Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 176-182 9780812203684

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Colonizing Nature

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Colonizing Nature The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, – Beth Fowkes Tobin

University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Copyright ©  University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper           Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tobin, Beth Fowkes. Colonizing nature : the tropics in British arts and letters, – / Beth Fowkes Tobin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN --- (cloth : alk. paper) . English literature—History and criticism. . Tropics—In literature. . Great Britain— Colonies—History—th century. . Great Britain—Colonies—History—th century. . Gardening—History—th century. . Gardening—History—th century. . Gardening in literature. . Colonies in literature. . Nature in literature. . Tropics—In art. I. Title. PR.TT  .′—dc 

For Joe

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Contents

List of Illustrations Preface

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Introduction: Troping the Tropics and Aestheticizing Labor  1

Tropical Bounty, Local Knowledge, and the Imperial Georgic 

2

Provisional Economies: Slave Gardens in the Writings of British Sojourners 

3

Land, Labor, and the English Garden Conversation Piece in India 

4

Picturesque Ruins, Decaying Empires, and British Imperial Character in Hodges’s Travels in India 

5

Seeing, Writing, and Revision: Natural History Discourse and Captain Cook’s A Voyage towards the South Pole, and Round the World 

6

Domesticating the Tropics: Tropical Flowers, Botanical Books, and the Culture of Collecting  Epilogue: Decolonizing Garden History Notes



Select Bibliography Index





Acknowledgments





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Illustrations

. Agostino Brunias, Linen Market, Dominica  . Agostino Brunias, A West Indian Flower Girl and Two other Free Women of Color  . Johann Zoffany, Mr and Mrs Warren Hastings  . Arthur Devis, Sir John Shaw and His Family in the Park at Eltham Lodge, Kent  . Arthur Devis, Thomas Lister and His Family  . Arthur Devis, Robert and Elizabeth Gwillym and their Family, of Atherton Hall, Herefordshire  . Paul Sandby, Hackwood Park, Hampshire  . Bifrons Park, Kent  . Arthur Devis, Leak Okeover, Rev. John Allen and Captain Chester at Okeover Hall, Staffordshire  . Johann Zoffany, The Drummond Family  . Johann Zoffany, The Impey Family Listening to Strolling Musicians, Calcutta  . Arthur William Devis, The Hon. William Monson and his Wife, Ann Debonnaire  . Arthur William Devis, William Dent with his Brother, John, and an Indian Landlord, Anand Narain  . Arthur William Devis, Louisa Dent and her Children  . William Gilpin, View into a Winding Valley  . B. T. Pouncy, after William Hodges, A View of Bidjegur  . Gaspard Poussin Dughet, View of Tivoli with Rome in the Distance  . W. Angus, after William Hodges, The Pass of Sicri Gully  . J. Fittler, after William Hodges, A View of the Palace of the Nabob Asoph ul Dowlah at Lucknow  . J. Walker, after William Hodges, A View of Agra  . W. Byrne, after William Hodges, A View of the Fort of Gwalior  . J. K. Sherwin, after William Hodges, The Landing at Erramanga, one of the New Hebrides 

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. William Hodges, The Fort of Bidjegur  . J. K. Sherwin, after William Hodges, The Landing at Middleburg one of the Friendly Islands  . J. Basire, after William Hodges, The Landing at Mallicolo, one of the New Hebrides  . Logbook and journal of Captain James Cook in the Resolution during his second voyage round the world;  July –  Nov.   . Logbook and journal of Captain James Cook in the Resolution during his second voyage round the world;  July –  Nov.   . Logbook and journal of Captain James Cook in the Resolution during his second voyage round the world;  July –  Nov.   . After an anonymous artist employed by the Calcutta Botanic Gardens, Caespalinia sappan  . After James Sowerby, Hamellia patens 

Preface

Plants, Gardens, and Knowledge For the nearly two decades that I lived in Hawai‘i, I couldn’t garden. When we first moved into our house in Hawai‘i, my husband, who came late to his love of gardening, would repeatedly ask my advice on landscaping and planting since I, as a country girl, was supposed to know these things. Somehow I could not bring myself to help him. He would say in response to my seeming indifference: “Why can’t you help me or at least help plan our garden especially when all you do all day is read and write about plants, gardens, and agriculture?” I began to realize that I couldn’t plant precisely because I was reading about plants, gardens, and agriculture. Reading, for instance, Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City, John Barrell’s The Darkside of the Landscape, William Cronon’s Changes in the Land, Lilikala¯ Kame‘eleihiwa’s Native Lands and Foreign Desires: Pehea La- E Pono Ai?, and Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things had convinced me of the ideological status of gardens and the political implications of having knowledge about plants. I had become so overwhelmed by this recognition of the ideological implications of gardens that I was unable to take pleasure in planning and planting a garden in our backyard. Seemingly simple questions from my husband about what to plant or how to design the garden would become ideological conundrums for me, and I would become immobilized by my thoughts. Once my husband asked me what I thought about building a curving path through our garden. His query reminded me of Pope’s Twickenham garden, his clever use of a small space to create the illusion of greater space, and how the serpentine walkway had helped achieve this. At first the serpentine path seemed a good idea, and then I remembered Pope’s landscaping advice to his Whig magnate friends, and the incredible gardens designed by Kent, Brown, and Repton, all of which were displays of aristocratic power, the power to exert one’s will on the land and the wealth to take large parts of rural land out of agriculture, to level villages, to move peasants off the land, all to create “pleasing” prospects. Unable to divorce the serpentine walk from the class politics implied by the country house garden, I hemmed

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and hawed. My husband went ahead and built his version of the serpentine walkway (it turned out quite nice). Every May, I would get the urge to plant a vegetable garden. What to plant? I would fantasize about the gardens I planted as a child with my father in New England—corn, squash, pumpkin, and beans. Wanting to recreate those distant pleasures of my childhood and to remember the New England of my youth would become strong reasons for planting corn, squash, and pumpkin. But planting these vegetables in Hawai‘i presented problems that went beyond fruit flies eating the blossoms of most squashes. Though the “torrid zones” with their warm and humid air, frequent but soft rainfall, and vibrant green landscapes suggest fertility and agricultural abundance, tropical and subtropical places are not necessarily sites of unlimited natural abundance. Soils are often dense with clay or barren because too sandy, and often lack that rich, black topsoil necessary for sustained and intensive growth. Plants grow in the tropics, not because of the rich soil, but because humus, the layer of rapidly rotting leaves and fallen blossoms and decomposing dead wood, provides the nutrients plants need to grow. Though the climate is relatively gentle (no frosts or freezes), plants suffer from a range of pests that thrive in these warm and moist regions. Abundant rainfall and warm sunshine are more than balanced out by pests such as slugs, aphids, beetles, nematodes, fungi, and an array of insect-borne viruses and bacteria. To the uninformed eye, the tropic’s greenery is a sign of fecundity, but not all plants grow equally well; a few thrive, become weeds, and threaten others. Introduced species, such as the Christmas berry tree, clog the foothills of O‘ahu, choking out the native hardwood, Koa. Contrary to popular belief, growing plants in the tropics requires effort and knowledge. In addition to the inherent difficulties of cultivating temperate-zone plants in a subtropical climate, I struggled with what to plant in our garden. I worried that, in wanting to plant corn, I was imposing my New England predilections on a Hawaiian landscape, reminding me too much of how, two hundred years ago, New Englanders imposed religious, political, and (agri)cultural institutions on Hawaiians, and of the consequences of that imposition—loss of native lands, creation of huge sugar plantations, irreparable damage done to native Hawaiian cultural traditions, health, and welfare. And what about my corn? I couldn’t look at it (a University of Hawai‘i hybrid engineered for the tropics) with pride (even though it had grown quite nicely). Corn, I should not forget, is the product of centuries of Native American agricultural practice, and planting corn carries with it all sorts of stories, ranging from Iroquois corn mothers to Euro-American dispossession

