating an intimate way of bringing the reality of the slave trade home. Returning to the metaphor of the body, Clarkson observes that “the Slave-trade may be considered, like the fabulous hydra, to have had a hundred heads, every one of which it was necessary to cut off before it could be subdued” (1:23). To defeat the massive structure of corporate interests that sustained the slave trade, the early abolitionist movement became like them in crucial and surprising ways. This is a body of men that spoke individually but also collectively and confronted what has been a central issue for advocacy movements ever since: how can mere writing act upon and hope to change the world? And how could this body make use of, but also stand apart from, the tools of the “worldly interest” that underwrote the slave trade as it attempted to get the public to take what Clarkson also called an “interest” in the cause of enslaved Africans? These questions inform the matter of this chapter.

THE DEBATE ABOUT THE ABOLITIONIST DEBATE Clarkson was both a central actor in the abolitionist movement of the 1780s and its fi rst historian, author of both An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African (1786, with a revised edition issued in 1788) and the History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament (1808). Clarkson consistently understands and then remembers the abolitionist movement as a question of how to engage the “interest” of the British public. Here, for example, is his account in the fi rst volume of his History, of the society’s meetings at which the Wedgwood emblem was adopted as the group’s seal: On the second and sixteenth of October [1787] two sittings took place; at the latter of which a sub-committee, which had been appointed for the purpose, brought in a design for a seal. An African was seen, (as in the figure,) in chains in a supplicating position, kneeling with one knee upon the ground, and with both his hands lifted up to Heaven and round the seal was observed the following motto, as if he was uttering the words himself—“Am I not a Man and a Brother?” The design having been approved of, a seal was ordered to be engraved from it. I may mention here, that this seal, simple as the design was, was made to contribute largely, as will be shown in its proper place, towards turning the attention of our countrymen to the case of the injured Africans, and of procuring a warm interest in their favour. (1:450–51)

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Clarkson’s History was enormously influential for many decades and established a paradigm by which the abolitionist movement was understood to be a great success, as having almost single-handedly persuaded Parliament to outlaw the slave trade, by having first gotten the public interested in an aspect of the economy to which it had for centuries been almost indifferent. Clarkson’s account of the power of moral suasion was a paradigm that lasted well into the twentieth century, until it was challenged by economic-historical arguments that also centered on the question of interest. The question of what kind of interest was meant by Clarkson and the abolitionists for whom he became the willing representative is the essential point of Eric Williams’s Capitalism & Slavery, fi rst published in 1944.11 Countering what he saw as a post-Clarksonian complacency that moral suasion had done the job of abolition, Williams argued that slavery ended when and because members of the British merchant class realized that it was no longer serving its purpose. They were thus, Williams, argued, following the model par excellence of homo economicus, acting out of rational self-interest rather than moral principle. Williams claimed that the abolition of the slave trade was possible only because it was no longer profitable; now constituting a net drain on Britain’s resources, the slave trade had to be dismantled so that the wage system that powered the industrial revolution could take its place. Abolitionists were, by Williams’s lights, not only accomplishing nothing that would not have happened anyway, but, worse, serving as the unwitting assistants of the industrialists who substituted an urban proletariat for the forced workers on the plantations. Williams’s argument has been widely critiqued, fi rst for overstating the degree to which Britain’s wealth in the eighteenth century derived directly from slavery and the slave trade, for exaggerating the decline of the trade’s profits as the century went on, and then for putting too great a discount on factors other than economics.12 Eltis asserts that “the quantitative underpinnings of Williams’s view are insecure. . . . It now appears that the British slave system was not in permanent decline in the late eighteenth century. . . . The long run economic data testify to the continuing vitality of the British West Indies well into the nineteenth century.”13 But in spite of this, Williams’s basic description of the story has proved to be durable; as Christopher Brown puts it in his recent book Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (2006), “Capitalism and Slavery continued to influence the way investigators framed questions about the antislavery movement, even as the decline thesis fell from favor. How did the choices of the abolitionists reflect the interests of their class?”14 Clarkson’s

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paradigm for understanding the effect of the abolitionist movement comes from the center, the very heart of the society itself; it radiated outward to shape the fi rst century and a half of the collective memory of the abolition project, and it retains its appeal for anyone who wishes to believe in the power of moral suasion. The other paradigm, originating from the position of the colonized, spoke back to the metropolis and still inflects the historical debate. At the heart of both paradigms, however, is the question of interest: what was the nature and the power of the stake that people felt in the continuance or end of the slave trade? Since the late eighteenth century, the concept of “interest” has had economic and affective valences. We can trace the evolution of the concept through two of the major works of the 1770s, the revised edition of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1773) and Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776). Samuel Johnson had not defi ned the word “interest” in his 1755 Dictionary, an omission that we can (inevitably) consider interesting as a symptom of a certain lack of urgency around it, since Johnson did not tend to shy away either from terms of art or from words with multiple meanings and connotations.15 The word was added in the fourth, revised edition of the Dictionary that Johnson issued in 1773. Johnson here offers a fairly rich and nuanced set of meanings, as a verb (“concern; to affect; to give share in. . . . To affect, to move, to touch with passion; to gain the affections: as this is an interesting story”) and as a noun (“1. Concern; advantage; good. . . . 2. Influence over others. . . . 3. Share; part in any thing; participation: as, this is a matter in which we have interest.  .  .  . 4. Regard to private profit.  .  .  . 5. Money paid for use; usury. . . . 6. Any surplus of advantage”).16 Johnson, whose illustrative quotations here are drawn largely from religious writers like Hooker and poets like Pope, Shakespeare, and Dryden, begins with the affective connotations of interest as an emotional stake and moves from there to the more openly economic associations such as “share” and “usury.” It was Adam Smith who, just three years later, conflated the affective and economic senses of the word, located their primary site of agency as the individual self, and then put this at the center of the operations of a modern economy: [M]an has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and shew them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this

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which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.17

Not the least significant thing, then, about Olaudah Equiano’s 1789 autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, is the presence of the word “interesting” in its title. Now without a doubt the most widely read text produced by the first generation of British abolitionists, Equiano’s text, as we will see later, stands at some remove from the society, of which Equiano was never formally a member. But Equiano is very much of his moment in asserting his intention to create “interest” in his readers, to give them a moral and affective stake in his story and, by extension, the story of other Africans who, like him, were forced into servitude in the American colonies. Smith, Johnson, and Equiano help us see that interest is to no small extent a rhetorical issue, a tool for persuasion that depends on the situation of the rhetor, the speaker or teacher who convinces the audience of their stake in his cause. Yet “interest” also functions in eighteenth-century usage as a rhetorical substantive in another sense, the sense invoked by Clarkson’s use of the phrase “worldly interest” to describe the tremendous political and economic power of the forces aligned in support of the slave trade’s continuance and against which abolitionists had to constitute themselves as an equal and opposite entity, an “interest” of their own. That sense of interest, one that Johnson does not record even in his 1773 revision, has an itinerary through religious, partisan, and economic registers, as references to entities like “the Protestant interest” emerge in the mid-1600s and are succeeded by references to the “Tory interest” and the counterbalancing “Whig interest” with the emergence of the party system in the 1680s; then, in the early eighteenth century, references to the “landed interest” and the “monied interest” begin.18 It is this last that is of most interest here, of course, because it quickly became clear even to those writing about the “monied interest” that it had a close relationship to the early modern corporation. Writing in the midst of a parliamentary election in 1710, Charles Davenant worries about the influence that “the Monied Interest  .  .  . of which the Companies, [Davenant is referring explicitly to the Bank of England and the British East India Company] as

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things stand at present, are above a third,” might have on the political process.19 Over the course of the century, the “monied interest” occupied and then transformed and ultimately displaced the state-licensed companies that had formed in the early modern period. Such entities as the Royal African Company, then, that attempted to appeal to the interest of the monarch, of investors, and of people of the British state that licensed it, became powerful speakers of their own in the public sphere. How that company was positioned in the early eighteenth century and, crucially, how it spoke turned out to be a powerful relay point between the slave trade and the abolitionist movement. The genealogical relationship between them complicates both Clarkson’s and Williams’s paradigms, and it is this to which we now turn.

ECONOMICS OF SLAVING COMPANIES It is no surprise that the history of the slave trade is deeply interwoven with the history of the business corporation, and one of the minor premises of each chapter of this book has been to demonstrate that the slave trade was involved in every aspect of the economy of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglo-America, from colonial settlements to state finance to insurance law. But the relationship between the slave trade and the chartered corporation is less straightforward than one might think. As I noted in chapter 1, the most typical form of the early modern English company had the goal of trading with and exploiting the resources of a defi ned geographical place: the Muscovy Company was formed in 1559 to trade with Russia, the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1670 was formed to trade in what is now Canada, the East India Company was chartered in 1600 to trade in and around the Indian subcontinent. On this logic, the Royal African Company was chartered in 1672 with monopoly power over trade on the West African coast.20 This was not a trade in African slaves exclusively; for decades, in fact, the company did a greater business in commodities such as gold, ivory, and pepper than it did in slaves. This fact was reflected in its own corporate seal, which depicted an elephant and a castle, the elephant referring to the ivory, the castle referring to the fortifications and stations that the company held along the west coast of the African continent. A very small version of the logo appeared on the “guineas” that were minted in honor of and with the gold that came from Africa, at least during the time when James Stuart, the company’s patron, was on the throne (see fig. 4.2). But the proportion of the business devoted to traffic in slaves grew in the eighteenth century, and the state-chartered

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Fig. 4.2. A gold “guinea” issued in 1686 during the brief reign of James II. He had been the patron of the Royal African Company since its founding as the Company of Merchant Adventurers in 1660, a fact alluded to by the presence of the company’s elephant-and-castle symbol just beneath his profi le. Photograph © Museum of London.

joint-stock-company model, so dominant and, in its own terms, successful in colonial ventures elsewhere, did not work very well in as a means of exploiting the slave trade. This was illustrated by the case of the South Sea Company, which, as we saw in chapter 2 was incorporated by act of Parliament in 1713 for the purpose of exploiting the asiento, the contract to provide slaves to the Spanish colonies in the Americas that was one of the key concessions that Britain obtained in the Peace of Utrecht. The collapse of the Bubble led then, and has continued to lead, to splendid fl ights of rhetoric about the capacity of fi nance capital to prompt imaginative delusion. There is plenty of truth in those accounts, but in chapter 2 we also noted that that there was a reason why investors would have seen South Sea Company shares as desirable; the slave trade was extremely lucrative, and the cash flow provided by the asiento— a guaranteed contract— should have been enough to enable the South Sea Company to service the debt payments it took on as a condition of its incorporation and to have generous profits as well. The South Sea Company’s failure suggests that there was something problematic with the joint-stock company form in relationship to the slave trade, and the fate of the Royal African Company would seem to prove it. The Royal African Company faced difficulties almost from the outset, as small-scale private merchants, which the company always referred to as “interlopers” or “separate traders,” conducted trade that did not have the authority of the company’s patent to protect it. K. G. Davies, who has written what remains the most useful corporate biography of the Royal

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African Company, fi nds himself unconsciously expressing the full capacity of the metaphorical relationship between the human and the corporate body as he calls the interlopers “a running sore” on the Royal African Company’s business.21 By the 1690s, it had become clear that such interlopers in the slave trade had gained sufficient influence in both the London merchant community and Parliament that they could not be stopped, and the company fell back to trying to regulate them. The company lost its monopoly status in 1698 when merchants from places like Bristol successfully petitioned Parliament to permit groups of merchants to conduct their own slaving voyages legally, turning the former smugglers and interlopers into licensed business operations in their own right. In the wake of the 1688–89 revolution that deposed the Stuart dynasty, the Royal African Company had lost its royal protection and had to accept a diminished role. Quobna Ottobah Cugoano tells the story as efficiently as anyone else in his Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (1787): The Royal African Company (as it is called, ought rather to be reversed as unworthy of the name) was incorporated 14th Charles II, and impowered to trade from Salle in South Barbary to the Cape of Good Hope, and to erect forts and factories on the western coast of Africa for that purpose. But this trade was laid open by an act of parliament, Anno 1697 [sic], and every private merchant permitted to trade thither, upon paying the sum of ten pounds [actually ten percent of its profits] towards maintaining the forts and garrisons. This Company, for securing their commerce, erected several factories on the coast.22

For the fi rst part of the eighteenth century, the Royal African Company was to a great degree a rent-seeker, since a large part of its income was derived from licensing fees. Although it still conducted its own trading operations and voyages, its main responsibility consisted of maintaining and supplying the factories along the West Africa coastline that were visited by the independent slaving vessels. This proved impossible to sustain; the company steadily lost money, found itself deeply in debt that the government had to restructure, and got out of the slave trade altogether in favor of concentrating on gold, ivory, and other rare commodities. But nothing worked. The Royal African Company was dissolved entirely in 1752.23 Its successor, the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, was organized as what was called a “regulated company”; it was responsible largely for maintaining the British forts along the Gold Coast, what is now the nation of Ghana, which would now be open to the use of any British trader. This

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company was not expected or permitted to carry on any commercial business of its own. The interlopers had displaced the joint-stock monopoly for good. Many other European countries also discovered in the course of the eighteenth century that the joint-stock form was less successful in the African slave trade than it had been in other kinds of commercial venture. According to John Hippisley, the governor of what was perhaps Britain’s most important trading base in Africa, the large fortification located at Cape Coast in present-day Ghana, the folding of the Royal African Company was evidence for the “long exploded and desecrated project of a Joint Stock Company; a project which is equally to be rejected, whether we consider it in theory, or appeal to experience.”24 Clarkson observed in 1788 that “the great African company, which was vested with extraordinary powers, and which had every opportunity of feeling the emoluments of the trade, failed twice.”25 For his part, Adam Smith noted in The Wealth of Nations that even “before the erection of the Royal African Company, there had been three other joint-stock companies successively established, one after another, for the African trade. They were all equally unsuccessful.”26 The joint-stock model of slave trading had failed well before the abolition campaign began. Why was this? Economic historians have achieved no consensus position, and it is fair to say that part of the reason is that the Royal African Company has been neglected as an object of research and inquiry. This is especially true compared to, say, the British East India Company, which endured into the nineteenth century and has been the subject of many scholarly and popular studies. The last book-length study on the Royal African Company, the aforementioned book by Davies, dates to 1957. Since then, economic historians have offered a number of explanations for why the Royal African Company failed: the enormous expense of maintaining the forts and stations; the “agency problem” of managing large numbers of bureaucrats whose interests might diverge from that of the company, and of doing so at a great distance; the related problem that the company’s own captains undermined its business by smuggling on the side; the inability or unwillingness of the state (in large part in the form of the Royal Navy) to support and enforce the company’s monopoly rights against domestic interlopers; and the fact that the great profitability of the slave trade brought so many competitors into the business that it was impossible to maintain any kind of monopoly. The fullest recent explanation for the Royal African Company’s decline, offered by economic historians Ann M. Carlos and Jamie Brown Kruse, traces it to erosion of the sovereign “prop-

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erty right” in its patent because of interlopers emboldened by the fall of the company’s patron James Stuart in 1688: “One could perhaps argue that the decline of the Royal African Company was the result of the historical accident of the rise of the House of Orange.”27 Turning this kind of argument on its head, William Pettigrew has recently argued that, rather than trying to lament the Royal African Company’s failure, we might rather admire the great political savvy of the “separate traders,” the interlopers who nimbly played the game of parliamentary lobbying and ideological positioning, successfully casting themselves as the true representatives of “English national liberty.” The deep irony that Pettigrew articulates is that the “interlopers” or “separate traders” helped provide the rhetoric of freedom that made the right to trade in African slaves a marker of the exercise of individual liberty: “The assertion of individual freedoms gave rise to a politics of interest that equated the pursuit of self-advancement with the economic development of the nation.”28 Pettigrew sees in the political wrangling over who had the right to the slave trade, the Royal African Company or its opponents, a microcosm of the process by which African slavery became not an incidental but an essential component of the ideology of Anglo-American freedom. It is worth pausing a moment, however, to consider where these particular exercises of sympathetic imagination for the positions of eighteenthcentury merchants lead us. For is it not more than a little perverse to be praising the skills of the separate traders or, even more so, hypothesizing how the Royal African Company might have succeeded? Is there not something astonishingly tone-deaf in starting an article about the Royal African Company’s decline (as Carlos and Kruse do) by celebrating how it “occupied the enviable position of being a legal monopoly in an expanding and profitable industry,” when that industry is the commerce in human beings?29 To imagine this is to come close to being a kind of management consultant across the centuries, a time-traveling representative of McKinsey and Company looking for the formula for turning around a failing business. It seems more to the point here to suggest that the comparative failure of the joint-stock corporate model in this case was a measure of the form’s limits and a marker of a historical shift away from it. The Royal African Company’s failure serves as a leading indicator and symptom of the joint-stock form’s obsolescence, the coming emergence of corporations that were both more independent of the state and more coherently focused on a single, well-defi ned objective rather than being projected onto large geographical expanses. In a history of the business corporation, the Royal African Company might be used to mark a transition from the dominance

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of one kind of corporate model to another. And we might at the same time see the fitful attempts of economic historians to solve the Royal African Company’s problems for them as marking the limits of the discourse of economics, its assumptions about the integrity of abstract property rights, and above all, its reduction of everything to the logic of the marketplace, where human beings, once given a price, become like anything else, a commodity. The waning of the Royal African Company’s importance to the slave trade did nothing to end or even to slow the slave trade. In Britain, the company’s decline decentralized the trade away from London and toward places like Liverpool and Bristol, where the slave trade was largely conducted by small partnerships and interlocked groups of bankers, shipowners, and underwriters who organized themselves in slightly different ways for specific ventures. Such groups were often aligned with family interests, as in the case of the Gregson family of Liverpool or, in the American colonies, the brothers John, Moses, and Nicholas Brown of Providence, Rhode Island. The Brown family—part of whose fortune went to endow Brown University—is particularly interesting because of the way it split in the 1770s, with John remaining active in the slave trade while his brother Moses converted to Quakerism and became an abolitionist, helping to found the Providence Society for Abolishing the Slave Trade, a group clearly modeled on the London society, in 1789. Moses may have help draft its founding document, called a “Constitution” in emulation of the U.S. Constitution of 1787. 30 For a while in early 1789, John and Moses found themselves arguing with each other over the slave trade without even knowing it, in the pages of the Providence Gazette; because they were using print avatars of “the Citizen” and “the Monitor,” the Brown brothers did not at fi rst realize that they were publicly taking opposing sides. 31 The slave trade was conducted over great distances, but by the middle of the eighteenth century, it was also done on a very intimate, personal scale, run by interwoven groups of merchants, insurers, and mariners who aligned their interests for discrete but reiterated undertakings.

CORPORATE PROPAGANDA AND THE EMERGENCE OF ABOLITIONIST WRITING The failure of the Royal African Company in the early 1750s had implications that went beyond the question of how the slave trade would be conducted. It also led to a change in the way slavery could be talked about in the print media. It may only be a coincidence that a full-fledged debate

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about the propriety of the slave trade did not emerge in print in AngloAmerican culture until after the failure of the Royal African Company at midcentury. But it is quite possible that the fact that until around then the slave trade was at least nominally supervised by a joint-stock company based in London, the home of government and the center of the print media, created obstacles for arguments against the trade to reach readers. This need not be so much a matter of suppression as a matter of the shared norms and assumptions that had taken hold in the metropolis. Many of the fi rst writers against the slave trade came from the provinces; as we shall see shortly, a key antislavery writer from which the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade took inspiration was Anthony Benezet, a Quaker who lived in Philadelphia. Benezet’s arguments were often indebted to the writings of the Royal African Company’s London propagandists. More generally, the abolitionist campaign came to partake of some of the same intimacy as was becoming the normative shape of the slave trade itself, as the abolitionist emblem demonstrated. One important effect of the decline of the Royal African Company at midcentury, then, was the loss of a propaganda engine in the London print media that was able to advance arguments on behalf of the company and  the trade it conducted. Early in the century, Daniel Defoe had defended the company’s interests against the “separate traders” at a moment when the company’s debts were exceeding its ability to service them, in large part, Defoe argues, because of the separate traders’ invasions on the absolute “Right of Property” in the trade held by the company as a publicly licensed entity. This, not malaria, is what Defoe diagnoses as one of the “Diseases of the African Trade” that weakened the corporate body. 32 By midcentury, the company’s chief propagandist was Malachy Postlethwayt. Postlethwayt is best remembered now in association with the multivolume Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (1751–57), his translation and adaptation to British needs and interests of Jacques Savary des Brûlons’s French encyclopedia of commerce of the 1720s, but much of his work was (like much of Defoe’s) written on behalf of political paymasters. In the 1730s, Postlethwayt was a propagandist in the service of Sir Robert Walpole, but following Walpole’s fall in 1742, Postlethwayt moved in 1743 to the employ of the Royal African Company. From then until the disbandment of the company in 1752, Postlethwayt’s main output consisted of essays on the company’s behalf, such as The African Trade, the Great Pillar and Support of the British Plantation Trade in America (1745), The Natural and Private Advantages of the African Trade Considered (1746), and Considerations on the Revival of the Royal British Assiento (1749), the

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last of which suggests a merger of the South Sea and Royal African companies to try to regain the asiento from Spain. In retrospect, we can see Postlethwayt’s tracts as last-ditch efforts to sway public and parliamentary opinion in favor of the Royal African Company, efforts that were doomed to failure, given not only the company’s poor management but also the growing obsolescence of this particular kind of joint-stock corporation. Postlethwayt, however, argues not only in behalf of the Royal African Company, but on the advantages of the joint-stock form in being able to dominate the slave trade: “As so very considerable a Part of our Commerce absolutely depends on the Well-Being of this Company, can he be any Friend to his Country, who will oppose Justice being done to so national a Corporation?”33 Postlethwayt sees the evidence for the importance of the corporate form in the eagerness of other countries, such as France and the Netherlands, to vest their slave-trading operations in a state-licensed company and aggressively to discourage private merchants from encroaching on it. Postlethwayt has often been called a “mercantilist” for his advocacy of the national interests of Britain, but it would be more accurate (and not only because of the imprecision and anachronism of the term “mercantilism,” as outlined in chapter 1) to think of his writings on the African trade as corporatist, as advocating for the interests of a single, state-supported company as the best form to sustain a profitable business. When the Royal African Company was disbanded in 1752, there was no entity left to take up the role of a propagandist on behalf of the corporate interest in the slave trade. Postlethwayt turned to other things, and, in his Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, began to express reservations about the damage that the slave trade had done to Africa, a continent that, he says, was a “captive” that “produced its treasures, merely for the use and benefit of the rest of the world, and not at all for its own.” It is not as though Postlethwayt was renouncing his earlier positions; in his book Britain’s Commercial Interest Explained and Improved, he continues to argue that Britain should support “a great and powerful company” to conduct its trade with Africa, or it will lose out to the French. 34 But he is stating what there was no point in doing when he was writing in behalf of the Royal African Company, namely that if Europeans wished fully to exploit the resources of western Africa, they had to imagine how to involve the interests of African people as well and help construct bilateral trading relationships that would be mutually beneficial. By the time of the publication of the Universal Dictionary, there was no Royal African Company left to defend. But Postlethwayt’s argument that the key to British success

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in Africa demanded an alignment of Britain’s interest with the interests of Africa became central to abolitionist writing in the following decades, as they turned the economic logic of colonialization on its head to argue not for but against the slave trade. As noted above, the key figure here is Anthony Benezet, who began writing against the slave trade in the late 1750s. He published Observations on the Inslaving, Importing, and Purchasing of Negroes in 1759, A Short Account of that Part of Africa, Inhabited by the Negroes in 1762, A Caution and a Warning to Great Britain and her Colonies in 1766, and Some Historical Account of Guinea, its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of its Inhabitants. With an Inquiry into the Rise and Progress of the Slave Trade, its Nature, and Lamentable Effects in 1772; all were published in Philadelphia fi rst, and several were reprinted in London.35 Benezet was influential on both sides of the Atlantic, even though he died in 1784, before the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was established and the parliamentary abolitionist campaign began in earnest. Clarkson cited him in 1786 as the “pious Benezet” who had not only spoken out against the slave trade but had also “kept a free school at Philadelphia for the education of black people,” combining practice with theory. 36 But although Benezet is identified, then and now, as the author of all of his works, there is a real sense in which they were collective productions from the start. For Benezet’s works are typically pastiches of other texts: travelogues, works of geography, economic tracts, epistles issued by Quaker annual meetings. Many of these he acknowledges openly and identifies by name. For example, in his fi rst book, a short pamphlet entitled Observations on the Inslaving, Importing, and Purchasing of Negroes (1759), Benezet transcribes passages from A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea by William Boseman, a factor for the Dutch African Company, from a 1732 account by “John Barbot, Agent General of the French Royal African Company,” and Joseph Randall’s 1744 System of Geography, among others. Benezet continued to draw on these works and others in his later writings. Observations ends by printing excerpts from the epistle issued following the 1758 annual meeting in Philadelphia of the Society of Friends, an epistle that called explicitly for the fi rst time for Quakers “to keep their Hands clear of this unrighteous Gain of Oppression.”37 It is also clear, however, as readers like Brycchan Carey, Christopher Leslie Brown, David L. Crosby, and David Brion Davis have noted, that Benezet does not acknowledge all of his sources and that he paraphrases or

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even includes sections of other texts wholesale without referring to them explicitly. The fi rst ten lines of the second edition of Benezet’s Observations are, as Carey points out, identical to the first ten lines of his fellow Philadelphia Quaker John Woolman’s 1754 pamphlet Some considerations on the keeping of Negroes. Carey observes that “this was not a cynical act of plagiarism but a gesture of solidarity and an acknowledgement on Benezet’s part that he was entering into a long-standing debate” among Quakers about the morality of their participation in the slave trade.38 This is surely true, but Benezet read widely in other debates as well, and he incorporated into his essays arguments from other kinds of texts that extended their imaginations to Africa, texts that envisioned a thriving culture and landscape that might be brought into commerce with Europeans and their colonial descendants. Among these texts are, in fact, sections of Postlethwayt’s Universal Dictionary and of Britain’s Commercial Interest, Explained and Improved, both of which Benezet drew on for Some Historical Account of Guinea, where he describes the fertility of Africa and the benefits of helping its inhabitants become Christian farmers and merchants like Europeans in terms that, Brown argues, “owe an unacknowledged debt to the work of Postlethwayt, the erstwhile propagandist for the Royal Africa Company.”39 It may be that Benezet knew this and did not want to seem to be using the work of a known company flack, or it may be that he considered the material that he was deriving from Postlethwayt’s books to be information rather than opinion, much less propaganda, and therefore common property that could be rendered as common knowledge. But whatever is the case, Benezet’s arguments track Postlethwayt’s assertion that Britain can serve its own “commercial interest” by encouraging Africans to trade more broadly, exploiting their resources of raw materials and underfarmed soil rather than their human resources. As Benezet puts it, Africa has about ten thousand miles of sea coast, and extends in depth near three thousand miles from east to west, and as much from north to south, stored with vast treasures of materials, necessary for the trade and manufactures of Great-Britain; and from its climate, and the fruitfulness of its soil, capable, under proper management, of producing in the greatest plenty, most of the commodities which are imported into Europe from those parts of America subject to the English government; and as, in return, they would take our manufactures, the advantages of this trade would soon become so great, that it is evident this subject merits the regard and attention of the government.40

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That Benezet’s source Postlethwayt was very possibly cribbing other works for parts of his own texts without acknowledgment, and then that Olaudah Equiano later drew upon Benezet’s works in the Interesting Narrative complicates the question of original “authorship” a great deal.41 The mise en abyme into which any quest for an authoritative source leads us here might be read as testimony of the way in which what Foucault terms the “author function” had advanced in the course of the previous 110 years. Whereas no one in the 1670s seems to have worried that the Fundamental Constitutions of the Carolina Company lacked a sole public author (unlike modern writers, who, as we saw in chapter 1, are eager to assign authorship of the work either to a combination of Lord Ashley and John Locke or, even better, to Locke alone), it was expected by the middle of the eighteenth century that a work be known to be the product of a single author.42 Benezet’s books are, as Vincent Carretta aptly puts it, “digests” of works by others, carefully selected, edited, and reworked by him, with passages of his own prose serving to give the text shape and direction, but they are in a sense works of collective authorship that were, after his death, enlisted in the project headed by the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade.43 The works published under the name “Malachy Postlethwayt” were often corporate propaganda written on behalf of the Royal African Company; the works published under the name “Anthony Benezet” were also corporate publications, in the small-c sense that they comprise a collectivity of voices.

QUAKER ABOLITIONISTS, QUAKER WRITING Another way to consider Benezet’s works, however, is in the context not only of Quaker thought, but of Quaker writing and publication practices, which had long been collective, written to express the voice of a group rather than an individual. As I have noted, Benezet silently uses text verbatim from John Woolman’s Some considerations on the keeping of Negroes and also openly in his fi rst book, Observations on the Inslaving, Importing, and Purchasing of Negroes, includes an excerpt from the epistle sent by the Philadelphia Society of Friends in 1758 urging fellow Quakers to avoid the slave trade. There is no author named for this epistle, and this was typical of Quaker practice, which to this day often entails publishing texts like these with a collective voice. Quaker meetings still sometimes issue annual epistles to the Society of Friends at large, statements that have the authority of a group, rather than being the work of any individual member of the meeting. Examples of such epistles from the eighteenth

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century form, among other things, a valuable archive of information about the gradual development of abolitionist sentiment among Quaker congregations. As early as 1696, the Philadelphia meeting asked Quakers “not to Encourage the bringing in any more Negroes.”44 In the key year of 1713, when Britain gained the asiento, the epistle of the London Yearly Meeting “censured” the slave trade; it did so again in 1727. In 1758, as we have seen, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting held that the slave trade was “in direct Violation of the Gospel Rule”; in 1761, the London Meeting followed suit, banning Quakers from being involved in the slave trade altogether, under punishment of being “disown[ed]” from the congregation altogether.45 Quaker congregations in larger cities often sent out epistles of advice to more provincial congregations, sometimes in manuscript form, with particularly important ones reaching print. Benezet himself is quite possibly the primary author of the Epistle of caution and advice, concerning the buying and keeping of slaves (1755), a printed essay of advice from the Philadelphia meeting to other Quakers in the Delaware River valley, but, as Carey observes, there was a committee of fourteen appointed to advise on and review it, so that “the document cannot, therefore, be read as the work of a single author.”46 For Benezet, all of these instances of collective writings from within his own community served as powerful examples for how a text could unify multiple voices into one. Quakers such as Benezet were in the vanguard of the abolitionist movement, advocating for the end of the slave trade and even for the full emancipation of African slaves well before the general public took notice, and there is a real sense in which the multidenominational and multiracial abolitionist movement that developed and came to public prominence in the mid-1780s simply redeployed arguments that had originated in Quaker debates and texts. Yet it is not only the case that the abolitionist movement owed a great deal to Quaker principles; it also came to owe a considerable debt to the sense of a collective that was something other than the court or the state articulating a common position in writing. It is for this reason worth thinking of abolitionist writing as a coordinated group project. Starting in 1784, and continuing for several years, the print market in London was flooded with abolitionist literature; almost all of the key texts that we now read from this period about the slave trade and British efforts to end it were published in this fairly brief period. James Ramsay’s An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies appeared in 1784, and between then and his death in July 1789, Ramsay went on to publish no fewer than seven books or pamphlets in support of the abolitionist cause, many of which reached

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second editions and were republished elsewhere. We have already seen that Clarkson’s An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African, probably the most important prose tract of the movement, came out in 1786, with a second, revised edition issued in 1788. Clarkson followed that up with a pamphlet entitled A Summary View of the Slave Trade and of the Probable Consequences of Its Abolition in 1787 and An Essay on the Impolicy of the African Slave Trade, a pamphlet focused on the economic benefits for Britain of colonizing West Africa, in 1788. Granville Sharp’s A Short Sketch of Temporary Regulations (until better shall be proposed) for the Intended Settlement on the Grain Coast of Africa, near Sierra Leona, came out in 1786, with new editions in 1787 and 1788. Quobna Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evils of Slavery, the fi rst abolitionist text written by an Afro-Briton, came out in 1787; a revised and shortened version appeared in 1791. Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, was published in May 1789. Alexander Falconbridge, a surgeon who had been on four slaving journeys in the 1780s but joined the abolitionist cause, published An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa in 1788. The anonymous author “Africanus” published Remarks on the Slave Trade, and the Slavery of the Negroes in 1788. John Newton, who also had served on slave ships, even as captain, before becoming an Anglican priest and the composer of hymns including “Amazing Grace,” published his abolitionist pamphlet Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade in 1788. Newton’s friend, neighbor, and collaborator William Cowper—they had worked closely together on the collection known as the Olney Hymns, in which “Amazing Grace” fi rst appeared in 1779—wrote “The Negro’s Complaint,” a poem that was published in pamphlet form (under another name, as we shall see), in 1788 and then again on April 2, 1789, in a London newspaper. Hannah More’s “Slavery, A Poem” appeared in 1788. And not only is this far from an exhaustive list, but with the exception of Cowper’s poem, it takes no account of the many contributions to periodicals and newspapers. In a period of around half a decade, there appeared more abolitionist writing—indeed probably more work addressed to the topic of the African slave trade from any perspective—than had appeared in the entire century before. Many of these works were printed and sold by the London bookseller James Phillips, a Quaker who had already established himself as a publisher of religious tracts. A good number of these works also featured an engraving of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade’s emblem in their front matter, such as on the title page of Peter Peckard’s

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1788 pamphlet Am I Not a Man? And a Brother?, a text obviously designed in concert with the society’s other efforts (see fig. 4.3). Here the abolitionist emblem functions as a sign of the work’s affiliation with the society’s goals, a corporate logo that established the “authorship” of this essay as being effectively more comprehensive than either Peckard or Falconbridge alone, that the society itself was responsible for its claims and arguments. Indeed, there is evidence that, like the emblem of the historical Cato that Jacob Tonson affixed to title pages of Addison’s play, the abolitionist em-

Fig. 4.3. Title page of Peter Peckard, Am I Not a Man? And a Brother? with the abolitionist emblem (1788). Moved by accounts of the Zong incident, in 1785 Peckard set the topic for the annual prize essay at Cambridge, “Is it lawful to enslave the unconsenting?” Thomas Clarkson won with the fi rst version of the Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. Photograph © The British Library Board.