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of Native American lands. Should I be planting taro, I wondered? But if I were to plant taro, would I as a haole (white person/foreigner) be usurping native traditions? What could I plant that wouldn’t be ideological? At the heart of these obsessions about gardening lurked the discomfort one feels when confronted with the contradiction between one’s own beliefs and practices. Specifically in our case, we felt discomfort about owning land in Hawai‘i, land that was once possessed by Hawaiians, and yet we fancied ourselves supporters of Hawaiian sovereignty. Their land was ours on which to map our foreign desires. Our (pathetic?) compromise between our white guilt and our love of our garden was to encourage the growth of native Hawaiian ferns and ti plants and to harass invasive foreigners, my husband chainsawing the Christmas berry tree favored by nineteenth-century American missionaries, who were fond of the hollylike, red berry clusters that appeared during the Christmas season. I’ve even grown cantankerous about house plants—many of them, you see, are subtropical plants. I remember when I used to live in Chicago how I would labor over the welfare of a small umbrella tree, an Australian plant, which stood two feet high and needed its leaves wiped clean of dust to breath in that dry, winter, apartment air. I would mist it, water it, and fertilize it, but here in Hawai‘i, the umbrella trees up on the hill behind our house are forty feet tall and spread so aggressively that my husband regards them as a nuisance and has even taken a chainsaw to one to make space for a Koa tree, a native to Hawai‘i. It is abundantly clear that tropical and subtropcial plants are happier in tropical climates than in the houses of the northern climes. The question is why do people, and I should say, middleand upper-class people in the North, raise houseplants? Of course, I’m aware of the pleasure of seeing green in the midst of winter and the soothing nature of plants, but in my mind the history of houseplants and their significance is too linked to imperialism for me to enjoy them. Houseplants are an eighteenth-century invention: the trophies of empire used to decorate the bourgeois home. (I’m talking about tropical house plants, not herb gardens, which are an ancient practice linked with healing and cooking.) Houseplants represent the North’s dominance over the tropical zones of the earth. Houseplants are a manifestation of a larger pattern of the circulation of plant life from the tropical and subtropical centers of the globe northward to the temperate zones in North America and Europe. You can see now why I can’t plant. I should say, why I couldn’t plant, because with the writing of this book, I am finding a place other than my head for these (rather obsessive) thoughts, a process which I hope will free

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me to do a little digging. What has helped me to recover my pleasure in gardening even more than the writing of this book is, strangely enough, our move from Hawai‘i to the Sonoran Desert of Arizona. Longing for Hawai‘i and desperate for green, we’ve thrown ourselves into gardening but have only begun to fathom the ideological contradictions of Phoenix’s green lawns and suburban sprawl amid central Arizona’s lack of water. With this book, I don’t intend to ruin the pleasure that you, my readers, get from house plants, flower gardens, and picturesque landscapes, but I must warn you that what I write about the tropics and empire might, for instance, dampen your delight in viewing the displays of subtropical and tropical plants at botanic gardens and may diminish your pleasure as you take home from garden centers little pots of bougainvillea, passion flower vines, and hibiscus. You might end up like me, caught between what you know and what you do.

Laboring in Paradise This book was written in conversation with a particular place, my backyard in Hawai‘i, and a particular group of people, my students and colleagues at the University of Hawai‘i. My years as a professor of English literature in Hawai‘i, an ex-sugar-producing colony and now tourist destination, inform my critique of the way in which painters, such as Hodges and Zoffany, and poets, such as Thomson and Grainger, depict tropical and subtropical landscapes as well as the georgic’s and natural history’s use of the catalog as a way to organize information about tropical nature. My critical stance toward these writers and artists grows out of a recognition that I shared with them a position enabled by bourgeois expertise and that I occupied vis-à-vis the tropics a structural relation analogous to someone engaged in maintaining the colonial project.1 My role as a teacher of English art and literature, one informed by cultural imperialism, mimicked that of the missionary; only the choice of text differed while the structural relation remained the same. The negative affect that may have seeped into this book’s description of colonialists’ projects stems from my recognition of and recoil at my own complicity, despite my anticolonialist aims, with the ongoing colonial project, which in Hawai‘i has shifted from agricultural production of sugar and pineapples for global consumption to tourism. It is myself, my inclinations expressed and unexpressed as well as my position within a colonialist state apparatus, that I critique when I write critically of a travel

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writer’s appropriation of native knowledge or a botanist’s decontextualization of tropical plant life. To insist, as I do in this book, on foregrounding the exploitative structural relations of colonialism may appear overly reductive, especially in these days of “complicating” colonialism, a reaction within the academy against the postcolonial critique as initiated by Edward Said and further elucidated by Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and others. Now historians, literary critics, art historians, and cultural geographers often position themselves in opposition to Said’s Orientalism (or a caricature of his work) and other decolonizing strategies that stress the power differentials of the structural relation between colonizers and the colonized. Typically, such anti/ante-postcolonial work focuses on the blurring of these boundaries as, for instance, in the colonized’s complicity with the colonial project, the benefits native elites accrued from the colonial state, the parallel nature of the exchange between the colonized and colonizers, and the way in which the culture of the colonized mediated and transformed European culture. I have myself in other projects engaged with questions of accommodation, acculturation, and resistance to colonial power. However, with this book, Colonizing Nature, I believe it is necessary to keep in plain view the enormous power differentials that underwrote these cultural and material exchanges so as to avoid being seduced by the pleasant alibi that I have seen surface recently, especially in the context of the East India Company, in scholarly work that celebrates colonial officials’ love of the people they ruled over. Though a colonial official may have developed a deep affection for and an appreciation of the culture of the people he governed, and may have relied on native expertise to rule and to collect information, his structural relations, regardless of his affect and even particular actions, were based on unequal power dynamics, which were at heart, as in the case of the East India Company, a form of exploitation. A colonial official benefited from these structures of exploitation, even if his actions were intended as neutral and disinterested, as in the gathering of information about plants. The intellectual positions I take in this book emerge from my experience of having lived and worked in Hawai‘i for nearly two decades. I have tangible and personal reasons for my interests in the tropics and tropical agriculture. Besides my home having been surrounded by tropical plant life (my backyard contained banana, plantain, papaya, avocado, pomegranate, guava, jackfruit, and mango trees), I was a teacher of students, who, for the most part, were native Hawaiians or the descendants of Asian sugar plantation workers. Their pasts and Hawai‘i’s colonial legacy, fraught with class

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and racial conflict, were and still are palpable presences in the classroom, energizing discussions of even the most canonical of literary texts. When I would teach, for example, Thomson’s The Seasons, I would place it alongside other imperial texts, such as Pope’s “Windsor Forest” and Addison’s Spectator essay No.  (on the Royal Exchange), to demonstrate how they employ the catalog of exotic commodities to figure England as the center of a global market economy. Our discussions would focus on how the catalog erases geographical and cultural specificity, and how it elides local knowledge and local labor, transforming the tropical into the exotic. Living in a colony under an economic regime that is fueled by the core’s consumption of the exotic, my students would see how Enlightenment tropes such as the catalog still operate with force and in tandem with a global economy that relegates the tropics to the margins. From my students I have learned that representation is never disinterested, and armed with that insight, I have turned my attention to the representation of the tropics, specifically those images and ideas that achieved iconic status in the eighteenth-century cultural imagination.

Introduction

Troping the Tropics and Aestheticizing Labor

[W]e should not imagine that the world presents us with a legible face, leaving us merely to decipher it; it does not work hand in glove with what we already know; there is no prediscursive fate disposing the word in our favour. We must conceive discourse as a violence that we do to things, or, at all events, as a practice we impose upon them. —Michel Foucault, “The Discourse of Language”1

James Thomson’s poem “Rule, Britannnia!” () celebrates British naval power, which ensured the expansion and dominance of British commerce across the globe.2 As a measure of British rule, the tropics are invoked as a site to be exploited by and harnessed to British commercial forces: I see thy Commerce, Britain, grasp the world: All nations serve thee; every foreign flood Subjected, pays his tribute to the Thames. Thither the golden South obedient pours His sunny treasures: thither the soft East Her spices, delicacies, gentle gifts . . . 3

The warm and fecund regions of the world are Britain’s obedient servants, whose tributes are their natural riches. What constitutes these tributes (aside from the ubiquitous “spices”) is made more explicit in his much longer poem, The Seasons, which catalogs the “dreadful beauty” and “barbarous wealth” (ll. –) found in the tropics. These regions, blessed and cursed with “returning suns and double seasons” (l. ), produce not only shining metals and gems but also exotic fruits, flowers, plants, and animals. Suvir Kaul explains in his reading of The Seasons though the sun is the “source of tropical abundance,” it also “turns out to be a tyrannical and morally corrupting

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force there.”4 With this ambivalent portrait of the sun’s powers, Thomson conveys the excitement as well as the anxiety generated by Britain’s assumption of imperial authority over the globe’s natural resources. As this poem implies, mastery of tropical nature, and especially its potential for agricultural productivity, became key concepts in the formation of British imperial identity. This book is about how the tropics, as a region and as an idea, became central to the way in which Britons imagined their role in the world. I take as my subject the representation of tropical nature and tropical landscapes in a variety of media, from travel writing to botanical treatises and from family portraits to topographical illustrations, as a way to investigate how these modes of representation constructed the tropics as simultaneously paradisaical and in need of British intervention and management.

Bounty and the Tropics I begin with Captain James Cook’s depiction of tropical landscapes in the South Pacific. What is remarkable about Cook is the attention he paid to Pacific Islanders’ agricultural practices. As a writer, Cook did not do what most of his contemporaries did when they wrote about tropical nature. He did not recur to pastoral, georgic, or edenic tropes, nor did he aestheticize the worked landscape, transforming it into an object for visual consumption. Nor did Cook use what he had observed as a platform to construct theories about human difference and the civilizing process. Nor did he make extracts from his observations of tropical nature to slot into existing classifying schemas. As James Boswell said of Cook after having met him in , he “was a plain, sensible man with an uncommon attention to veracity” and “did not try to make theories out of what he had seen.”5 Because Cook’s writings about tropical landscapes eschew his contemporaries’ rhetorical strategies of troping the tropics, aestheticizing labor, and decontextualizing plant life, his descriptions of Pacific gardens are a good place from which to explore the way in which writers and artists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries depicted the tropics. In August , Captain Cook, in the second year of his second circumnavigation, guided his ship, the Resolution, to Vanuatu, or as Cook called this group of islands, the New Hebrides. Along with his team of artists and scientists, he disembarked to explore the island and take stock of the plants, animals, and people. He wrote the following about the island of Tanna in his journal:

Introduction



Here and there we met with a house, some few people and plantations, of these latter we found in different states; some of long standing, others lately clear’d and some only clearing and before any thing was planted. The clearing a peice of ground for a plantation seem’d to me to be a work of much labour, considering the tools they have to work with, which are of the same kind but much inferior to those at the Society Isles. Their methods is however judicious and as expeditious as it can well be. They lop off the small branches of the trees, dig under the roots and there burn the branches or small shrubs and plants which they root up and by this means destroy both root and branch of every thing.6

Such a matter-of-fact statement about how Tannese cleared their land for planting appears to contain nothing noteworthy. And yet, Cook’s careful observation of how the Tannese worked their land is extraordinary because he is one of the few eighteenth-century European travelers to acknowledge the labor, skill, and knowledge that Pacific Islanders employed when practicing tropical agriculture.7 Cook also expressed admiration for the way in which taro was cultivated in New Caledonia, a much drier climate than Tonga or Vanuatu. Noting that one village had “about it a good deal of cultivated land, regularly laid out in Plantations, planted and planting, with Taro or eddy roots, yams, Sugar Cane and Plantains,” Cook provided a detailed description of the methods used to plant and water taro: “They have two methods of planting these roots, some are planted in square or oblong plantations which lie perfectly horizontal and sunk below the common level of the adjacent lands, so that they can let in as much Water upon them as they please or is necessary; I have generally seen them covered two or three inches deep, but I do not know that this is always necessary. Others are planted in ridges about  or  feet broad and  or ½ high, on the middle or top of the ridge is a narrow gutter in and along which is conveyed, as above described, a little rill which waters the roots planted in the ridge of each side of it.”8 The attention Cook gave to how Pacific Islanders grew the food—taro, yams, plantains, and breadfruit—that these British voyagers depended on for sustenance is unique among those who traveled with him on his three voyages. Even those charged with the duties of naturalist and botanist did not attend to the details of Pacific Islanders’ agricultural practices and horticultural techniques the way Cook did. For instance, surprisingly indifferent to Pacific Island agronomy was Sir Joseph Banks, who accompanied Cook on the first circumnavigation and was given permission by the Admiralty to oversee the collection and classification of new plant life. An avid amateur naturalist rather than a professional botanist, Banks financed

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much of this part of the expedition, employing a professional taxonomist, Daniel Solander, and botanical illustrator, Sydney Parkinson. Banks wrote of the culture of breadfruit trees in Tahiti: In the article of food these happy people may almost be said to be exempt from the curse of our forefather; scarcely can it be said that they earn their bread with the sweat of their brow when their cheifest sustenance Bread fruit is procurd with no more trouble than that of climbing a tree and pulling it down. Not that the trees grow here spontaneously but if a man should in the course of his life time plant  such trees, which if well done might take the labour of an hour or thereabouts, he would as compleatly fulfull his duty to his own as well as future generations as we natives of less temperate climates can do by toiling in the cold of winter to sew and in the heat of summer to reap the annual produce of our soil, which once gathered into the barn must be again resowd and re-reapd as often as the Colds of winter or the heats of Summer return to make such labour disagreeable. O fortunati nimium sua si bona norint may most truly be applied to these people; benevolent nature has not only supplyd them with nescessaries but with abundance of superfluities.9

Though in this passage Banks quotes Virgil’s Georgics, a poem about the necessity of hard labor in husbandry and agriculture, his sentiments belong to the pastoral vision and the belief that nature, at least in these tropical zones, is bountiful. According to this myth, those who dwell in the tropics have nothing more to do than to gather nature’s bounty. Banks was convinced that the easy living he thought he observed in Tahiti was due to the abundance of breadfruit. “Idleness the father of Love reigns here in almost unmolested ease, while we inhabitants of a changeable climate are obliged to Plow, Sow, Harrow, reap, Thrash, Grind Knead, and bake our daily bread . . . these happy people whose bread depends not on an annual but a Perennial plant [breadfruit] have but to climb up and gather it ready for baking from a tree.”10 Banks’s belief that breadfruit could sustain a large population without requiring labor to produce that food source resulted in one of his earliest and most famous plant transfer schemes, involving Captain Bligh, the ship Bounty, and breadfruit seedlings, which ended up being thrown overboard. The mutiny on the Bounty thwarted Bligh’s first attempt to bring breadfruit to the Caribbean to feed enslaved Africans laboring on sugar plantations, slaves who were starving by the thousands due to the interruption in the flow of foodstuffs from the thirteen colonies during the American Revolution. But Bligh returned to Tahiti and on his second attempt was successful in putting Banks’s plan into action. Banks believed that breadfruit could help maintain slave populations, as he thought that the large populations of the “Society Islands” were due, in part, to breadfruit. Banks did not

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seem to realize that the plentiful food supplies of Tahiti were the product of careful management of resources by skilled agriculturalists. It may seem ironic that Banks, who thought of himself as a naturalist, was oblivious to the skill and labor that went into the making of the tropical landscape. Banks’s inability to see labor in a landscape that looked lush and green can be explained, in part, by the European belief that tropical landscapes, given their warmth and moisture, are naturally bountiful.11 Even the astute naturalist George Forster, who accompanied Cook on the second circumnavigation, fails in his travel narrative to describe as fully as Cook the agricultural techniques employed by Pacific Islanders. Comparing Cook’s description of the taro irrigation system in New Caledonia with Forster’s, we find that Cook’s is more detailed. Forster notes that the “cocopalms, destitute of fruit, some sugar-canes, bananas, and eddoes” were “supplied with water by several little trenches. Some of the eddoes were actually set under water, in the same manner as is customary throughout the South Sea islands.”12 As we can see from this passage, Forster does indeed note native agricultural practices; however, his description lacks Cook’s eye for detail and his appreciation for the islanders’ elaborate method of taro irrigation. Perhaps Forster was so heavily invested in current protoanthropological theories about hierarchies of civilization and their relation to agriculture that he underestimated the sophistication of the irrigation systems that Pacific Islanders constructed for their taro gardens.13 Cook, on the other hand, is generous with his admiration for the ingenuity displayed in these “little rills”: “The Taro plantations were prettily watered by little rills continually supplied from the Main Channel, where the Water was conducted by art from a River at the foot of the Mountains. . . . [T]hese plantations are so judiciously laid out that the same stream waters several ridges. These ridges are sometimes the divisions to the horizontal plantations, when this method is used, which is for the most part observed, when a Path way or something of that sort is not necessary, not an inch of ground is lost.”14 In describing the elaborate irrigation systems of New Caledonia as “judiciously laid out,” Cook acknowledges native knowledge and agricultural expertise. To be fair to George Forster’s skills as a naturalist, it is important to note that he does indeed notice native horticultural practices and the climatic conditions under which native agriculture is conducted. Forster is consistently much more perceptive about native horticultural practices than the other “gentlemen” on this or the other voyages including his father. The younger Forster recognizes that the tropical climate does not ensure