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blem served as a copyright notice, as the sign that the society was itself the copyright holder of the work to which it was affixed. Like the others writing in the movement, Falconbridge and Peckard put their own experiences and beliefs forward as support for their testimony against the trade, but, also like others, they joined in a larger corporate project of collective advocacy to engage the reading public in supporting the abolitionist cause. As if to bring the notion of corporate authorship full circle, Phillips reis-

Fig. 4.4. Title page of Anthony Benezet, Some Historical Account of Guinea, second edition (1788). Benezet’s book, fi rst published in 1767, was here republished after his death in 1784 in order to support the abolitionist movement. The abolitionist emblem indicates that this edition was authorized by the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Photograph © The British Library Board.

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sued Benezet’s Some Historical Account of Guinea posthumously in 1788, with the abolitionist emblem on the title page to signify that the society had now enlisted it as part of its own corporate project (see fig. 4.4). What I have been tracing is a line that consists of ideas about Britain’s relationship to Africa and the slave trade and a mode of arguing them, a line that runs from the Royal African Company to the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which in effect turned the Royal African Company’s arguments on their head while adopting features of its corporate form. The society found itself rearticulating Postlethwayt’s arguments that Britain’s interests were best served by helping Africans discover that their own self-interest lay in commerce, while also adopting a collective voice modeled on that of Quaker writings. The emblem condenses these relationships, expressing the society’s humanitarian message, denoting its corporate rhetorical products, and alluding silently to its genealogy in the iconography of corporations like the Royal African Company and the Hand-in-Hand insurance company, as well of coins such as the guinea, with which it shares reproducibility, an expectation of being widely circulated, and a subject depicted in profile. But the emblem, and the works that it authorized, also of course contain an aesthetic dimension that exceeds that genealogy. I want to pause briefly here to consider the abolitionist emblem in the context of other contemporary kinds of image-text composites to assess it as an aesthetic object in its own right, before reinserting it into the contemporary abolitionist discourse’s protocols of representation. The most relevant proximate aesthetic object to the emblem is the miniature portrait painting, a genre that was particularly prominent and popular in bourgeois culture at the moment when the abolitionist was also ascendant.

THE ABOLITIONIST EMBLEM AS AESTHETIC OBJECT When Clarkson tells the story in his History in 1808 of how the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade commissioned Wedgwood to make the abolitionist emblem, he notes that he would have more to say about how it was received, and what effect it had on the British public, “in its proper place” (1:451). It comes as a bit of surprise, then, to discover that the “place” that Clarkson fi nds is proper to this discussion is deep in the second volume of his enormous work, a point too late for the emblem to be construable as a significant causal factor in the success of the abolitionist movement. As he remembers it, the emblem had its primary circulation as an item of fashion:

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Mr. Wedgwood made a liberal donation of these, when fi nished, among his friends. I received from him no less than five hundred of them myself. They, to whom they were sent, did not lay them up in their cabinets, but gave them away likewise. They were soon, like The Negro’s Complaint, in different parts of the kingdom. Some had them inlaid in gold on the lid of their snuff-boxes. Of the ladies, several wore them in bracelets, and others had them fitted up in an ornamental manner as pins for their hair. At length, the taste for wearing them became general; and thus fashion, which usually confi nes itself to worthless things, was seen for once in the honourable office of promoting the cause of justice, humanity, and freedom. (2:192)

“For once”—the emblem stands as a nearly singular example of an aesthetic object that accrued value in the moral economy. But this is also an object that, viewed from the safe harbor of 1808, when the abolitionist’s movement objective of outlawing the slave trade in Britain had been accomplished, seems in the fi rst instance more an item of “taste” than of persuasion. The placement of this description, deep in the second volume of Clarkson’s comprehensive account of how the abolition movement succeeded, underscores how marginal he wishes to make the emblem, as if he is embarrassed that its popularity runs the risk of trivializing the cause. I say nearly singular because Clarkson notes that one other frequently reproduced item rivaled its circulation: William Cowper’s 1788 poem “The Negro’s Complaint.” Poem and emblem here defi ne a species of artifact unto itself: mass objects noted mostly for the broadness of their circulation and their surprising and unusual efficacy. Here the medal in particular has taken on an artistic dimension, becoming an object of fashion and a sign of good taste as well as an expression of a person’s affinity with the abolitionist movement. To ponder the medal’s status as an aesthetic object, we need to think more concretely, fi rst, about the aesthetics and the history of the miniature painting, which was a more significant form of art in the eighteenth century than it is now. And then we need also to think about the thematics of voice that the abolitionist emblem shares with the poem remembered here and since as “The Negro’s Complaint.” As a form, the miniature has been undertheorized; as Marcia Pointon put it, in one of the few essays that have attempted to conceptualize the aesthetics of the miniature, miniatures “occupy an uncertain place in art historical studies.”47 Miniature paintings, in particular portraits, were very much in vogue in eighteenth-century Britain, an extremely popular consumer item for the middle class. Much cheaper than a full-length por-

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trait, a miniature represented an affordable luxury; this was perhaps the fi rst time it was possible for many to own portraits of their loved ones. What is more, unlike a full-size portrait, the miniature not only could be displayed on a wall; it could be carried anywhere, worn as a pendant like a watch, set as the centerpiece of a necklace, brooch, or bracelet, used as decoration on clothing or in hair, or set in a snuffbox to be kept in a pocket until brought out for use. Miniatures were deeply intimate yet also highly public items, individualized portraits (either painted in watercolor or done as silhouettes) that could and often were carried close to the body. They were thus both a reminder of the affective ties between the bearer and the person depicted and an advertisement of that relationship to others, what Steven J. Gores calls “part of the theatrical apparatus of the eighteenth-century presentation of self.”48 The cameo emblem that the Wedgwood studio designed and that the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade disseminated was not personalized in the same way; it was an item of mass rather than individual production. Still, given the widespread distribution of miniatures in the period among the very same middle-class population that the society aimed to influence by disseminating propaganda in print, it seems valid to see the miniature as a reference point against which the kind of character portrayed by the abolitionist emblem was designed to project. And looking at English miniatures of the 1780s gains momentum when we realize that the leading miniaturist of the period had a connection of his own with the abolitionist debate. In the 1780s Richard Cosway was the most fashionable miniaturist in London; he was named the official painter to the Prince of Wales in 1785. He was also the master of Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, who I believe to be the black servant depicted in Cosway’s whimsical sketch of himself and his wife Maria dressed in costume and seated in a garden (fig. 4.5).49 Cosway was fashionable in part because he was so productive; he claimed to paint up to twelve or thirteen sitters a day, and part of his reputation is based simply on the fact that there are so many examples of his work.50 But that is true of Thomas Kinkade as well, and it does not take much effort to see that Cosway was a far more skilled and subtle craftsman than the average painter we associate with popular kitsch; Cosway had a talent for detailed brush stroking and striking use of color. Cosway worked mostly on ivory, a product associated with the African trade, one of the most important products other than slaves that British merchants sought to acquire. As we have seen, the seal of the Royal African Company depicted an elephant in reference to ivory. It was a surface that Cosway used to great effect, allowing the ivory background to show

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Fig. 4.5. Richard Cosway’s 1784 sketch of himself and his wife Maria in a garden, probably with their household servant Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, who also went by the name James Stuart and was the author of Thoughts and Sentiments of the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787). Courtesy of the Whitworth Gallery, University of Manchester.

through in places, to become part of the image itself. Against the ovalshaped ivory background, Cosway frequently painted a light blue background, using a color known as Antwerp blue, suggesting the subject’s placement in an outdoor setting. Against that background of ivory and blue, Cosway’s miniature portraits typically depict a single subject from the chest up, looking directly at the viewer. Cosway was noted for the fi neness of his brushstrokes and the lightness with which his paint was applied; as George Williamson, his early-twentieth-century biographer, puts it: “The special feature that distinguishes Cosway’s miniatures from those of his contemporaries and rivals is not easily expressed in words. It consists in the fact that the portrait is so lightly laid upon the ivory as to appear almost as though it had been blown into position, and was an aerial thing of graceful lightness, that, like a bit of gossamer, had rested upon the ivory and become fi xed there.”51 Cosway’s images are delicate and flattering to their subjects, whose faces are always smoothed of imperfection. For Pointon, such idealization is to be expected, given the role of the minia-

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ture in society: “These portrait-objects . . . are less imitations of the real world than tactile artifacts to be held, viewed, and shown”52 They are, in that sense, she argues, toys in a social game in which people define and display themselves as affective beings, capable of emotional attachment to the absent other who is either depicted on the miniature or who is gazing upon it. In the 1780s, no artist was more in demand to enable Britons in this performance than Richard Cosway. The abolitionist emblem differs from the typical miniature, by Cosway or other artists of the period, in many ways, of course. It is made of colored jasper-ware rather than painted, and has only two colors, the creamy background (which resembles the ivory with which Cosway in particular was associated) and the dark black used to signify the brown skin of the African man. The subject is depicted in profi le, turned away from the spectator, and his full body is on display. There is text, the famous words “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” that, the viewer is meant to assume, are spoken by the manacled slave. Whereas Cosway’s subjects seemed to float ethereally in space above the ivory background, the slave is resolutely earthbound, visually pulled both toward the bottom of the image and the background that holds it. And, unlike the subject of a miniature, the slave depicted here is expressly not someone who would be known to the possessor or viewer of the emblem; he is a representative figure, a projection of an ideal African man and slave rather than a particular individual. Yet Clarkson’s memory of how the emblem was embraced as an item of fashion by middle-class supporters of the movement suggests that the medal was received in ways not unlike that of a miniature portrait. It is worth noting that even such apparent vehicles of individualization as a portrait by Cosway might seem to be heavily stylized to the point of a stereotype. Cosway’s portraits look very similar to one another; many have virtually the same slender, elongated nose, for example. Idealization was no bar to treating such an object intimately, to viewing its subject as a person to whom one had affective ties. Like the miniature portrait, the Wedgwood emblem had the effect of bringing an absent person— an African man who was far outside the frame of reference of the middleclass people who were the emblem’s intended viewership—into representation. And, like the miniature portrait, it enabled the owner to display his own capacity for feeling. The beseeching words “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?,” which, as we shall see, also point to some of the central legal issues of the day, work in the fi rst instance to appeal to the most intimate space of all, the nuclear family. To invoke a common brotherhood is to situate the emblem in the

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context of the familial relationships that also motivated people to sit for, to own, and to display miniatures of their loved ones who were, ideally, absent—what is the point of looking at or displaying an image if the original is right there? In its motto as well as in its image, the Wedgwood emblem was issued in the context of a boom in miniature-portrait painting that helped create the conditions for its immediate dissemination and enthusiastic reception. The same context also surely informs the famous frontispiece placed at the beginning of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (fig. 4.6). Equiano’s famous work takes its own approach toward collective textual production, one informed by the culture of corporate writing, publication, and aesthetics that I have been describing in this chapter. We have already

Fig. 4.6. Frontispiece of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789). Photograph: Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.

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seen that, like Benezet and his fellow Quaker writers, Equiano freely drew upon other works without explicit acknowledgment, a fact that in our time has led to considerable debate over the authenticity of Equiano’s account, in particular the degree to which it represents the truth of his own experience. Has Equiano appropriated the experiences of others to create a work of fiction in the sense that its protagonist—the “Olaudah Equiano” whose life the reader traces in the book—is in effect a composite character, bringing together the stories of other Africans as well as the historical Equiano himself?53 At this remove, we cannot be certain one way or the other, but the precedent of Benezet and other Quaker writers, as we saw earlier, makes it clear that Equiano had very proximate models to draw upon for crafting a singular authorial voice that assimilated several different voices into one. This is but one way in which the Interesting Narrative stands in a relationship of affiliation with and also distinction from the abolitionist writings produced on behalf of the society in the previous three years. Unlike most of these works, Equiano’s book was not published by James Phillips; Equiano published the book by subscription, supervised its printing, and retained the copyright himself; he did not even include Phillips among the eleven London booksellers listed on the title page of the fi rst edition as carrying his book in their shops. His book did not therefore carry the society’s emblem in its front matter. Why Equiano did not publish with Phillips is not known, but Cugoano had also self-published his Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery in 1787, so perhaps Equiano was consciously following that precedent; or perhaps it seemed better, to all or at least to some of the parties involved, that Equiano’s book stand on its own, not appearing to issue from the society’s collective. At the same time, however, Equiano’s book is also clearly part of the same abolitionist campaign in Parliament, a fact made clear by the timing of its official publication on May 1, 1789, which was almost certainly coordinated to coincide with the publication of a Privy Council report on the slave trade in April and William Wilberforce’s fi rst speech on the abolition of the slave trade on May 12. Equiano’s image offers him as a kind of corporate representative, “the African,” the visible embodiment of a people who otherwise had no representation in the society. The image also alludes to and displaces the abolitionist emblem by even more fully embracing the aesthetics of the contemporary miniature. Seated in the same kind of oval as was typical for miniatures, Equiano is depicted in the suit of a contemporary British gentleman, his gaze confidently turned toward the reader as an equal. Here the intimacy is not, as Clark remembers it being with the

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Wedgwood cameo, a function of the owner’s using it to decorate her or his own body, but rather a function of the direct, one-to-one relationship of author and reader. Equiano’s frontispiece, then, both alludes to and critiques the abolitionist emblem that was issued by Josiah Wedgwood. It defi nes what constitutes “interest” in its own terms, displacing the supplicating African of the Wedgwood emblem with a portrait that even more explicitly draws upon the conventions of the miniature in the service of enlisting its reader in the abolitionist project. But its location at the beginning of a long narrative, and its incorporation within the image of the Bible in Equiano’s hands, reminds us that both the emblem and this portrait are composites of image and text, and here not just any text, but the Word itself, a word that seems to speak from the object in your hands, be it the printed page or the mass-reproduced icon. The passage that Equiano’s Bible is open to is Acts 4:12: “Neither is there salvation in any other; for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.” The prominence of the text bears witness to Equiano’s evangelical convictions, his conversion to which is movingly documented in the course of the Interesting Narrative. Yet although the “name” referred to by Peter in the Acts of the Apostles is that of Jesus Christ, it is hard not to think that Equiano is also slyly calling attention to his own name, printed in script just underneath his picture and then again identified as the holder of the book’s copyright in small print near the bottom of the page. It has frequently been noted that Equiano did not typically go by that name until virtually the moment when the Interesting Narrative was published in May 1789; until then, he was known as Gustavus Vassa, a name given to him by his English master, even when he was publishing letters in the Public Advertiser and other periodicals in 1787. Vincent Carretta points out that by identifying himself by both his African and his slave names, Equiano underscores his unique position “on the boundary between African and British identities” as the names form a verbal analogue to the image of the author above them.54 Still, to contemporaries, “Olaudah Equiano” was the striking novelty, a name that even the author’s acquaintances had never used to refer to him, nor he to himself, and it is perhaps for that reason that Equiano goes to such pains to describe the moment of his naming as a child in Africa: “Our children were named for some event, some circumstance, or fancied foreboding at the time of their birth. I was named Olaudah, which, in our language, signifies vicissitude, or fortunate also; one favored, and having a loud voice and well spoken.”55 In using his African name, Equiano not only asserts the African dimension of his

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identity; he also brings to the fore a thematic of the voice that is part and parcel of the abolitionist emblem as well, a linguistic component that is designed to be fully as impressive (in every sense) as the visual images of emblem and portrait.

“THE NEGRO’S COMPLAINT” No work of the period deploys this thematic more insistently than William Cowper’s poem best known as “The Negro’s Complaint.” Given the popularity of this poem in the period, the critical literature on it is surprisingly thin and often tends to reduce the poem. A crucial exception is Suvir Kaul, who identifies the poem as an example of “ventriloquism” that is akin to the abolitionist emblem in that both “confer a rhetorical dignity, the status of a protagonist even, to someone ordinarily considered outside of polite discourse or indeed of language.”56 But critics following Kaul have tended to minimize the poem’s significance. Julie Ellison mentions it only in passing in her excellent 2001 essay “News, Views, and Cowper’s Busy World.” Baucom identifies “The Negro’s Complaint” as “the virtual ballad of the abolition movement in England” but minimizes it as “a distinctly minor part of [Cowper’s] oeuvre.”57 Minor in what sense? If we consider the poem’s wide distribution and popularity, the sheer number of people who read it and heard it over the years, and its potential to influence opinion, it may be considered Cowper’s most significant work. To note this is less to fault Ellison and Baucom than to observe how both the critical response to and the diminution of the poem start, as with so much else about intellectual history of the abolitionist movement, with Clarkson. He remembered “The Negro’s Complaint,” as we have already seen, as the other work of the abolitionist movement that, along with the Wedgwood emblem, achieved the most general circulation and influence in Britain. Clarkson recalls the origins of the poem this way: This little piece, Cowper presented in manuscript to some of his friends in London; and these, conceiving it to contain a powerful appeal in behalf of the injured Africans, joined in printing it. Having ordered it on the fi nest hot-pressed paper, and folded it up in a small and neat form, they gave it the printed title of “A Subject for Conversation at the Teatable.” After this, they sent many thousand copies of it in franks into the country. From one it spread to another, till it travelled almost over the whole island. Falling at length into the hands of the musician, it was set to music; and it then found its way into the streets, both of the

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metropolis and of the country, where it was sung as a ballad; and where it gave a plain account of the subject, with an appropriate feeling, to those who heard it. (2:190)

What Clarkson leaves out is that those “friends” were largely the members of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, in particular John Newton, the slave-boat-captain turned preacher and then abolitionist and collaborator with Cowper on the collection known as the Olney Hymns (1779), in which Newton’s “Amazing Grace,” a poem celebrating Newton’s conversion from his involvement in the commerce in human beings to evangelical Christianity, fi rst appeared. It was Newton who, in March 1788, forwarded a request from Lady Balgonie to his friend and neighbor Cowper to write a popular ballad in support of the abolitionist campaign; Cowper responded almost immediately.58 While Clarkson openly acknowledges the provenance of the abolitionist emblem as the product of a committee charged to design a corporate symbol, he underplays the degree to which Cowper’s poem was also executed at the abolitionist movement’s request. And, too, Clarkson forgets here that the poem was originally one of two of Cowper’s poems included in “A Subject for Conversation and Reflection at the Tea Table”: there called simply “Complaint,” this poem is preceded by another one entitled “Reflections,” and both poems are framed and linked by prose (written by an unknown author) that sets them out for the reader as “noble sentiments” designed as a prompt to intimate speech, to initiate “conversation” about the ethics of the slave trade over the domestic plane of the tea table. The poems are framed as objects of middle-class consumption and even display, as emphasized by the high quality of the paper used to print them.59 The wider circulation of “The Negro’s Complaint,” which began even before it was reprinted anonymously in the Public Advertiser for April 2, 1789 (timed, as was the publication of Equiano’s Interesting Narrative a month later, to sway public opinion toward the abolition bills that were to be introduced in Parliament by William Wilberforce in May), represents for Clarkson a fall from the middle-class home into the hands of the mass public, where it was an object of widespread consumption long before it made it to the Public Advertiser. “The Negro’s Complaint” was being sung at Vauxhall Gardens in the summer of 1788; the sheet music was advertised in late August as one of a number of popular Vauxhall Gardens tunes that were now available to be purchased for home performance. There, it was surely set to the tune that Cowper himself had identified as the one he had in mind, the tune known variously as “Hosier’s Ghost,” “As near

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Porto Bello lying,” or “The Sailor’s Complaint.” This is a song with lyrics by Richard Glover that dates back to 1740 and refers to events in the mid1720s, when Admiral Francis Hosier led a disastrous attempt to blockade the port of Porto Bello in Panama to prevent the Spanish from shipping silver back to Europe. Following orders not to seize the town but merely to blockade the port, Hosier and thousands of his men died of yellow fever and malaria (diseases brought to the Caribbean Basin by the European slave trade in the fi rst place) while circling around offshore. Glover’s song is spoken in the voice of the ghost of Admiral Hosier, here rising with his officers and sailors from his “watr’y grave” to address his successor Admiral Edward Vernon, who in effect avenged Hosier’s loss by taking Porto Bello in 1739 as part of the War of Jenkins’ Ear.60 Hosier’s ghost calls on Vernon to remind English people to temper their excitement over their victory by remembering that his death was solely due to the “orders not to fight.” Clarkson remembers how the poem was brought into the intimate space of the bourgeois home, but from the start, Cowper, Newton, and presumably even Lady Balgonie imagined it as being fashioned for much wider popular use and appropriation, where it was recognized to have affi nities with earlier examples of imperial lament spoken in the voice of an aggrieved male seemingly fated to perpetual suffering. Clearly, however, even in its fi rst, most genteel setting, the poem was explicitly fashioned to fit into the genre of the complaint. As Lauren Berlant, tracing the trajectory of the “female complaint” in U.S. popular culture since the middle of the nineteenth century, has argued, the complaint is a genre that anticipates its own disappointment or, perhaps better, expresses the injustice of the speaker’s condition without being able to articulate how that situation could be remedied: “The complaint is often a half-truth in the guise of a whole one, hyperbole projected out of a consciousness that observes struggle and registers the failure of the desired world without wanting to break with the conditions of that struggle.”61 Although Berlant’s examples are drawn from the archive of postwar U.S. popular culture (e.g., The King and I, Imitation of Life, Now Voyager), she sees these as returning to a structure of sentimental feeling that dates to the publication of that central text of abolitionism in the United States, Harriet Beecher’s Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Since her goal is to see how what she calls “the Uncle Tom form” can be understood as an ancestor of a modern genre of works that articulate a specifically female position, Berlant does not pursue that form’s own history.62 But there can be little doubt that Stowe’s novel builds upon tropes developed a half century earlier by British writers. Cowper’s poem might thus be understood

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here as a relay point between Stowe and Glover, a link demonstrating a genealogical relationship between the female complaint of the twentiethcentury United States and earlier imperial laments spoken in the voice of a man appealing to the listener to recognize his structural inability to help himself. This situation, in which the speaker asks for a sentimental response from the reader or listener, appealing to a common experience in a way that would seem to limit the possibilities for escaping that experience, typifies both the appeal articulated by the speaker in the abolitionist emblem and, here, the speaker of Cowper’s poem. Cowper’s “Complaint” is spoken in the voice of an African who has been, like the figure on the emblem, like Equiano, captured into slavery by English traders: Forced from home and all its pleasures Afric’s coast I left forlorn, To increase a stranger’s treasures O’er the raging billows borne. Men from England bought and sold me, Paid my price in paltry gold; But, though slave they have enrolled me, Minds are never to be sold.63

The condition of the poem’s expression, that the slave has a “mind,” a subjectivity of his own, and should therefore forever be excluded from the cash nexus, here comes front and center as its central message: to have a voice is also, here, to have a mind, a human sensibility that removes one from the will-to-commodify of the marketplace, which the poem’s stanza  6 terms as a “man-degrading mart.” So too does this sensibility insist on the fundamental equality of African and English subjects, fully articulated at the close of the next stanza: Skins may differ, but affection Dwells in white and black the same.

True to his evangelical roots, Cowper guarantees the slave’s claim by calling on the testimony of God himself, whose “voice” answers the hypothetical question of whether the English are free “to use” Africans in their plantations with “tornadoes” and “whirlwinds” that constitute the answer “No.” The poem ends with a reversal: now the English are the “slaves of gold” who are asked to demonstrate their own capacity for sentiment,

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their “human feelings” before they have the “right to question” those of Africans. The burden of the poem, explicit in its message and implicit in the way it gives its speaker an eloquent voice, is that the African slave and the reader share a common humanity that make it theoretically impossible to assign them a price. The point is an important one, as it explains the insistent place of “Man” as the fi rst noun in the text of the abolitionist emblem, its use in this poem, and the frequency of its appearance in abolitionist writing more generally. Here the literary genre of the complaint overlaps with the legal genre of the appeal, because the constant affirmation of the status of the common humanity of the slave was important to the emergent case law that that was establishing the de facto freedom of African persons on British soil. This is very likely why, for example, the single most frequently used word in Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evils of Slavery is “man.” The word “man” has a specific referent in the period’s case law, in particular a rare example of a case that became a public sensation in the 1770s and was remembered for decades. To a reader or listener of the late 1780s, it would serve as a reminder of the Somerset decision in 1772, which established that African subjects in Britain were legally persons. Although a full recounting of the facts of the case is beyond the scope of this chapter— and it has been well done elsewhere— a brief detour into the process by which African subjects in Britain gained that kind of legal protection is worth our time. And to do this, we need to go a little further back, to a case that Granville Sharp brought in behalf of another Afro-Briton, Jonathan Strong.

CASES AND THE STATUS OF “MEN” The legal status of Africans who were enslaved in the British colonies once they came to the metropolitan center had always been ambiguous. Slavery was widely understood to be at odds with the sense that Britons were inherently a freeborn people; it seemed out of place in the British Isles. It was fairly rare for Afro-Britons in England to be considered slaves. Kathy Chater, who compiled legal records and other surviving pieces of evidence to construct a database that documents four thousand of the African-born or -descended persons in England from 1600 to 1807, found only fi fteen examples of anyone being classed as a slave.64 There was no statute law that applied specifically to African-born or -descended persons, but, as an anonymous writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine noted in 1741, it had “long been the Custom of England to set all such Slaves upon their Appli-

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cation to a Magistrate, forthwith at Liberty.”65 Cowper’s “Reflections,” the fi rst poem in “A Subject for Reflection and Conversation at the Tea Table,” observes succinctly, “We have no slaves at home.”66 Yet there was also a written opinion from 1729 by Philip Yorke and Charles Talbot, the king’s attorney and solicitor general, respectively, that slaves were not made free either by coming to the home country or by baptism. The opinion did not itself have the force of law, but it ambiguated things such that in practice, slaves who accompanied their masters from the colonies to the British Isles in practice frequently remained enslaved even while on the purportedly free soil of the home country. It was Granville Sharp, a government clerk (he held a job in the ordnance office until he gave it up to avoid being associated with arming forces fighting to keep the continental American colonies under British control) with a taste for antiquarian research, who brought the contradiction into full intelligibility when he became interested in two cases of young Afro-British men in London who were the victims of cruel treatment by masters who, by Sharp’s reading of the case law concerning the defi nitions of subject, property, and, particularly, “man,” should no longer have been their masters at all. In 1765, while visiting his brother William, a doctor who treated poor Londoners for free, Sharp saw Jonathan Strong, a young man who had been brutally pistol-whipped by his master David Lisle, a lawyer from Barbados, and left for dead in the street. The Sharp brothers attempted to nurse Strong back to health, and they found him a position as a servant to an apothecary. But at some point about two years later, he was, by chance, seen by Lisle again, who had him kidnapped and sold to a Jamaican planter.67 Sharp attempted to interest the lord mayor of London in the case, with only modest success; Strong’s new master, James Kerr, threatened a lawsuit; and Lisle threatened Sharp with a duel. While legal threats and counterthreats were volleyed back and forth— and Jonathan Strong’s health deteriorated— Sharp began to look for other possible test cases and began to immerse himself in British case law concerning the liberty of persons. He drafted a tract entitled A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of tolerating Slavery, or of admitting the Least Claim of Private Property in the Persons of Men in England that he circulated in manuscript and then published in 1769. Sharp credited the impact that the manuscript made among the legal community in London with intimidating Lisle and Kerr into dropping their suit. I include the full title of Sharp’s Representation here because Sharp reserves one of his key terms—“men”—for close to the end of his title for emphasis. Much of Sharp’s Representation is designed to establish the sta-

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tus under English law of the category of “man” and to demonstrate how Africans brought to Britain fit into that category. The central object of Sharp’s attack in the Representation was the 1729 Yorke-Talbot opinion that asserted that “a Slave by coming from the West-Indies to Great-Britain, or Ireland, either with or without his master, doth not become free.”68 Sharp, who had educated himself in the law, sets himself two major tasks: to defi ne Africans in Britain as subjects and also to defi ne them as men. Writing specifically about the Strong case, Sharp takes on the latter point fi rst by countering Lisle’s argument that Strong was “as much private property as a horse or a dog” (13), which was, Sharp observes, to classify a person under the law among “things of a base nature” (14). Sharp’s strategy here is to pursue the slave owner’s logic to its absurd conclusion in the law, which allows him to come out the other end and assert that slaveholders can only uphold their analogy between slaves and dogs if they can prove that an African person is “neither man, woman nor child” (15). Sharp’s other claim, that Africans who come to England are subjects, is based in the notion that everything in the realm is, fi rst and foremost, the king’s, and only secondly private property. So, even if a slave in the colonies might be considered to be the property of his or her master, “every Negro Slave, being undoubtedly either man, woman or child; he or she, immediately upon their arrival in England, becomes the King’s property in the relative sense before-mentioned, and cannot, therefore, be ‘out of the King’s protection’” (19). This gives Africans standing as English subjects, which means that they cannot be enslaved without their contractual permission. And with standing, they have the right to sue for redress: But if I were even to allow that a Negro Slave is not a subject (though I think I have clearly proved that he is) yet it is plain, that such an one ought not to be denied the benefit of the King’s courts, unless the Slaveholder shall be able to prove, likewise, that he is not a man; because “every man may be free to sue for and defend his right in our courts” (says a Statute 20 EDW. III. ch. iv) “and elsewhere according to law.” “And no man of what estate or condition that he be” (here can be no exception whatsoever) “shall be put out of land or tenement, nor taken, nor imprisoned, nor disinherited, nor put to death, without being brought in answer by due process of the law” 28 Edw. III. ch iii. (25)

Strong died in 1770 at age twenty-five, presumably from the lingering effects of his beating at the hands of Lisle, so his case went no further. But

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Sharp was on the lookout for another test case, and he found one the very next year, in the case of James Somerset. Somerset had been purchased by his master Charles Steuart in Virginia and had come to London in 1769 when Steuart returned from his duties as a customs officer in Boston. Somerset escaped in 1771, and Steuart had him seized and put on a ship, intending to sell him in Jamaica. Sharp was able to have Somerset released by getting a writ of habeas corpus, and his case went before Lord Mansfield. The precise language of Mansfield’s decision is elusive, since all that we have are versions of it as recorded in the popular press of the day, which differ from one another. But two things are clear: fi rst, that Mansfield, while fi nding for Somerset, made every effort to rule as narrowly as he possibly could, and he found for the defendant on technical points of law rather than on moral principle. But the second point was far more significant: Sharp, members of the Afro-British community, and sympathizers with the abolitionist cause responded to Mansfield’s ruling by interpreting it as broadly as possible, as representing the end of slavery in the British Isles. One aspect of Mansfield’s decision that is not often commented upon, however, is how it completely bypasses the question that was active enough in the Strong case that Sharp had felt compelled to address it at the outset, whether or not Somerset could be considered to be a legal person rather than merely an item of property. Perhaps the fact that the writ of habeas corpus had been granted in the first place established this point sufficiently that it no longer needed to be argued. It is important to remember, however, that this status could not be assumed. The 1857 Dred Scott decision in the United States turned on this same question, as the court overturned a lower court’s grant of a writ of habeas corpus and ruled that Scott did not have standing to sue because it held that the phrase “all men” in the U.S. Declaration of Independence did not apply to “the unhappy black race.” As Chief Justice Roger Taney, the author of this decision, put it, the “black race” was “separated from the white by indelible marks, and laws long before established, and were never thought of or spoken of except as property, and when the claims of the owner or profit of the trader were supposed to need protection.”69 Yet the assumption that Africans were something other than merely pieces of property was one of the unspoken premises of Mansfield’s decision, a decision that, more than anything else, defi ned the separate paths in relation to slavery that were taken over the next decades in Britain and its soon-to-be former colonies on the North American continent. Britain came to be idealized as a land of freedom and opportunity by African Americans who continued to endure

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slavery until the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, which declared that “all persons held as slaves” in the Confederate states were now free.70 Taney could not wholly ignore Mansfield’s decision in the Somerset case—it was too well-known to be dismissed— but he referred to it largely to assert that British decisions made before the American Revolution could not be considered to be binding upon the courts of the United States. And his notorious decision, while it errs in saying that Africans enslaved in either Britain or the Americas were “never thought or spoken of except as property,” does rely upon a strain of pseudo-scientific writing from the late eighteenth century that questioned the humanity of Africans and that is also clearly being refuted by the motto of the Wedgwood emblem. The 1788 pamphlet Am I not a Man? and a Brother?, usually attributed to Peter Peckard, the vice chancellor at Cambridge and one of the founding members of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (he had set the prize question that led to Clarkson’s original Latin dissertation, which became his Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species), sets as its task to refute “the opinion now industriously propagated, for what reason I am unwilling to say . . . that the native inhabitants of Africa are not of the Human Species; that they are Animals of an inferior class; or if they have any relationship to the human race, they are some spurious brood, arising from some impure mixture (no one knows when or where) and are so far debased as to have lost all title to Humanity.”71 Peckard’s main intertext here is the notorious Query XIV of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, which had been published in London in 1787. Here Jefferson, the author of the phrase “all men” in the U.S. Declaration of Independence that Taney refers to explicitly, argues that Africans formed a separate, and inferior, race: “Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.”72 Jefferson goes on to impugn the quality of Phillis Wheatley’s poetry and Ignatius Sancho’s published letters, both frequently offered by abolitionist writers as evidence for the imagination and sensibility of Africans. Peckard’s refutation, Cowper’s poem, and Clarkson’s essay are designed in the fi rst instance to answer the question of “Am I Not a Man?” in the affirmative, and to do so specifically in order that Africans might be understood to have standing in the legal sense of being understood to be a person with rights under British law. By the lights of The Wealth of Nations, published only a couple of

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years after the Mansfield decision, being human also emerges as a precondition of being capable of having an interest in the affairs of another. The famous passage in The Wealth of Nations that we looked at earlier in this chapter, where Smith introduces his argument that the key to getting the help of others is to appeal not to their benevolence but to their selfinterest, frames itself as a discussion about the distinction between “man” and all other animals. Here I include (in italics) the language that precedes Smith’s famous lines on the importance of self-interest: In civilized society [man] stands at all times in need of the cooperation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons. In almost every other race of animals, each individual, when it is grown up to maturity, is entirely independent, and in its natural state has occasion for the assistance of no other living creature. But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favor, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them.73

“Interest” is predicated on the two parties involved being human, a fact that Smith does not take for granted. Why would that be? In the 1770s and 1780s, the context in which this question was the most widely debated and most charged was the abolitionist debate, which insisted on the shared humanity of the African slaves and the European slave owners, traders, and, in the works we have read here, the English readers who were being enlisted in the abolitionist cause. To be a person, to be classed as a “man,” is to have standing, not only in the court of law but also in the domain of interests, both economic and sentimental. And to recognize the pressure that the question put on Smith’s argument is to see how important the slave trade was, not only to the economy of Britain in this period but to The Wealth of Nations itself. The slave trade was the often-invisible but nonetheless essential under pinning of the Atlantic trading system that was “the economy” as Smith understood it. That same system shapes the contours of the discipline of economics for which his book is even now the foundational text.

THE ABOLITIONIST SUBLIME What I have been tracing through this chapter can seem to be a depressing tale of the all-embracing quality of the economic, of the way it permeates

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even an oppositional discourse like the abolitionist writings of the late eighteenth century. Was Eric Williams, for all that historians have taken issue with some of his data and with his argument, basically correct, that the moral “interest” that Thomas Clarkson remembered the abolitionist movement as having mobilized was essentially the same as the fi nancial interests of the merchant class, which allowed the abolitionists to create an ethical cover-story for the transformation of the British economy from being one based on slave labor in the colonies to proletarian labor at home? It can easily seem so, given that the abolitionist movement, despite the success that Clarkson was in a position to celebrate when he published his History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade in 1808, took decades to accomplish its goals in Britain, and decades more to see the full emancipation that many of its members, such as Cugoano, desired from the outset. The work of fully comprehending the centuries-long African slave trade is a long way from being completed; the work of constructing a just means of compensating for its costs has barely begun. This may be one factor contributing to the “melancholy interest” that Baucom diagnoses as one crucial outcome of the Zong decision and modernity’s reckoning with the slave trade more generally: “Such, increasingly, is our moment’s knowledge of the state of the debt the present owes the past and of the long-deferred, long-ignored, long accumulating payment of interest the living owe on the lives of the dead.”74 Even, here, the act of memorializing the loss of life in the African slave trade is cast in terms of “debt” and “interest,” as if to demonstrate the inevitability of the spread of finance into subjective life. But within the abolitionist writing of the 1780s that has been the object of my attention in this chapter, there are moments when writers demonstrate, perhaps in spite of themselves, an awareness of the limits of their own positions and models to represent, to account for the complete reality of the African slave trade that, as we have seen, the abolitionist emblem and the writings it authorized attempted to bring into representation. These moments often occur when the authors come to a point at which they are attempting to describe what Clarkson was the second to identify in print as the “middle passage,” the journey aboard slave ships that brought captured Africans to the Americas, to represent the slave trade’s operations to readers who were not in a position to perceive them with their own senses.75 What characterizes most of the abolitionist writers of this period is how fervently they refuse to offer a full description of the middle passage because it exceeds their capacity to represent, and they call attention to that fact. An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of

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Africa, by Alexander Falconbridge (also spelled Faulconbridge), is typical in this respect. This short book, already drawn into the fi nancial genre of the “account” in the fi rst word of its title, was published by James Phillips in 1788, and starting with its second edition (issued the same year), it was identified as a work affiliated with the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade by having the abolitionist emblem printed on the title page. Indeed, at this point the society could claim to be the author of the work, having purchased the copyright from Falconbridge.76 Beginning his eyewitness description of the middle passage, Falconbridge observes that “the hardships and inconveniencies suffered by the negroes during the passage, are scarcely to be enumerated or conceived.”77 When he describes the chaos and brutality of the “scramble” in the West Indies, a type of slave auction in which potential purchasers were allowed to rush in and seize as many bodies as they could grab (sometimes lassoing a group with a rope or a string of handkerchiefs tied together), he observes that “it is scarce possible to describe the confusion of which this mode of selling is productive.”78 Even Equiano, whose description of the middle passage is frequently reprinted now as the most complete documentary record of it from the period, is less thorough than it seems at fi rst. Here is Equiano’s famous description, which deserves reprinting at length: At last, when the ship we were in had got in all her cargo, they made ready with many fearful noises, and we were all put under deck, so that we could not see how they managed the vessel. But this disappointment was the least of my sorrow. The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time, and some of us had been permitted to stay on the deck for the fresh air; but now that the whole ship’s cargo were confi ned together, it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers. This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the fi lth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable.

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Happily perhaps for myself I was soon reduced so low here that it was thought necessary to keep me almost always on deck; and from my extreme youth I was not put in fetters. In this situation I expected every hour to share the fate of my companions, some of whom were almost daily brought upon deck at the point of death, which I began to hope would soon put an end to my miseries. Often did I think many of the inhabitants of the deep much more happy than myself; I envied them the freedom they enjoyed, and as often wished I could change my condition for theirs. Every circumstance I met with served only to render my state more painful, and heighten my apprehensions, and my opinion of the cruelty of the whites. One day they had taken a number of fishes; and when they had killed and satisfied themselves with as many as they thought fit, to our astonishment who were on the deck, rather than give any of them to us to eat, as we expected, they tossed the remaining fish into the sea again, although we begged and prayed for some as well we could, but in vain; and some of my countrymen, being pressed by hunger, took an opportunity, when they thought no one saw them, of trying to get a little privately; but they were discovered, and the attempt procured them some very severe floggings. One day, when we had a smooth sea, and a moderate wind, two of my wearied countrymen, who were chained together (I was near them at the time), preferring death to such a life of misery, somehow made through the nettings, and jumped into the sea: immediately another quite dejected fellow, who, on account of his illness, was suffered to be out of irons, also followed their example; and I believe many more would soon have done the same, if they had not been prevented by the ship’s crew, who were instantly alarmed. Those of us that were the most active were, in a moment, put down under the deck; and there was such a noise and confusion amongst the people of the ship as I never heard before, to stop her, and get the boat to go out after the slaves. However, two of the wretches were drowned, but they got the other, and afterwards flogged him unmercifully, for thus attempting to prefer death to slavery. In this manner we continued to undergo more hardships than I can now relate; hardships which are inseparable from this accursed trade.79

“Almost inconceivable,” “more hardships than I can now relate”; even this detailed description, clearly designed to make the full horror of the middle passage present to the British reader, is careful to mark its limits, delineating not only what it can show but also what it cannot. And in describing

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this as a “scene of horror,” Equiano is also invoking the representational protocols of the theater. These are, it turns out, important to understanding the abolitionist sublime, and the place where they are most fully articulated is Clarkson’s Essay of 1786. Clarkson was among the fi rst English writers to undertake an attempt to describe the middle passage, and one of the most important set pieces of his Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species is what purports to be a full description of the process by which people were captured, sold to English slave traders on the West African coast, enslaved, transported across the Atlantic, and then resold to buyers in the Americas. Clarkson’s “narrative” is notable from the outset for how freely he admits its artificial quality, the degree to which it is a representation that he is constructing from sources in the trade (Clarkson interviewed hundreds of people who had worked in the slave trade), and that he has never actually witnessed this process himself: “I shall suppose myself on a particular part of the continent of Africa, and relate a scene, which, from its agreement with unquestionable facts, might not unreasonably be presumed to have been presented to my view, had I been actually there.”80 Clarkson’s professed goal here is to compel his readers to imagine the middle passage, to bring it into their mind’s eye. But he always makes it clear that both his and the readers’ access to these events was mediated. First, the events are mediated by virtue of being not Clarkson’s experience but the experience of others who were willing to be interviewed by him. The term “middle passage” itself came to Clarkson via interviews with sailors and sea captains, for whom it served as a neutrally descriptive term, denoting the second of the three legs of the typical slaving voyage from Britain to Africa to the West Indies and back to Britain again. Second, and more to the point here, Clarkson’s narrative is mediated by the representational codes of literature. As his word “scene” implies, Clarkson, like Equiano a couple of years later, identifies theater, in particular tragedy, as the primary literary mode through which to understand the middle passage. This is to invoke a decorum of representation that owes more to neoclassical theory than it does to the novel or to lyric poetry, a set of conventions about what can be seen and heard and what should remain hidden that continued to resonate well past its formulation in the work of critics like the Abbé DuBois, Joseph Addison, and David Hume. The essential question is this: how is it just to entertain an audience, to give them pleasure, by representing the sufferings of others? This was to Hume, writing at the end of a long line of authors who worried about that question, an “unaccountable pleasure” because it seemed to in-

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crease in direct proportion to the amount of suffering that the viewer is asked to witness.81 Neoclassical writers and critics took various positions on how much suffering should be shown, how much might happen offstage, and how much should simply be described. Addison pointedly had Cato fall on his sword outside the view of the audience, and he argued in the Spectator that Corneille’s Horace erred even in having a murder occur “behind the Scenes. . . . To give my Opinion upon this Case; the Fact ought not to have been represented, but to have been told if there Was any Occasion for it.”82 Even David Hume, who is more complacent about the pleasure of witnessing human suffering, agrees that “bloody and atrocious” actions (he mentions a particularly gruesome scene from Nicholas Rowe’s The Ambitious Stepmother) should not be represented on stage, and he sees such “shocking images” as being a particular flaw of English playwrights (224). Tragedy comes to Clarkson then, as the literary form with the most fully developed theorization of what should and should not be represented, an understanding that he calls upon as he negotiates his own attempt to bring the slave trade home to his readers. Clarkson’s most explicit descriptions of the operations of the African slave trade and of the middle passage occur in part 3, chapter 4, of his Essay. He divides “the tragical scenes that happen in the middle passage” into two classes: those in which the slaves kill themselves rather than face lives in captivity and those that are primarily due to “the conduct of the receivers,” the British slavers who took possession of captured Africans in coastal forts and castles.83 He tells exemplary stories of each class, the fi rst an account of a slave uprising on a ship that was so brutally turned back that many of the surviving slaves “completed” “the tragedy” by diving into the sea.84 Clarkson illustrates the second class with a brief description of the Zong disaster of 1781, the event that, as we have seen, was a crucial catalyst for the abolitionist cause of that decade, because (among other things), it galvanized writers like Sharp, Peckard, and Equiano to action, the urgency of combating the slave trade never being clearer than at the moment when emergent insurance practices made inescapable the degree to which human life was now being subjected to the law of the market. The Zong incident (which Clarkson does not identify by name) was “of so black and complicated a nature” that if it were left simply to the “testimony of an individual, it could not possibly be believed” (162). Even here, though, Clarkson takes pains to point out that the “tragical scenes” he has depicted are “inadequate to convey a just idea” of the truth of the middle passage, but that decorum demands that he do no more: “To mention others, would be only to increase a painful, and to perform an

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unnecessary task” (162). For all that the abolitionist movement took as its task the job of making the slave trade visible to British subjects, it is important to recognize the degree to which Clarkson and the writers who shared his goals and often followed his lead took care to mark the point at which they were unable to do full justice to the slave trade’s brutal reality. The abolitionist sublime, the incessant move to identify the movement’s own discursive limits, creates a kind of intimacy of its own; it reminds the reader of these texts of his status as a reader, the holder of a work of art that is attempting to mediate an experience that it cannot fully capture. Which is to say that the abolitionist sublime also marks the point at which the texts identify how the experience of the slave trade is incapable of being fully rendered into symbols. It stands, then, in pointed contradistinction to the fi nancial assumption that everything has a price, that every quantum of human experience can be calculated and subjected to the logic of exchange. The abolitionist movement, I have argued in this chapter, found itself perforce repeating some of the key aspects of the corporate culture that shaped the slave trade they opposed. But it is important to recognize, too, the ways in which writers like Cugoano, Equiano, Clarkson, and Falconbridge identify the self-awareness with which this “body of men” handled the representational codes their culture left them to craft performances that compel our interest while also holding the economic logic of the system they deployed at arm’s length, as an object to be contemplated, held in view as something else, a scandal to thought.

CONCLUSION The abolitionist emblem’s design was used as a form of currency in the 1790s, when the economic crises brought about by the Napoleonic Wars created a shortfall of “real” money, coinage issued by the Bank of England and backed with the authority of the state. Such “coins” were used locally, in places like Middlesex and Birmingham, and served both as a medium of exchange between merchants and customers and as a medium for expressing solidarity with the abolitionist cause in the long period between the fi rst legislative attempts to end British involvement in the slave trade in the late 1780s and the passage of the Slave Trade Act (47 George III 1.c.36) in 1807. The emblem was used as currency again in the late 1830s, this time in the United States during yet another economic crisis. There was a significant variation, though, in these American “Hard Times” tokens: one of them, and quite possibly the one that had the broadest circulation, depicted a woman, rather than a man, as the supplicant. The reemergence

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of the emblem at this moment bears witness to many things. First, it reminds us that the abolition of British participation in the transatlantic slave trade in 1807 and U.S. participation in the following year did not end the institution of slavery by any means. Slavery continued in the British colonies until 1833, and of course in the United States until the Emancipation Proclamation thirty years later. One argument that these abolitionist tokens of the 1830s— commissioned in New York, milled in New Jersey, and circulated, so far as we know, only in the northern states—were making was that the United States should follow the lead of Britain in outlawing chattel slavery, and doing so immediately. Second, the presence of a female supplicant registers the growing presence of women in the abolition debate and the economic imaginary more generally; here a woman is the object of the viewer’s attention but is also imagined as an ideal viewer, a person whose interests should now be engaged in behalf of the cause. It testifies to the feminization of the sentimental public sphere in the nineteenth-century United States, the degree to which such emotional appeals were becoming imagined as specifically the province of women, something that was simply not the case in the eighteenth-century abolitionist debate in Britain. The token is a small data point in a genealogy that led to the publication of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the emergence of the genre of the female complaint to which it is indebted. And, too, the return of the abolitionist emblem to prominence in the 1830s underscores the frequency with which fi nancial crises recurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (and since!) in the transatlantic world. In chapter 5, I explore more fully the crisis of the 1830s and 1840s in Britain and America, a crisis that has important lessons and precedents for the kinds of panics that still occur, as witnessed by the fi nancial crisis of 2008 and its protracted aftermath. To do this, I will reframe attention once again to another kind of corporate entity, this time to the bank, the issuer of the money that links all the participants in the system. Banks, money, and the stories we tell about them faced acute legitimation crises in the 1830s and 1840s, and it is to these crises and the ways they were figured that we now turn.

Chapter Five

Held in Reserve: Banks, Serial Crises, and the Ekphrastic Turn

T

he reviewer of Edgar Allan Poe’s just-published Tales (1845), writing in the Aristidean magazine, cuts right to the point of “The Gold Bug,” the fi rst story in the collection: “The intent of the author was evidently to write a popular tale: money, and the fi nding of money being chosen as the most popular thesis.”1 Money was indeed an enormously popular topic for fiction in both Britain and the United States in the 1840s. “The Gold Bug” was fi rst published in 1843 in a Philadelphia newspaper called the Dollar, where it was the winner of a contest for the best short story. (The runner-up was a story by the Philadelphia journalist Robert Morris titled “The Banker’s Daughter,” about which more shortly.) And even if we are not too surprised to discover a newspaper called the Dollar giving preference to stories about money, the 1830s and 1840s in the United States and Britain were rife with fiction and poetry on the topics of or set in the worlds of money, fi nance, and banking. In addition to “The Gold Bug” and a number of other stories by Poe from these decades, we can think of American examples such as Charles Frederick Briggs’s works, including The Adventures of Harry Franco, a Novel of the Great Panic (1839) and his story collection The Haunted Merchant (1843). British works that respond in one way or another to the contemporary economic crisis include Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy, her series of novels published from 1832 to 1834; Charles Dickens’s American Notes for General Circulation (1842), A Christmas Carol (1843), and Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Sons (1848); and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848). Few periods have offered a richer vein of fiction that so explicitly addressed economic and fi nancial topics, and there are few major works of the period that were not informed by its fi nancial climate. The 1830s and 1840s in both Britain and the United States were decades of fi nancial cri186

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sis: bank failures, crashes, panics, currency shortfalls, and credit crunches that constituted a set of urgent topoi for imaginative writing. It is no surprise that there would be a proliferation of writing about fi nance on both sides of the Atlantic. A central figure for writers in these decades was the bank, because the banking institutions in both countries brought about ongoing public controversy. Banks were such a familiar and important part of everyday speech as to become an imaginative resource for writers who continued to work in the tradition of the Idea, which, as we saw in chapter 1, Locke imagined as the money of the mind. This was the case, for example, when Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1833 described volume A of his journals as a “Savings Bank” into which the “earnings” gleaned from inquiry and contemplation could be deposited and from which his essays could be drawn.2 Like Locke, Emerson imagines the “sovereignty of ideas” as being threatened “by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise” and understands the result as a corruption of language that can be figured as the relationship between an authentic and a debased currency: “New imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults.”3 Emerson reaches back to Locke’s paradigms but is also deeply responsive to his own historical context, where the bank had emerged as the corporation par excellence, a salient and readily understood paradigm for imagining the relationship between the individual and the collective, and where the question of the conditions under which paper money might be acceptable was an urgent, daily one. In Britain in these decades, the Bank of England and the regional banks that were responsible for issuing local currency were at the center of the nation’s recalibration of the economic system to peace following the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars. Among other things, the Bank of England’s notes became once again “convertible” for specie in 1821, for the fi rst time since such exchanges of paper for precious metal had been ended by the Bank Restriction Act in 1797. In the United States, the very existence of a national bank was an ongoing public locus for a debate about the power and scope of the federal government versus state and local institutions; two banks of the United States were chartered amid controversy and were allowed to lapse—rare cases of corporations that failed to meet the form’s presumption of immortality. Early-nineteenth-century writers were also building on the fact that since its consolidation in the late seventeenth century into something resembling its modern form, the bank was also readily affiliated with the poetic imagination. Both create some-

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thing of value through writing. The poet Richard Blackmore played with the relationship between artistic creation and the issuance of currency as early as 1700, just over half a decade after the founding of the Bank of England in 1694 and four years after the recoinage in which Locke had played a major role. In A Satyr against Wit, Blackmore proposes that England make up for the shortfall in the “defective Species” of wit that must be “recoyn’d” by creating a Bank for Wit and Sense. A Bank whose current Bills may Payment make, Till new Mill’d Wit shall from the Mint come back.4

Blackmore’s satire playfully associates a contemporary crisis in literature with the ongoing crisis in the British currency, the persistent insecurity caused by the chronic shortage of hard currency, and the concern that the bank’s notes could not really be trusted. A century and a half later, similar things could be said about the literary as well as the economic situation, as writers often suffered economic hardship, and as the systems of currency and banking went through one of their periodic paroxysms. In the 1830s and 1840s, banks in both Britain and the United States, now embarked on separate national trajectories but still deeply interwoven economically, were objects of suspicion on the part of politicians and ordinary people alike. The power that they had accrued seemed to destabilize, rather than support, the social order. And given the persistence of fi nancial panics and crashes that have continued to happen in both nations— sometimes spreading from one to the other as a consequence of their continued interdependence—this moment marks the beginning of a simmering and ongoing legitimation crisis about the relationship between the state and its corporate surrogates that occasionally erupts into fullblown panic. Far more than the South Sea Bubble of 1720, the Panic of 1837 was a sustained and global phenomenon, a fi nancial crisis that was understood to be the precipitant of the long-lasting depression that followed it and came to be compared to those of the early 1930s and the fi rst decade of the 2000s. Financial panics like the ones that occurred on both sides of the Atlantic in the early decades of the nineteenth century typically manifest themselves in the moment as surprises, shocks to a system that is imagined normatively as proceeding with a kind of logical efficiency. But the case is quite the opposite. As the economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff put it in their book This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of

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Financial Folly (2009), a comparative account of fi nancial crises since the thirteenth century, “For the advanced economies during 1800–2008, the picture that emerges is one of serial banking crises.”5 Why are we always surprised at a panic or crisis?, they wonder. We should not be, since such panics have been a recurrent feature of the modern economic system. Like the speculative bubbles in corporate institutions that were the focus of chapter 2, banking crises seem to contain within them a powerful amnesiac, such that they are quickly forgotten. Reinhart and Rogoff’s rhetoric is as familiar to economic discourse as the forgetfulness that they shrewdly diagnose. When they attempt to remind their 2009 readership of the common experience they share with many generations of people living under the conditions of modern fi nance capitalism, Reinhart and Rogoff fi nd themselves invoking the visual register, aiming to bring the inevitability of crisis into representation by means of a “picture.” The will-to-ekphrasis in their rhetoric of a “picture” emerging of “serial banking crises”—where what is fi rst imagined as a kind of picture begins to speak a narrative, a serial melodrama of abrupt crisis and slow returns to normality—is very typical of economic writers since the late eighteenth century. Thomas Malthus observes ruefully at the start of the fi rst edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) that “the view which he [i.e., Malthus himself] has given of human life has a melancholy hue; but he feels conscious, that he has drawn these dark tints, from a conviction that they are really in the picture.”6 David Ricardo, whose treatise On the Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation (1817) is often taken as one of the origin points of monetarist economics, frequently calls upon his readers to imagine “the view” of participants in the marketplace, or even “the object in view” as he describes his desire to see the Bank of England return to what was called full “convertibility,” where its bank notes would be exchangeable for gold bullion at their full face value.7 Modern economists who have followed in Malthus’s and Ricardo’s wake also express their desire to let charts and graphs that present the reader with a visual record of the flow of money speak for themselves. Thus we saw in the introduction to this book how Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz explain at the outset of their Monetary History of the United States (1963) that the need for such a study arises from the fact that statistics are not sufficient to prove their point about the centrality of an analysis of money to understanding economic crises; an “analytical narrative,” they realize, was needed to “add a much needed dimension to the numerical evidence.”8 When cast as narrative, the economic history of the past two centuries is a story of serial banking crises occasionally punctu-

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ated by periods of what is mistakenly defined as normality. But the very fact of narrative would seem to represent a fall from some ideal state of understanding, in which the picture of the economy gets to speak for itself. In the introduction to this book, I cited Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous line from the Philosophical Investigations: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”9 Wittgenstein describes here how easy it is for philosophers to fi rst mistake the way they frame the world for reality itself and then create discourses that reify the mistake. I take passages in which economists invoke the “picture” of the economic system that surpasses expression in their own language as fleeting moments of Wittgensteinian insight, when the epistemological closure of the age of corporate capitalism becomes momentarily clear even to its central explanatory discourse. Writers of Panic-era fiction like Martineau, Morris, and Poe made pictures into topoi for more extensive meditations on the relationship between writing and economics, which in this era they typically associated with the banks that were responsible for conducting the international flow of money. They deploy what I here call an ekphrastic mode, which, on the one hand, cannot help but fail to construct analogies between literary inscription on paper and economic inscription on paper and other surfaces, but which, on the other hand, also exceeds such analogies by trying to imagine how art might transcend the values of the marketplace.

THE BANK IN HISTORY The English monosyllable “bank” began as a synecdoche, but its use has expanded to something closer to a metaphor. Used as a fi nancial term, bank is derived from the Italian banco, for the bench in a money-changer’s stall or office, an etymology that carries with it the historical trajectory of banking from its origins in the Mediterranean in about the fourteenth century north to the low countries and ultimately to England in the late seventeenth century. The Bank of England was founded in 1694. But in many instances, writers in English have forgotten that etymology and associated such corporations with the banks of a stream or a river, an association that enables an affiliated pun on “current,” for the currency that it issues. Thomas Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), slyly joked that God “made his peculiar deposit for a substantial and genuine virtue” in the hearts of his farmers, burying a pun on banks as a kind of earthwork in his figure of virtue as moral bullion.10 More to the point for this chapter, in its first printing in the Dollar, Poe’s “The Gold Bug” opens

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on a description of its protagonist, William Legrand, “sauntering along the bank and through the myrtles, in quest of shells or entomological specimens,” an activity that will lead to the discovery of the titular bug that by the end of the story will lead Legrand and the narrator to the discovery of the buried treasure that Legrand has been seeking— and also to buried bodies.11 That later editions of “The Gold Bug,” probably amended by Poe himself, change “bank” to “beach” only directs our attention to the pun that at least some of the fi rst readers of a newspaper whose own name compared journalism to money would probably have appreciated. The joke cues the reader to “The Gold Bug’s” multiple fi nancial plays on words, the degree to which the rest of the story in large part consists, as Marc Shell and Terence Whalen have shown, of an elaboration of a series of puns on words like “gold-bug,” “specie,” and “kid.” Poe’s initial inclination to begin his story by punning on “bank” as a river boundary and bank as the financial institution that issues money underscores the way this particular metaphorical slide naturalizes banks, rendering what is really an arbitrary constellation of fi nancial functions united in one institution into something that has the inevitability of the weather. For the historical expansiveness of the word also reflects the extensibility of the institution itself, which has, partly by accident, partly by design, gained cultural authority by pulling together numerous functions that were performed by goldsmiths, scriveners, merchants, and others who dealt with money and credit in the early modern period. It is the kind of abstraction that Karl Marx warned himself about in the Grundrisse of 1857 as a useful, perhaps even indispensable concept that nonetheless obscures an enormous amount of lived history. Even today, what “bank” signifies remains fungible, as institutions as different as the Bank of England, the University of Virginia Community Credit Union, Goldman Sachs, and the U.S. Federal Reserve System are all very typically grouped under that term. Both Britain and the early United States incorporated institutions that shared their names with the state and were intended to stabilize its fi nances, becoming the ancestors of what are now called “central” banks. But neither the Bank of England nor either of the banks of the United States was formally a part of its government. Each was a private corporation, licensed by the nation, which gave it the protection of its laws.12 A key prize, in fact, for the public fi nanciers to whom those charters were granted was the legal protection given them by the nations that allowed banks to do business with their names engraved on the documents they issued. The near-inextricability of the state and these private corporations would seem to endorse Joshua Barkan’s recent assertion “that corporate

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power should be rethought as a mode of political sovereignty,” that the corporation and the modern nation-state are not two distinct entities but are rather best understood as being “ontologically linked,” emerging handin-hand in the seventeenth century and sharing what needs now to be reconceptualized as a common history.13 Barkan’s claim forms a provocation to both political history and economics, one that envisions a thoroughgoing overhaul, or even what we might call a corporate merger, of these disciplines, such that they might recognize their history and theoretical underpinnings, a task that well exceeds the scope of this book. But Barkan’s point underscores the significance of institutions like the Bank of England and the two banks of the United States, the way they encapsulate the political and economic aspects of corporate bodies in the early modern period. In the early nineteenth century, the banks that had an intimate relationship with the national governments were joined by many smaller entities that had the same title but functioned on a more local scale. These were the institutions with which most people would have had contact, particularly in the form of the bank-issued notes that were a crucial part of an economic system that was still largely agrarian. Jefferson’s invocation of the farmer as the repository of virtue is to be expected from his essentially agrarian political ethos, but it also helps explain why banks were so particularly culturally central in this period. Even in Britain, most people worked in agriculture and therefore were highly dependent on the price of commodities. This depended on things like supply and demand and, in the case of agricultural commodities, on weather and harvests. Fluctuations in the grain or, in the United States, the cotton harvest, had substantial effects on prices throughout the economic system during this period. But the price of things also depended on the price and availability of money, which was a far more complicated question then than it is now. Money came in several forms: hard currency in the form of metals, primarily silver and gold, with some copper coins in small denominations. In Britain, these would be issued either by the Bank of England or, for many local transactions, by local banks. In the United States, the institutions that were called the banks of the United States did not issue paper currency for general circulation. This was done by state and local banks, with the result that, as was also the case in Britain, there was lots of money that had only local currency; once you got to a different state or region, it would be accepted only at a discount if at all. All of this meant that people in this period were far more sophisticated than we are about pricing, since the price of money itself needed to be calculated as a fi rst step toward pric-

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ing anything else. Banks—local, regional, and national—were the mediating institutions in a complicated system that demanded considerable skills in handling several different orders of valuation at once. The importance of banks but also the complexity of the relationships that they mediated also explains why banks were frequently viewed with a great deal of suspicion. In what was still largely a rural and agrarian culture, banks were based in cities. They were believed to be under the control of the urban elites, fi nanciers whose motives were uncertain and whose power to manipulate the price of money and thereby the price of everything else was—for good reason—feared. What is more, the indeterminate relationship between cause and effect that banks seemed to condense— how does a bank based in, say, London or Philadelphia, influence activity hundreds of miles away?—led to fl ights of anxious fretting. For example, William Gouge, writing in 1835 against the renewal of the charter of the Second Bank of the United States, observed that “Banking is not a local, temporary, or occasional cause. It is general and permanent. Like the atmosphere, it presses every where. Its effects are felt alike in the palace and the hovel.”14 Such a figure imagines a kind of democratizing quality to the bank, since everyone is subject to its effects. But Gouge’s work also, as we saw in the introduction to this book, is responsible for introducing the argument, which originated with Sir Edward Coke in the early 1600s and was repeated by Poe in 1840, that “corporations have neither bodies to be kicked, nor souls to be damned,” fi nding in the bank the locus of the scandal that gave the corporation agency of its own in human affairs.15 For Gouge was no disinterested observer; he was an adviser to President Andrew Jackson and was writing here in support of Jackson’s plan to destroy the Second Bank of the United States. His extraordinary essay is thus a piece of propaganda that serves as one of the most resonant texts from Jackson’s “Bank War,” his sustained campaign against the Second Bank of the United States that saw Jackson’s veto of Congress’s attempt to recharter the bank in 1832, his redirection of federal assets from the bank to various state banks in 1833, and ultimately the bank’s complete dissolution in 1841. In standard historical accounts, Jackson and his successful war against the Second Bank of the United States serve as one of the main precipitants of the Panic of 1837. The transfer of federal deposits to state banks resulted, such accounts emphasize, in extensive land speculation in the western states and a concomitant bubble in the price of land; when that bubble inevitably burst, the results were felt throughout the national economic system, and the shortfall of money led to widespread unemployment that endured for years. Jackson has been remembered as a poor man-

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ager of the nation’s economy; as he gained popularity in part by serving as the vehicle for resentment against the urban fi nancial class and their institutions, he deprived the United States of its best institution for stabilizing the nation’s money supply. The history of this period as told by economic historians is quite different. The predominant explanation now offered by economic historians focuses largely on the international disparities between interest rates, and the quantities and flow of specie around the globe. Economic historian Peter Temin offered what is still the paradigmatic explanation for the transatlantic economic upheavals of the 1830s and 1840s, and his argument is notable for the extent to which it downplays the significance of Jackson and other political agents in favor of an analysis of the international circulation of credit and specie. Temin argued that the Bank of England’s monetary policy had much more to do with the instability in the U.S. economy in the middle and late 1830s than did the confl ict between Jackson and the bank: “The economy was not the victim of Jacksonian politics; Jackson’s policies were the victims of economic fluctuations.”16 And this monetary policy was in turn, Temin claimed, driven mostly by increases in the amount of silver entering the British system in the form of Mexican silver from increased productions in silver mines there and Chinese gold coming into Britain from opium sales in the Far East. That is to say that Temin sees the primary cause of economic events to be the quantity and flow of money rather than the agency of human actors. The agent of history here is the bank itself, in particular the Bank of England and the two banks of the United States, which ordered and organized the flow. Temin’s argument has proved to be remarkably resilient. To be sure, recently several economic historians have challenged it at the margins, using careful analysis of flows of cash and credit within the United States to argue that decisions made not only in Washington and New York but also, crucially, in regional banking centers had significant effects on the intensity and duration of the crisis. But the economic historiography about the fi nancial crisis of the period remains essentially framed by the paradigm that Temin constructed. Or, perhaps better, the paradigm that Temin adapted from Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz, whose landmark study A Monetary History of the United States, published in 1963, was enormously influential in establishing the ascendancy of monetarist economics in the United States. The central case of Friedman and Schwartz’s study is the Great Depression of the 1930s, which they understand not so much as a political crisis as a failure of central banks to respond swiftly and adequately to the contraction in

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the money supply following the stock market crash of 1929. Their book traces the supply of money in the United States from the end of the Civil War onward, in large part, they say, because it was only after the war that reliable statistics were available. But they observe that the best comparison case for the Great Depression of the 1930s was the “contraction of 1839 to 1843,” which similarly “occurred during a period of worldwide crisis.”17 Temin in effect takes Friedman and Schwartz’s thesis and applies it back to the 1830s, where they had hesitated to venture. Amassing new statistical evidence for the amount of money and commodities in circulation at various places and times, Temin, like Friedman and Schwartz, discounts the role of political actors like Jackson in favor of technical factors like the amount and movement of specie. However much economic historians have amended Temin’s argument about the causes of the U.S. economic crisis of the late 1830s to the early 1840s, they remain loyal to a particular kind of economic explanation, one largely indebted to the monetarist paradigm of economic historiography that was constructed by Friedman and Schwartz and consequently promoted as a recipe for future policy by Friedman in particular well into the 1990s. Much the same can be said of many writers of the 1830s in Britain and the United States. Economic and political argument itself in this period focused, too, on money, understanding it to be the central factor of economic life. This is not to say that politics and politicians did not loom large in the popular imagination; even a brief acquaintance with the periodical literature of the time will tell you how prominently figures like Jackson and Nicholas Biddle (the president of the Second Bank of the United States) and their confl ict figured in the public understanding of the economic crisis. But money, and the banking system as the regulator of its flow, was also, as Gouge’s essay testifies, widely scrutinized and recorded. It is entirely possible that there is a kind of economic-historical feedback loop in operation here; because contemporaries paid so much attention to the flows of specie, their records have in turn become the raw material from which modern economic historians like Friedman, Schwartz, and Temin can draw, thereby creating the parameters of their analysis of what happened and why. Monetarism as a strain of the discipline of economics reached its ascendancy in the 1970s and 1980s, but careful attention to money as an agent of its own was widespread in nineteenth-century writing. As we saw in the introduction to this book, the challenge that such writers face is in turning such statistical evidence into narrative, making the “picture” (to use Friedman and Schwartz’s word) speak. The writers to whom I turn now, Martineau, Morris, and Poe, also fi nd in the trope of the speak-

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ing picture a way to bring economic questions into the domain of fiction. Their stories feature both money and images in their plots, making them into objects of interrogation. And while they all share the mixture of suspicion of and fascination with banks and money that was widespread in the period, they also point us to things that economic writing does not: to the emotional bonds that cannot be quantified and to the histories that statistics cannot convey.