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agricultural bounty since pests and weeds are constant threats to foodproducing plants in warm and wet regions. He writes, “The excellence of the soil, instead of being an advantage to cultivation in its infant state, is rather of disservice; as all kinds of wild trees, bushes and weeds, are with the greatest difficulty rooted out, and propagate with luxuriance, either from seeds, or from the roots. Cultivated vegetables, being of a more weakly and delicate nature, are easily oppressed and suffocated by the indigenous wild tribes, till repeated labours succeed at last to bring them to a flourishing state” (:). Not only does Forster recognize the difficulties inherent in farming in tropical climates, but he, like Cook, is struck with the infertility of New Caledonia: “it was plain they had barely enough for their own subsistence. The soil of New Caledonia is indeed very unfit for agriculture, and poorly rewards the labours which the natives bestow upon it” (:). Unlike Banks, who assumed that tropical climates were naturally abundant, Forster recognized the difficulties of growing food-producing plants in the tropics. And yet, Forster was not interested in learning Pacific Islanders’ agricultural methods for the sake of knowing this information. Instead, their practices became evidence to support his ideas about climate as the origin of human variation.15 In addition to using what he saw in the Pacific to help construct theories to explain the problem of cultural difference, Forster also used tropical landscape as a source of romantic inspiration and aesthetic appreciation. Cook and Forster witnessed the same method of clearing land on Tanna, “a work of much labor” in Cook’s description. Forster, in contrast, dwells on himself and the feelings he experienced as he viewed “rich plain” and “vast number of fertile hills” (:). Though he begins his description by noting that “I frequently saw the natives employed in cutting down trees, or pruning them, or digging up the ground with a branch of a tree,” his imagination is caught when he hears “a man singing at his work” (:); his narrative quickly shifts tonal register as it moves into a romantic appreciation of this “rich plain” (:): Those who are capable of being delighted with the beauties of nature, which deck the globe for the gratification of man, may conceive the pleasure which is derived from every little object, trifling in itself, but important in the moment when the heart is expanded, and when a kind of blissful trance opens a higher and purer sphere of enjoyment. Then we behold with rapture the dark colour of lands fresh prepared for culture, the uniform verdure of meadows, the various tints upon the foliage of different trees, and the infinite varieties in the abundance, form, and size of the leaves. Here these varieties appeared in all their perfection, and the different

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exposure of the trees to the sun added to the magnificence of the view. . . . The numerous smokes which ascended from every grove on the hill, revived the pleasing impressions of domestic life; nay my thoughts naturally turned upon friendship and national felicity, when I beheld large fields of plantanes all round me, which, loaded with golden clusters of fruit, seemed to be justly chosen the emblems of peace and affluence. The cheerful voice of the labouring husbandman resounded very opportunely to complete this idea. (:)

In Forster’s prose, Tanna’s gardens become a pleasing prospect, echoing the aestheticizing tropes of harmonized variety and happy husbandmen that frequently structure English georgic poetry. It is a prospect inflected with a romantic sensibility, which transforms beautiful objects into emblems of transcendental feeling. “The mind at rest, and lulled by this train of pleasing ideas, indulged a few fallacious reflections, which encreased its happiness at that instant by representing mankind in a favourable light” (:).16 New Caledonia and Tanna, respectively, become in Forster’s journal an opportunity to ruminate on the relationship between agriculture and civilization and to express lofty ideals about intercultural exchange. Cook’s attention to the agricultural practices of Tanna (Vanuatu) and New Caledonia is not only more acute than that of his fellow travelers; it is also typical of his ongoing concern with gardens and gardening in the South Pacific. Though one might not expect a mariner to be so interested in agriculture, Cook himself planted English gardens in New Zealand, gave out seeds for turnips, parsnips, and carrots in Tonga, and tried to stock New Caledonia with pigs. In May , he notes in his journal that “My Self with a party of Men employed digging up ground on Long Island which we planted with Several sorts of garden seeds,” and “This day I employ’d in clearing and digging up the ground on Motuara and planting it with Wheat, Pease, and other pulse carrots Parsnips and Strawberries.”17 Maritime historians, who have noticed Cook’s enthusiasm for planting gardens in the Pacific, have explained this behavior as altruistic and pragmatic, which is, in fact, the explanation Cook gave in his journals. “We meant to serve,” he says of his planting of gardens in New Zealand, and of the seeds he gave to Tongans, he writes, “I probably have added to their stock of Vegetables by leaving with them an assortment of garden seeds and pulses.”18 He sees his acts of plant transfers as benevolent, giving to Pacific Islanders such plants as carrots and turnips, which Europeans have found beneficial. In addition, these gardens were also meant to provide needed nutrition for British mariners, who tended to be dependent on islanders’ generosity (and often nonexistent surpluses) to survive the years at sea.19 In The Apotheosis of Captain Cook,

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Gananath Obeyesekere counters these interpretations that stress Cook’s humanitarian motives by arguing that Cook’s planting of gardens is driven by an imperialist and expansionist agenda and a Eurocentric dogma that made European-style cultivation the key to the “civilizing” process. The eighteenth-century impulse to conflate English gardens with civilization does indeed haunt Cook’s proceedings, but it does not explain Cook’s intense interest in how Pacific Islanders grew food-producing plants. The Eurocentric and imperialistic motives that Obeyesekere often justly ascribes to Cook do not in this case allow for Cook’s appreciation of native practices and knowledge traditions concerning agriculture. Cook’s admiration for the “little rills” so judiciously laid out does not fit into Obeyesekere’s paradigm of Cook as an imperialist bent on bringing English values and customs to benighted “savages.”20 I believe Cook’s enthusiasm for planting gardens on various Pacific islands can be explained, in part, by his background.21 While Cook was growing up, his father had been an agricultural day laborer; he eventually rose into the ranks of farm management as an overseer of the local squire’s estate. Cook’s ability to see the effects of labor on a landscape, even landscapes of coconut groves and taro patches, can be attributed to his having firsthand knowledge of what was involved in the growing of food-producing plants. That he was able to see that agricultural laborers possessed knowledge and skill in their production of food-producing plants can also be attributed to his limited formal education. With only a few years in a country school, Cook acquired, as an apprentice, the sophisticated skills he needed in mathematics and geography to become the master mariner and navigator that he was. The education that Cook received was, therefore, artisanal, and was not derived from the Latin-driven and classics-based curriculum received by college-educated gentlemen, nor was it informed by a curriculum based in natural philosophy and political economy that was offered by dissenting schools. While it is impossible to know for certain why Cook took such an interest in South Pacific gardens, his lack of a gentleman’s polite education may have freed him from serious misconceptions, such as those entertained by Banks, about the edenic nature of the tropics. Cook is unique among his peers in possessing a clarity of vision and understanding when it came to seeing who planted what and how in the Pacific region. In calling Cook a remarkable observer, I do not mean to suggest that he, unlike the well-educated “gentlemen” who accompanied him, was able to step outside rhetorical conventions and mystifying discourses to see

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unmediated reality. Rather, I am suggesting that his thinking operated within a different discursive frame, which I will call (in keeping with Marx) “artisanal,” a term used by historians of science to distinguish this form of knowing that is embedded in praxis from polite science, which became the dominant scientific mode under Banks’s decades-long presidency of the Royal Society. Artisanal science can be thought of as a remnant of preEnlightenment engagement with the physical world, based on older systems of knowledge, such as the guild system, where expertise is based on praxis; it can also be thought of as a precondition for Enlightenment science, which, even at its most abstract, was constructed in relation to and even directly derived from work and thought of artisans themselves. The point of comparing Cook’s rhetorical strategies with those of the gentlemen scientists on board his ships is to highlight the differences between discursive formations and, for the purposes of this book, to assert that the dominant discourse on the tropics in the late eighteenth century was not Cook’s but rather Banks’s and Forster’s, typified by their use of pastoral and edenic tropes and the deployment of aestheticizing representational practices. This polite discourse on tropicality, in assuming authority and achieving the status of “truth,” became “true” and, as such, was used to regulate people and to manage natural resources. Emblematic of how state-sponsored ventures and government policies were constructed wholesale from pastoral visions of tropical nature is Banks’s plan to send Bligh to Tahiti for breadfruit. This act signaled the beginning of Banks’s busy career orchestrating the movement of plants and people around the globe. Carrying tea plants out of China and planting them in Bihar and Bhutan for British tea drinkers, transplanting breadfruit trees from the Pacific to the Caribbean for starving slaves who produced the sugar for the Briton’s tea and jam, and populating Australia with Britain’s superfluity of human beings are only a few of the highlights in Banks’s long career of managing the globe’s resources for Britain’s benefit.22