“THE STORY TELLS ITSELF IN THE DRAWING”: HARRIET MARTINEAU’S ILLUSTRATIONS The most prominent attempt to heal the divide between literature and political economy in the 1830s was that undertaken by Harriet Marti neau, who argued for the “duty of studying political economy,” given the complexity of the modern world. Martineau uses this phrase in the title of a review, in the Unitarian journal the Monthly Repository, of an 1826 book entitled Lectures on the Elements of Political Economy by Thomas Cooper, the president of the College of South Carolina and also a professor of both chemistry and political economy there. Cooper here understands political economy to be a natural science, one organized by “elements” in the same manner as chemistry.18 Cooper’s book is aimed at an audience of American men of letters, who should, he argues, follow the example of British “gentlemen” in educating themselves in the works of Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo, a trio of authorities in the literature of political economy that he claims are read equally as avidly as “Shakespeare, Milton, or Pope.”19 Here poetry is put in the service of rendering economics in effect a branch of “literature” broadly conceived, letters that are as worthy of study as the natural sciences and the classics of English poetry, which still form the standard by which serious study is measured. Advocating in turn for Cooper’s book for readers on the British side of the Atlantic, Martineau pushes the argument even further in the direction of the aesthetic. She laments, first, that Cooper is greatly overrating the political-economic knowledge of British gentlemen, politicians, and subjects more broadly: “Alas! Dr. Cooper thinks too well of us.  .  .  . Many popular representatives prefer shooting and billiards to studying Ricardo, as much as Charles Fox preferred tending his geraniums to reading Adam Smith” (1:272, 274). (Fox was the Whig politician who was a famous radical, at least among those who served within government throughout the period of the French Revolution.) Martineau is probably right about the leisure preferences of politicians, but what is key in our context for

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Martineau is that political economy, looked at the right way, is beautiful in its own right: “Is there no beauty in the simple and compound adaptation of means to ends, or in the creative processes of the human intellect, whose results are embodied by the ingenuity of the human hands?” (1:283). The framework here is religious, as Martineau casts political economy as a means of understanding the beauty of providential design, “the plan by which communities are wrought upon to achieve the great ends of human virtue and human enjoyment . . . the Divine signature by which institutions are sanctioned or prohibited” (2:283, 284). God is here the author of the book of human society, a book that humans learn about through systems of knowledge like political economy that they in turn preserve in books of their own. When Martineau decided to move to London and undertake imaginative writing on her own, her fi rst order of business was to concretize political economy as an aesthetic project in her Illustrations of Political Economy, a series of twenty-four novel-length narratives issued fi rst in pamphlet form and then bound in nine volumes from 1832 to 1834. The specific topics in the narratives—labor, banking, property— are drawn from James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy (1821), which, like Cooper’s work, invokes the discipline of chemistry in its title as a way of giving the patina of natural science to its own object of knowledge. That is to say that Martineau is motivated in the Illustrations to understand the ongoing British fi nancial crisis of the 1820s and 1830s in terms given by an emergent discipline that was attempting to comprehend society with the rigor and objectivity of the natural sciences and the affective power of imaginative fictions. Here, however, it is the novel as it had taken form by the 1820s that Martineau adopts as the vehicle for aestheticizing political economy. Illustrations has significant affiliations with one of the most important and influential long-form fictional projects of the early nineteenth century: the Waverley novels of Sir Walter Scott. Like the Illustrations (and like James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales [1827–41], also modeled on the works of Scott), each of the Waverley novels recreates a society by focusing on a central protagonist engaged in a particular set of historical problems. The Waverley novels were, as it happens, the subject of two long essays that Martineau wrote when she was taking a break from the grind of writing Illustrations of Political Economy. For Martineau, it is not just that each novel helps illustrate the history and culture of a past age; it is that Scott’s method provides a new rationale for fiction as a vehicle for ethical teaching: “We rather learn from him how much may be impressed

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by exemplification which would be rejected in the form of reasoning, and how there may be more extensive embodiments of truth in fiction than the world was before thoroughly aware of.”20 Translating the method of Scott’s historical fiction into an examination of the political-economic principles of the present, Martineau casts the central characters of her Illustrations as “embodied principles of political economy.” She tells us that she wrote the Illustrations in effect backward, starting with a list of political economic principles (derived largely from Mill’s Elements) and then imagining settings and characters as the vehicles through which they could be cast into fiction. Martineau’s plan was not entirely unlike that described by Edgar Allan Poe in the “Philosophy of Composition,” his famous essay on the strategy by which he constructed “The Raven”; he started not with the principles he wished to impart, but with the effect he wished to achieve. The extent to which Poe is being sincere here in describing how “The Raven” was actually composed remains a matter of debate, but it is worth observing that he frames the story of the poem’s construction by depicting a scene of his own reading: “Charles Dickens, in a note now lying before me, alluding to an examination I once made of the mechanism of ‘Barnaby Rudge,’ says ‘By the way, are you aware that Godwin wrote his “Caleb Williams” backwards? He fi rst involved his hero in a web of difficulties, forming the second volume, and then, for the fi rst, cast about him for some mode of accounting for what had been done.’”21 Poe’s tale of his own review prompting a note from Dickens about a novel by Godwin establishes its own chain of causality back to the convolutions of Caleb Williams’s Revolutionary plot, which it hollows out for a purely formal understanding of a work that, as Dickens puts it in the language of the merchant bank, demanded some kind of “account.” When we get to “The Gold Bug,” we shall see that Poe himself turned there to an image as a medium for retrospective accounting, a formal strategy that he shares with Martineau, however much their sensibilities otherwise diverged. Martineau’s own accounting for her translation of the scientific “elements” of political economy to fictionalized “principles” is routed through a third term, the one that gets pride of place in the title of the series: the “illustration,” which put the image at the center of imaginative writing and which, as we shall see, becomes a way for Martineau to thematize the relationship between her art and the artifice of the modern economic system. That this is to no small extent a corporate system becomes clear at many points in the collected Illustrations, as for example in Weal and Woe in Garveloch (1832), a tale set in a fishing village in western Scotland whose subsistence economy has now been reorganized by the arrival of “a

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large Fishing Company” that has purchased the village and its surrounding islands from the local laird.22 This replacement of the traditional feudal system with the modern corporate structure is the essential backdrop for this illustration, the sign that, as the fi rst chapter title tells us, “Times are Changed,” and traditional ways of life and, crucially, the traditional patterns of thought that go with them, are becoming obsolete. Weal and Woe in Garveloch becomes an explicitly Malthusian allegory about the inexorability of the pressure that population growth puts on resources, particularly of food. The company’s arrival and its investment in infrastructure supporting the fishing industry initiates a short-lived boom in food production, a boom that is inevitably followed by an increase in the population beyond what the village can sustain and, with it, widespread hardship. Martineau’s adherence to a strict interpretation of Malthus’s doctrines displays not only her loyalty to his controversial position but her embeddedness in the historical moment of their full-throated emergence. But so too does her specification of the modern fi nancial company as the precipitant of a new cyclicity of life even at the fringes of the British state, the way fi nance capitalism was extending its reach even into places and industries that would not long ago have seemed to be unlikely prospects. I want to use Berkeley the Banker, the fourteenth of the Illustrations, as an exemplary case, because it engages issues of banking, money, and representation that resonated more broadly in the political-economic crisis of the 1830s. Berkeley the Banker has seen a boom in its own critical stock: critics such as Mary Poovey, Claudia Klaver, and Brian P. Cooper have given it pride of place for much the same reason I do here, as a particularly self-conscious example of the Illustrations that makes intelligible questions of the relationship between art and commerce for us, just as it brought the complexities of the modern banking system into view for its contemporary readers.23 Like the Waverley novels, and like Weal and Woe in Garveloch, Berkeley the Banker is a work of historical fiction, one that reaches back a decade and a half from the early 1830s to the moment a generation or so earlier when, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Bank of England was once again going to back its paper currency with gold. This had not been the case since 1797, when the Bank Restriction Act had put a stop to the conversion of paper into specie. Banknotes, at least those issued by the Bank of England, would once again be “as good as gold,” a phrase that dates, by no mere coincidence, to the late 1820s.24 The principles at stake in each of the Illustrations novels were listed as bullet points at the end of the work. For Berkeley the Banker they number twenty-one and include things like “As the issuing of paper money is a

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profitable business, the issue naturally became excessive when the check of convertibility was removed, while banking credit was not backed by sufficient security.” As embodied by the characters in the tale, these principles become a story about the multiple kinds of relationships that people can have to money: as banker, obviously, but also as miser, as consumer, as shopkeeper, and as forger. Martineau sets the story largely in a country town named Haleham where the title character, Mr Berkeley, who is a bit of an eccentric, makes the mistake of investing in a local bank, which seems to be a safe, low-risk venture and has been urged on him by his son Horace. Berkeley invests in the bank for the sake of improving the fortunes of his daughters, a point that cannot help but recall a work like Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, similarly set in a country town and featuring an eccentric father with marriageable daughters. Investing in the bank is a mistake, because the unexpected instability of money in this moment leads, in the course of the story, to a bank run that comes close to ruining him. And even though by the end of the story he is back on relatively secure fi nancial ground, there is little comfort to take from this: Berkeley is released from his debts only by having them forgiven by his creditors, a bit of narrative magic that belies the otherwise comparatively realistic mode of storytelling that Martineau follows throughout the Illustrations. And the marriages at the end of the novel—which are not of the Berkeley daughters at all, but of three secondary or even tertiary couples— are unsatisfying, not only because they come off almost as afterthoughts, but because almost the entirety of the second half of the story has been taken up with what becomes Berkeley the Banker’s main plot, focusing on the disastrous marriage of the Berkeleys’ neighbor Hester Parndon to Edgar Morrison. Edgar is at fi rst an appealing and ambitious young man, one of whose main attractions is that he has a job in London working in the Royal Mint. But Edgar is not what he seems to be. He turns criminal as he begins forging small-denomination Bank of England notes in an attic garret in their London house, then sending Hester out—fi rst unknowingly, then with full knowledge of the crime—to pass them. He is eventually caught and executed (forgery was a capital offense), and Hester, wiser for the experience, and presumably now resolved to a single life, returns to Haleham to live with her mother. The disaster of the Hester-Edgar marriage undermines any satisfaction we might take in the traditional resolution to the marriage plot that seems to be where the story is headed at its outset, making it clear that Martineau is really after something else, that the conventions of the courtship novel are just the means by which she can create (to pick up on the terms of the previous chapter) sufficient

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interest on the part of the readers in the characters to bring the force of her economic message home. Banking, money, the relative utility of specie and paper, and the crisis of convertibility from one to the other, posed during the time of the novels’ events in the 1810s and 1820s and still resonating at the time of Berkeley the Banker’s composition in 1833, become the real topics of Martineau’s work, its characters merely the vehicles for our engagement with them. Far more than Berkeley the banker, Hester has become the reader’s point of identification by the midpoint of the story. In part this can be traced to the substantial grounds of identification between Martineau herself and Hester, who turns out to be a book illustrator, in a literal sense: she designs pictures that go into the young-adult novels that will be issued by the town bookseller, a man named Enoch Pye.25 Early in the book, Hester presents Enoch with an illustration for a new story, a picture in which a young woman has been thrown from a horse that was scared by some mischievous young children. Enoch is at fi rst dubious at the young woman’s expression, which renders the illustrations less somber than those that he has typically placed as a frontispiece to the novels he publishes. But Hester convinces him that her drawing is a better, more aesthetically pleasing depiction of the narrative (“the story tells itself in the drawing,” she says) than the one he has imagined in his head, and he pays her a shilling in coin.26 The exchange of an “illustration” for money— even though it is not a lot of money— surely serves as a kind of allegory of Martineau’s own situation, as a woman writer attempting to make a modest living on her own through her art. But Martineau raises the stakes in several ways. First, Hester’s payment in coin leads to a discussion on the potential utility of the new banks— Berkeley’s included—that are opening in this town, which will issue banknotes to supplement the scarce metallic currency. The discussion, one of many such long didactic dialogues explaining economic ideas in the course of the Illustrations, basically puts into the form of conversation principles drawn from James Mill’s Elements on the utility of banking. But more consequentially for the novel, it turns out that the money Hester receives is going toward her small stock of savings in anticipation of her wedding to Edgar. The wedding is greeted with high hopes, not only because of the excellence of the marriage, as everyone sees it, but because it coincides with the opening of the Cavendish bank (a rival bank to Berkeley’s), whose opening leaves the town flush with cash in the form of Cavendish-issued banknotes. Martineau’s fi rst allegory— about Hester as the artist in the marketplace— creates the conditions for a second, here

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more consequential allegory, between Hester’s marriage to Edgar and the economy of Haleham. Both could be said to “crash” on a similar problem, the issuance of false currency that is unsupported by any source of value. The Cavendish banknotes turn out to be valueless when it becomes clear that Cavendish has no stock of precious metals or anything else to back them up, and a bank run leaves them worthless; Mr. Cavendish then goes to America and almost ruins Berkeley in the process. And the marriage fails because Edgar turns to counterfeiting notes of his own. Which is to say that Edgar’s mode of illustration—forgery—is held up against Hester’s drawings, the one illegitimate morally, legally, and economically, and the latter affirmed both by virtue of their fidelity to lived experience and by their figurative relationship to the Illustrations itself. The comparison becomes inescapable when Martineau chooses Enoch Pye to be the person who shows Hester how to tell a real banknote from a forgery, using, as it happens, one of the notes that Edgar has forged as his example (though neither of them knows at this point where the note has come from, or that Edgar is a forger). The analogy between Edgar’s excellent-but-not-flawless forgery of notes, and Hester’s art— and from that to Martineau’s own Illustrations, the book that we hold in our own hands—is inevitable. Forgery appears here not only as a perversion of economics but as a perversion of art as well, an illegitimate application of Edgar’s once highly regarded talents. This allegory by which Edgar’s counterfeiting becomes a figure for and is in turn figured by the illustrations by Hester and by Martineau herself exceeds any of the economic principles that Martineau is trying to “illustrate” in her book; it renders those principles objects of inquiry and attention in their own right. This stands as an argument for the special role of the Illustrations in providing an ethical understanding that purely economic thinking cannot perform. Claudia Klaver complains that “One half of Martineau’s didactic project—its engaging and accessible narrative form— comes into direct confl ict with the second half—the persuasive diffusion of correct economic doctrine to a wide, general readership. . . . Berkeley the Banker unintentionally makes visible an important theoretical slippage or failure within scientific political economy. This failure, the inability of mathematical certainty to account for and quantify the irrational, ‘human’ elements of trust and desire at the center of the capitalist system of money or ‘circulating credit’ weakens the authority of the Ricardian economic model as an explanatory and prescriptive social and economic tool.”27 But Martineau is more self-aware than this: what appears to be an unconscious irony is anything but; Martineau has identified what political economy will recognize as its limit.

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Berkeley the Banker’s real value, and surely what explains its success and the success of the other stories in the series, is the way it harnesses the affective power of the marriage plot to engage the reader’s powers of identification with a woman who understands that her duty is not so much in learning the principles of political economy but in returning to her village to care for her mother. Martineau’s turn here to another artistic medium—to the picture, referring to Hester’s art, to the engraving, and to the genre of the illustration—would seem to mark the point at which she feels that historical fiction is not quite enough to convince her readers, that fiction must reach for something else to convey the truth of political economy. Hester’s fi rst illustration, the one that Enoch asks her to change, but then relents and accepts (in part because of the judicious intervention of Mr. Craig, the local curate), offers a clue here. The problem, as Enoch fi rst sees it, is that the image depicts the woman who has fallen from her horse as more interested in the children who have upended her than in her own situation, to which she should be, Enoch thinks, “resigned,” as though anticipating her own death. (This is the attitude that he has wanted expressed by other women in frontispiece illustrations that he has commissioned from Hester—“the mother on her death-bed, and the sister when she heard of the sailor-boy’s being drowned, and the blind beggar-woman,” as Hester remembers.)28 Goaded by Mr Craig, Hester wins the argument, and her version of the image will go to press as she drew it. Her version, it is clear, is an image of sympathy conquering self-interest: the young woman demonstrates that she is a person of great sensibility, able to demonstrate concern for the welfare of others even when her own body is in considerable pain. Selfinterest is marked, interestingly, as a mode of a death, of “resignation”; for all that Enoch serves in some respects as a figure for Martineau, and for all that his generosity and religiosity will give us reason to admire him in the course of the novel, this is a moment when his tastes are shown to be archaic. By putting this idea in the form of the image, however, Martineau implies that there are limits not only to Ricardian political economy, but to narrative as well, that it must point outside itself to convey a true picture of sentiment—the unnamed young woman’s, Hester’s, and ultimately our own. This particular Illustration, about money and banking and marriage, creates a world of sympathetic identification with people who learn the hard way about the contingency of value in the modern economic system. And in its incorporation of a picture at the center, Berkeley the Banker is characteristic of tales of this moment, in Britain and, as we shall see, the United States as well.

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THE BANKER’S DAUGHTER AND THE RESERVE OF SENTIMENT Like Berkeley the Banker, Robert Morris’s “The Banker’s Daughter,” the story that fi nished in second place to Poe’s “The Gold Bug” in the Dollar Newspaper’s 1843 prize competition, organizes itself around an obvious opposition between art and commerce, the latter of which it equates with banking and condenses in the figure of Hamilton Montgomery, frequently called simply “the Banker.”29 The story positions banking as the enemy of beauty, creativity, femininity, and feelings that are understood to be more authentic and profound than the “pride” that, the story tells us from the start, has been the primary motivation for Montgomery’s career. The competition that called forward both of these tales about money is a case in which the victor really did receive all the spoils; while Poe’s story was an enormous success, Morris’s tale has been completely forgotten. But Morris’s story is interesting, both in its own right and because of the structure it shares with Berkeley the Banker and to which it also gives a name, a structure that has been replicated many times since then by authors who do not seem to be influenced by Morris’s “The Banker’s Daughter” in any of the ways that we usually think of intertextuality as working. The Banker’s Daughter became the name of an extraordinarily popular drama by Bronson Howard, one of the most successful and prolific late-nineteenth-century playwrights in the United States. After its fi rst, very successful New York run in 1878, The Banker’s Daughter was a staple of the repertory, frequently revived in New York and in regional theaters around the country well into the early twentieth century;30 it was adapted as a silent feature-length fi lm in 1914. Other fi lm companies of the period issued short fi lms that had the same title but different plots; D. W. Griffith directed a sixteen-minute short with the title The Banker’s Daughters in 1910. Walt Disney made a now-lost Oswald the Rabbit cartoon called The Banker’s Daughter in 1927; Terrytoons, a less ambitious and now defunct animation studio, did its own short with that name, which survives, in 1933. Emran Mian, a Pakistani-British writer who has moved between the worlds of government and private think tanks as well as journalism and fiction, used the title for a 2012 thriller. Though it is very likely that none of the authors or directors of these works had read Morris’s story of 1843, his original is still worth our attention, not only for its association with Poe and the fi nancial crisis that provided the occasion for both stories, but because it clearly established a paradigmatic structure that has continued to have appeal in the era of serial banking crises and panics that

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began in the 1830s and in which we still live. “The banker’s daughter” names a compelling relationship that fuses finance, sentiment, gender, generational change, sexuality, and patriarchy. No wonder it has proved so durable a part of the collective unconscious of writers and consumers of popular art. Morris was himself a journalist and then a banker; at the time of the publication of “The Banker’s Daughter,” he was the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and he became the president of the Commonwealth National Bank when it was incorporated in 1857. 31 The banker of his tale has seemingly been destined for that profession since birth; given the name “Hamilton” by his parents in a clear but unacknowledged reference to the founder of the First Bank of the United States, Hamilton Montgomery is intended from the outset to fulfi ll their desire for upward mobility from their rank in the merchant class (his father is a brewer). The story’s narrator pointedly introduces Hamilton by invoking the visual register: “Mark yonder fi gure! Turn the eye of mind for a moment upon the portrait of an aristocrat, an American aristocrat.” The reference to portraiture here sets up what we might think of as the story’s MacGuffin, a portrait of his late wife, about which more in a moment. First, though, the narrator establishes that young Hamilton has reached adulthood as perhaps the ideal homo economicus, a man who “kept a vigilant eye to the money world, selfishness having become a leading principle in his nature. . . . The aristocrat was united with the fi nancier.” Subtitled “A Story of Love and Pride,” “The Banker’s Daughter” not surprisingly identifies “pride” as Hamilton’s “besetting sin,” the essence of his “nature,” so much so that, crucially, he does not realize it himself: “Few possess the nerve to read the secret promptings of their own acts—to analyze, in a spirit of truth and sincerity, the mysteries of their own nature.” The plot of the story seems designed to reveal this mystery, to bring Hamilton into confrontation with the pride that would seem to be his and, to the extent that his name aligns his story with that of the nation, the United States’ birthright. “The Banker’s Daughter” does this by sacrificing fi rst Hamilton’s wife, and then his daughter, sending them to the grave for the sake of moments of art and sentiment. The main purpose of Montgomery’s wife (who is never given a name) in the story, it seems, is to give birth to a daughter and then die. At seventeen, that daughter, Alice, who we are told is “a picture” of youthful beauty, can remember her mother only through a portrait that Montgomery had commissioned from a young artist called Louis Rudolph. The portrait was done from the lifeless body of the mother, but Rudolph could not fi nish the mother’s eyes until he asked Alice to

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take her mother’s place, to sit for him so that he could use her eyes in the portrait of her mother. The scenario verges on the gothic, as Alice seems to revivify and then preserve the “soul” of her late mother in the portrait. But the sense of the uncanny is quickly mobilized into a love plot, because Alice falls in love with Rudolph. Montgomery refuses to permit the marriage, and Rudolph departs to Italy, where his artistic career blossoms as he incorporates Alice’s eyes into every portrait, an act that is cast by the narrator as an expression of his unconscious: “He felt this defect as a great weakness; but, he could not correct it.” Alice meanwhile withers away in grief, consumed by her banned love. Rudolph returns as Alice is on her deathbed—“The Artist springs forward, clasps and kisses the hand of the Banker’s Daughter”— and Montgomery relents: “His heart for the time, is human. He takes the hand of his child and places it in that of her lover.” Alice and Rudolph are married, and she immediately dies. “The Banker’s Daughter” makes no effort to hide the message that we are to take away from the story, framing it from the outset as “a story of love and pride” and steering the plot toward a death that is clearly designed to teach Hamilton and the reader a lesson: put familial love ahead of commerce! The story’s use of an illustration, here a portrait that seems to be the repository for a female, sentimental essence that passes from mother to daughter, an ekphrastic turn that is reinforced or cross-referenced by the frequent invocations to the reader to see the characters in the mind’s eye, forms a striking point of convergence with Martineau. In both cases, the visual register is used to help articulate a truth that seems inexpressible in any other way. “The Banker’s Daughter” is in many ways highly conventional— a blocking figure getting in the way of young love is the oldest story in the book—but its particular deployment of those conventions, and its use of a picture to figure forth a relation is characteristic of this moment. Whereas Berkeley the Banker had seen illustration as a cognate of money, the pictures here are deployed to express what we might think of as a reserve of feeling that Hamilton Montgomery has been systematically trained to repress. That this is a national story as well is suggested not only by the fact that, as we have seen, Hamilton Montgomery refers to Alexander Hamilton; in addition, both the story and its publication take place in Philadelphia, the home of both banks of the United States. The building in which the banks were housed— still a landmark in Philadelphia—is possibly hinted at in the story when the narrator notes that Montgomery lives in a home “immediately adjoining the banking-house with which he was connected.” That “house” is not specified further, but the reference clearly

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alludes, if not to the Bank of the United States itself, to the Bank War of the previous decade and the following fi nancial crisis that surely forms the larger context within which the publication of “The Banker’s Daughter” makes sense. “Some changes have since taken place in the vicinity” of both the banker’s and the bank’s “houses,” we learn in the story’s fi rst marker that what we are reading is a piece of historical fiction, a tale set in a time different from the present moment. Morris specifically sets the climax of his story—the return of Rudolph, the deathbed marriage, and the death of Alice— a decade earlier, in June 1833, when Andrew Jackson was on the verge of transferring the deposits of the U.S. federal government from the Second Bank of the United States to state banks (but had not yet done it), an act that is at least one of the factors leading to the Panic of 1837. This has the effect of removing “The Banker’s Daughter” from its local historical context and positioning its events at the start of what, by 1843, could appear to be a decade of ongoing fi nancial crisis. Hamilton’s pride in this accounting would read as the nation’s, too, as what we are to see as the United States’ misguided devotion to commerce over sentiment. The complication of the corporate institution and the nation here serves Morris’s purposes as he uses the Bank of the United States as a key point of reference in a national allegory. “The Banker’s Daughter” fi nished behind Poe’s far more famous tale “The Gold Bug,” and there is no reason to second-guess that judgment. But Morris’s interests— and Martineau’s— are not nearly so far removed from Poe’s as we might think. Money, banking, sentiment, the nation, images, nostalgia: all of these elements are present in different form in “The Gold Bug” as well. Since, of all of the short works of fiction of this period that refer in some sense to the figure of the bank, that story has continued to have the most resonance in a variety of contexts, it is time at last to turn our focus to Poe’s tale, which has the additional feature of bringing the questions of race and slavery— so often, as we have seen, inextricable from the histories of writing and business in this period—back as objects, however encrypted, of our interest, attention, and inquiry.

“THE GOLD BUG” AND THE PLACE OF LITERATURE I want to return now to the review of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1845 Tales in the Aristidean magazine with which this chapter began, the review that observed that “The Gold Bug” was designed from the outset to be popular by virtue of its theme of discovering money. The review was published anonymously, but the reviewer seems to know a lot about the author’s in-

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tentions, and there’s a reason for that; the writer of this review is quite possibly Poe himself. To be sure, the evidence for Poe’s authorship of the review is inconclusive and is likely to remain so. The editor of the Aristidean was Thomas Dunn English; Thomas Ollive Mabbott, the editor of the scholarly edition of Poe’s tales, believes that it was English who wrote this essay, “obviously after a discussion with Poe himself.”32 It is hard, however, to see how it is “obvious” to imagine such a discussion, for which no documentary evidence exists. More to the point, the essay is so sympathetic to Poe’s work, as well as so well informed about his intentions that it seems extremely unlikely to have been written by English, with whom Poe had a vexed relationship. Patrick Quinn, the editor of the Library of America edition of Poe’s Poetry and Tales, ascribes it to Poe himself, as I do here, since Poe seems to be by far the person who would be most likely to know the author’s goals. 33 Yet even in the unlikely scenario that the review is not by Poe, its purposes are still relevant, because it aims to take “The Gold Bug” and the other tales in the collection out of their first publication in newspapers and journals and position them as works of imaginative literature, testimony to “the creative power of the mind,” which is capable of producing an “original combination of ideas.”34 The review needs to be considered as a constituent part of the story itself; it in effect completes a circuit opened by the story’s invocation of the aesthetic and frames “The Gold Bug” as exceeding the occasion of its original newspaper publication, as original in relation to other writers of the period and as the tale that is most characteristic of Poe’s own work. And for many years, this effort was successful. “The Gold Bug” was widely read in its moment and for decades thereafter. The Aristidean review imagines the story itself as a kind of currency, one that has been “circulated to a greater extent than any American tale, before or since.”35 In the wake of its original publication, “The Gold Bug” was reprinted by the Dollar newspaper, then by many other newspapers in violation of the copyright that the Dollar had taken out; it was translated into French and also became the subject of a stage production in Philadelphia. Poe boasted in 1844 that it was his most “successful tale,” of which “more than 300,000 copies [had] been circulated” and suggested the next year that his new collection of Tales—which gave “The Gold Bug” pride of place, the first story in the collection, should be retitled The Gold- Bug and Other Tales.36 This elevation of “The Gold-Bug” over Poe’s other stories did eventually come to pass; many early-twentieth-century popular collections of Poe’s writings follow his suggestion that it should take priority in the title. But the story seems to be much less prominent today, at least in one of the main

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venues by which the canon of nineteenth-century U.S. writing is disseminated: the literature anthology. The current editions of the Heath Anthology of American Literature, the Norton Anthology of American Literature, and the Pearson Anthology of American Literature all omit the story from their sampling of Poe’s writings. This might be as good an indicator as any that the story has fallen out of popular taste and perhaps, to some extent, ready intelligibility, its interests and momentum so alien to modern readers that it may be hard to figure out what the fuss was all about in the fi rst place. But perhaps a likely and immediate reason for “The Gold Bug’s” exclusion from modern anthologies at least is Poe’s use of the word “nigger” three times to refer to Jupiter, Legrand’s elderly servant. 37 This is obviously a powerfully charged word in our time, as witnessed by the recent controversy over the inclusion of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where the word appears more than two hundred times, on school reading lists; the controversy has been so intense as to cause at least one edition to replace “nigger” with “slave.”38 With so many other Poe stories to choose from, why would an anthology editor court that kind of controversy? Yet to ignore “The Gold Bug” entirely as a consequence is to misremember Poe’s long reception history and to ignore what Poe himself seems to have realized was not only his most popular but in some sense his most representative story. And it is more than a little ironic that the likely cause of this story’s eclipse in our collective memory of Poe’s oeuvre—which, perhaps in part because of “The Gold Bug’s” absence, is now often essentially, and reductively, thought of as in the mode of the gothic—would have to do with Jupiter’s place in it. For Jupiter is central to this story, both diegetically and thematically. Jupiter is, for one thing, the person who climbs the tree to drop the gold bug of the title through the eye of a skull left there by Captain Kidd as an aid to fi nding the treasure, doing so when Legrand offers him a “silver dollar,” that is, a solid and valuable piece of American currency that cannot help but form a contrast with the treasure they discover, which is entirely composed of golden objects and a hodgepodge of European specie dating from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. What is more, Jupiter’s relationship to Legrand is the emotional core of the story. Jupiter is a manumitted slave, a fact that (as Terence Whalen has noted) would have the effect of making the story more palatable to a national audience in the United States, and to the international readership as well.39 The narrator of “The Gold Bug,” an unnamed friend of Legrand, tells us that he strongly suspects that Legrand’s family, worried that he was “somewhat unsettled in intellect” (3:807), had made sure

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that Jupiter stayed with him even after his manumission. Their relationship is thus pointedly sentimental, sustained now through emotional ties rather than by the institution of slavery. Legrand and Jupiter’s relationship is a strange one in many respects. Jupiter is willing to talk back to Legrand when he is exasperated at Jupiter for hesitating to climb out on a tree limb: “Yes, massa, needn’t hollo at poor nigger dat style” (820). When Legrand disappears for a day, wandering around apparently lost in thought on the mainland, Jupiter threatens him with a beating, but thinks better of it when Legrand returns looking “so berry poorly” (3:812). The narrator does not seem surprised by this, and Legrand, who confi rms Jupiter’s account, is not outraged, but at a time and in a place where a black man could be severely punished for threatening a white man with violence, this scene seems deliberately provocative.40 It has no function in the plot, which indicates that it is here to tell us something about the Legrand-Jupiter relationship, which is clearly a complex and long-standing bond. All of this means that any treasure that Jupiter and Legrand fi nd is pointedly removed from any direct implication in the slave system. Kidd’s treasure is not the product of slave trading, and Jupiter’s efforts are explicitly exchanged for money rather than being coerced as a result of a master-slave relationship. (Whether Jupiter is to share in the treasure is left unstated at the end of the story.) The primary labor that Legrand will use to recover the treasure is the labor of his mind, and even the physical work required to execute his plan is on a wage basis surrounded by an aura of long-standing affection rather than the product of the slave system. Poe’s use of the word “nigger” in “The Gold Bug” deserves attention fi rst because it raises the question of language and reference in the story, and also because it underscores the absence of slavery as an economic issue in other discussions of and from this period. It is important to recognize that “nigger” is the word that Jupiter uses to refer to himself; neither of the white characters in the story, Legrand and the narrator, ever uses it; this is a further way in which Poe distances them and the story from the slave system. In the Aristidean review, Poe invokes the visual dimension of the written character when he claims that Jupiter is “drawn accurately—no feature over shaded, or distorted.”41 But that is not at all true. Jupiter may be less of a caricature than other contemporary fictional depictions of African Americans, but this is far from a nuanced or realistic portrait, and his distinctive language is the giveaway. The word that Jupiter uses to refer to himself is part and parcel of Jupiter’s idiosyncratic dialect, a patois of Poe’s own invention that sort of resembles, but also sort of does not, the Gullah dialect spoken in coastal African American com-

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munities in South Carolina, where the story is set. Jupiter’s language, in its difference from the standard English used by the other characters in the story (and presumably by the readers that Poe imagines as the story’s audience), creates plays on words where they otherwise might not occur, notably, for example, in Jupiter’s reference to the “goole bug” that Legrand pursues, a mispronunciation that echoes with the word “ghoul” (3:809, 826). This suggestion of the supernatural turns out, of course, to be a red herring, but Legrand confi rms that he, too, had intended “a little bit of sober mystification” (3:844) in the retelling of his solution, keeping a supernatural explanation in play until the very end. More generally, Jupiter’s language points us to the story’s many plays on words, its puns on “no tin,” “specie,” “Kidd,” “deposit,” “fool’s cap,” “tell” and (as we have already seen) “bank.” We will return to Jupiter, but for now it is crucial to observe that one aspect of his significance to the story is that he has a particularly crucial, and easily overlooked, role in setting in motion the play in referentiality that is such an obvious part of the “The Gold Bug” and that has in recent years become such a central part of its interpretations. For the one place where “The Gold Bug” has seen a revival of sorts in recent decades is in studies like this one, works of criticism by scholars who read this remarkable story as a covert story about the place of the literary. For Marc Shell, “The Gold Bug” allegorizes how contemporary “financiers were turning paper into gold by means of the newly widespread institution of paper money.”42 Terence Whalen, building on (and also correcting) Shell’s work, sees the tale as “exposing the complicitous relations among capitalism, cryptography, and the rise of a mass culture in antebellum America.”43 Shawn Rosenheim puts Poe and this story in particular at the origin-point of a strain of cryptographic writing that he traces from Poe through twentieth-century American literature and military intelligence: “From the time of World War I on, American literature and intelligence have been shaped by Poe’s secret writing in all its forms.” He notes that the word “cryptograph” itself fi rst appears in “The Gold Bug,” and he sees that story as clarifying “a set of assumptions about language and literature that, just as Poe claims, are probably coextensive with writing.”44 Heinz Tschachler has recently placed this story at the center of what he calls Poe’s “monetary imagination.”45 More studies along the same lines could be cited. Common to all of them is an implicit belief that “The Gold Bug” is really about something quite different from the search for lost treasure, that its content is in effect coded or encrypted in the manner of the treasure map at its center and that its pleasures, to readers in the moment and to the story’s many interpreters since, has to do with the

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effort of deciphering “The Gold Bug’s” message. Rosenheim argues that “despite the relative simplicity of Poe’s game, the pleasure of solving his cipher— or, rather, of watching it be solved by Legrand—mobilizes a deep tension in realist fiction between our absorption in the represented world of the tale and our simultaneous fascination with the process of reading, of translating signs into meaning.”46 More than most short stories, this one seems to solicit the attention of a particular kind of obsessive reader, one for whom no detail might be too small, one who sees “The Gold Bug” as a fascinating story about telling a story. We need, then, to understand “The Gold Bug” not just as a story to interpret but as a story about interpretation, about art, and about the place and utility of the literary. But, using Jupiter’s voice against the grain of Poe’s story, we also need to see how it also encodes within it both the possibilities and the limits of its moment, here at what turned out to be end of an era of fi nancial crisis that the story wants to will out of existence, by means of ratiocination. This is done by means of a picture on a document, a piece of parchment that encodes a map identifying where Captain Kidd had buried his treasure. Legrand and Jupiter fi nd the parchment on the beach on the coast of South Carolina, just across from Sullivan’s Island (where they live, and where the treasure was buried); Jupiter had picked it up to wrap in it the gold-colored beetle that the two had discovered moments before. Bitten— literally, on the hand—by this gold bug, Legrand sets out to decode the encrypted message on the parchment. He does so successfully and is led to a chest fi lled with “a treasure of incalculable value” (3:826), consisting of something on the order of $450,000 in old English, Spanish, French, and German coins, buried indiscriminately with jewels, watches, and a variety of golden objects (rings, chains, earrings, punchbowls, sword handles, crucifi xes, etc.)— all told, valuing more than “a million and a half of dollars” (3:827, 828). At its most obvious level, “The Gold Bug” presents a fantasy of discovering vast riches, or, perhaps more to the point, of proving oneself worthy of making such a discovery by virtue of one’s skill at decoding a cryptograph, of interpreting a text from the past. In this, many critics have (I think very plausibly) seen in Legrand a figure of Poe himself, not only since Poe (as we shall see in a second) loved cryptography, but also because the fantasy of discovering wealth to restore his position in the world— Legrand is the scion of a once-aristocratic family that has fallen on hard times—was one that Poe, chronically short of money and always resenting his wealthy adoptive father’s refusal to support him, had every reason to share. Poe’s interest in cryptography turns out to be revealing, and it

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is worth a detour, before we put Legrand’s accomplishment back into the larger arc of “The Gold Bug.” Poe’s detective stories—“The Purloined Letter,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Tell-Tale Heart”— all encode secrets that have to be discovered by Dupin, the detective, and we can, in broad terms, think of these stories as making a theme of secret or hidden writing that is not far removed from the task that Legrand sets for himself in “The Gold Bug.” But Poe was also very interested in cryptographs in a much more specific sense, as many critics have noted since just after his death. He seems to have developed an acute interest in cryptography around the year 1840. In that year, he contributed numerous cryptograms and other puzzles to Alexander’s Weekly Messenger, and he wrote several articles on the topic of “Secret Writing” for Graham’s Magazine in 1841. Even if we do not go so far as Rosenheim, to see Poe’s interest in cryptography as the master key not only to his career but to a significant strain of writing in the many years since Poe’s death, it’s clear that Poe embraced cryptography as an intellectual exercise and a useful engine of plot construction. As Terence Whalen puts it, “though he had fi rst stumbled upon secret writing as a gimmick to sell newspapers, Poe later described it as a device for mental improvement, an instrument of diplomacy, an aid to courtship, and fi nally as a means to locate the buried treasure of dead Scottish pirates.”47 Cryptography also became the vehicle by which Poe attempted, like Legrand, to rehabilitate his fortunes. Poe offered his cryptographic skills as a calling card to what he hoped would be a political appointment in the Tyler administration. In the last of his essays on “Secret Writing,” in Graham’s in 1841, Poe, disguising himself as a correspondent named “W. B. Tyler” writing to Poe, offers a cryptogram that turns out, when decoded, to be a passage from the end of Addison’s Cato: The soul, secured in her existence, smiles At the drawn dagger, and defies its point. The stars shall fade away, the sun himself Grow dim with age, and nature sink in years; But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth, Unhurt amidst the wars of elements, The wrecks of matter, and the crush of worlds.48

The speaker here is none other than Cato himself, as he contemplates suicide as a way of maintaining his integrity in the face of what has now

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become Caesar’s inevitable victory. The word “thou” refers to Cato’s soul, which will endure in spite of the death of his material body, preserving the principles of republican virtue forever. The passage specifies the very moment when Cato the historical figure launches himself forward to become Cato the ideological symbol that, as we saw in chapter 2, fi rst established itself in Anglo-American discourse as a response to the financial crisis following the collapse of the South Sea Bubble— and has lived on as a contributor to the American political imaginary. Poe’s invocation of Cato gains even greater specificity when we see how it was invoked in other places at the turn of the 1840s. In the wake of the Panic of 1837, the figure of Cato was mobilized once more, as opponents of reconstituting a national bank, like Tyler, identified themselves with the species of incorruptible Roman virtue in the face of tyranny that Cato was remembered as embodying.49 Poe’s politics in the sense of his partisan affiliations or positions on specific issues are notoriously hard to determine with certainty; his writings most typically address the politics of the day in the mode of satire and negation, as, for example, in “Peter Pendulum,” his 1840 story on the culture of American business, a story often read as a satire on the persona and legacy of Benjamin Franklin. Or here, in the mode of an encrypted message, one quite possibly meant for Tyler alone, a message that attests to affiliation more with Tyler’s public persona as the last republican facing down the corruptions of his time than with his reactionary policies. This particular cryptogram was not publicly decoded until the early 1990s, so we have no way of knowing whether Tyler—who is known to have been a reader of Poe’s works— ever even saw it, much less decoded it himself. But Poe’s citation of Cato here at the moment of another economic legitimation crisis underscores the way Poe understood himself to be, like Cato, a figure living in the wrong time, witnessing the end of the era to which he belonged and the start of something quite alien. Poe’s secret message to Tyler was an attempt to curry favor in the hopes of gaining a government position and getting an income that would be more secure than what he could make as a journal editor and fiction writer; it invokes what he seemed to have hoped would be a structure of feeling that Tyler would have recognized and shared. Yet for all of the public debate in Britain and America in the 1830s and 1840s about the legitimacy and propriety of fiat money and the role of banks in regulating currency, it was pretty clear by the early 1840s that there was no turning back, that paper instruments were here to stay. Tyler himself, an advocate of hard money and so strong a believer that a national bank was unconstitutional that he vetoed the legislation that would have

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created what would have been in effect a third Bank of the United States, admitted as much in his December 1841 message at the opening of Congress. Observing that “paper circulation” constitutes a “comparatively modern” invention over against “the circulation of gold and silver,” Tyler nonetheless bows to the inevitable: I do not propose to enter into a comparative analysis of the merits of the two systems. Such belonged more properly to the period of the introduction of the paper system. The speculative philosopher might fi nd inducements to prosecute the inquiry, but his researches could only lead him to conclude that the paper system had probably better never have been introduced, and that society might have been much happier without it. The practical statesman has a very different task to perform. He has to look at things as they are; to take them as he fi nds them; to supply deficiencies, and to prune excesses, as far as in him lies. The task of furnishing a corrective for derangements of the paper medium, with us, is almost inexpressibly great.50

Tyler invokes what we could think of as a pecuniary sublime, a point where language fails, as he contemplates the statesman’s task of comprehending, much less controlling, the spread of fiat money in the United States. And this is in part because, as Tyler goes on to point out, the fact that states have chartered so many different “banking corporations” that have issued various forms of paper currency renders moot the question of whether paper money is acceptable. The issue now is not whether hard money can return to its central place but how best to regulate the status quo. And from this point onward, advocates of a return to a currency that would stand for no more than the value of its precious metal content also found themselves to be outliers and eventually cranks. Out of step even with Tyler, Poe’s coded invocation of Cato now seems construable as a nostalgic gesture, a move that not only is compatible with its origins in Addison’s play but extended that structure of feeling through “The Gold Bug” and beyond. For “The Gold Bug” is a rare example of a work of literature having impact on the world, as giving language to economic actors. For it is not as though Poe, in putting a gold-colored beetle at the center of his story, was adopting a term in common use to describe those who favored hard money like gold against bank-issued forms of paper money. Rather, he was creating a term that went on to be adopted by them throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. Even now, “gold bugs” seek refuge in precious metals because they are suspicious of the integrity and permanent

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value of currencies that are supported by national governments. They do not need to have read Poe’s story to continue to share its flattering fantasy of outsmarting everyone else to discover treasure ignored by others. In the system of relays between Addison, Poe, Tyler, and the “gold bugs” who followed them, specie currency becomes liberated from its role as the essential basis of the economic system to serve the purposes of fiction and nostalgia. Returning, then, to “The Gold Bug,” it seems to be no coincidence that the treasure map that Legrand decodes is at fi rst doubly hidden, written in invisible ink that only shows itself when, by chance, the story’s unnamed narrator absentmindedly holds the map near the fi re in Legrand’s small house. The heat reveals a picture, first that of a death’s head and then of a “kid,” a baby goat, that Legrand “at once” realizes is “a kind of punning or hieroglyphical signature,” that of Captain Kidd, who was by this means identifying the map as his own (3:833). Heating the map some more, Legrand discovers an encoded message that, once decoded, leads him, the narrator, and Jupiter to Kidd’s buried treasure—that is, to the gold, silver, and booty of the past, specifically of the late seventeenth century, when William Kidd was engaged in privateering. As Legrand uses this map to discover Kidd’s treasure, Poe stages not the scene of decoding itself but the scene of “telling,” as Legrand retrospectively explains the process of interpretation to the narrator. I put “telling” in scare quotes because Poe underscores the punning or hieroglyphic aspect of that word as well when he makes “tell” the very last word of the story, playing on its use as both a referent for narration and the act of counting out money at a bank window. The tale of the map’s decoding, offered to the narrator who here stands in for the reader of “The Gold Bug,” becomes an allegory for the act of interpretation in general, the conversion of an image into narrative and the conversion of mere symbols into things of value. The hidden character of the map’s message might be read, too, as an allegory for how the past, like the clues that Poe’s detective Dupin discovers in “The Purloined Letter,” tends to hide in more or less plain sight, requiring much less effort than we usually assume to decode. In this respect, the fact that the map is written on parchment, that is, on animal skin, gains a new significance. Legrand emphasizes that the map is on parchment, in fact—“not paper”— an act that, as Whalen points out, not only creates another pun on “kid” but pointedly differentiates the map from paper currency (3:831). It also directs us to the different skin colors of the characters in the story, which include not only Jupiter but also the “older negroes”— presumably slaves, though we are never told so explicitly—whom Legrand

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consults when he tries to fi nd the location of Bessop’s castle, a key location identified on the map (3:841). Central to the story’s linguistic play, providing the labor for discovering the treasure chest, retaining the memory of the land that Legrand uses to recover the fortune that restores his family’s wealth, African American characters are the essential but easily occluded keys unlocking the story’s meaning at every turn. Skin is the surface on which Legrand’s wealth— and America’s—is written. It is less surprising to see, then, that Legrand’s narrative of how he unlocked the parchment’s message ends with a scene of violence, as he attempts to account for the presence of several skeletons that he, Jupiter, and the narrator found around the treasure chest. What Legrand supposes, he says, is that these are the bodies of those who performed the “labor” of putting the chest in the ground in the fi rst place— and who were then killed by Kidd himself in order to secure his secret: “Who shall tell?” (3:844). The joke here can be read, I suggest, as a screen memory for the violence of the past, much of it performed on the bodies of laborers with black as well as white skin, that has created the wealth that always seems to be the discovery of those clever enough to uncover it in the present. The frisson of this not-quite-gothic moment is quickly contained and played for a joke, a gesture in keeping with the way the story consistently gestures toward, then quickly contains, the work of enslaved peoples, indeed of the larger world beyond Sullivan’s Island. Yet this chilling reminder of the ruthlessness by which treasure has been secured surely serves here to displace understandings of the economic system from being largely about tracing the flow of money to imagining richer veins of history, experience, and feeling. This may well be a message from Poe’s unconscious, rather than his conscious mind, but, like the explicit substitution of parchment for paper, it preserves, encodes, aestheticizes the money economy that, Poe suggests, is his ostensible subject. It gives the corporate economy of the 1840s the “body to be kicked” that the figure of the bank had seemed to remove from our view.

Coda

The Entrepreneur as Corporate Hero

S

ince the middle of the nineteenth century, the business corporation’s influence and role have only grown, and the concomitant sense of scandal that flares up around it has only intensified, particularly in the United States, when corporations seem to supplant the agency of individual persons by, for example, being extended constitutional rights that were originally imagined for people. A full narrative of these developments is well beyond the scope of this book. So too is an in-depth analysis of imaginative works over the past century and a half that could be said to have been occasioned by the expansion of corporate economic forms, though some intriguing cases can be identified with ease. In Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (published in 1843, the same year as “The Gold Bug”), Ebenezer Scrooge pointedly continues to operate his business under the corporate identity of “Scrooge and Marley” after his partner’s death: “It was all the same to him.”1 The corporate body has endured past the death of Marley’s physical body, a point that is only reinforced by the fact that Marley’s ghost has never really left Scrooge; as Marley tells his former partner, “I have sat invisible beside you many and many a day” (15). Scrooge has achieved a kind of immortality of his own, a fact that seems almost premeditated, given how the story is premised on the way business has already created structures designed to persist beyond the mortal lives of human persons. This mechanism of corporate continuity gets raised to an even greater level of intelligibility when, in the middle of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), Carrie’s lover Hurstwood begins his inexorable decline, which will end with his suicide in the midst of abject poverty, the narrator reflects on how an individual’s “fortune”—here understood more as his wealth than his luck—is able to endure even as his “strength and will” declines with age. What happens, the narrator observes, is that 218

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a fortune “becomes allied with young forces which make for its existence, even when the strength and wisdom of the founder are fading.” As these “young forces” take over the responsibility of conserving the fortune, its founder merely provides “direction” for a time, and then, eventually, “the man wanes” into insignificance.2 The mechanism of self-extension described here offers, as Walter Benn Michaels has pointed out, a myth of origin for the corporation. 3 We could also read James M. Cain’s novel Double Indemnity, fi rst published in serial form in Liberty magazine, then reissued as a novel and reaching its widest audience as a 1944 film, as a brilliant and acerbic meditation on the incursion of the insurantial imaginary into the private domain of marriage, one that has a genealogy in the kinds of eighteenth-century insurance fictions that we explored in chapter 4. And, staying in the medium of fi lm, we would have to take note of Norman Jewison’s 1975 movie Rollerball, in which nation-states have been superseded as the primary means for political and economic organization by multinational corporations, which stage violent public games to underscore the insignificance of individuals. Remade in a more-or-less literal version in 2002, Rollerball’s corporate dystopian fantasy informs the far more successful series of Hunger Games novels and movies, starting with the publication of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins in 2008. It seems very likely that the relationship between the corporation and human beings will continue to be a spur to scandal, debate, theorization, and imagination across the domains of business, law, and literature for some time to come. Rather than an extended narrative of economic history or a survey of literary examples, I close here with a brief discussion of one influential and prescient articulation of the relationship between the corporation and the individual, one offered by Ronald Coase that centers on the figure of the entrepreneur. As Deirdre McCloskey observes, Coase’s work inhabits a special disciplinary space of its own, often “taking as much from the Law School as from the Department of Economics.”4 Coase was also, I would argue, a writer of fiction, as in his fi rst published paper, “The Nature of the Firm” (1937), where he presents what amounts to a myth of origin for the corporation. Why, Coase asks, when the individual “entrepreneur” can go to the open market to contract out everything he might need to conduct his business, do business fi rms emerge at all?5 The answer, Coase argues, lies in the existence of what he calls in this essay “marketing costs” and what have become better known since (with many different economists responsible for extending Coase’s concept) as “transaction costs.” Markets, Coase says, are never completely efficient because they are never com-

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pletely intelligible: it costs the entrepreneur something to fi nd out what the best price is, to negotiate for it, to hedge against the risk that the price might change over the duration of the contract, to factor in the broader uncertainties of the world, to calculate and pay taxes, and so on. Firms come into existence when it is cheaper to handle some of these transaction costs within an institution rather than to go out to the open market every single time for each transaction that it needs in order to conduct its business. Later economists have elaborated upon Coase’s insight—which at the time ran against the grain of most mainstream economic writers, who typically heralded the efficiency of the price mechanism— and they have shown that something on the order of half of the modern economy can be understood as consisting of transaction costs. This is the work of sales, of marketing, of insurance, of negotiation, of regulation, of lawyering. As McCloskey puts it, “Coase’s transaction costs are in fact the costs of talking.”6 In bringing this kind of activity into the domain of the economic, Coase takes the discipline back to its eighteenth-century origins in the work of Adam Smith, theorist of national wealth and teacher of rhetoric, thereby emphasizing the quotidian experience of human beings in a world that is extremely complex and not transparent, and for which it takes the hard work of thought, negotiation, discernment, and persuasion to achieve their goals. And for this reason people fi nd themselves frequently creating institutions—fi rms, partnerships, corporations, collective entities of all kinds—that give form to the rhetoric that constitutes so much of economic life, institutions that gird individuals as they encounter the impersonality of the marketplace. In this book, I have taken literature to be another place where the transaction costs of modernity have left their mark, and the rhetoric of economic writing to be susceptible to literary analysis. The abundance of talk that goes into economic life is structured by rules that are not unique to business, which must share its language with the rest of us. Like literature, the economy is a social form made of words, and its fi rms are in a sense like genres, forms structured to a specific purpose: banks do one kind of thing, insurance corporations do another, as do novels and dramatic tragedies. This analogy is far from seamless, and it neither exhausts the relationship between literature and economics nor fully explains it. But I offer it to suggest how attention to the writings surrounding corporations in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, when the terms of those entities’ engagement with the world was itself under negotiation, can tell us something that we have forgotten about how they exerted their claims to organize society.

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The history of Coase’s term “entrepreneur” forms an interesting example in its own right. The word comes into English from the French, where it dates to at least the Middle Ages; it was used then to describe a person who undertakes a particular task.7 It became a specialized term of art in works such as Jacques Savary des Brûlons’s Dictionnaire universel de commerce of 1727 and Richard Cantillon’s Essai sur la nature du commerce, written in the 1730s and then published in 1755 in French. Cantillon, whose work was translated in part by Malachy Postlethwayt and was also known to Adam Smith, was the fi rst to speak of the entrepreneur as a particular kind of economic actor, a mediating figure between farmers or manufacturers and their customers, who therefore bore particular kinds of risk.8 But the figure who is most responsible for installing the figure of the entrepreneur at the center of commercial life is Jean-Baptiste Say, whose Traité d’économie politique (1803) was designed in part to popularize Adam Smith among French readers. But Say also in part intended to correct Smith by putting the entrepreneur, here understood as the man who originates a business, at the center of his model of the economic system. A businessman himself (he worked for a life insurance company and opened his own cotton plant), Say faulted Smith for (among other things) having little to say about the individuals who, Say argued, were most crucial to constructing the modern economy, the entrepreneurs who built businesses, assumed risk, and created wealth. Say offers an extraordinary hymn of praise to the entrepreneur: “We must remember that the work of the entrepreneur of industry is linked to the second kind of the operations that we have recognized to be necessary for exercising all industries whatsoever; the operation that consists of applying acquired knowledge to a product for our use.” Say endows the figure of the entrepreneur with special gifts: “This kind of work calls for moral qualities whose combination is not common. He must have judgment, persistence, knowledge of persons and things. He must be able properly to assess the importance of every product, the demand for each, the means of procuring them; he must sometimes employ a great number of individuals; he must buy or see obtained raw materials, bring them together with his workers, seek consumers, have a spirit of order and economy; in a word, he needs to have administrative talent.”9 Say continues for some length on the many virtues of the entrepreneur, stressing his importance and his rarity, his capacity for risk-taking and the comprehensive knowledge of all aspects of the economic system that enables him to serve as the agent between merchants, farmers, and industrialists. Say’s entrepreneur redeems the Smithian fall into the division of labor that sees each actor in the economy atomized,

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pursuing his own self-interest without the awareness of what others are doing. He is, in every way, the hero of Say’s economic system. Say had many admirers in the early-nineteenth-century United States, who saw his valorization of an essentially agrarian economy as a healthy counter to arguments advancing the importance of industrialization. And, too, Americans were primed in these decades to admire French challenges to British intellectuals. Among Say’s admirers was Thomas Jefferson, who tried to recruit him to become professor of political economy at the University of Virginia (a position that, as it happens, Ronald Coase later held before he moved to the University of Chicago). Jefferson recommended Say over Smith to correspondents and was given a copy of the second edition of Say’s Treatise by the author himself. Say also had collaborators in France, most notably Destutt de Tracy, author of the five-volume Eléments d’idéologie, published in 1817–18.10 This was de Tracy’s attempt to codify the science that he was the fi rst to call “ideology,” the science of ideas that he took from his reading of John Locke. De Tracy’s notion of “ideology” is partly like, partly unlike what we usually mean when we use the word. For him, ideology is always the matter of conscious thought, and ideas are concepts that can be fully imagined in the mind and then articulated in language. De Tracy has no particular interest in the notion of ideology as a constituent of the unconscious that is widely used in modern cultural critique and that informs this book. Parts of de Tracy’s Eléments d’idéologie were translated into English 1817 and 1818 by Jefferson, who gave it the title A Treatise on Political Economy in emulation of Say’s book. A key figure in Jefferson’s translation is that of the “undertaker.” This is Jefferson’s awkward translation of entrepreneur, which had not yet been accepted as an English word in its own right. The “undertaker” here is imagined as a mediating figure, one of “three kinds of labourers; the man of science, the undertaker, and the workman.”11 It is the undertaker who conceptualizes how to apply the abstract work of the theoretician to problems of the world that will in turn be worked upon by the manual laborer: “Theory is part of the scientific, application that of the undertaker, and execution that of the workman” (114). The figure here is very much like that of Say’s book: the hero of the economy in the way that he puts the very best ideas into practice; even the entrepreneur’s “consumption,” writes de Tracy/Jefferson, “is fruitful, because it is replaced by a superior production” (203). Promoting the importance of the entrepreneur serves Jefferson’s ideology of agrarian capitalism, since it is probably very much like the way that Jefferson saw himself, the individual farmer who was bringing the best of the developments in modern agricultural science to bear on his planta-

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tions. What Jefferson never states, of course, is that the “workman” in the context of the American South was very likely to be an enslaved African American. That Jefferson promotes this figure of the entrepreneur in opposition to larger economic entities is revealed in the introductory letter that Jefferson wrote to his Georgetown publisher, Joseph Milligan, regarding de Tracy’s Treatise; there Jefferson observes that the publication of this work might, “by diffusing sound principles of Political Economy . . . protect the public industry from the parasite institutions now consuming it” (3). Those “parasite institutions” would be understood by any reader of 1818 to be corporations, and specifically the Second Bank of the United States, recently chartered amid a great deal of controversy by those, including Jefferson, who resisted the concentration of fi nancial power in a centralized institution. It is hard not to see Jefferson as being particularly attracted to de Tracy’s work for its description of the way “bankers, exchangers, agents, lenders, discounters . . . have a strong tendency to unite themselves into large companies,” in particular the state-chartered banks that de Tracy sees as having had ruinous effects in both France and England: “It is thus all privileged companies end: to the extent that they are privileged they are radically vicious; and every thing essentially bad always terminates badly” (158, 159). We can read Jefferson’s opposition to the bank and his decision to translate and promote the part of de Tracy’s work that closely follows Say in putting the entrepreneur at the center of the economic system as a gesture of resistance to the emergent forces of fi nancialization that reorganized the U.S. economy in the course of the next century. To no small extent, Say, de Tracy, and Jefferson, building a model based on eighteenth-century scales of manufacturing, agrarianism, and, in the last instance, slavery, were describing a system that was already becoming obsolete. This is an unconscious sense in which Jefferson was ideological, a sense betrayed by his rage at the fi nancial corporations that he consistently, from the time when Alexander Hamilton introduced the idea of a national bank in the late 1780s, had opposed without success. The entrepreneur comes into American usage as a concept designed to support the individual artisan or farmer against the abstract forces of finance capitalism. Jefferson reads and translates de Tracy’s book as a sort of fantastic predictive allegory of the early United States; predictive in that Jefferson sees the crises to which de Tracy responds in the European states as likely to occur on his side of the Atlantic, should such privileged companies be established there; fantastic in that it abstracts away the most important way in which the United States’ economic system depended on an enslaved African American workforce. Jefferson’s undertaker/entrepreneur

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is explicitly set against the institution of the bank and implicitly against the institution of chattel slavery that the exercise of translating de Tracy enables Jefferson never to mention. Writing a century later, Coase calmly enlists the figure of the entrepreneur—its name fully assimilated to English by this time— as the precipitant to the formation of the larger, collective institution. Here the date of Coase’s publication—1937—is worth noting, since it is still within the long crisis in the capitalist system known as the Great Depression. To many economists, the force opposing the individual was no longer the capitalist corporation, however, but the collectivized state represented by the Soviet Union, whose promoters in the West took every opportunity to advance the virtues of state ownership of everything and pointed to the breakdown of the capitalist system as evidence for the superiority of communism. In the lecture he gave when he accepted the Nobel Prize in 1991, Coase recalls how in this period he had been pondering Lenin’s claim that “the economic system in Russia would be run as one big factory” and says he was interested in the question of how that kind of state planning might compare with the operations of large corporate entities in the capitalist West, particularly the United States.12 Coase says nothing in “The Nature of the Firm” about Lenin’s analogy, but he reveals the pressure exerted by the Soviet model when in that essay he addresses the question of scale, of how big a fi rm can or should be. If fi rms are so good at reducing transaction costs, Coase asks, “Why is not all production carried on by one big fi rm?”13 Coase’s answer has continued to seem plausible. He argues that eventually the benefits of a fi rm diminish with its expansion, to a point where it once again becomes cheaper either to contract in the outside marketplace for something or to break up the firm into smaller units. But what is more interesting to me is how the shape of Coase’s argument both builds upon and inverts de Tracy’s use of the entrepreneur, particularly as adopted by Jefferson. As it had for Jefferson, the figure of the entrepreneur in Coase’s hands serves as the means to place the individual man of business at the center of the story of the larger economy. But writing in the fi rst half of the twentieth century, Coase does not see the entrepreneur as the site of resistance to the corporation but rather as its logical partner, a man who employs his own rationality to see where his advantage lies in creating an institution larger than himself. But by starting here, Coase reaffirms the centrality of that individual against the forces of collectivization that offered themselves as the solution to capitalism’s crisis. Since the publication of Coase’s essay, the figure of the entrepreneur has risen to assume an extraordinary mythic status in the economic imag-

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inary, as virtually all participants in the economy (including literature professors such as this author) have been urged to become entrepreneurs.14 So, for example, endorsing Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged as “must reading” for both friends and adversaries of capitalism, Robert Bruner, who served from 2005 to 2015 as the dean of the Darden Business School at Jefferson’s own University of Virginia, observes how Rand “characterizes the investor and the entrepreneur . . . as a romantic figure, a person with a mission, who deep in [his or her] heart wants to transform society for the better.”15 Bruner may or may not be aware of Jefferson’s role in the translation of the figure of the entrepreneur to the U.S. business context, from which Coase and then Rand developed it along somewhat different trajectories. But his endorsement of Rand’s deeply emotional fiction, a work that has proved to be influential among libertarian businessmen, is telling in the way it unconsciously returns the concept of the entrepreneur to its origins in the period we now also identify as “romantic”—the early nineteenth century, when economics was itself constituting itself as a discipline in its own right. If there is any virtue to Rand’s novel, it may be in reminding us that Say’s invention is a fiction, an idealization that could not exist in the real world. Indeed, we might best understand the entrepreneur in the terms offered by Tobias Smollett in his dedication to The Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom (1753), when he imagines the relationship between a novel’s plot and its characters. As we saw in chapter 4, Smollett argues that “a Novel is a large diffused picture” that nonetheless, like an image drawn in perspective, requires a focal point: “This plan cannot be executed with propriety, probability or success, without a principal personage to attract the attention, unite the incidents, unwind the clue of the labyrinth, and at last close the scene by virtue of his own importance.”16 The combination of discourses that Smollett draws upon in his defi nition—painting (“picture”), architecture (“plan”), Greek mythology (“labyrinth”), theater (“scene”)—testifies to the synthetic character of the form in which he is writing, a form that was not yet identified as “the novel.” Smollett’s “principal personage” does much the same work for fiction as “the entrepreneur” has come to do for the modern economic imaginary. It is a powerful fiction, one that, particularly in the heroic terms articulated (in very different registers) by writers such as Say and Rand, could never exist as such in the real world. And as its genealogy, through Say through Jefferson to Coase, reveals, the entrepreneur is a myth that has everything to do with the emergence of the business corporation as a challenge— as Dickens suggests, a haunting one—to the autonomy of the individual. The in-

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tensity with which the entrepreneur has been advanced as a model for how a person should conduct herself or himself in the world is, if anything, evidence of nothing so much as the increasing intensity with which the business corporation seems to threaten the integrity of persons. It is, as Robert Bruner says, a romantic formulation, and one that indicates that the corporate unconscious that I have been tracing in this study continues to be part of our shared lives.

Ack now ledgments

T

he fi rst thing to acknowledge, perhaps, is that the scholarly monographic is rarely a model of efficiency in action and that this book is no different. Some of the research dates back to my dissertation work at the University of Chicago in the 1990s, and its topics have been a nagging preoccupation ever since. In its current form, this book has been aided by support from the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia, which provided a research leave at a crucial moment, enabling me to get most of the fi rst draft completed. Audiences at Marquette University, at Texas A&M University, at the University of Virginia, and at several different meetings of the American Society for Eighteenth- Century Studies have heard presentations and have offered helpful commentary on various parts of the project as it took shape over the years. I owe a special thanks to people who have read parts of the book and offered their insight and the benefit of their sharp pencils: Bill Brown, James Chandler, Jeffrey Cox, Paul Hunter, and Brad Pasanek. I thank Alan Thomas and Randolph Petilos, my editors at the University of Chicago Press, for their generous professionalism. Lynn Fest and James Thompson, the readers for the Press, had many good ideas for how the book could be improved, and I have tried to work them into the fi nal round of revisions. Derek Gottlieb produced a splendid index, and Kelly Fleming was an expert proofreader. And readers of this book owe a special thanks to its copyeditor, Lois Crum, who shaped the sometimes ungainly prose of the fi nal draft, thereby sparing anyone who ventures into these pages many moments of confusion. Whatever flaws of fact or execution that remain are mine. The librarians, curators, and staff at the British Library, the Huntington Library, the Houghton Library, and the University of Virginia Library were unfailingly helpful and efficient, and one of the pleasures of complet227

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Acknowledgments

ing this book is contemplating the opportunity to spend more time in archives like these. Part of chapter 1 appeared in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy, and some sections of chapter 4 appeared in a very different form in a special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economics. My thanks to both journals for permission to reprint. My greatest thanks are reserved for Vicki Olwell, whose loving support and keen intelligence exceed all reckoning. During the time that this book was being written, our family fi rm has increased by two. Aidan and Maeve have not always helped make the writing process more efficient, but they gave gifts of delight and laughter that helped put this book in its proper place. I dedicate it with love to them.

Notes

Introduction 1. The closest things to such a study were done by John P. Davis and William Robert Scott in the early twentieth century, a period of intense interest in the history and ontology of corporate forms. See John P. Davis, Corporations: A Study of the Origin and Development of Great Business Combinations and of Their Relation to the Authority of the State, 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1905); and William Robert Scott, The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish, and Irish Joint- Stock Companies to 1720, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910–12). 2. For a very recent book that brilliantly analyzes representations of the business corporation in the twentieth century, when it had entered the public imaginary as such in fi lms like Office Space and Michael Clayton and the work of novelists like Frank Norris, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gaddis, see Ralph Clare, Fictions, Inc.: The Corporation in Postmodern Fiction, Film and Popular Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014). 3. The Oxford English Dictionary identifies the earliest usage of “economy” in this sense as “the organization or condition of a community or nation with respect to economic factors” as dating to 1892. 4. Henry Peachum, The Garden of Eloquence (London, 1593), unpaginated. This is the second, revised edition of Peachum’s work, which was originally published in 1577. 5. Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth- Century Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 130. 6. Edgar Allan Poe, “Peter Pendulum (The Business Man),” in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Tales and Sketches, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1978), 2:480– 93, 489. The doubled title of the Mabbott edition reflects the fact that Poe published this story twice, fi rst as “Peter Pendulum” in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in 1840 and then in a revised version under the title “The Business Man” in the Broadway Journal in 1845. Notably, in the fi rst publication in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, corporations are said not to have “bodies” but “posteriors” to be kicked. But in either version, Poe is probably quoting from the chapter entitled “Of Banks as Corporations” in William Gouge’s A Short History of Paper Money in the

229

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Notes to pages 2–5

United States (Philadelphia, 1833, reprinted in 1835 and 1837), which was written in support of Andrew Jackson’s campaign against the Second Bank of the United States: “A celebrated English writer expressed the truth, with some roughness, but with great force, that ‘corporations have neither bodies to be kicked, nor souls to be damned’” (42 [1833 ed.]). The English writer to whom Gouge referred was Edward, Baron Thurlow, who served as Lord Chancellor in the 1770s and 1780s. His formulation, indebted in its own right to Coke, had become, by the late eighteenth century, virtually proverbial. 7. Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (New York: Free Press, 2005), 1. 8. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 201. Kantorowicz sees the invention of this concept as expressing a new relationship to time itself in around the fourteenth century, since writers then began to speak of the human race as perpetual rather than limited and reconceptualized their institutions to reflect that. 9. On municipal corporations in particular and the complications of their relationship to the Crown in a particularly crucial period, see Paul Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England’s Towns, 1650–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 10. William Sheppard, Of Corporations, Fraternities, and Guilds (London, 1659), 1. 11. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 230. As Noel Malcolm has demonstrated, though, Hobbes’s dislike of monopolies and companies did not stop him from investing in entities such as the Virginia Company. See Malcolm, “Hobbes, Sandys, and the Virginia Company,” Historical Journal 24 (June 1981): 297–321. 12. Henry Polloxfen, The Argument of a Learned Counsel, Upon an Action of the Case Brought by the East- India Company, against Mr. Thomas Sands, an Interloper (London, 1696), 30, 33. 13. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. with a foreword by Martin Nicolas (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 104. We will return to the concept of the “Mercantile System” in chapter 1. 14. Ibid., 108. I am informed here by Michael McKeon’s important use of Marx’s concept of the “simple abstraction” in the Grundrisse as a way of conceptualizing the emergence of the novel. See McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1660–1740 (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 17–19. 15. J. S. Gibbons, The Banks of New York, Their Dealers, the Clearing- House, and the Panic of 1857 (New York: Appleton, 1858), 344. 16. Michael R. Krätke has demonstrated that Marx became all but obsessed with the Panic of 1857, eagerly following the course of fi nancial events in Britain, France, Germany, India, and the United States, and also contributing a number of essays to the New York Tribune from September 1857 to March 1858 explaining those events to a general audience. See Krätke’s two essays, “The First World Economic Crisis: Marx as an Economic Journalist” and “Marx’s ‘Books of Crisis’ of 1857–58,” in Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later, by Karl Marx, ed. Marcello Musto (London: Routledge, 2008), 162– 68, 169–75. Marx’s essays in the New

Notes to pages 5–10

231

York Tribune documenting the course of the crisis are reprinted in volume 15 of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (New York: International, 1986). 17. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty- First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014), 203. One of the features of Piketty’s book that has gotten a lot of attention is his use of fiction, particularly the novels of Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac, as historical evidence for the inequalities in wealth that permeated the patrimonial cultures of Europe in the early nineteenth century, something that economic writers rarely do: “These and other novelists,” he writes, “depicted the effects of inequality with a verisimilitude and evocative power that no statistician or theoretical analysis can match” (2). Others, both economic writers and literary critics, have noted that Piketty is on less fi rm ground when he claims that references to money occur less frequently in modern literature: see, for example, Sarah Skwire and Stephen Horwitz, “Thomas Piketty’s Literary Offenses,” Freeman, September 11, 2014, http://fee.org/freeman/detail/thomas-pikettys-literary-offenses; and Ted Underwood, Hoyt Long, and Richard Jean So, “Cents and Sensibility,” Slate, December 10, 2014, www.slate.com/articles/ business/moneybox/2014/12/thomas _piketty_on _literature _balzac _austen _fitzgerald _show_arc _of _money.single.html (both accessed March 11, 2015). I admire Piketty’s use of literary examples (he should use more of them, not fewer), in particular his belief that the evidence of lived experience recorded in those texts is valuable historical data that escapes other ways of apprehending the past. But I also take his frequent recourse to Austen and Balzac as testimonies to the British and French experience of the early nineteenth century as a symptom of his loyalty to national frames of reference, which leads him perhaps to ignore the role of corporate entities in exacerbating the problems that he wishes to address. 18. Ibid., 156. 19. See Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen, eds., The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics (New York: Routledge, 1999). 20. Jonathan Schlefer, The Assumptions Economists Make (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012), 4. 21. I take to heart here Louis Menand’s critique of interdisciplinarity in his recent book The Marketplace of Ideas (New York: Norton, 2010), especially where he notes that “interdisciplinarity is not something different from disciplinarity. It is the ratification of the logic of disciplinarity” (119) because it maintains the perspectives of the individual disciplines and seems to affirm that they represent the sum total of ways of perceiving the world. 22. Deirdre N. McCloskey, The Secret Sins of Economics (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2002), 41, 55. See also McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics, 2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998). 23. Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), xxi. On the advent of monetarism in U.S. economic writing and then political practice, see J. Bradford deLong, “The Triumph of Monetarism,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14 (Winter 2000): 83– 94. 24. Friedman and Schwartz, Monetary History, 300.