Colonizing Nature Cultivated tropical and subtropical nature is the focus of this book, not the romanticized or spiritualized pristine landscapes of untouched nature, but land that has been harnessed to commercial and market forces. This book is about how a combination of knowledge and ignorance about plants enabled the British to colonize huge parts of the globe, harnessing nature to serve

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imperial interests. The role of agriculture is undertheorized in the study of colonial expansion.23 The economics of imperialism is usually discussed in terms of the forging of trade routes, the rise of mercantile capitalism, and the concomitant military conquest of territory. This book insists that agriculture is crucial to understanding the British empire. The vast plantations devoted to the monoculture of sugar in the Caribbean and Pacific, and the cotton, tea, and indigo estates of India not only transformed these regions but also radically altered their populations through genocidal policies and the massive movement of peoples from one region of the globe to another. These agricultural practices also had a huge impact on the social fabric of Britain, shaping daily rituals of consumption central to the formation of a national identity. Because tropical plants as food (such as sugar, tea, chocolate) have been key in the construction of British identity, those who grew the plants in the tropical regions of the empire are therefore implicated in this identity formation. Enslaved Africans and their descendents (and in the postemancipation era, East Indian indentured workers), who labored on West Indian sugar plantations, and South Asians, who grew tea and cotton for British planters, produced commodities that defined British character. As Stuart Hall has said about the centrality of the Afro-Caribbean experience to British life, “I am the sugar in the bottom of the English cup of tea.”24 My goal is to recover eighteenth-century ideas about the tropics so that we may better understand how Britain came to dominate the global circulation of tropical plants (and people) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With its sugar plantations in the Caribbean, its domination of India’s agriculture and natural resources, and its colonial botanical gardens, Britain made itself the center of a global economy based on agricultural production and exchange, specifically the production of such commodities as sugar, tea, coffee, indigo, and cotton. Though much postcolonial criticism (my own work included) has focused on colonial and postcolonial subjectivity, little attention has been paid to the representation of nature within the colonial context.25 Only in the field of the history of science, in the subdiscipline of colonial science, are these issues being taken up and discussed with the seriousness they deserve. Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature, a collection of interdisciplinary essays edited by David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill, and Richard Drayton’s Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World represent the best of these efforts to document colonial science and its goal of mastering natural resources for Britain’s benefit.26 While literary critics and art historians have produced extensive studies of the representation of English

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landscape, few, with the exception of Peter Hulme, Mary Louise Pratt, and Elizabeth Bohls, have focused their attention on colonial landscapes. Though I draw on Pratt’s Imperial Eyes and Bohls’s Women Travel Writers to analyze the rhetorical strategies of natural history and travel writing, my project differs from Pratt’s and Bohls’s in my combined emphasis on visual and verbal texts, which extend beyond natural history and travel writing to other genres to include georgic verse, the garden conversation piece, and botanical books such as floras and hortuses. I agree with Pratt’s brilliant analysis of natural history writing “as a way of taking possession without subjugation and violence.”27 However, I would qualify her characterization of travel writing and natural history as triumphal and dominated by the trope of “master-of-all-I-survey” to suggest that present in the array of visual and verbal texts that represent colonized nature is an anxiety about the potential for failure of the colonial project. What was at stake in the various representations of the tropics was ultimately the question, not necessarily the assertion, of British mastery over the globe’s natural resources, a mastery that, though not always complete, was crucial to the formation of British cultural identity and sense of imperial mission. This book’s goal is to call attention to the discursive processes by which labor and history were elided from the representation of tropical nature, and to suggest ways to reconstruct the conditions under which tropical plants, flowers, and fruit as well as landscapes were produced and consumed. Tropicality, the way in which the category of the tropical operates in the European imagination, is touched upon in this book insofar as those European fantasies of fertility and abundance shaped material practices and were deployed in depicting nature. This book critiques the mystifying practices of poets, painters, natural historians, and botanists, their decontextualizing and aestheticizing practices that, in the process of offering up beautiful images of discrete items, erased the conditions under which tropical commodities were produced, and in the process substituted their own literary and artistic efforts in the place of local producers’ work.

Troping the Tropics Colonizing Nature begins with an examination of the traditional English georgic’s capacity to transform physical labor (hoeing and shearing sheep) into its discrete material effects (wheat fields and pastures of sheep). In aestheticizing labor, the georgic and the picturesque shift the emphasis from

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Introduction

the agricultural producer to the poet or writer who occupies the subject position in the text. This book also examines the ideological effect of the cataloging that occurs within georgics as well as in natural history and botanical writing. Coupled with the concept of bounty, the catalog decontextualizes tropical nature and erases the material conditions and cultural significance of the local production of tropical commodities. The knowledge and skill of the local producer are lost in the catalog’s celebration of nature’s bounty and the elevation of the writer as expert about agriculture, botany, geology, and the natural world. Chapter , on Anglo-Indian gardens, exposes the processes whereby country house portraits and garden views work to mystify the material conditions that inform landholding practices in Britain and in India. The popularity of the genre of garden conversation pieces with East India Company employees stems from their wishes to be portrayed as if they were the gentry, the garden imagery lending them a landed social status that they coveted as merchants, bureaucrats, and military men. Indian landscape was represented in these garden views as under the command of British authority. In contrast, in the picturesque landscape paintings and topographical prints that William Hodges produced on his tour of Bengal, Bihar, and Oudh, Indian landscape is portrayed as timeless and ancient. The conflict between British and Indian armies for control of these territories is masked by the serenity and stasis of Hodges’s picturesque illustrations that fill his book, Travels in India. The picturesque banishes labor and history from its frame in much the same way that the georgic, in aestheticizing labor, suppresses the materiality of work. Genre is key to this study, for genre played an important role in shaping the expectations and desires of artists, natural historians, sojourners, and colonial agents who were confronted with the new and the different in the tropical regions of the world. The central argument of this book is that popular forms of eighteenth-century art and literature played an important role in developing eighteenth-century ideas about land, labor, and natural resources in the tropical regions of the world. Eighteenth-century ways of seeing, describing, and portraying tropical nature were determined, to a large degree, by preexisting notions of what constituted the pastoral and the picturesque. As we have seen, Sir Joseph Banks, gentleman botanist on board Captain Cook’s Endeavour voyage, saw Tahiti through the lens of pastoral poetry and painting, ascribing to nature’s benevolent powers the abundance of breadfruit, taro, and yams that were, in actuality, cultivated by the Tahitians, who were expert agriculturalists, not the leisured swains Banks mistook them for. This way of thinking was shaped, in part, by the

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locodescriptive poetry of writers such as Pope, Gay, Dyer, and Thomson, by country house portraits both verbal and visual, and by picturesque landscape paintings, drawings, and illustrations. Though these forms of cultural production were distinctly English, growing out of particular sets of social, economic, and artistic concerns that were specific to England at this time, they were used repeatedly by writers and artists to describe regions beyond England’s shores, in particular Britain’s colonies in the West and East Indies. That poets, painters, travel writers, and naturalists should employ familiar idioms and formal conventions to convey their impressions of these tropical and subtropical regions is not surprising, for, as Giambattisa Vico suggests in The New Science (), the strange and new can be understood and articulated only within the framework and language of the known and familiar: “poetic geography” is “when people can form no idea of distant and unfamiliar things, they judge them by what is present and familiar.”28 The intellectual and visual mastery of the tropics, as exercised in genres as different as georgic verse, botanical illustrations, and garden views, preceded and accompanied such material appropriations of land, labor, and natural resources as the Pacific voyages of discovery, the sugar plantations in the West Indies, and the indigo, cotton, and tea estates in Bengal. This book explores the cultural and political work that genre performs by shaping the way in which we think and see. Each genre possesses particular formal codes that operate selectively, organizing that which is being represented, so that an ideologically coherent and aesthetically pleasing visual or verbal image is produced. However, genre, more than a collection of formal features, is also an epistemological tool, a way of knowing and seeing that asserts mastery over the object represented. As Karen O’Brien suggests in her overview of eighteenth-century georgic poetry, “genre is both a set of conventions and mode of social understanding.”29 I use the term “genre” in its most inclusive and expansive form to refer to both a mode of thought and a range of visual and verbal practices that speak beyond the strictly poetical and painterly to social practice and epistemic mastery. I examine the discursive strategies and representational practices that particular genres license and prohibit, focusing on the boundary work that genre performs as it calls into play various tropes and figures in its attempt to give shape and coherence to the new and different. Though this book is about visual and verbal generic modes and tropes that were prevalent from the s to the s in British colonial settings, the significance of my case studies reaches beyond the long eighteenth century and British studies to have larger implications about cognition and