232

Notes to pages 11–16

25. John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding ed. Peter H. Nidditch (1698; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 1.1.8. In the coda to this book, I very briefly explore a genealogical relationship between Destutt de Tracy’s science of ideas or Ideologie, a science indebted to Locke’s example, and the figure of the entrepreneur, a key mediating figure in a modern myth of origin for the corporation. 26. This is to fl ip over Giovanni Arrighi’s invocation of a long twentieth century, in which he identifies how the fi nance capitalism of the time of his writing in the 1990s has its origins in the early eighteenth century. See The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of our Times (London: Verso, 1994). By my reckoning, it is less useful to say that the twentieth (or now the twenty-fi rst) century began in the eighteenth than to imagine the ways in which the eighteenth century is not over. 27. Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 9. 28. Peter Temin, “The Rise and Fall of Economic History at MIT,” MIT Department of Economics Working Paper number 13–11, December 9, 2013, http://papers.ssrn .com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract _id=2274908. 29. Pierre Bourdieu, The Social Structures of the Economy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 216. 30. Edward Coke, Case of Sutton’s Hospital (1612) 77 Eng Reports 960. 31. Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819). 32. Bank of the United States v. Deveaux, 9 U.S. (5 Cranch) 61 (1809). 33. Alexander Hamilton, “Final Version of an Opinion as to the Constitutionality of an Act to Establish a Bank, [23 February 1791],” in Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01- 08- 02- 0060 - 0003 (last update October 23, 2014). Source: The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 8, February 1791– July 1791, ed. Harold C. Syrett (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 97–134. 34. Hobbes, Leviathan, 111. 35. Hamilton, “Final Version.” 36. Gregory A. Mark, “The Personification of the Business Corporation in American Law,” University of Chicago Law Review 54 (Autumn 1987): 1441– 83, 1454. On the corporation as a mode of personification, see also Barbara Johnson, “Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law,” in Persons and Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 188–207. 37. Dartmouth College. 38. Joseph Cabell to Thomas Jefferson, January 30, 1825, in Early History of the University of Virginia: As Contained in the Letters of Thomas Jefferson and Joseph C. Cabell, Hitherto Unpublished, by Nathaniel Francis Cabell and Thomas Jefferson (Richmond, VA: J. W. Randolph, 1856), 336–37. 39. “Constitutional Law,” North American Review 10 (1820): 83–115, 97, 111. Joshua Barkan has recently argued that the university has a utopian potential as a counterweight to the power of the business corporations, with which it shares a genealogy: “The corporate university emphasizes not the fact, that, today, universities are factories but rather that, at their core, universities are collectivities completely and totally distinct from the logics of capitalist accumulation.” Barkan, Corporate Sovereignty:

Notes to pages 16–28

233

Law and Government under Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 160. 40. Quoted in Kenneth E. Shewmaker, ed., Daniel Webster, “The Completest Man” (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College: University Press of New England, 1990), 168– 69. 41. The split came to the fore in the 2013 Nobel prize for economics, jointly won by Eugena Fama, long associated with the rational-choice school of economics, and Robert Schiller, known as a behaviorist. That they were imagined as a logical pairing testifies to the way these approaches seem to be (as it were) two sides of the same coin. 42. See Robert J. Schiller, Irrational Exuberance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000; 2nd ed., 2005). The field is obviously much more extensive than this book, but my point is that by adopting this phrase as the title of his most mainstream and public book, Schiller was adopting the rhetoric that Greenspan was using expressly to mark decisions Schiller saw as clouded by emotions as deviations from the norm. 43. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner; textual editor W. B. Todd, 2 vols. (1776; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 1:145. 44. Ibid., 1:156, 360. 45. Nick Robins, The Corporation That Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational (London: Pluto Press, 2006), 76. 46. The OED has examples of the word “nabob” in English writing as early as the seventeenth century, but they refer only to South Asians, for whom the term is given as a title roughly equivalent to an English earl. It dates its fi rst referent to an English person as a “nabob” (and by that logic its adoption as an English word) to Samuel Foote’s play The Nabob, fi rst staged in 1772. 47. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The School for Scandal, a Comedy; as it is performed at the Theatres- Royal, in London and Dublin (London, 1781), 52. All other references are to this edition. 48. François Ewald, “Insurance and Risk,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Millar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 197, 210. 49. Milton Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970. 50. Justin Fox, “What We’ve Learned from the Financial Crisis,” Harvard Business Review, November 2013, https:// hbr.org/2013/11/what-weve-learned-from-the-fi nancial -crisis (accessed November 15, 2014). 51. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), 1:115, p. 48e.

Ch apter One 1. John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (1698; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 1.1.8, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 2. Many essays could be written on the critical literature about this foundational

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Notes to pages 28–36

statement. The place to start remains John Yolton’s John Locke and the Way of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956). 3. See Brad Pasanek’s Metaphors of Mind: An Eighteenth- Century Dictionary (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) on the surprisingly close conceptual and linguistic relationship between “mine” and “mind” in eighteenth-century English writing. 4. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 59. 5. Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 62. On Locke’s relationship to the discipline of philosophy, I have also been greatly informed by William Walker, Locke, Literary Criticism, and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 6. K. H. D. Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 232–33. 7. Locke became a “landgrave” in Carolina; and he also invested 400 pounds in 1674 and another 200 pounds in 1675 in the Royal African Company. James Farr, “Locke, Natural Law, and New World Slavery,” Political Theory 36 (August 2008): 495–522. He had invested 100 pounds in the Company of Adventurers to the Bahamas, a kind of subsidiary of the Carolina Company, in 1672. See Roger Woolhouse, Locke: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 110. 8. See Peter Laslett, “John Locke, the Great Recoinage, and the Origins of the Board of Trade: 1695–1698,” William and Mary Quarterly 14.3 (July 1957): 370–402. 9. Jennifer Greeson, “The Prehistory of Possessive Individualism,” PMLA (October 2012): 918–25. 10. On the doctrine of scarcity, see Robert Markley, “‘Land enough in the World’: Locke’s Golden Age and the Infi nite Extension of ‘Use,’” South Atlantic Quarterly 98.4 (Fall 1999): 817–37. 11. Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies after Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 96. 12. See Destutt de Tracy, Elémens d’idéologie (Paris, 1804–18). 13. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner; textual editor W. B. Todd, 2 vols. (1776; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 1:430. 14. Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), 117, 299. 15. Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in SeventeenthCentury England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 236. 16. See Jacob Viner, “Mercantilist Thought,” in Essays on the Intellectual History of Economics, ed. Douglas A. Irwin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 262–76, 262. 17. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936), 341. 18. Ibid., 342–43. 19. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1970), 175, hereafter noted parenthetically in the text.

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20. Foucault is citing Locke, Some Considerations upon the Lowering of Interest, and the Raising the Value of Money (London, 1692), 71–72. 21. John Locke “Some Considerations upon the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest, and the Raising the Value of Money,” in Locke on Money, ed. Patrick Hyde Kelly, 2 vols. (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991), 1:258–59. 22. Karen Iverson Vaughn, John Locke: Economist and Society Scientist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 25; Kelly, introduction to Locke on Money, 1:80. 23. Nicholas Barbon, A Discourse of Trade (1690; Baltimore, 1905), 14. 24. Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology, 184. Appleby is in part following the lead of William Letwin’s The Origins of Scientific Economics (London: Methuen, 1963), which also sees the end of the seventeenth century as witnessing the emergence of economics as a discipline— and of course ultimately Smith. 25. Dudley North, Discourses upon Trade (London, 1691), 14. 26. The Oxford English Dictionary records the fi rst use of the term “joint stock” in 1615, discovered in a book about the herring trade. 27. John Locke, The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, in Locke: Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 162. 28. Philip J. Stern, The Company- State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3– 6. 29. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 2:103. 30. On these events, see P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967); and also John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State (New York: Knopf, 1989). 31. On Locke’s authorship, see J. R. Milton, “Locke and the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina,” Locke Newsletter 21 (1990): 111–12. In his recent biography, Woolhouse downplays Locke’s involvement in the composition of this document. But David Armitage plays it up, arguing that Locke had a central role. See David Armitage, “Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government,” Political Theory 32.5 (October 2004): 602–27. 32. Quoted in Woolhouse, Locke, 86. 33. Quoted in Vicki Hseuh, “Giving Orders: Theory and Practice in the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63.3 (July 2002): 425–46, 429. 34. See Peter Colleton to John Locke, October 1673, in The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E. S. De Beer, 8 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–), 1:395. De Beer believes that “though some of the language, and even some of the matter, may have been supplied by Locke, Shaftesbury is to be regarded as the author and Locke as his assistant” (1:395n). 35. Locke joked with Nicholas Toinard in a letter on June 6, 1679, about the island off the coast of what is South Carolina that the proprietors named Locke Island in his honor (it is now called Edisto Island); Toinard described the Fundamental Constitutions as “vos constitutions” in his response to Locke the next month; Henri Justel, in a letter that same September, speaks of “les constitutions de la Caroline” as though Locke is responsible for them. See Correspondence of Locke, 2:32, 47, 105.

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36. In contrast to Shaftesbury’s biography and the editor of Locke’s letters, some modern scholars clearly desire to simplify things by treating Locke as the person largely responsible for the Fundamental Constitutions. David Armitage has recently asserted that Locke’s position “makes it inconceivable that he would not have played at the very least a major supervisory role in their drafting,” an assertion that makes it easier to prove the larger point of Armitage’s claim that the Second Treatise was decisively shaped by Locke’s colonial experience. See Armitage, “Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises,” 607. The truth is that no one knows who bears primary responsibility for the language of the Fundamental Constitutions. 37. Locke, Political Essays, 180. 38. Ibid., 162, 181. 39. For a careful analysis of Locke’s understanding of slavery, both in the Constitutions and in the Second Treatise, see Mary Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 326– 61. 40. See Neal Wood, John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 17–18. 41. Ibid., 17–19. 42. Ashley, in Collections of the South Carolina Historical Society, ed. Langdon Cheves (Charleston, SC, 1897), 5:327–28. 43. Second Treatise, §49, in Locke, Political Essays, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 44. Here I am indebted to Markley, “Land enough in the World.” 45. Kelly, introduction to Locke on Money, 1:40. 46. Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 97, cited in Robert Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 15. 47. See Stephen Quinn, “Gold, Silver, and the Glorious Revolution: Arbitrage between Bills of Exchange and Bullion,” Economic History Review 49 (1996): 373–490. 48. See James Thompson, Models of Value: Eighteenth- Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 48– 65, for a fuller discussion of the debate between Locke and Lowndes. 49. John Locke, Further Considerations concerning Raising the Value of Money, in Kelly, Locke on Money, 2:410. 50. Locke, “Some Considerations upon Consequences,” 2:173. 51. Locke, Considerations upon Lowering Interest, and Raising Value of Money, 2:211. 52. William King to John Locke, in Correspondence of Locke, 4:535. 53. John Yolton’s John Locke and the Way of Ideas remains the most thorough discussion of Locke’s relationship to the innatist position. 54. James Hodges, The Present State of England, as to Coin and Public Charges (London, 1697), 150. 55. Henry Lee, Anti- Scepticism; or, Notes upon each Chapter of Mr. Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding (London, 1702), 104. 56. See Edward A. Driscoll, “The Influence of Gassendi on Locke’s Hedonism,” International Philosophical Quarterly 12 (March 1972): 87–110; and Richard Kroll, “The

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Question of Locke’s Relation to Gassendi,” Journal of the History of Ideas 45 (July– September 1984): 339–59. 57. Reprinted in Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, ed. W. von Leyden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 265. 58. Ibid., 269. 59. James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and His Adversaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 215. 60. Quoted in Jane Mayer, “State for Sale,” New Yorker, October 10, 2011, www .newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/10/state-for-sale (accessed November 14, 2014). 61. Jane Mayer estimates that about 80 percent of the foundation’s money comes from the Pope family foundation, with the rest from tobacco companies and Koch foundations. 62. Randall J. Bezanson, “Institutional Speech,” Iowa Law Review 80 (1994– 95): 775, cited in “Opinion of Stevens, J.,” Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 55 U.S. 310 (2010), note 55, available at www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf. 63. “Who Is John Locke?,” John Locke Foundation, www.johnlocke.org/about/who _is _john _locke.html (accessed July 8, 2013). 64. George M. Stephens, “John Locke: His American and Carolinian Legacy,” John Locke Foundation, www.johnlocke.org/about/who_is _john _locke _essay.html (accessed July 11, 2013). 65. See Murray N. Rothbard, Economic Thought before Adam Smith: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1995), 317–20. 66. Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo- American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 187. 67. Cato Institute annual report, www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/fi les/pubs/pdf/annual _report _2012a.pdf, accessed 7/11/13. The Cato Institute is a private foundation, so it need not break out how much money comes from any particular source, but it does identify the Koch family foundation as a continuing contributor.

Ch apter Two 1. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–86, 174. The mirror analogy, as it happens, is appropriate here, because Althusser wrote that his notion of interpellation was inspired by Jacques Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage of development. 2. Richard Steele, Theatre 7 (January 23, 1720), in Richard Steele’s “The Theatre,” 1720, ed. John Loftis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 28. 3. Lewis Theobold, Censor 7 (April 25, 1715), in The Censor, 3 vols. (London, 1717), 1:46. 4. John Cassidy, “Interview with Eugene Fama,” New Yorker, January 13, 2010, www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/interview-with-eugene-fama (accessed October 17, 2013). 5. I compress a very complicated argument, but the thrust of the chapter will

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demonstrate that I am more in sympathy with Schiller’s model than with Fama’s, while recognizing that as a way of predicting the long-term movement of markets, Fama’s models are probably (as they have proved to be) extremely useful. 6. See, for a recent example, Richard S. Dale, Johnnie E. V. Johnson, and Leilei Tang, “Financial Markets Can Go Mad: Evidence of Irrational Behaviour during the South Sea Bubble,” Economic History Review 58 (May 2005): 233–71, which uses the South Sea event as an example of how a speculative bubble can, contra rational-choice theory, drive investors to make irrational decisions. They conclude by using the evidence of the South Sea crisis to argue that the same kind of irrationality can occur in modern speculative bubbles. 7. Jean- Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in AngloAmerican Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 157, 160. 8. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). 9. Michael Warner, “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 377–401. 10. Simon Shepherd and Peter Womack, English Drama: A Cultural History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 153. 11. Here I am informed by Diedre Shauna Lynch’s The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 12. Richard Steele, The Conscious Lovers (London, 1723), unpaginated. 13. Here I am indebted to Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 138. 14. Richard Steele, The School of Action: A Comedy, in The Epistolary Correspondence of Sir Richard Steele, ed. John Nichols, 2 vols. (London, 1809), 1:5. 15. George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 265. 16. Alexander Pope, prologue to Cato: A Tragedy, by Joseph Addison, in Cato: A Tragedy, and Selected Essays, ed. Christine Dunn Henderson and Mark E. Yellin (1713; Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004), 5. 17. Ibid., 8. 18. My thanks to James Ascher for pointing out the likelihood that these are woodcuts. 19. Lynch, Economy of Character, 13. 20. Shell, Economy of Literature, 64. 21. Describing an “aesthetics of numismatics” in the play, Luis Gamez has gone so far as to identify the persistence of what he calls “static imagism” in Cato, the frequency with which Addison leads the performers to moments when they are arranged in visual tableaux where Cato stands at the center in a scene from which his virtue radiates forth. Luis Gamez, “Addison’s Aesthetics of Numismatics in Cato,” Modern Philology 85 (February 1988): 256– 64. 22. Joseph Addison, Dialogues upon the Usefulness of Precious Medals, in The Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Addison, ed. A. C. Guthkelch, 2 vols. (1914; St. Clair, MI: Scholarly Press, 1978), 2:289, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 23. Neil Saccamano, “Wit’s Breaks,” in Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century,

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ed. V. Kelley and D. von Mucke (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 45– 67; Joseph Addison, Spectator 61 (May 10, 1711), in The Spectator, ed. Donald Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 1:263. 24. Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image- Music-Text, trans. Steven Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 39. 25. Addison, Guardian 96 (July 1, 1713), in The Guardian, ed. John Calhoun Stevens (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), 345. 26. Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo- American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 57. 27. Ibid., 60. 28. Ibid., 6. 29. See Jonathan Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680–1840 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 30. B. L. Add. Chart. 16281, quoted in John Carswell, The South Sea Bubble, rev. ed. (London: Cresset Press, 1993), 45. The company was also supposed to engage in commercial fishing, a venture that it did not take up in earnest until the 1720s. For historical information about the company, I rely largely on Carswell’s vivid book and Helen Paul’s recent revisionary account, The South Sea Bubble: An Economic History of Its Origins and Consequences (London: Routledge, 2011). 31. See Sherman, Telling Time, 130. 32. Carswell, South Sea Bubble, 45. 33. Paul, South Sea Bubble, 40. 34. Carswell believes the company to have been essentially a fraud; Paul argues that the investors had reason to think that the company could have made money. 35. Pierre Nora, “General Introduction: Between Memory and History,” in Of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, vol. 1, Confl icts and Divisions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 1–20, 1. 36. For the fullest description of this image, see Carswell, South Sea Bubble. This image was originally published in the London Journal, which was to become the home of Cato’s Letters. 37. Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (London, 1841), 68. 38. Such accounts include Peter Garber, “Famous First Bubbles,” Journal of Economic Perspectives (Spring 1990): 35–54; and Famous First Bubbles: The Fundamentals of Early Manias (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); Larry Neal, The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Peter Temin and Hans-Joachim Voth, “Riding the South Sea Bubble,” Centre for Economic Policy Research, London, 2004. 39. Garber, “Famous First Bubbles,” 52. 40. See Paul, South Sea Bubble, 59– 62, for these figures and a discussion of the methodological challenges involved in making any such claims. Still, this is as much as we know right now. 41. I continue to assign this book to Haywood in spite of the skepticism voiced recently by Leah Orr, who observes, correctly, that the book was published without an author identified on its title page (or a publisher, for that matter) and that the contem-

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porary evidence for its attribution to Haywood is Alexander Pope’s hostile attack on her in The Dunciad (1728). I am not yet ready to throw Haywood overboard; in any case, not much in my argument depends on her being the author. See Leah Orr, “The Basis for Attribution in the Haywood Canon,” Library 12 (December 2011): 335–75. 42. On the genre of “advice to a prince,” see Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 90– 91. We can also connect Memoirs to the discourse of what Pocock and others have conveniently labeled “civic humanism.” See J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). 43. Delarivier Manley, The New Atalantis, ed. Rosalind Ballaster (1709; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 8. 44. Eliza Haywood, Memoirs of a Certain Island, Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia, 2 vols. (London, 1725), 1:4–5. 45. The Secret History of the South Sea Scheme, published in A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Toland, 2 vols. (London: J. Peele, 1726), 1:406–7. There is no known explanation for why this account of the South Sea Bubble would have appeared in the collected papers of the late philosopher John Toland. 46. John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letters; or, Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects, ed. Ronald Hamowy, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1995), 1:42, 47, 76. 47. Ibid., 1:45. 48. “About Cato,” www.cato.org/about (accessed July 25, 2013). 49. Trenchard and Gordon, Cato’s Letters, 1:72. 50. Ronald Hamowy, introduction to Trenchard and Gordon, Cato’s Letters, 1:xxxiii. 51. Trenchard and Gordon, Cato’s Letters, 1:427. 52. Susanna Centlivre, A Bold Stroke for a Wife (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1994), 54. 53. John Dennis, “Remarks on The Conscious Lovers,” in The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. E. N. Hooker (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1939), 272, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as D. 54. Steele followed through with this by promoting a performance space that he called, punningly, the Censorium. 55. Richard Steele, “The State of the Case between the Lord- Chamberlain of His Majesty’s Household, and the Governor of the Royal Company of Comedians,” in Steele, Tracts and Pamphlets, ed. Rae Blanchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1944), 595. 56. Richard Steele, Theatre 10 (February 2, 1720), in Loftis, Richard Steele’s “The Theatre,” 44. Steele’s license seems to have been revoked in retaliation for his vote against the Peerage Act in 1719, when he had sided against Newcastle, his parliamentary patron, and the Whig faction headed by Sutherland in their attempt to make it impossible for the king to name new members of the House of Lords. It was not until Robert Walpole, with whom Steele had sided on the question of the Peerage Bill, came to power in the wake of the South Sea Bubble in 1721 that Steele’s license was restored;

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that both Dennis and Steele can claim Walpole as their patron speaks to the complexity of political affiliations in this period, as well as to Walpole’s genius in positioning himself so as to be indispensable to parties who were otherwise in confl ict with each other. The friction between Steele and Newcastle actually predated the Peerage Bill, but Steele was probably right in thinking that his vote against it was the last straw. At issue was the Whig ministry’s wish to freeze the size of the House of Lords as it was, against the possibility that the Prince of Wales might tamper with its composition at his accession; see John Loftis, Steele at Drury Lane (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952), 121–58, for a detailed account of the confl ict between Newcastle and Steele. Newcastle found a loophole in the law that enabled him to void the license, not the royal patent itself; he thus left Steele’s right to run a theater intact while depriving him of the ability to exercise that right. 57. Frances Hargrave, “Mr. Hargrave’s Observations in respect to the Objection to the Patent to Killigrew on the ground of Merger and Dormancy,” March 13, 1793, British Library Add. Mss. 12201, f. 2. At issue for Hargrave was whether the patent rights originally granted to Thomas Killigrew by Charles II in 1662 were still active, having been in a sense dormant for more than a century because Killigrew’s company had merged with William D’Avenant’s in the 1680s and had run, in effect, a joint operation at Lincoln’s Inn Fields after that. 58. Ibid., f. 2. 59. Robert W. Gordon, “Paradoxical Property,” in Early Modern Conceptions of Property, ed. John Brewer and Susan Staves (New York: Routledge, 1995), 102. 60. The State of the Case, Between the Lord Chamberlain of his Majesty’s Household, and Sir Richard Steele, as Represented by that Knight. Restated, in Vindication of King George, and the Most Noble the Duke of Newcastle (London: Applebee, 1720), 14. Steele’s biographer Aitken suggests that this essay is by Dennis, and it might be; the British Library attributes it to Newcastle himself, which is also conceivable, though unlikely. It was almost certainly written by someone in Newcastle’s employ, and with his consent. See George A. Aitken, The Life of Richard Steele, 2 vols. (London: Isbister, 1889), 2:230–31. 61. Ibid., 15. 62. See The Theatre, issue 3 (January 9, 1720), where Steele imagines characters who would serve as representatives of different cohorts of the audience and then populates his representative body with the cast of The Conscious Lovers. 63. The Crisis of Property was published on February 1 and The Nation a Family: Being the Sequel of the Crisis of Property; or, a Plan for the Improvement of the SouthSea Proposal on either February 26 or 27; they can be dated so precisely because both were advertised in the Theatre. 64. Steele, “The Crisis of Property” in Tracts and Pamphlets, 566. 65. Somewhat similarly, Steele elsewhere tried to make the case that his own right to the patent of Drury Lane was stronger than Killigrew and Davenant’s had been because George I’s motives in granting it were more purely disinterested than those of Charles II, who had essentially sold the patent rights, and “voluntary Acts are more valid in Law, than those given for valuable Considerations.” Steele, Tracts and Pamphlets, 603.

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Notes to pages 100 –109

66. See The Crisis of Honesty: Being an Answer to the Crisis of Property in a Letter to Sir R_____ S_____ (London, 1720), 8. 67. Richard Steele, A Nation a Family, being a sequel to the crisis of property (London, 1720), 7. 68. See Robert M. Jennings, Donald F. Swanson, and Andrew P. Trout, “Alexander Hamilton’s Tontine Proposal,” William and Mary Quarterly 45 (January 1988): 107–15. Tontines have not been the object of many scholarly studies, but see Robert M. Jennings and Andrew P. Trout, The Tontine: From the Reign of Louis XIV to the French Revolutionary Era (Philadelphia: Heubner Foundation), 1982. 69. See Edmond Halley, “An Estimate of the Degrees of the Mortality of Mankind, drawn from curious tables of the Births and Funerals at the City of Breslaw; with an Attempt to ascertain the Price of Annuities upon Lives,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, January 1693. 70. See James E. Ciecka, “Edmond Halley’s Life Table and Its Uses,” Journal of Legal Economics 15.1 (2008): 65–74. 71. Halley, “Estimate of Mortality,” 602. 72. Steele, Nation a Family, 31. 73. Steele, Tracts and Pamphlets, 580. 74. Steele, Conscious Lovers, act 4, scene 2. 75. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852; New York: International, 1996), 15. 76. May 25, 1721, in Eric Wertheimer, Underwriting: The Poetics of Insurance in America; 1722–1872 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 3.

Ch apter Thr ee 1. Daniel Defoe, An Essay upon Projects, ed. Joyce D. Kennedy, Michael Seidel, and Maximillian E. Novak (1697; New York, AMS Press, 1999), 50. 2. Ibid., 46. 3. Corbyn Morris, An Essay Towards Illustrating the Science of Insurance (London, 1747), 2. 4. Ibid. 5. Such expansiveness explains why Wertheimer, in a study of what he calls “the poetics of insurance in America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” observes that “the writers in this study are of the corporate age. This statement is true in at least two senses— one recalling the corporate history of Alan Trachtenberg, the other the biopolitics of Michel Foucault. First, it was during the eighteenth century that insurance fi rms began to sell stock (indeed, they more often than not took the form of joint stock companies); in addition, underwriting moved beyond ad hoc partnerships forged by coffeehouse sociability and into more legally articulated, and thus less personal, more corporate associations.” Eric Wertheimer, Underwriting: The Poetics of Insurance in America, 1722–1872 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 14. 6. Aaron Doyle and Richard Ericson, “Five Ironies of Insurance,” in The Appeal of Insurance, ed. Geoffrey Clark, Gregory Anderson, Christian Thomann, and J.-Matthias Graf von der Schulenburg (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 227.

Notes to pages 109–115

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7. Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 33. 8. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), 144. 9. Ibid., 144–45. 10. James T. Phelps, Life Insurance Sayings (New York: Spectator, 1895), 13. 11. Geoffrey Clark, Betting on Lives: The Culture of Life Insurance in England, 1695–1775 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 57. 12. Doyle and Ericson, “Five Ironies of Insurance,” 226. 13. François Ewald, “Insurance and Risk,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Millar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 198. Ewald was for a time Foucault’s assistant, and his work is very much in the same tradition of Foucault’s late work on biopolitics mentioned by Wertheimer. 14. Ibid., 208. 15. Nicholas Magens, An Essay on Insurances (London: J. Haberkorn, 1755), iii. Magens was born in Germany but made his fortune as a merchant and insurance broker in London. An Essay on Insurances was an English translation of his Versuch über Assecuranzen, published in German in 1753. 16. John Millar, Elements of the Law Relating to Insurances (Edinburgh, 1787); John Weskett and James Allan Park, A System of the Law of Marine Insurances, with Three Chapters on Bottomry; on Insurances on Lives; and on Insurances against Fire (London, 1787); John Weskett, A Complete Digest of the Theory, Laws and Practice of Insurance (London, 1781). 17. Clark, Betting on Lives, 39. 18. This process started very early, with Charles Povey’s The Secret History of the Sun Fire Office (London, 1733), and Nicholas Magens’s An Essay on Insurances. For later examples, see Charles Wright and C. Ernest Fayle, A History of Lloyd’s: From the Founding of Lloyd’s Coffee House to the Present Day (London: Macmillan, 1928); Daniel Hawthorne, Hartford of the Hartford: An Insurance Company’s Place in a Century and a Half of American History (New York: Random House, 1960); or Barry Supple, The Royal Exchange Assurance: A History of British Insurance, 1720–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). 19. Spencer L. Kimball, Cases and Materials from Insurance Law (New York: Aspen, 1992), xxv. 20. 43 Eliz c. 12, cited in Wright and Fayle, History of Lloyd’s, 38. 21. Supple, Royal Exchange Assurance, 11. 22. See Benjamin Franklin, “Deed of Settlement of the Philadelphia Contributorship” (March 25, 1752), in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 4, http://franklinpapers .org/franklin//framedVolumes.jsp (accessed November 20, 2014). 23. Ibid., §22. 24. Doyle and Ericson, “Five Ironies of Insurance,” 226. 25. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765– 69), 1:463. 26. Defoe, Essay upon Projects, 47.

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Notes to pages 115–124

27. Clark, Betting on Lives, 5. 28. See Geoffrey Clark, “The Slave’s Appeal: Insurance and the Rise of Commercial Property,” in Clark et al., Appeal of Insurance, 52–74, 58. 29. See Tim Armstrong, The Logic of Slavery: Debt, Technology, and Pain in American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 15. Armstrong cites from Douglas Barlow’s translation of The Marine Insurance Code of France, 1681 (Self-published, 1989). 30. Clark, Betting on Lives, 16. 31. See Clark, “Slave’s Appeal,” as well as his source for this story, Robert Sidney Smith’s “Life Insurance in Fifteenth- Century Barcelona,” Journal of Economic History 1 (May 1941): 57–59. Smith poignantly records that his research was conducted in archives in Barcelona in the summer of 1936 but that he was interrupted in his work on the 18th of July—the day the Spanish Civil War broke out. It appears that no other scholar, at least no other scholar working in the English language, has returned to these archives. 32. Clark, “Slave’s Appeal,” 58. 33. Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom, ed. Jerry Beasley and O. M. Brack (1753; Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 240. 34. The act’s preamble summarizes the conflation well: “Whereas it hath been found by experience that the making insurances on lives or other events wherein the assured shall have no interest hath introduced a mischievous kind of gaming. . . .” 35. 14 Geo 3, c.48, I.1. 36. Solomon Stoddard, The Tryal of Assurance, as set forth in a sermon preached upon a lecture day July 7, 1698 (Boston, 1698), 15. 37. Samuel Acton, Fruit from Canaan, or, Fore-Tasts of Glory: In Several Discourses on Assurance (London, 1709), vi. 38. See Timothy Alborn, Regulated Lives: Life Insurance and British Society, 1800–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). 39. See Vivian Zelizer, Morals and Markets: The Development of Life Insurance in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 3. 40. Ibid., 57. 41. The British Mercury was fi rst published by “The Company of London Insurers” and then by the Sun Fire Office, which had previously published the General Remark; Lloyd’s published its eponymous List and also the Historical Register until 1720, at which point the Historical Register seems to have achieved independence. The association between insurance and print journalism carried over to colonial America; Benjamin Franklin advertised meetings of the Philadelphia Contributorship in his Pennsylvania Gazette. 42. British Mercury 396, February 4, 1713, 1, Gale Cengage 17th–18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers. 43. Ibid. 369, July 30, 1712, 2. 44. Ibid. 391, December 31, 1712, 1. 45. Ibid. 395, January 28, 1713, 2. 46. At the end of the last installment of “A Letter from Madrid,” an unidentified

Notes to pages 124–136

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editor for the British Mercury notes that the entire work is about to be published in a single volume. I have been unable to locate any such volume. 47. I am indebted to Thomas Kavanagh, Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 20, for this kind of formulation. 48. Jesse Molesworth, Chance and the Eighteenth- Century Novel: Realism, Probability, Magic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 9. 49. Simon Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 48. 50. The best recent biography is Jeremy Lewis, Tobias Smollett (London: Jonathan Cape, 2003). 51. Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, ed. O. M. Brack (1751; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 2, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 52. Smollett, Adventures of Ferdinand, 4. 53. Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random, ed. O. M. Brack Jr., with an introduction and notes by James G. Basker, Paul- Gabriel Boucé, and Nicole A. Seary (1748; Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 298. 54. James Annesley’s story would have been well known to midcentury readers, since the legal cases whereby Annesley tried to claim his title were much reported in the press. The story became the basis of many works of fiction over the next century and a half, notably Eliza Haywood’s Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman (1743), Sir Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815), and Robert Lewis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886). 55. The privateering was going on because of the English-Spanish confl ict known in the English-speaking world as the War of Jenkins’ Ear but in Spanish history as the Guerra del Asiento, because it was about Britain trying to enforce its rights under the asiento. Smollett served as a surgeon on a ship involved in the last major British campaign of the war, an attempt to capture the city of Cartagena in modern-day Colombia. 56. Smollett, Roderick Random, 347. 57. The editors of the recent scholarly edition of Roderick Random say that “Roderick’s ironic (and tasteless) play on the word ‘slave’ and his pronounced aversion to the actual conditions of the trade again signal his, and perhaps Smollett’s, uneasiness about the ethics of the trade in slaves.” Ibid., 482. Perhaps, but “irony” seems far too weak a way to resolve the confl ict here, because Roderick expresses no aversion to the trade itself but rather to its impact on his own physical, rather than psychic, comfort. 58. Weskett, Complete Digest, 252. 59. Of these, 132 died; one, incredibly, got back onto the Zong unseen and hid belowdecks until the ship arrived in Jamaica.