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Introduction

culture. British colonists and travelers, when confronted with the foreign and strange, used familiar tropes and genres to make alien places and people more familiar, more recognizable, and more palatable, or conversely, to dismiss, erase, or contain disturbing differences. For instance, Lady Nugent, wife of the lieutenant governor and commander-in-chief of Jamaica, upon her arrival on that island employed the well-worn pastoral trope of “paradise” to describe the tropical landscape, which, with its mountains, vegetation, sugar estates, and “negro settlements,” was “all so new to the European eye.” Describing the gardens surrounding the house of a sugar estate, Lady Nugent searches for words to convey what she sees: “it is quite impossible to describe the great variety of beautiful plants, trees and shrubs, that at this moment delight my eyes and regale my nose.” Relying on similes and English equivalents, she declares that one plant “is something like the geranium” and another is “like a full blown rose.”30 Using cognitive categories learned at home, these Britons abroad negotiated the otherness presented by the tropical, denying or recognizing the disruptive qualities of difference in ways that assimilated or incorporated the strange and unfamiliar into existing categories of thought. In this book I demonstrate that genres such as the pastoral, the georgic, and the picturesque modes and tropes such as bounty and paradise were integral, even key elements in colonialist ideas about the tropical and subtropical regions of the British empire. I am aware that some may think that I am claiming too much for the power of literature and art to shape cultural beliefs and practices, that I have got it backwards, as belle lettres and visual culture are superstructural, dependent on the larger determining forces of economics and politics. But, as a cultural materialist, I believe that poetry and painting, which could be dismissed as the most frivolous because the most elite forms of cultural production, can actually shape thought and influence how people interpret the world, and, in turn, can affect the kind of material practices they put into action. As Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe argue, the assumption that discourse is “mental” and not “material” has led to a dismissive attitude toward the analysis of discourse as a form of meaningful political intervention. They counter such critiques that are often marshaled by traditional Marxists (and by traditional humanists) by insisting on discourse’s materiality. Discourse, “embodied in institutions, rituals, and so forth,” is “a real force which contributes to the moulding and constitution of social relations.” Because social relations are therefore discursively constructed, representational techniques such as metaphor and metonym are not merely “forms of thought that add a second sense to a primary, constitutive literality of social

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relations; instead, they are part of the primary terrain itself in which the social is constituted.”31 By examining the semantic codes of representational practices, we gain access to social and material relations that informed the colonial project of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Aestheticizing Labor Though the ideological function of aestheticization will be further explored in chapters on the georgic, the picturesque, and the garden conversation piece, it may be helpful to see here an example of how an aesthetic rendering of workers and the products of their labor can, in the process of dignifying them, also suppress the value of their labor and deny them access to subjectivity. The elision of labor from the experience of the tropics haunts a series of small paintings by Agostino Brunias. Active in Dominica and St. Vincent in the s and s, Brunias worked under the patronage of the prominent sugar planter and colonial official Sir William Young. Brunias painted several pictures that he later engraved for prints recording West Indian life. Among his paintings are several scenes depicting commercial exchange. He painted pictures of markets such as the one shown in Linen Market, Roseau and pictures of street vendors selling their wares. These latter images belong to the category of “genre” paintings, which continued to be very much in vogue in the eighteenth century after having risen to popularity in Britain in the mid-seventeenth century with Marcellus Laroon’s work. Brunias’s pictures are highly aestheticized images of commercial exchange. Like Laroon’s images of street vendors, milkmaids with their milk pails balanced gracefully on their heads and knife-sharpeners grinding their patron’s blades, Brunias’s images of higglers possess an elegance and grace derived from continental influences. To highlight the elegance of his figures and the stasis to which he assigns them, I juxtapose Brunias’s The Linen Market, Dominica (Figure ) with a verbal description of a West Indian market scene. A British traveler, John Luffman, in recounting his impressions of Antigua, stresses the noise, smell, and chaos of what was known as the “negro” or “Sunday” market. Here an assemblage of many hundred negroes and mulattoes expose for sale poultry, pigs, kids, vegetables, fruit, and other things; they begin to assemble by day-break and the market is generally crowded by ten o’clock; . . . The noise occasioned by the jabber of the negroes and the squalling and cries of the children basking in the sun exceeds anything I ever heard in a London market. The smell is also

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intolerable, proceeding from the strong effluvia, naturally arising from the bodys of these people, and from the stinking salt-fish and other offencibles sent for sale by hucksters, which the negroes will buy, even when in the last stage of rottenness, to season their pots with.32

Luffman’s racist description stresses the sensory with its focus on the body, noise, and smell, conveying a scene lively to the point of disorder. While Luffman’s details suggest an assault on his senses, Brunias’s painting of the linen market in Dominica differs dramatically in the elegance, grace, and static quality of its figures. The focus of this painting is a beautifully dressed couple who are more interested in each other than the fabrics on display at the nearby booth. Their fused overlapping bodies form a slight arc that runs from the hat in his hand up his right arm to his head, which is tilted toward her head. The arc continues from its height of her elaborately dressed head to descend to a woman behind her who fingers some cloth. This line continues through the seated female figure, perhaps the proprietress of the stall,

Figure . Agostino Brunias, Linen Market, Dominica, c. , oil on canvas, . × . cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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and ends in the figure of a small boy, seated at her feet, beating a drum. Looking more closely, we see that this arc begins in the lower right-hand corner with the dark body of a man seated on the ground, selling fruit. The contrast between his dark green jacket and the white of a woman’s blouse seated behind him highlights the beginning of this arc in the slope of his back as it moves through his upturned head. There is a gap between his head and the well-dressed gentleman’s hat, breaking this line briefly as it moves up and through the main figures in the middle ground of the market scene. The origin of the arc in this huckster’s seated body is not readily apparent because Brunias had made this corner quite dark, quite in the way picturesque views are often framed with dark lower corners. However, the dark seated figure of this man selling fruit is very important to this painting since it is slave labor, such as his, that supplied the island market economy, as we will see in the discussion of food and slaves’ gardens in Chapter . Returning to the elegant pair and their dalliance, I want to explore the quality of grace that suffuses this whole scene and to ask why the noise, the smell, and chaos of Luffman’s description does not enter into Brunias’s image even though it is a market scene complete with a child beating a drum. The answer, as one may suspect, has to do not only with genre but also with Brunias’s aestheticizing practices. Brunias’s pictures of economic exchange, in particular French Mulatress Purchasing Fruit from a Negro Wench and A West Indian Flower Girl (Figure ), are genre paintings, which, unlike portraiture or history painting, have ordinary life as their subject. Genre paintings in the eighteenth century were regarded as a lesser form of art. Their subject matter could range from still life to animal painting, landscape, and domestic scenes. Eighteenth-century French art critics divided art into peinture de genre and peinture d’histoire, and of the former Diderot wrote in , “The appellation ‘genre painters’ is indiscriminately applied to painters of flowers, fruits, animals, woods, forests, mountains, as well as those borrowing their scenes from everyday domestic life.”33 Sir Joshua Reynolds also maintained this hierarchy that placed history painting at the pinnacle of artistic achievement and still life at the bottom. Today, genre painting tends to refer to “a scene of everyday life wherein human figures, being treated as types, are anonymously depicted,”34 and it is this definition that can help us understand how genre pictures reduce the potential for subjectivity in their depiction of people as types. Brunias’s West Indian Flower Girl and French Mulatress Purchasing Fruit are a specific kind of genre painting, one that partakes of the “Cries” tradition that portrays street hawkers or vendors

Figure . Agostino Brunias, A West Indian Flower Girl and Two other Free Women of Color, c. , oil on canvas,  ×  cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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selling produce and other foodstuffs, cloth, trinkets, and services, the term “Cries” referring to the song or shouted phrase that announces items for sale, such as “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh.” Brunias’s full-blown market scenes have even more in common with the Dutch tradition of Rhyparographi—a term that Samuel van Hoogstraten in the seventeenth century borrowed from Pliny to describe genre pieces that featured shops and stalls in marketplaces—with the significant exception that Brunias’s market scenes eschew the earthiness and visceral quality prevalent in Dutch market scenes. Images of street vendors, beginning in the Elizabethan period with crude woodblock prints and extending well into the nineteenth century with photography, have long fascinated the British public.35 At once a commodity in the form of a purchasable print and an image of someone selling something in the pregnant moment prior to exchange, these images tapped into the anxieties and pleasures that were aroused by the erotics of commodity production and exchange. I would suggest that viewers’ fascination with the “Cries” tradition stemmed from the need to see the moment when labor-power is absorbed and disappears into the commodity and is poised to produce surplus-value. That there was a proliferation of these vending images that rehearse this moment over and over suggests that something akin to repetition compulsion is called into play to contain the trauma of alienation that is a necessary part of capitalism’s commodity production and exchange. Like the three-year-old child who can’t take his eyes off his feces as they circle down the toilet drain, viewers of the “Cries” tradition may have been searching for what is lost when something that was once an extension of oneself becomes an object, which is what happens when a product of labor becomes a commodity. Not only do these vending images rehearse the tensions produced by the trauma of alienation but they also assert through repetition a visual mastery over the potentially socially disruptive terrain of trade and the marketplace rife with Bahktinian inversions and transgressions. In addition to these dynamics of viewing that inject these images with anxieties having to do with labor and loss, particular series produced by artists such as Marcellus Laroon in the seventeenth century and Paul Sandby and Francis Wheatley in the eighteenth century exacerbate the tension between retaining and containing the disruptive nature of the commodity exchange by heightening the aesthetic quality of the figures. Laroon’s series The Cries of London presents the viewer with graceful, attractive figures whose postures are more akin to dancers than to men and women who spend all day hauling around trays, baskets, buckets, and

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wheelbarrows filled to the brim with things they must sell so that they can make enough money to eat. Selling is labor, to be sure, and that is what is displayed for viewers to see, but not the labor that went into the production of those commodities. The productive labor is completely obliterated in the figure of the seller, unless that seller also happens to be the producer, which, in a sense, was the case with the milkmaid, who not only milked the cow but also sold the milk.36 In prints that depicted women selling fish or leeks, for instance, the productive labor is nearly extinguished in the image of selling, and yet, even the labor of selling involved in the exchange is further attenuated with the aestheticization of these figures. Similar to Laroon’s aestheticizing of hawkers, Brunias’s handling of marketplace figures underscores their grace and elegance. Brunias’s Italian training, which most likely entailed copying Greek and Roman statues, would explain his figures’ small heads on elongated torsos and postures that mimic classical statuary. While not much is known about the details of Brunias’s life other than that he came to England under the auspices of Robert Adam, we may speculate that he, like other Italians working in London, including engravers such as Giovanni Battista Cipriani, valued the grand style tradition of history painting. As Bernard Smith suggests in his discussion of Cipriani’s engravings of Sydney Parkinson’s illustrations of Cook’s voyage, “The grand style was strongly supported by the Italian junta of artists in the Academy for whom painting in that style was a matter of national pride.”37 Smith argues that this Italianate taste was supported by the Academy’s espousal of classical formulas, and, in particular, by Sir Joshua Reynolds’s dictum concerning the grand style. Reynolds urged artists to uphold the dignity of the human figure in history painting and even in portraiture: “the Artist should restrain and keep under all the inferior parts of his subject; he must sometimes deviate from vulgar and strict historical truth, in pursuing the grandeur of his designs.” Referring to Raphael’s handling of Christ’s apostles as exemplary in representing subjects “in a poetical manner,” Reynolds praised Raphael’s decision to give “them as much dignity as the human figure is capable of receiving” when it was well known that Saint Paul’s “bodily presence was mean” and Alexander was “of low stature.”38 Clearly, the grand style was not meant for slaves or even figures in market scenes, but Brunias may have been unable or unwilling to dispense with this habit of portrayal. He was, after all, trying to portray the West Indies in such a way to please his patrons by creating pleasant, attractive images for their consumption. In his aestheticizing practices, Brunias fetishizes the figures in his market

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scenes. In the paintings of hucksters, particularly the women figures who sell fruit and flowers, these vendors themselves become commodities through the metonymic collapse of sellers into what they are selling. The huckster in French Mulatress Purchasing Fruit from a Negro Wench is, in fact, a commodity, the term “negro” being a euphemism for slave. In aestheticizing slaves and the consequential displacement of labor, Brunias’s representational practices elide the foundation of slave labor on which these markets were based. The dark, lower right-hand corner of Linen Market, Dominica serves as a reminder, though, of whose labor not only produced the sugar planters’ wealth but also supplied the local markets with their garden produce as well as “pigs, goats, and fowls.”As Luffman notes, it was enslaved Africans and Creoles who “by their attention to these articles, that the whites are prevented from starving, during such times of the years as vessels cannot come to these coasts with safety.”39 Slave labor produced the bounty of local markets as well as the owners’ sugar profits, and yet, only traces of that labor are present in Brunias’s pretty little pictures. Brunias engages in “an aesthetics reliant on idealization, generalization, or transcendence,” to borrow Sam Smiles’s phrase describing nineteenth-century British paintings of the English countryside. Smiles argues that Constable, Gainsborough, and other painters employed an “aesthetic strategy of containment” in their so-called realistic treatment of landscape. Not representing details of material reality that were thought disgusting or threatening was a way for painters to give viewers pleasure because “the world they depicted had been made safe through the agency of asesthetic validation.”40 Aesthetic rendering of cultivated landscapes and the abundance of the marketplace contains and obscures the unsettling economic relations of exploitation that undergird such images.

Representational Practices Colonizing Nature examines aesthetic strategies of containment and obfuscation in chapters on georgic poetry, country house portraits and garden views, and picturesque topographical prints. The first two chapters focus on the idea of the tropics as a site of natural abundance. The first chapter, “Tropical Bounty, Local Knowledge, and the Imperial Georgic,” examines the concept of bounty and how it operates in the georgic poetry of Alexander Pope, James Grainger, and James Thomson. Modeled on Virgil’s Georgics, eighteenth-century georgic poetry celebrates British agriculture as well

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as British imperialism. In Thomson’s tremendously popular poem The Seasons, the passages which trace out the circuits of global exchange dwell on the “delights” of the tropics and portray the “torrid zone” as a site of natural abundance unassisted by human agency. Tropes of Arcadia, Eden, Paradise, and the Golden Age circulate not only in the georgic poetry of the period but also in the more “objective” writings of natural and civil historians, who, along with travel writers, describe the tropical islands of the Pacific and the Caribbean as sites of unlimited natural resources. Chapter , “Provisional Economies: Slave Gardens in the Writings of British Sojourners,” analyzes visual and verbal representations of the “natural” bounty of the West Indies. Travel writers and natural historians, in portraying tropical islands as naturally bounteous, minimized or even actively ignored the skilled labor and agronomic knowledge of enslaved Africans who ultimately produced this agricultural abundance. British planters and sojourners, such as Sir William Young and Janet Schaw, failed to see the extent to which slaves were responsible for growing and selling the food that not only circulated among the lower orders of West Indian society but also was purchased for the tables of the ruling elite of sugar planters and slave owners. The chapter examines the ambivalent portrait of slave gardens that emerges in plantocratic writing, and the use to which the georgic mode was put by plantocratic writers to defend the institution of slavery and to argue for its favorable impact on the quality of Afro-Caribbean lives. The third and fourth chapters focus on the visual representation of the subtropical landscape of the northern provinces and states of the Indian subcontinent. Chapter  examines the genre of the garden conversation piece, which traditionally in England was used to depict estate owners and their families seated informally in their parklike gardens. This chapter analyzes conversation pieces produced in India by British artists for their patrons, the officials of the British East India Company. To explain the popularity and significance of the garden conversation piece for India’s colonial elite, I focus on Johann Zoffany’s portrait of Warren Hastings and his wife on the grounds of their garden house. Borrowing the garden imagery of country house and garden conversation paintings, colonial officials, in their eagerness to establish their credentials as a ruling elite in India, attempted to signal with these portraits their parity with the landed gentry back home in Britain. To understand the various social and political meanings attached to the garden conversation piece, the chapter canvasses the visual conventions and the ideological implications of this form of portraiture as it was practiced and received in Britain during the mid-eighteenth century. Like