Ch apter Four 1. The cameo has often been referred to as the “Wedgwood emblem” because it was manufactured at Josiah Wedgwood’s factory at Stoke-on-Trent, which went on to produce thousands of copies of it. Wedgwood had been brought into the abolitionist cause by Thomas Clarkson, and he became an active participant in the movement. The

246

Notes to pages 136–143

emblem was actually designed by one of Wedgwood’s artisans; the most probable candidate, most accounts agree, was William Hackwood, who was one of the most skilled of Wedgwood’s modelers. Here the economy of authorial thrift has assigned a creative function to the company’s owner. Jean Fagin Yellin rightly observes that the seal “represents a fortuitous synthesis of advanced technological skills and radical political ideas” because it had only been comparatively recently that Wedgwood and his workers had figured out how to color the clay in this way, with the human subject rendered in black against a creamy white background. See Yellin, Women & Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 6. 2. Benjamin Franklin to Josiah Wedgwood, May 15, 1788, in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, http://franklinpapers.org/franklin//framedVolumes.jsp;jsessionid= 01EC6D4B91A752BD4970D37A8F7065F7 (accessed October 23, 2014). 3. See Diedre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 4. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765– 69), 1:463. 5. Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representation of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 22. 6. Marcus Wood, “Emancipation Art, Fanon and ‘the Butchery of Freedom,’” in Slavery and the Cultures of Abolition: Essays Marking the Bicentennial of the British Abolition Act of 1807, ed. Brycchan Carey and Peter J. Kitson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007), 11–41, 23. 7. David Brion Davis, foreword to Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, by David Eltis and David Richardson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), xvii. 8. David Eltis, “Free and Coerced Transatlantic Migrations: Some Comparisons,” American Historical Review 88 (April 1983): 251–80, 255. 9. Substance of the Debates . . . in the House of Commons on the 10th June, 1806, and in the House of Lords on the 24th June, 1806 (London: Phillips and Fardon, 1806), 37, cited in Lynn Festa, “Humanity without Feathers,” Humanity 1 (Fall 2010): 3–27, 5. 10. Thomas Clarkson, History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament, 2 vols. (London, 1808), 1:107, 111, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 11. See Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944). Williams’s book was based on his PhD dissertation, completed at Oxford in 1938, but it did not reached a large audience until the mid-1960s, when the book was reissued on the occasion of Williams having become the fi rst prime minister of the newly independent nation of Trinidad and Tobago. For comparatively recent considerations of Williams’s work and its influences, see Capitalism and Slavery Fifty Years Later: Eric Eustace Williams: A Reassessment of the Man and His Work, ed. Heather Cateau (London: Palgrave, 2000). For an even more recent survey of the historiographical debate around Williams’s work, see Seymour Drescher, “Antislavery Debates: Tides of Historiography in Slavery and Antislavery,” European Review 19.1 (February 2011): 131–48. 12. David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 5. Perhaps the historian who has worked

Notes to pages 143–146

247

the hardest to complicate and counter Williams’s argument is Seymour Drescher. See in particular Drescher’s books Abolition (2009), Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (1986); and Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (1977). 13. Eltis, Economic Growth, 3. 14. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 16. Moral Capital, which aims, at least in part, to restore the importance of humanitarian arguments to the effectiveness of the end of the slave trade, is in many ways a great accomplishment, as it excavates a very large archive of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writings about slavery and links the history of abolitionist thought to the history of the empire. But in its oxymoronic title, yoking morality to, well, not its opposite exactly, but what we can think of as its indifferent other, Moral Capital not only acknowledges the continuing influence of the Williams thesis but also identifies the common ground that Clarkson and Williams share. 15. Johnson had also used the word “interest,” as in his famous Rambler 4 essay, where he talks about the heroes of contemporary works of fiction: “Many writers, for the sake of following nature, so mingle good and bad qualities in their principal personages, that they are both equally conspicuous; and as we accompany them through their adventures with delight, and are led by degrees to interest ourselves in their favour, we lose the abhorrence of their faults, because they do not hinder our pleasure, or, perhaps, regard them with some kindness for being united with so much merit.” Rambler 4 (March 31, 1750), in Samuel Johnson: The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht W. Strauss (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969), 23. 16. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed. (London, 1773), s.v. “Interest.” Johnson’s citations under the subdefi nition “concern, affect,” include the following sentence from Joseph Addison’s Dialogues upon the Use of Precious Metals: “This was a goddess who used to Interest herself in marriage.” 17. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner; textual editor W. B. Todd, 2 vols. (1776; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 1:26–27. Here is where, as Albert Hirschman famously argued, “passions” have been recast as “interests,” as the quest for glory and conquest gives way to the calculating logic of fi nancial gain through the civilizing effects of commerce. See Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). 18. The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, includes references to the Protestant interest in the 1670s and the “Whig interest” in the 1710s. See the Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Interest.” 19. Charles Davenant, New dialogues upon the present posture of affairs, the species of mony, national debts, publick revenues, Bank and East- India Company, and the trade now carried on between France and Holland (London, 1710), 111. 20. The Royal African Company took over the charter that had been assigned to the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa, incorporated in 1660, so it could arguably be dated to the Restoration; I begin with 1672 since that is when a new charter was issued. The fullest account of the Royal African Company remains K. G. Davies, The Royal African Company (London: Longmans, Green, 1957).

248

Notes to pages 148–155

21. Ibid., 113. 22. Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery, ed. Vincent Carretta (1787; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), 73. 23. For an interesting account of an attempt to direct the Royal African Company’s resources to more scientific pursuits, see Matthew David Mitchell, “‘Legitimate commerce’ in the Eighteenth Century: The Royal African Company of England under the Duke of Chandos,” Business History (2013): 544–78. 24. John Hippisley, Essays (London, 1764), v. 25. Thomas Clarkson, Essay on the Impolicy of the African Slave Trade (London: J. Phillips, 1788), 25. 26. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 5.1.110. 27. Ann M. Carlos and Jamie Brown Kruse, “The Decline of the Royal African Company: Fringe Firms and the Role of the Charter,” Economic History Review 49.2 (May 1996): 291–313, 312. If nothing else, such an argument demonstrates how persistent an unproblematized notion of property rights has been over the past three centuries and how central its defense remains to economic theory. Richard Steele, who, as we saw in chapter 2, defended the sovereign property rights of patent holders like himself, would probably have been sympathetic to this line of thought. 28. William Pettigrew, Freedom’s Debt (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 215. 29. Carlos and Kruse, “Decline of the Royal African Company,” 291. 30. See Constitution of a Society for Abolishing the Slave Trade (Providence, RI: John Carter, 1789). 31. See Charles Rappleye, Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 260–71. Moses wrote his Monitor piece responding to the Citizen’s proslavery essay without knowing that it had been written by John, who for his part immediately suspected Moses as the Monitor. When John asked him if he was indeed the Monitor, Moses affirmed it, and refrained from attacking his brother in print beyond that. 32. Daniel Defoe, An Essay upon the Trade to Africa (London, 1711), 20. 33. Malachy Postlethwayt, The African Trade, the Great Pillar and Support of the British Plantation Trade in America (London, 1746), 34. 34. Malachy Postlethwayt, Britain’s Commercial Interest, Explained and Improved in a series of Dissertations, 2 vols. (London, 1757), 2:156. 35. All of these titles have recently been reissued in The Complete Antislavery Writings of Anthony Benezet, 1754–1783: An Annotated Critical Edition, ed. David L. Crosby (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013). 36. Thomas Clarkson, An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African (London: J. Phillips, 1786), 176, vi–vii. 37. Anthony Benezet, Observations on the Inslaving, Importing, and Purchasing of Negroes (Germantown, PA, 1759), 11. 38. Brycchan Carey, From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1657–1761 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 211. 39. Brown, Moral Capital, 322–23. 40. Anthony Benezet, Some Historical Account of Guinea (Philadelphia, 1772), 144.

Notes to pages 156–163

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41. Postlethwayt called his Universal Dictionary a translation of Jacques Savary des Brûlons’s Dictionnaire Universel du Commerce, and it is, but it is clear that Postlethwayt was also cribbing, in the manner of the Grub Street hack that he was, more generally from trade manuals of the period. 42. To be sure, there was still a lot of anonymous publication in the latter part of the eighteenth century. But the expectation had set in that a work would more often than not be identified with a single author, a Benezet, Postlethwayt, or Equiano who could be identified as the author. Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, as has long been recognized, borrows passages from other authors, sometimes with and sometimes without acknowledgment. Much of this borrowing is in the early sections of his book, where he is describing his African homeland. In notes, Equiano refers to Benezet’s Some Historical Account of Guinea, which itself draws on earlier travelogue accounts; to John Matthews’s 1788 book A Voyage to the River Sierra- Leone, on the Coast of Africa; and, in later editions, to James Stanfield’s Observations to the Coast of Africa. But there are many places in the Interesting Narrative where Equiano is drawing on other works without acknowledgment. As S. E. Ogude demonstrated as long ago as 1982, Equiano’s book uses William Snelgrave’s A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea and the Slave Trade (1734) and various works that were gathered together in Thomas Astley’s A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels Comprehending Everything Remarkable in its Kind in Europe, Asia, Africa and America (London, 1745). S. E. Ogude, “Facts into Fiction: Equiano’s Narrative Reconsidered,” Research in African Literatures 13.1 (April 1, 1982): 31–43. There is no reason to be scandalized by this or to accuse Equiano of plagiarism, since this kind of use of other texts was extremely common for eighteenth-century writers. What’s crucial, though, is the way Equiano represents the sum total of the facts derived from these sources as his own memory of his homeland, projecting them not as objective facts-in-the-world that might be shared but as a part of the subjectivity housed in his own person. 43. Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self- Made Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2007), 313. 44. Carey, From Peace to Freedom, 1. 45. Congregations of Quaker women writers in the seventeenth century, as Margaret Ezell has shown, also wrote collective epistles of their own, epistles that would circulate, often in manuscript, among local congregations around Britain, building group cohesion both at the local and the national level. See Margaret J. M. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 58–59. 46. Carey, From Peace to Freedom, 191. 47. Marcia Pointon, “‘Surrounded with Brilliants’: Miniature Portraits in Eighteenth- Century England,” Art Bulletin 83 (March 2001): 48–71, 48. See also John Murdoch, Jim Murrell, Patrick J. Noon, and Roy Strong, The English Miniature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981). 48. Steven J. Gores, “The Miniature as Reduction and Talisman in Fielding’s Amelia,” Studies in English Literature 37 (1997): 573– 93, 575. 49. In one of the many complex ironies to which the slave system gave rise, Cugoano’s slave name was apparently “James Stuart”—that is, the name of the monarch who had been the patron of the Royal African Company at its inception. It is also

250

Notes to pages 163–172

possible that Cugoano is the person portrayed in a portrait usually attributed to Allan Ramsay, now at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter, that was long thought to be that of Olaudah Equiano; the portrait is still used on the familiar Penguin paperback edition of the Interesting Narrative even though just about no one now believes it to be a portrait of Equiano. 50. George Williamson, Richard Cosway, R. A. (London: Bell, 1905), 102. 51. Ibid., 101. 52. Pointon, “‘Surrounded with Brilliants,’” 48. 53. The question of the extent to which Equiano represents his youth accurately (including his birthplace) has been much argued since Vincent Carretta fi rst pointed out the documentary evidence, such as baptismal and ship’s records, that would indicate that he was born in South Carolina rather than, as the Interesting Narrative claims, West Africa; see Carretta’s article “Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa: New Light on an Eighteenth- Century Question of Identity,” Slavery and Abolition 20.3 (December 1999): 96–105. There is no need to rehearse all of the arguments here; both sides have persuasive but inconclusive arguments to make, and in the absence of further and more conclusive documentary evidence, we cannot be certain of the truth. 54. Vincent Carretta, introduction to The Interesting Narrative and other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), xix. 55. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (London, 1789), 30–31. 56. Suvir Kaul, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 245. 57. See Julie Ellison “News, Views, and Cowper’s Busy World,” Modern Language Quarterly 62.3 (September 2001): 219–37; Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 236. 58. See John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, eds., The Poems of William Cowper, vol. 3, 1785–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 283. Lady Balgonie was the daughter of the merchant and evangelical John Thornton, who had been Newton’s patron. 59. Though Clarkson claims that “many thousand” copies of the book were distributed upon its fi rst printing (1788), copies of this printing are extremely rare. 60. The backdrop for both of these incidents was continued confl ict between Britain and Spain over the terms and enforcement of the asiento, the contract to supply slaves to the Spanish colonies in the Americas that, as we saw in chapter 2, had been granted to Britain in 1713 as part of the Treaty of Utrecht. Vernon’s capture of Porto Bello was hailed in Britain; “Rule Britannia” was fi rst sung in celebration of the victory, and Portobello Road in London was named for the event. Tobias Smollett joined Vernon’s fleet shortly after the fall of Porto Bello and participated in the siege of Cartagena, which he then fictionalized in Roderick Random. 61. Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfi nished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 18. 62. Ibid., 49. 63. “The Negro’s Complaint,” in Baird and Ryskamp, Poems of William Cooper, 3:13.

Notes to pages 173–180

251

64. Kathy Chater, “‘Black People in England, 1660–1807,” in The British Slave Trade: Abolition, Parliament and People, ed. Stephen Farrell, Melanie Unwin, and James Walvin (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 66– 83, 72. 65. Gentleman’s Magazine 11 (April 1741): 186. 66. Cowper, “Reflections,” in A Subject for Conversation and Reflection at the TeaTable (London, 1788), n.p. 67. See Prince Hoare, Memoirs of Granville Sharpe (London: Henry Colburn, 1820), 32–41. 68. Cited in Granville Sharp, A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery or of Admitting the Least Claim to Private Property in the Persons of Men in England (London, 1769), 2, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 69. Scott v. Sandford (60 U.S. 393) 1856. 70. Emancipation Proclamation, www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured _documents/ emancipation _proclamation/transcript.html (accessed December 2, 2014). 71. Peter Peckard, Am I not a Man? and a Brother? With all Humility addressed to the British Legislature (Cambridge: J. Archdeacon, 1788), 2. The tract was published anonymously and disguises its authorship by addressing Peckard in the third person. Peckard had set the prize in 1785– 86, having been moved by reports of the Zong incident. 72. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (London: John Stockdale, 1787), 232. 73. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1:26. 74. Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 203. 75. Clarkson fi rst uses the word in the second, 1788, edition of his Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species; see Clarkson, An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, 2nd ed. (London: J. Phillips, 1788), 91. There, he refers to “what is termed the middle passage,” implying that the term was already in use within the trade. The term had earlier had been used in James Ramsay’s An Inquiry into the Effects of Putting a Stop to the African Slave Trade (London, 1784). 76. Like Tobias Smollett, Falconbridge was trained as a surgeon, which was an important role on slave ships, since surgeons were responsible for evaluating and maintaining the health of the slaves and the crew. Like Smollett’s hero Roderick Random, and like Luke Collingwood, captain of the Zong, Falconbridge served as a surgeon on slaving vessels, making four voyages in the 1780s before joining the abolitionist cause in 1787, when he met Thomas Clarkson. Clarkson had come to Falconbridge’s home city of Bristol, a center of the slave trade, to gather evidence on the slave trade. He made Falconbridge a kind of bodyguard and brought him to London to testify on the slave trade to a parliamentary committee. Falconbridge’s book, which was put together in large part, perhaps even all but ghost-written, by James Phillips’s cousin Richard, a Quaker lawyer who gave Falconbridge a questionnaire to fi ll out and then organized his answers for publication, is designed as testimony too, here giving witness to what the slave trade was like for the reading public. Falconbridge’s reputation suffered after his death in Sierra Leone in 1792, and in particular after his wife Anna published her Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone in 1794, which describes the marriage as having gone against the wishes of her family and her husband as an ineffectual drunk who

252

Notes to pages 180 –191

was unable to navigate the Sierra Leone Company’s treacherous politics. I rely here on the entry by Christopher Fyfe, “Falconbridge, Alexander (c. 1760–1792),” in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). But Fyfe gets the date of publication of Falconbridge’s Account wrong, listing it as 1790. 77. Alexander Faulconbridge, An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa (London: J. Phillips, 1788), 24. 78. Ibid., 34. 79. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 78– 82. 80. Clarkson, Essay on Slavery and Commerce, 147. 81. David Hume, “Of Tragedy,” in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, rev. ed., ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), 216, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 82. Joseph Addison, Spectator 44 (April 20, 1711), in Bond, The Spectator, 1:188– 89. 83. Clarkson, Essay on Slavery and Commerce, 160. 84. Ibid., 159.

Ch apter Five 1. Edgar Allan Poe(?), “Poe’s Tales,” Aristidean, October 1845, 316. 2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, ed. William H. Gilman, Alfred R. Ferguson, Harrison Hayford, Ralph H. Orth, J. E. Parsons, and A. W. Plumstead, 16 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1960), 4:250. 3. Emerson, Nature (Boston: J. Munroe, 1836), §2. Christopher Newfield identifies what he calls a “corporate form of liberalism” in Emerson’s project, in which the individual is most typically imagined as submissive, in the end, to larger forms of social organization. The result is a “corporate individuality” expressing the tensions between autonomy and authority that have haunted liberalism ever since. See Christopher Newfield, The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 6, 72. 4. Richard Blackmore, A Satyr against Wit (London, 1700), 9, 10, Early English Books Online, http://eebo.chadwyck.com (accessed March 1, 2014). 5. Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 141. 6. Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London: J. Johnson, 1798), iv. 7. David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation (London: John Murray, 1817), 406. 8. Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), xxi. 9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), §115, 48e. 10. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (London: John Stockdale, 1787), 274. 11. The connection was made by Marc Shell, who fails to mention that the word was changed to “beach” after its fi rst print editions. Shell observes, however, that “The

Notes to pages 191–204

253

Gold Bug” begins and ends at the “bank” of the body of water separating Sullivan’s Island from the mainland. See Shell, Money, Language and Thought: Literary and Philosophic Inquiries from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 52. 12. Technically, the two banks of the United States were incorporated in Pennsylvania, since under U.S. law, corporations were licensed by individual states. But each had a monopoly on handling the federal government’s debt, and each was owned in part by the federal government. 13. Joshua Barkan, Corporate Sovereignty: Law and Government under Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 4. 14. William Gouge, A Short History of Paper Money and Banking in the United States (Philadelphia, T. W. Ustick, 1833), 2. 15. Ibid., 42. 16. Peter Temin, The Jacksonian Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 17. 17. Friedman and Schwartz, Monetary History, 299. 18. Cooper had been hired by Thomas Jefferson to be the fi rst professor of political economy and law at the University of Virginia, but he proved to be too radical for the Virginia legislature and moved to South Carolina. The close relationship between chemistry and political economy as emergent disciplines in this moment would be a rich topic for a future story. 19. Harriet Martineau, Miscellanies, 2 vols. (1836; New York: AMS Press, 1975), 1:273, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 20. Harriet Martineau, “Characteristics of the Genius of Scott,” in Martineau, Miscellanies, 1:52. 21. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” Graham’s American Monthly Magazine of Literature and Art 33 (April 1846): 163. 22. Harriet Martineau, Weal and Woe in Garveloch (London: Charles Fox, 1834), 2. 23. See Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 338–52; Claudia Klaver, A/moral Economics: Classical Political Economy and Cultural Authority in Nineteenth- Century England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003); and Brian P. Cooper, “‘A Not unreasonable Panic’: Character, Confidence and Credit in Harriet Martineau’s Berkeley the Banker,” NineteenthCentury Contexts 32 (December 2010): 363– 84. 24. The Phrase Finder, www.phrases.org.uk. 25. Pye is another avatar of the author in that he is deaf— as was Martineau. Martineau’s family had seen its textile business fail when the death of her father coincided with the British fi nancial crisis of 1826. She was forced to make a living for herself, and, in part because she was poorly suited to work as a governess or teacher because of her deafness, she turned to writing. 26. Harriet Martineau, Berkeley the Banker (London: Charles Fox, 1833), 1:18. 27. Klaver, A/moral Economics, 73. 28. Martineau, Berkeley the Banker, 1:19. 29. See Robert Morris, “The Banker’s Daughter,” Dollar Newspaper 1.24 (July 5, 1843): 1, available at www.eapoe.org/misc/other/dlr43002.htm.

254

Notes to pages 204–219

30. See Bronson Howard, The Banker’s Daughter, in America’s Lost Plays X (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), 84– 85. 31. “Bank Items,” Banker’s Magazine and Statistical Register 11 (July 1856– June 1857): 502. 32. Edgar Allan Poe, Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Tales and Sketches 1843– 1849, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1978), 3:799. 33. Poe(?), “Poe’s Tales,” 316. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Poe, Collected Works, 3:799n. 37. Ibid., 3:818, 820, 826, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 38. Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, January 6, 2011. 39. Terence Whalen, Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 142. 40. See, on this, John F. Jebb, “Race, Pirates, and Intellect,” in Edgar Allan Poe: Beyond Gothicism, ed. James M. Hutchisson (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 17–36. 41. Poe(?), “Poe’s Tales,” 317. 42. Shell, Money, Language and Thought, 8. 43. Whalen, Poe and the Masses, 196. 44. Shawn James Rosenheim, The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Allan Poe to the Internet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 140, 43. 45. Heinz Tschachler, The Monetary Imagination of Edgar Allan Poe: Banking, Currency, and Politics in the Writings (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013). 46. Rosenheim, Cryptographic Imagination, 43. 47. Whalen, Poe and the Masses, 206. 48. Terence Whalen was the fi rst to decode this cryptogram. See ibid., 209. For the original code, see Edgar A. Poe, “A Few Words on Secret Writing,” Graham’s Magazine, July 1841, 33–38, 37. 49. Whalen, Poe and the Masses, 211–13. 50. John Tyler, “President’s Message” to Congress, December 7, 1841, cited in Whalen, Poe and the Masses, 201. Tyler’s words come from his annual message to Congress, a document that was the nineteenth-century equivalent of the State of the Union address.

Coda 1. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843; New York: Dover, 1991), 2. 2. Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900; New York: Penguin, 1981), 338. 3. Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 55. 4. Deirdre N. McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics, 2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 89. 5. R. H. Coase, “The Nature of the Firm,” Economica 4 (November 1937): 386–405.

Notes to pages 219–225

255

6. McCloskey, Rhetoric of Economics, 96. 7. See Bert F. Hoselitz, “The Early History of Entrepreneurial Theory,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History 3 (April 1951): 193–220, 194. 8. Cantillon was an Irish merchant who spent much of his career in France. He died in London, as a result of a fi re in his home that was reputed at the time to have been set by angry creditors. The fi rst full translation in English of Cantillon’s Essai did not appear until 1931; see Richard Cantillon, Essai sur la nature du commerce en général by Richard Cantillon, ed. Henry Higgs (London: Macmillan, 1931). 9. Jean-Baptiste Say, Traité d’économie politique, ou simple exposition de la maniere dont se forment, se distribuent et se consomment les richesses, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Paris: Renouard, 1814), 2:73, 75, my translation. I cite the second edition because this is the edition used by Thomas Jefferson, who did more than anyone else in the nineteenth century to bring the figure of the entrepreneur into English. 10. See Jefferson to Jean Baptiste Say, March 2, 1815, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: The Retirement Series, vol. 8 (October 1, 1814–August 31, 1815), ed. J. Jefferson Looney (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 303–8. Say seems to have entertained the idea of accepting the professorship, going so far as to inquire about farming conditions and the price of land in the Charlottesville area. 11. Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy, A Treatise on Political Economy, trans. Thomas Jefferson, ed. Jeremy Jennings (1817; Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2011), 21, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 12. Ronald Coase, “The Institutional Structure of Production,” www.nobelprize .org/nobel _prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1991/coase-lecture.html (accessed March 11, 2015). 13. Coase, “Nature of the Firm,” 394. 14. A Google Books Ngram view for “entrepreneur” shows a steady increase from 1900 to 1960 and then a steep rise in the use of the word in English from 1960 to 2000; if the database included journal articles and popular journalism, that usage would probably be even higher in the post–World War II period. 15. “Best Business Books, Robert Bruner’s Picks,” U.S. News and World Report, May 13, 2007, http://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid= 4&sid=faeb69cb-fb66 - 45c5-84e9-ba542bc8cd36%40sessionmgr4005& hid= 4114&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3Qtb Gl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=mth& AN=25059308 (accessed March 9, 2015). 16. Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom (1753; Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 4.

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. abolitionism: corporate structure of, 136–42, 166– 69, 178– 84; emblems and, 115, 136, 138–42, 161, 170, 184– 85, 245n1; interest question and, 142–46; the law and, 173–79, 184– 85; propaganda of, 151–56, 169–73; Quakers and, 141, 152, 155– 61, 169–73; Zong case and, 134–35 Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa, An (Falconbridge), 158, 179– 80 Acton, Samuel, 118 actors, 10, 12, 17–18, 36, 63– 64, 84, 89, 95– 98, 142, 194– 95, 215, 221–24 actuarial knowledge, 101, 106, 118–21 Addison, Joseph, 1, 9, 24, 62, 69– 81, 90– 91, 137, 159, 182– 83, 213, 216, 238n21 Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom, The (Smollett), 117, 130, 225 Adventures of Harry Franco, The (Briggs), 186 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 209 Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, The (Smollett), 125–35 Adventures of Roderick Random, The (Smollett), 126–27, 132–34, 245n57 affect: aesthetics and, 161– 69, 178– 84; fi nancial markets and, 67– 68, 83– 90; gender and, 171–72, 184; insurantial imaginary and, 24, 106–7, 110, 119–20, 123–25, 219; interest concept and, 23, 40, 45, 136–46, 168, 178– 84, 200–201, 247n15; intimacy and, 29–31, 101–3, 140–42, 151–52, 163,

170, 184, 192; performative events and, 69– 80; reserve of sentiment and, 204–7; sentimental literary mode and, 16–17, 20–21, 78–79, 126–32 African Trade, the Great Pillar and Support of the British Plantation Trade in America, The (Postlethwayt), 152 agency (human and corporate), 3, 10–13, 22, 25, 35, 49–50, 93, 107, 125, 144, 193– 95, 218, 221 agency problem, 149 Agnew, Jean- Christophe, 68– 69 AIG (American International Group), 107– 8 aleatory, the, 124–28 Alexander’s Weekly Messenger, 213 Allstate Insurance, 115 Althusser, Louis, 64, 69 “Amazing Grace” (Newton), 158, 170 Ambitious Stepmother, The (Rowe), 183 American Notes for General Circulation (Dickens), 186 Am I Not a Man? And a Brother? (Peckard), 158– 60, 165, 177 “Anatomie” (Locke), 45 Annesley, James, 133, 245n54 annuity contracts, 81– 83, 99–103, 115, 119 Anti- Scepticism (Lee), 55 Appleby, Joyce Oldham, 35, 40 Aristidean magazine, 186, 207–17 Armitage, David, 236n36 Arrighi, Giovanni, 232n26 articulation, 6, 11, 13, 18, 22, 30, 36

257

258

index

Ashley, Anthony (Cooper), 31, 45–46, 48–49, 156 asiento, 79– 88, 102, 137, 147, 152–53, 157, 250n60 “As near Porto Bello lying” (Glover), 170–71 Astley, Thomas, 249n42 Atlas Shrugged (Rand), 225 Atterbury, Francis, 92 Austen, Jane, 200, 231n17 authorship function, 46, 69, 154– 61, 166– 67, 169–73, 249n42 Bakan, Joel, 3, 26 Balzac, Honoré de, 231n17 “Banker’s Daughter, The” (Morris), 25, 186, 204–7 Bank of England, 5, 43, 81– 82, 184, 187, 189– 90, 192, 194, 199 Bank of the United States, 13–16, 205–7 Bank of the United States v. Deveaux, 13 Bank Restriction Act, 187, 199 banks: affect and, 202–7; corporate structures of, 82, 187– 88, 190– 96, 214, 223; emergence of, 43, 190– 96; etymology of, 190– 91; fi nancial crises and, 25–26, 107– 8, 186, 188– 89, 194– 95, 202–5, 214, 224, 253n25; laws pertaining to, 104, 108, 191– 96, 199; literary representations of, 186– 87, 189; social responsibilities and, 2 Barbon, Nicholas, 39–40, 62, 113 Barkan, Joshua, 191– 92, 232n39 Barthes, Roland, 77 Battle of Plassey, 20 Baucom, Ian, 7, 109, 169, 179 Becker, Gary, 12 Beecher, Henry Ward, 119–20 behavioral economics, 17–18 Benezet, Anthony, 152, 154–57, 160, 161, 167, 249n42 Berkeley the Banker (Martineau), 25, 199– 204, 206 Berlant, Lauren, 171 Biddle, Nicholas, 195 Blackmore, Richard, 188– 89 Blackstone, William, 114–15, 138 Blunt, John, 90 Body Economic, The (Gallagher), 7 Bold Stroke for a Wife, A (Centlivre), 95, 102 Boseman, William, 154 bottomry, 112, 118, 129. See also insurance

Bourdieu, Pierre, 12 Brabant Screen, The, 84, 86 “Brief Historical and Chronological Account of all the Empires, Kingdoms, and States of the World, A” (Mercury), 121–22 Briggs, Charles Frederick, 186 Britain: banking and, 5, 43, 81– 82, 184– 94, 199; colonial enterprises of, 30–31, 40– 49, 62– 63, 68–71, 79– 88, 93– 94, 102–4, 146–47, 149, 152–57; debts of, 24, 43, 81– 88, 104–5, 115–16; fi nancial crises in, 25, 51, 64–71, 84– 88; insurance industry in, 106– 8, 112–13; naval might of, 82– 83; property rights in, 94–103; recoinage in, 23, 30, 51–53, 77–79; slave trade and, 25, 47, 136–42, 146, 172–78, 184– 85. See also abolitionism; capitalism; colonialism; South Sea Company Britain’s Commercial Interest Explained and Improved (Postlethwayt), 153, 155 British East India Company, 4, 15, 19–22, 31, 42, 53, 62, 81– 82, 146, 149 British Journal, 92– 93 British Mercury, 120–27, 244n41 British Weekly Mercury, 120 Broadway Journal, 229n6 Brown, Bill, 11 Brown, Christopher, 143, 154–55, 247n14 Brown, John, Moses, and Nicholas, 151 Bruner, Robert, 226 Bubble Act, 104, 108 Bubblers Mirrour (print), 64– 65, 67, 102, 104–5 bubbles. See capitalism; fi nancial crises; South Sea Company; speculation Bubler’s Mirrour (print), 64– 65, 66, 102, 104 Cabell, Joseph, 16 Cain, James M., 111, 219 Cantillon, Richard, 221, 255n8 Capital (Marx), 5 Capital in the Twenty- First Century (Piketty), 5– 6, 231n17 capitalism: agrarian, 48, 191– 93, 222–23; desire and, 67– 68, 96– 97, 109, 129–30, 177–78, 202–3, 222; fi nancial capitalism and, 25–26, 64–71, 83– 88, 103–4, 188, 191– 95, 204–5, 214, 220, 224, 230n16, 253n25; insurance industry and, 108–10, 128–29; self-interest and, 8, 18–19, 36, 62, 125, 143, 161, 177– 84, 203, 222; subjectivity and, 10, 12, 17–18, 36, 63– 64, 84,

index 89, 95– 98, 142, 194– 95, 215, 221–24. See also affect; colonialism; desire; money; slavery Capitalism & Slavery (Williams), 143 Carey, Brycchan, 154, 157 Carlos, Ann M., 149–50 Carolina Company, 23, 31, 40–49, 56, 80, 82, 115, 234n7 Carretta, Vincent, 156, 168, 250n53 Carswell, John, 239n34 casebooks, 111–12 catachresis, 2, 11, 140 Cato (Addison), 1, 24, 69– 80, 90, 213–14, 238n21 Cato, Marcus Portius, 74, 159, 183 Cato Institute, 62, 91– 92, 237n67 Cato’s Letters (Trenchard and Gordon), 62– 63, 69, 90– 94 Cato’s Tears and the Making of AngloAmerican Emotion (Ellison), 78–79 Cato the Elder, 97 Caution and a Warning to Great Britain and her Colonies, A (Benezet), 154 Censor, 65 Centlivre, Susanna, 95, 101 Chance and the Eighteenth- Century Novel (Molesworth), 126 characters, 69–74, 79– 80, 83, 96 Charles I, 44, 51 Charles II, 31, 44, 148, 241n65 Chater, Kathy, 173 Child, Josiah, 41, 62 Christmas Carol (Dickens), 186, 218 Church of England, 47 circulation, ideas and, 28–29 Citizens United case, 2–3, 13, 60 Clark, Geoffrey, 109–11, 116–17 Clarkson, Thomas, 138, 141–45, 149, 154, 158, 161– 62, 165, 169–70, 177– 84 classical period, 39, 69, 183. See also neo-classicism Clive, Robert, 20 Coase, Ronald, 219–22, 224 Coke, Edmund, 2–3, 12–13, 193 Collection of Several Pieces of Mr John Locke, A (Des Maizeaux), 47 Colleton, Peter, 46 Collingwood, Luke, 134, 251n76 Collins, Suzanne, 219 colonialism: desire and, 32, 40–49; fi nancial capitalism and, 79– 88, 102, 194– 95; in-

259

surance and, 106–7, 112, 129; joint-stock corporations’ emergence in, 1, 19–21; philosophy’s conditions of possibility and, 28–29; property rights and, 68–71, 79– 84, 93– 94, 102–3; scarcity and, 23, 32–54; slavery and, 139–40, 143, 146–56, 250n60; unconscious of, 54– 60. See also Britain; capitalism; slavery; and specific companies comedy, 70, 94–103 Commentaries on the Laws of England (Blackstone), 114–15, 138 Commonwealth National Bank, 205 Companies des Indes. See Mississippi Company Company of London Insurers, 121 Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, 148 Conscious Lovers, The (Steele), 24, 69, 71, 95–103 Considerations on the Revival of the Royal British Assiento (Postlethwayt), 152 Constitution (U.S.), 13 convertibility, 189, 199–201, 214–15 Cooper, Brian P., 199 Cooper, James Fenimore, 197 Cooper, Thomas, 196– 97 Copson, John, 105, 108 Corporation, The (Bakan), 3 corporations: abolitionist organizations and, 136–42, 151– 61, 183– 84; agency and, 3, 10–13, 22, 25, 35, 49–50, 60– 61, 93, 107, 125, 144, 193– 95, 218, 221; authorship function and, 69, 152– 61, 166– 67, 169–73, 249n42; banks as, 82, 187– 88, 190– 96, 214, 223; embodiment and, 1–3, 14, 42, 44–49, 60– 63, 102–3, 108, 111, 113–14, 122, 147–48, 193, 216–19, 225–26; entrepreneur figure and, 218–26; histories of, 1, 3, 26; imagination and, 1, 3, 24, 27, 41; as legal entities, 1, 12–14, 60– 61; seals and, 25, 91, 114–15, 136–42, 146, 160–73, 177, 184– 85, 245n1; social role of, 2, 4, 25–27; states’ relations to, 14–16, 19–20, 24–27, 40–49, 62– 63, 68–71, 80– 88, 93– 94, 96–105, 108– 9, 112–13, 115–16, 150– 51, 153–56, 187– 89, 191– 96, 214–16, 219, 223; temporality of, 120–25; universities and, 2, 16–19, 232n39. See also Britain; insurance; joint-stock companies Cosway, Richard, 163– 64, 164

260

index

Council for Trade and Foreign Relations (of Britain), 31 Country Wife, The (Wycherley), 70, 99 Court of Assurances, 112, 118 Cowper, William, 158, 162, 169–74, 177 Crane, Ed, 62 credit default swaps, 107– 8 Crédit Mobilier, 5 Crisis of Honesty, The (anonymous), 100 Crisis of Property, The (Steele), 99 Crosby, David L., 154 cryptography, 212–17 Cugoano, Quobna Ottobah, 148, 158, 163, 164, 167, 172, 179, 184, 249n49 Dartmouth College case, 13, 15–18 Davenant, Charles, 145 Davies, K. G., 147–49 Davis, David Brion, 154 Davis, John P., 229n1 Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Sons (Dickens), 186 Death of Tragedy, 72 Defoe, Daniel, 9, 87, 106–7, 112, 115–17, 128, 133, 152 demand theory, 38 Dennis, John, 24, 96– 97, 240n56, 241n60 Derrida, Jacques, 24, 109 desire: capitalism and, 67– 68, 96– 97, 109, 129–30, 202–3, 222; limits upon, 33–40, 42, 62– 63, 76–77, 113; money and, 28–29, 31–32, 38–40; morality and, 55– 60, 129– 30; objectification of, 39–40; rational actor theory and, 17–18, 23; representation and, 33, 37; scarcity and, 32–54; self-interest and, 8, 18–19, 36, 62, 125, 143, 161, 177– 84, 203, 222; sexual desire and, 89– 90; value and, 28–29. See also affect; morality Des Maizeaux, Pierre, 47 Destutt de Tracy, Antonie Louis Claude, 33, 222, 232n25 devaluation, 52, 59 dialect, 210–11 Dialogues upon the Usefulness of Precious Medals (Addison), 76, 78–79 Dickens, Charles, 104, 186, 198, 218, 225–26 Dickie, Simon, 126 Dictionary of the English Language (Johnson), 144 discourse (defi nition), 36, 124–25

Discourse of Trade, A (Barbon), 39 Discourse upon Trade (Child), 41 Disney, Walt, 204 Dollar, 186, 190– 91, 204, 208 Double Indemnity (Cain), 111, 219 Doyle, Aaron, 109–10, 114 drama, 64– 80, 94–103 “Drapier’s Letters,” 9 Dred Scott decision, 176 Dreiser, Theodore, 218 Drury Lane Theatre Company, 24, 95–103, 241n65 DuBois, Abbé, 182 Duchess of Kendall, 86 Dunciad, The (Pope), 239n41 Dutch African Company, 154 Dutch East India Company, 41 economics: behavioral economics and, 17– 18, 143, 197, 233n42; bubbles and, 67, 83– 88, 103–4; colonialism and, 33–40; defi nitions of, 229n3; economic history and, 11–12; efficient-market hypothesis and, 17, 65– 68; interest concept and, 23, 35–36, 42–43, 81– 83, 100–103, 143–45, 153, 160– 61, 177– 84; literary language and, 6–11, 25, 188– 90; Locke and, 30–40, 60– 63; marketplace of ideas notion and, 28–29; mathematization and, 8– 9; mercantilism and, 33–40; modernity and, 220–21; monetary theory and, 10– 11, 189; political economy and, 1, 4–7, 25, 30–40, 47–54, 59, 73, 186, 196–204; rational-actor theory and, 12, 17–18, 23– 24, 38, 86, 143, 197, 233n42; scarcity and, 49–54; self-interest and, 8, 18–19, 36, 62, 125, 143, 161, 177– 84, 203, 222; sentiment and, 137–46, 183, 197; of slavery, 146–51, 156– 84; Adam Smith and, 1, 4, 7– 8, 18–20, 33–40; symbolic economies and, 23, 25, 33, 37–39, 54– 60, 137–42, 152–56, 160– 61 Economics of the Imagination, The (Heinzelman), 7 Economy of Literature, The (Shell), 6 efficient-market hypothesis, 17, 65, 67– 68 ekphrasis, 10, 25, 107, 189– 90, 198, 203–4, 206 elasticity, 38 Eléments d’idéologie (Tracy), 222–23 Elements of Political Economy (Mill), 197– 98, 201

index Elizabeth I, 43, 51 Ellison, Julie, 62, 78–79, 91, 169 Elster, Jon, 12 Eltis, David, 139 Emancipation Proclamation, 177, 185 emblems, 25, 114–15, 136, 137, 138–46, 160– 73, 177, 184– 85, 245n1; Cato’s promotion and, 74– 80, 75, 92– 93; representational crises and, 77–78 embodiment, 14, 22, 47, 72, 84, 167, 197–200, 214 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 187 emotions. See affect; sentimental mode (in literature) empiricism, 30, 33–34 England’s Treasure by Foreign Trade (Mun), 34 English, Thomas Dunn, 208 entertainment (defi nition), 71–72, 90 entrepreneurship, 218–26 Epistle of caution and advice, concerning the buying and keeping of slaves (Benezet), 157 epistles, 156–57, 249n45 Equiano, Olaudah, 135, 145, 156, 158, 166, 166, 167– 68, 170, 179– 84, 249n42, 250n53 Ericson, Richardson, 109–10, 114 Essai sur la nature du commerce (Cantillon), 221, 255n8 Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke), 23, 28–30, 32–33, 49, 54–59, 76 Essay on Insurances, An (Magens), 110 Essay on the Impolicy of the African Slave Trade, An (Clarkson), 158 Essay on the Principle of Population (Malthus), 189 Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African (Clarkson), 142, 158, 177, 182 Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies, An (Ramsay), 157–58 Essay Towards Illustrating the Science of Insurance (Morris), 107– 8 Essay upon Projects, An (Defoe), 106–7, 128, 133 “Estimate of the Degrees of the Mortality of Mankind” (Halley), 101 Ewald, François, 24, 110, 124, 243n13 example (logic of), 68– 69, 71, 73–74, 92

261

Falconbridge, Alexander, 158– 60, 179– 80, 184, 251n76 Fama, Eugene, 65, 233n42, 237n5 Federal Reserve System, 67– 68, 191– 92, 215 Festa, Lynn, 2, 229n5 fi nancial crises, 25–26, 64–71, 83– 88, 103–4, 107– 8, 186, 188– 89, 194– 95, 204–5, 214, 224, 230n16, 253n25 Fish Pool Company, 64 forgery, 202 Foucault, Michel, 33–34, 36–39, 46, 156, 242n5, 243n13 Fox, Charles, 196 Fox, Justin, 26–27 Franklin, Benjamin, 9, 100, 113, 136, 214, 244n41 Free- Holder, 91 French Revolution, 196– 97 Freud, Sigmund, 11 Friedman, Milton, 10, 22, 25, 189, 194– 95 Fundamental Constitutions (Carolina colony), 23, 31, 40–49, 156, 235n31, 235n35 Further Considerations concerning Raising the Value of Money (Locke), 53, 55 Gallagher, Catherine, 7, 89 Gamez, Luis, 238n21 Gans, Joachim, 43–44 Garber, Peter, 86 Garden of Eloquence (Peachum), 2 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 186 Gassendi, Pierre, 56–57 gender, 89, 95, 171–72, 196–207 general average, 134 General Remark upon Trade, 120–21 General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (Keynes), 36 Genoa, 112 Genres of the Credit Economy (Poovey), 7 Gentleman’s Magazine, 173, 229n6 George I, 85, 86, 241n65 Gibbons, J. S., 5 Glorious Revolution, 148 Glover, Richard, 170–72 Godwin, Charles, 198 gold: bank notes and, 189, 191– 92, 199–201, 214–16; mining of, 28–29, 49 “Gold Bug, The” (Poe), 25, 186, 190– 91, 198, 204, 207–18 Goldhammer, Arthur, 231n17 Goldman Sachs, 191

262

index

gold standard, 62 Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, The (Michaels), 7 Gordon, Robert W., 98 Gordon, Thomas, 62– 63, 69, 90– 94 Gores, Steven J., 163 Gouge, William, 193, 195, 229n6 Goux, Jean-Joseph, 23, 33 Graham’s Magazine, 213 Great Depression, 10, 194– 95, 224 Great Fire of London, 113 great man of history, 10–11 Greenspan, Alan, 18, 67 Greeson, Jennifer, 31 Griffith, D. W., 204 Grundrisse (Marx), 4–5, 191, 230n14 Guardian, 78–79, 91, 137 guineas, 146, 147, 161 Habermas, Jürgen, 69 Hacking, Ian, 126 Hackwood, William, 245n1 Halley, Edmond, 101, 119 Hamilton, Alexander, 13–16, 100, 206–7, 223 Hand-in-Hand, 113–14, 119, 161 Hargrave, Francis, 97– 98, 241n57 Harley, Robert, 9 Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, 310 Harvard Business Review, 26 Haunted Merchant, The (Briggs), 186 Haywood, Eliza, 69, 88, 90– 91, 123, 245n54 Heath, Robert, 44 Heath Anthology of American Literature, 209 Heckscher, Eli, 35 hedonism, 56–57, 58–59 Heinzelman, Kurt, 7 Hemp and Flax Company, 64 Heraclitus, 30 Hippisley, John, 149 Hirschman, Albert, 247n17 Historical Register, 120 History of Economic Analysis (Schumpeter), 35 History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament (Clarkson), 138, 141–43, 179 Hobbes, Thomas, 4, 14, 14, 15, 26, 31, 57, 230n11 Hodges, James, 55

Hood, John, 60– 61 Hoover, Herbert, 10 Horace (Corneille), 183 Hosier, Francis, 171 “Hosier’s Ghost” (Glover), 170–71 Hudson’s Bay Company, 15, 31, 40–49, 81, 146 Hughes, John, 74 Huguenots, 49, 56 Hume, David, 9, 182– 83 Hunger Games (Collins), 219 Idea, the: abstraction strategy and, 91– 92; defi nitions of, 11, 28, 33, 76; materiality and, 71–80, 137–38; mental economy and, 30, 33, 54– 60, 71–72, 76–79, 186–87, 222 identification, 70–71, 79– 80, 95– 96 ideology, 11, 33–36, 64, 137, 150, 214, 222–23, 232n25 Illustrations of Political Economy (Martineau), 25, 186, 196–204 imagination: affect and, 76–77, 197; colonialism’s relation to, 28–29; insurance’s structure and, 24, 106–7, 110–11, 123–25, 219; literary temporality and, 120–25 impressions, 70– 80, 92, 137, 168– 69 incorporation: etymology of, 3; as metaphor, 2 India, 19–21 insurance, 24, 219; actuarial knowledge and, 101, 106, 118–21; corporate forms of, 104–5, 107– 8; emergence of, 1, 111–20; fictional depictions of, 126–32; gambling and, 116–18; laws regarding, 111–12, 116– 17; medallions and, 114; moral valences of, 106, 109, 112, 115–20, 134–35, 183– 84; slavery and, 116, 132–35, 146–51, 161; supplement concept and, 109–10, 112–13, 120; temporality of, 120–25; tontines and, 100–103 intelligibility, 64, 70, 94, 96, 174, 183– 84, 209, 220. See also ideology; representation interest: defi nitions of, 144–45; economic sense of, 23, 35–36, 42–43, 81– 83, 100– 103, 143–45, 153, 160– 61, 177– 84; Locke on, 31, 43, 52–53; sentimental sense of, 23, 40, 45, 136–46, 168, 178– 84, 200–201, 247n15 Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, The (Equiano), 145, 158, 166, 166, 167– 68, 170, 180– 82, 249n42 interpellation, 64

index intertextuality, 204 intimacy, 29–31, 101–3, 140–42, 151–52, 161– 72, 184, 192 invisible hand, 8, 19–20 Irene (Johnson), 72 irrational exuberance, 67, 83– 90 Jackson, Andrew, 193– 95, 206–7, 229n6 James II, 146, 147, 150 Jameson, Frederic, 11 Jefferson, Thomas, 15–16, 177, 190, 192, 222–24 Jewison, Norman, 219 John Locke Foundation, 60– 62 Johnson, Samuel, 144–45, 247n15 joint-stock companies, 40–49, 140; colonialism and, 1, 140, 146–47; emergence of, 41, 146–47; Marx on, 4– 6; obsolescence of, 149, 152–53 Justel, Henri, 46 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 3, 230n8 Kaul, Suvir, 169 Kelly, Patrick Hyde, 38–39 Kerr, James, 174 Keynes, John Maynard, 36 Killigrew, Thomas, 241n57, 241n65 Kimball, Spencer, 111 King, William, 54–56, 58 Kinkade, Thomas, 163 Klaver, Claudia, 199 Koch, Charles, 62 Krätke, Michael R., 230n16 Kruse, Jamie Brown, 149–50 labor: banking and, 216–17; private property notion and, 31–32, 49–54; slavery and, 139–40, 223–24. See also capitalism; colonialism; property; value law: banking and, 104, 108, 191– 96; corporate form and, 1, 12, 150, 218–19; insurance and, 111–12, 116–17, 133–34, 146; legal studies and, 12–13; property rights and, 94–103; sentimental literature and, 16–17, 171–72; slavery and, 172–78, 184– 85 Law, John, 87, 90 Leatherstocking Tales (Cooper), 197 Lectures on the Elements of Political Economy (Cooper), 196 Lee, Henry, 55

263

Lehman Brothers, 108 Lenin, V. I., 224 “Letter from Madrid, A” (Mercury), 121, 123–27 Leviathan (Hobbes), 4, 14, 14, 15 Liberty magazine, 219 lieux de mémoire, 83 Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 87 Life Assurance Act, 104–5, 117, 119 life insurance. See insurance Lisle, David, 174–76 literary works: authorship practices and, 46, 154– 61; banking and, 186– 89; corporate figures in, 1, 10–11; economic events and, 64–71, 88– 94; imagination and, 110–11; New Economic Criticism and, 6–7, 9, 11–12, 20–22; sentimental mode in, 16–17, 20–21, 27, 126–32, 139, 200– 201, 206–7, 209–17; serialization and, 120–25. See also representation; and specific authors and works Lloyd’s Coffee House, 113 Lloyd’s List, 120 Locke, John: corporate entanglements of, 23, 30–31, 40–49, 156, 234n7, 235n21; desire and, 49–54; empiricism and, 1, 30, 45; Idea concept and, 11, 28, 33, 70, 76–77, 232n25; on money, 33–40, 43, 62– 63, 113; property concept and, 24, 30–32, 60– 63, 94, 98. See also specific works London Assurance, 64, 104–5, 108, 110 London Gazette, 120 London Journal, 90, 92– 93 London Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 25 Lott, Eric, 11 Lowndes, William, 52–53 Lowy, Michael, 109 Lynch, Diedre, 74, 136 Mabbott, Thomas Ollive, 208, 229n6 Mackay, Charles, 86 Madison, James, 45 Mad Men (series), 6 Magens, Nicholas, 110–11, 243n15 Malcolm, Noel, 230n11 Malthus, Thomas, 189, 196, 198– 99 Manley, Delarivier, 89 Man of Mode, The, 99 Mansfield decision, 175–78

264

index

marine insurance, 112–13, 134. See also bottomry; insurance Mark, Gregory A., 15 Marketplace of Ideas (Menand), 231n21 Marlborough, Duke of (John Churchill), 80 marriage, 95, 200–207, 219 Marshall, John, 13, 15, 17 Martineau, Harriet, 25, 186, 190, 195–203, 207, 253n25 Marx, Karl, 4–5, 103, 191, 230n14, 230n16 Mary Barton (Gaskell), 186 materiality, 71–72, 76 Matthews, John, 249n42 McCloskey, Deirdre, 9, 219–20 McCrory, Pat, 60 McKeon, Michael, 230n14 medallions, 114 Memoirs of a Certain Island, Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia (Haywood), 69, 88, 90– 91 Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman (Haywood), 245n54 Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (Mackay), 86 Menand, Louis, 231n21 mercantilism, 23, 33–40, 153 metaphor: economics and, 7– 8; pictures and, 64–71, 77, 189– 90, 196–207; screening image and, 84– 88, 92– 93; world-as-stage and, 64–71, 102–3 Mian, Emran, 204 Michaels, Walter Benn, 7, 219 Middle Passage, 179– 83 Mill, James, 197– 98, 201 Mill, John Stuart, 31 Millar, John, 110–11 Milligan, Joseph, 223 mimesis, 71– 80 miniature portraiture, 161– 69 Mississippi Company, 87, 90 Models of Value (Thomson), 7 modernity: actuarial knowledge and, 124–25; insurance and, 107, 111; representation and, 33–40, 107, 110; transaction costs of, 220 Molesworth, Jesse, 126 Monetary History of the United States, A (Schwarz), 10–11, 22, 189, 194 money: agency of, 10–11; desire and, 28–29, 38–40, 49–54; Idea notion and, 30, 33,

54– 60; language and, 33, 37, 60– 63; Locke on, 28–35, 187; scarcity and, 49– 54; value of, 51–52, 199–202, 214–15 monopolies, 4, 18, 80– 83, 105, 146–50, 230n11 Monthly Repository, 196 Moral Capital (Brown), 143–44, 247n14 morality: abolitionism and, 14, 22, 47, 72, 84, 167, 197–200, 214; insurance industry and, 106, 109, 112–20, 134–35, 183– 84; moral economy and, 55– 60, 129–30, 142– 46, 151–56, 169–73 moral judgment (Locke’s theory of), 54– 60 More, Hannah, 158 Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 135 Morris, Corbyn, 107– 8, 110–11 Morris, Robert, 25, 186, 190, 195– 96, 204–7 Mr. Spectator (character), 69 Mun, Thomas, 34 “Murders in the Rue Morgue, The” (Poe), 213 Muscovy Company, 41, 81, 146 mutual societies, 108, 113–14 Napoleonic Wars, 184, 187, 199 Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone (A. Falconbridge), 251n76 Nation a Family, A (Steele), 99–100 Natural and Private Advantages of the African Trade Considered, The (Postlethwayt), 152 “Nature of the Firm, The” (Coase), 219, 224 “Negro’s Complaint, The” (Newton and Cowper), 158, 162, 169–73 neo-classicism, 69, 72 neoliberalism, 26, 91– 92 Netherlands, 41, 154 New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, A (Boseman), 154 Newcastle, Lord Chamberlain, 98– 99 New Economic Criticism, 6–7, 9–12 New Economic Criticism, The (volume), 6–7 New England Courant, 100 Newfield, Christopher, 252n3 “News, Views, and Cowper’s Busy World” (Ellison), 169 Newton, John, 158, 169–73 New Yorker, 65 New York Times, 26 New York Tribune, 5 Nora, Pierre, 83 North, Dudley, 40

index North American Review, 16 Norton Anthology of American Literature, 209 Notes on the State of Virginia (Jefferson), 177, 190 novel, the, 1–2, 110–11 numismatics, 76–77, 83, 238n21 objects of discourse, 78, 111, 115, 129–30 Observations on the Inslaving, Importing, and Purchasing of Negroes (Woolman), 154–56 Observations upon the Growth and Culture of Vines and Olives; The Production of Silk; The Preservation of Fruit (Locke), 48 Of Corporations (Sheppard), 3 Of Grammatology (Derrida), 109 Ogude, S. E., 249n42 Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company, 4– 6 Old Whig, 91 Olney Hymns (Cowper), 158, 170 On the Principles of Political Economy (Ricardo), 189 Order of Things, The (Foucault), 36–38 Ordonnance de la Marine, 116 Orientalism, 121 Orr, Leah, 239n41 Panic of 1837, 188, 214, 230n16 paper currency, 191– 92 Park, James Alan, 110–11 Paul, Helen, 239n34 Peace of Utrecht, 79, 147, 250n60 Peachum, Henry, 2 Pearson Anthology of American Literature, 209 Peckard, Peter, 158– 60, 177, 183 Peerage Act, 97, 240n56 Pembroke (Earl of), 28–29 Pennsylvania Company for Insurance on Lives and Granting Annuities, 119 periodicals, 120–25 “Personification of the Business Corporation in American Law, The” (Mark), 15 “Peter Pendulum” (Poe), 2, 214, 229n6 Pettigrew, William, 150 Philadelphia Contributorship for the Insurance of Houses from Loss by Fire, 113 Philadelphia Inquirer, 205 Philadelphia Society for the Abolition of Slavery, 136 Philadelphia Society of Friends, 156

265

Phillips, James, 158, 160– 61, 167, 180 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein), 190 “Philosophy of Composition” (Poe), 198 Phoenix Fire Office, 113–14 pictures: dramatic sense of, 64–71; ekphrasis and, 10, 25, 76, 107, 189– 90, 198, 203– 6; emblems and, 161– 69; political economy and, 196–203; representational crises and, 77; Wittgenstein on, 27, 190. See also metaphor Piketty, Thomas, 5– 6, 231n17 Plato, 30 Poe, Edgar Allan, 2, 25, 186, 190– 98, 204, 207–17, 229n6 Poetry and Tales (Poe), 208 Pointon, Marcia, 162, 164– 65 political economy, 1, 4–7, 25, 30–40, 47–54, 59, 73, 186, 196–204 Polloxfen, Henry, 4 Poovey, Mary, 7, 12, 199 Pope, Alexander, 239n41 Pope, Art, 60 Postlethwayt, Malachy, 152–53, 155–56, 161, 221, 249n41 presentism, 12 Pride and Prejudice (Austen), 200 Prince, The (Machiavelli), 89 probability, 1–2, 101, 126–32. See also actuarial knowledge; risk propaganda, 74– 80, 151–56 property, 24; British law and, 97–103; fi nancial speculations and, 81– 83, 94–103, 241n65, 248n27; Locke on, 30–34, 49–53, 60– 61, 94– 98; marriage and, 95; slavery and, 134–35, 149–52, 173–79 prosthetic person, 69 Providence Gazette, 151 Providence Society for Abolishing the Slave Trade, 151 Prudential Insurance Company, 115 Public Advertiser, 168, 170 puns, 77 “Purloined Letter, The” (Poe), 213, 216 Quakers, 95, 141, 152, 155– 61, 167, 249n45 Quinn, Patrick, 208 racial difference, 79, 83, 103, 136, 139, 173–79. See also abolitionism; affect; sentimental mode (in literature); slavery

266

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Raleigh, Walter, 43–44, 49 Rambler 4 (Johnson), 247n15 Ramsay, James, 157 Rand, Ayn, 225 Randall, Joseph, 154 rational-actor theory, 12, 17–18, 23–24, 38, 143 “Raven, The” (Poe), 198 recoinage, 23, 37–38, 51–59, 61– 62, 113 Reinhart, Carmen, 188– 89 “Remarks on a Play, call’d The Conscious Lovers, a Comedy” (Dennis), 96– 97 Remarks on the Slave Trade, and the Slavery of Negroes (Africanus), 158 Report Containing an Essay for the Amendment of the Silver Coins, A (Lowndes), 53 representation: crises in, 69, 83; ekphrasis and, 10, 25, 107, 189– 90, 196–203, 206; emblems and seals and, 25, 114–15, 136– 42, 160–73, 177, 184– 85, 189, 199–201, 214–15, 245n1; embodiment as, 14, 22, 47, 72, 84, 167, 197–200, 214; examples and, 64–71, 92, 102–3; mimesis and, 71– 80; miniature portraiture and, 161– 69; racial difference and, 80; slave trade and, 179– 82, 184; supplement notion and, 24, 38–39, 58, 105, 107, 109–10, 113, 161– 69; symbolic economy and, 23, 25, 33, 37–39, 54– 63, 136–42, 160– 61, 186; value and, 4, 7– 8, 20–30, 33–39, 50–58, 67– 68, 76–77, 81– 82, 87, 97, 102, 106–11, 118–26, 162, 188– 90, 202–3, 216 Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of tolerating Slavery, A (Sharp), 174–75 Restoration, 51, 69– 80 Review, 120 Revolutionary War, 100 Rhetoric of Economics, The (McCloskey), 9 Ricardo, David, 189, 196, 202, 204 risk: corporate forms and, 41; discourses of, 111–12, 126–32; fictional depictions of, 110–11; hedging against, 220–21; insurantial imaginary and, 24, 106–7, 110, 123–25, 219; probability and, 1–2, 101, 126–32; speculation and, 23–24; theological conceptions of, 118–19 Roanoke Island, 43 Rogoff, Kenneth, 188– 89 Rollerball (Jewison), 219 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 10

Rorty, Richard, 30 Rosenheim, Shawn, 211–13 Rothbard, Murray, 62 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 109 Rover, The (Behn), 99 “Rover, The” (Mercury), 121 Rowe, Nicholas, 183 Royal African Company, 31, 41, 47, 64, 81, 83, 141–42, 146–56, 161, 163, 247n20 Royal Exchange Assurance, 108 royal paradox, 98. See also property RSA Insurance Group, 104–5 Sade, Marquis de, 39 Saile, William, 49 “Sailor’s Complaint, the” (Glover), 170–71 Satyr against Wit, A (Blackmore), 189 Savary des Brûlons, Jacques, 152, 221, 249n41 Say, Jean-Baptiste, 221–23, 225 Sayre, Robert, 109 scandal, 88– 94 scarcity, 23, 33–40, 49–54; desire and, 32, 40 Schiller, Robert, 67– 68, 233n42, 237n5 Schlefer, Jonathan, 8 School for Scandal, The (Sheridan), 20–22 School of Action, The (Steele), 72 Schumpeter, Joseph, 35 Schwartz, Anna Jacobson, 10, 22, 189, 194– 95 Scott, Walter, 197– 98 Scott, William Robert, 229n1 screen metaphor, 68, 84– 88, 85, 92– 93 seals, 114–15 Second Bank of the United States, 193– 95, 206–7 Second Treatise on Government (Locke), 30– 32, 34, 49–51, 53–54, 94, 96, 98 secret history genre, 68, 90 self-interest, 8, 18–19, 36, 62, 125, 143, 161, 177– 84, 203, 222 sentimental mode (in literature), 17–22, 27– 32, 79–83, 119–32, 139, 171–72, 200–217, 247n15 serialization, 120–25 shareholder value thesis, 25–27 Sharp, Granville, 135, 158, 173–75, 183 Shell, Marc, 6–7, 11, 30, 74, 191, 211, 252n11 Shepherd, Simon, 70 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 20–22 shining, 74 Short Account of that Part of Africa, Inhabited by the Negroes, A (Benezet), 154

index Short Sketch of Temporary Regulations (until better shall be proposed) for the Intended Settlement on the Grain Coast of Africa, near Sierra Leone, A (Sharp), 158 silver, 49, 51–54, 59– 60, 76–77, 194 Sister Carrie (Dreiser), 218 slavery, 22, 25, 81– 88, 132–51, 156– 61, 166–78, 184– 85, 209–10, 223–24, 247n14. See also abolitionism; insurance; property “Slavery, a Poem” (More), 158 Slave Trade Act, 136, 184 Smith, Adam, 1, 4, 8– 9, 18–20, 32, 62, 103, 144–45, 149, 177–78, 196 Smith, Robert Sidney, 244n31 Smollett, Tobias, 24, 103, 112, 117, 125–35, 225, 251n76 Snelgrave, William, 249n42 Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 137–38, 140–41, 152, 154, 156, 158, 161, 163, 170, 177, 180 Society for Equitable Assurance and Lives and Survivorships, 119 Some considerations on the keeping of Negroes (Woolman), 155–56 Some Considerations upon the Lowering of Interest (Locke), 37, 53 Some Historical Account of Guinea, its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of its Inhabitants (Benezet), 154–55, 160, 161, 249n42 Somerset, James, 175–77 Somerset decision, 139, 173 South Sea Company: asiento and, 79– 88, 102, 137, 147, 152–53, 157, 250n60; chartering of, 41–42, 147; collapse of, 63, 68, 86– 87, 147, 188, 214; insurance and, 108; interpretations of, 84– 88; representations of, 64–71, 80– 83, 88–103; seals of, 115 Spain, 44, 80– 83, 86, 250n60. See also asiento Spectator, 69, 71, 77, 81, 91, 120, 183 Specters of Marx (Derrida), 109 Spectres of the Atlantic (Baucom), 7 speculation: examples of, 68; South Sea Bubble and, 23–24, 81– 83, 87– 94; the state and, 68–71 Stanfield, James, 249n42 Steele, Richard, 24, 64, 69, 71–72, 81, 91, 94– 103, 116, 119, 240n56, 241n65, 248n27 Steiner, George, 72 Stern, Philip J., 42 Steuart, Charles, 176

267

Stevens, George M., 61– 62 Stevens, John Paul, 60 Stevens, Wallace, 31 Stoddard, Solomon, 118 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 171–72, 185 Strong, Jonathan, 173–76 Stuart, James, 146, 150 “Subject for Reflection and Conversation at the Tea Table, A” (Cowper), 174 subjectivity. See affect; agency (human and corporate); corporations; Idea, the; ideology; Locke, John Summary View of the Slave Trade and of the Probable Consequences of its Abolition, A (Clarkson), 158 Sun Fire Office, 113, 114, 121, 124–25 supplement (concept), 24, 38–39, 58, 105, 109– 10, 113, 161– 69 Supreme Court (US), 2–3, 13, 60 Sutton Hospital case, 2–3, 12–13 Swift, Jonathan, 9 symbolic economy, 23, 25, 33, 37–39, 54– 63, 136–42, 160– 61, 186 sympathy, 18 System of Geography (Randall), 154 Talbot, Charles, 174 Tales (Poe), 186, 207–17 Taney, Roger, 176–77 Tatler, 91, 120 “Tell-Tale Heart, The” (Poe), 213 Temin, Peter, 12, 194 temporality, 120–25 theater, 68– 80, 94–103 Theatre, 91, 99, 240n56 Theobold, Lewis, 65 theology, 118–19 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 18–19 This Time Is Different (Reinhart and Rogoff), 188– 89 Thomson, James, 7 Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (Cugoano), 148, 158, 167, 172 Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade (Newton), 158 Toinard, Nicolas, 46, 235n35 Tonson, Jacob, 74–76, 159 tontines, 100–103, 115–16, 119 Tories, 80– 82 Trachtenberg, Alan, 242n5 tragedy, 70, 72–74, 95, 103

268

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Traité d’économie politique (Say), 221 transaction costs, 219–20, 224 Treaty of Utrecht, 79, 147, 250n60 Trenchard, John, 62– 63, 69, 90– 94 “Tryal of Assurance, The” (Stoddard), 118 Tschachler, Heinz, 211 Tully, James, 57–58 Turkey Company, 41 Twain, Mark, 209 Tyler, John, 254n50 Tyler, W. B. See Poe, Edgar Allan Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 171, 185 unconscious, the, 147–48; affect and, 206–7; defi nition of, 11; economic frame and, 222–26; Locke’s mental economy and, 33, 54– 60; portraiture and, 206–7 uneasiness, 56–59. See also affect; desire Union assurance office, 119 Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (Postlethwayt), 152–53, 155 universities, 2, 16–19, 232n39 University of Virginia, 16 University of Virginia Community Credit Union, 191 value: of company shares, 67– 68, 76–77, 81– 82, 87, 97, 102; of human lives, 106–11, 118–26; monetary, 4, 7– 8, 20–30, 33–39, 50–58, 69, 188– 90, 202–3, 216; moral economy and, 162 Variety Wholesalers, 60 Vassa, Gustavus, 135 Vaughn, Karen Iverson, 38 Venice, 112 vent (defi nition), 38–39 Vernon, Edward, 171, 250n60 Virginia Company, 31, 41, 43–44, 81 VOC (Vereenindge Oost-Indische Companie), 41. See also Dutch East India Company Von Mises, Ludwig, 62

“Voyage into another World, A” (Mercury), 121 Walpole, Robert, 85, 86, 92– 93, 97, 152, 240n56 Warner, Michael, 69 War of Jenkins’ Ear, 171, 245n55 War of Spanish Succession, 79, 121 War of the Quadruple Alliance, 86 Washington, George, 13 Weal and Woe in Garveloch (Martineau), 198– 99 wealth, 37–38 Wealth of Nations (Smith), 18–20, 34, 42, 103, 144, 149, 177–78 Webster, Daniel, 16–17 Wedgwood, Josiah, 25, 115, 136, 138, 161– 63, 168, 177, 245n1 Wertheimer, Eric, 109, 242n5 Weskett, John, 110, 134 Whalen, Terence, 191, 211 Wheatley, Phillis, 177 Whigs, 49, 80– 81, 111, 145, 196, 240n56 Wilberforce, William, 140, 167, 170 William III, 83 William of Orange, 43, 52, 150 Williams, Eric, 143, 179, 246n11 Williamson, George, 164 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 27, 190 women, 89, 95, 171–72, 196–207 Wood, Marcus, 139 Wood, Neal, 48 Woolman, John, 155–56 Works (Addison), 76 Worlds Apart (Agnew), 68 Wycherley, Wiliam, 70 Yellin, Jean Fagin, 245n1 Yorke, Philip, 174 Zong case, 109, 134–35, 139, 179, 183, 251n76