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country house portraiture, the garden conversation piece performed important ideological work in that it underscored the connection between land and family, a connection that was crucial to the eighteenth-century construction of social and economic elites based on dynastic landowning families. Tracing the changes that a visual form undergoes when it is transported out of the specific cultural, economic, and social context in which it had been developed and put into another context with its own politics, social codes, and cultural expectations, this chapter explores the contradictions and inconsistencies that emerged in the colonial use of this very English form of portraiture. I argue that the representation of tropical plant life in the colonial garden conversations introduces culturally specific meanings into these paintings and subtly alters their effects, undermining what was intended as a display of colonial power. Chapter  explores William Hodges’s use of aesthetic and learned discourses, in particular, the picturesque in his illustrated book Travels in India, to portray the landscape of northern India. Though he made use of pastoral and georgic tropes to describe British-ruled India, his descriptions of Mughal India focus on ruins. In addition, Hodges’s portrayal of Mughal architecture within the picturesque tradition of ruin paintings and poetry worked to underscore the theme of decay and decline of Mughal political power. By locating Mughal dominance in the distant past, Hodges’s text and illustrations signal the inevitable defeat of the Mughal government as well as minimize native resistance to British control. Hodges’s book aestheticizes India within the familiar discursive codes of the pastoral, georgic, and picturesque modes, making this terrain palatable to British tastes. Despite the careful orchestration of text and image to produce this effect, there are moments in Hodges’s text which convey the sense of confusion and chaos that the British experienced in their encounters with Indian insurgents. Contradictions emerge in this illustrated book when Hodges’s picturesque framing of these Mughal forts and his naming them “ruins” are belied by narratives of resistance and, as a result, call into question the inevitability of Mughal defeat and British conquest. In addition to analyzing the aestheticizing strategies that georgic verse, garden conversation pieces, and picturesque illustrations perform in the colonial context, Colonizing Nature analyzes the cataloging practices deployed in natural history and botanical writing, such as floras and hortuses. Like aestheticizing practices that can remove “all soiling trace of origin,” natural history, to use Roland Barthes’s language, can transform “the products of history into essential types” by figuring a “fixated” world and obscuring “the

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Introduction

ceaseless making of the world.”41 Chapter , on the publication of Captain James Cook’s A Voyage towards the South Pole, argues that the changes Cook made to his journal’s descriptions of tropical nature transform his text into the polite discourse of natural history, removing it from the realm of direct observation. Cook’s journals are relatively devoid of those picturesque, georgic, and pastoral tropes that Johann Forster made so much use of in his Observations made during a Voyage round the World. To explain Cook’s lack of “style,” I use Bruno Latour’s ideas about the way in which science operates through levels of ever-increasing abstraction. Applying Latour’s model of how science works to what happens when literary tropes and visual codes are applied to representation, I suggest that Cook’s narrative as conveyed in his journal is the least abstracted form of representation that this journey produced, and while that might mean it was the least “scientific,” it was the most grounded in what he actually experienced (touched, smelled, and tasted). Likewise, I also examine the differences between Hodges’s engraved illustrations and his sketches and drawings on which they are based. I argue that the modifications that Hodges’s pictures underwent were due, in part, to his desire to elevate his subject matter into that worthy of history paintings. Cook and Hodges, both lacking a gentleman’s education, were concerned that their “mere” record of observations would not be sufficiently sophisticated in style to be recognized as contributing to England’s fund of knowledge and were willing to modify their respective verbal and visual descriptions of the South Pacific to comply with their readers’ expectations. Botanical books, such as floras and hortuses, combine written description and visual images to classify and catalog the plant life of a specific geographical region, as in Flora Londenesis, or a particular botanical garden, as in Hortus Kewensis. These botanical books deploy the rhetorical strategies of decontextualization, typification, and, sometimes, recontextualization. As genres of botanical writing, the flora and the hortus, both catalogs, employ discursive strategies that sever plants from the ecological economies and cultural contexts in which they had circulated in the tropical and subtropical regions of the world. A particular discourse within the bourgeois repertoire of universalizing procedures is responsible for the evaporation of history and culture from the discussion of plant life, and that discourse was shaped by Linnean botany.42 Lost in botany’s description of plants are the cultural meanings that plants are invested with, and missing from the particular versions of Linnean botany that circulated in late eighteenth-century Britain are discussions of plant ecology and physiology. In eighteenthcentury Britain, classification and systematics became the focus of botanists’

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attention while horticultural and medicinal practices were demoted as unworthy of scholarly investigation. The social functions of plants extend well beyond serving as the basic materials for food, clothing, and shelter; plants possess meanings and serve social and economic purposes particular to specific cultural groups. One has only to think of how tea functions in a variety of cultures: far beyond mere nourishment and refreshment, it is a crucial element in rituals of daily life that serve as the building blocks of a national identity. The Japanese tea ceremony and Britain’s high tea are obvious examples of how plants as food can carry within their preparation and consumptive practices enormous cultural meaning and social significance. Chapter , on illustrated botanical books, links natural history to the gentlemanly hobby of curio collecting and places both these activities within the colonial project, which, in the words of Nicholas Thomas, “sought to abstract, generalize, and dehumanize particular and contingent forms of knowledge.”43 The focus for this chapter is Sir James E. Smith’s Exotic Botany, which I use as an example of how the British cult of botany appropriated “exotics,” divested them of the cultural meanings that they possessed in their “home” societies, and reinserted them into a system that had social and political significance within British society.

Labor and Knowledge Colonizing Nature’s series of case studies examines representational practices that were used to portray tropical flowers, plants, and landscapes. Each chapter explores a particular kind of aestheticizing practice or discursive strategy that worked to elide the history of the colonized, or the labor of the peasant producer, and their culturally specific and class-based knowledge. In the chapters on georgic writing and Caribbean gardens, I examine the impact of the aestheticizing of labor and the trope of bounty on the depiction of labor and the production of food. The discursive strategies afforded by the georgic mode elide the labor of direct producers and send the products of this labor into a global market economy as commodities shorn of affective and cultural ties. This suppression of labor also occurs in country house portraiture and garden views, where the labor exerted to create and maintain the landed elites’ gardens, houses, and estates disappears into the material effects of that labor. Manicured lawns and judiciously placed clumps of trees become the repository of abstracted, invisible labor. The chapter on the picturesque demonstrates how this particular aestheticizing

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Introduction

practice creates landscapes devoid of labor and history, and in particular how Hodges’s aestheticizing of Indian landscape suggests a timelessness that relegates Mughal and Hindu societies to a permanent past. The chapter on botanical books explores the processes whereby tropical nature is divested of local meanings and inserted into “universal” categories, which are ultimately just as local in their social significance. Recontextualized as exotics and rarities, tropical plants circulated within British culture as imperial trophies and as a form of cultural capital. The chapters on georgical writing and botanical books interrogate the construction of knowledge about plants, demonstrating how the kind of knowledge that local producers possessed was ignored and dismissed while the kind of knowledge that can circulate shorn of specifics and locale became valorized for being “scientific” and universal. The representational practices that I examine in this book are a few of the several processes whereby socially constructed objects, invested with complex meanings, were stripped of local meanings and were severed from the context in which they operated, to circulate denuded as reducible and interchangeable units, as commodities. The rhetorical and discursive processes that did (and continue to do) this kind of work are many: among them, commodification, quantification, cataloging, decontextualization, abstraction, and aestheticization. In my book on land and poverty, Superintending the Poor, I explored the commodification, quantification, and capitalization of land in Britain as it shifted over the course of the eighteenth century from being imbued with complex social and economic ties to being stripped of social meanings so that it could circulate as a commodity. Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City, John Barrell’s The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, –, R. S. Neale’s Writing Marxist History, and Howard Newby’s Country Life provided the Marxian critical lens through which I analyzed the rationalizing and capitalizing forces at work in the English countryside. In a section of my book Picturing Imperial Power, I explored how representational practices of natural history and botany decontextualized knowledge about plants and people. Influenced by Bruno Latour, I suggested that the scientific method, because based on abstraction, shared the same structural relation to local knowledge as did colonization. This book, Colonizing Nature, extends these arguments by examining particular artistic, literary, and scientific genres and tropes to suggest that aesthetics as well as science played an important role in both Britain’s discursive mastery and Britain’s political and economic colonizing of the tropical and subtropical regions of the world.

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While Marx’s analysis of the commodity-form has shaped my discussions of agricultural labor and production, it is his critique of the division of labor, especially as it has been elaborated by Alfred Sohn-Rethel, that informs my reading of georgical writing, natural history discourse, and the late eighteenth-century cult of botany. In Intellectual and Manual Labour, Sohn-Rethel investigates the linkage between abstract thinking and the division between “the head and the hand in labour.” His thesis is that “the formal analysis of the commodity holds the key not only to the critique of political economy, but also to the historical explanation of the abstract conceptual mode of thinking and of the division of intellectual and manual labour, which came into existence with it.”44 He argues that central to the processes involved in the exchange of commodities is the notion of abstraction. For exchange to occur, the people involved must have an idea of the abstract value of the objects exchanged; often this abstract value is measured in money, which operates emblematically, marking the abstracting process. Slavoj Êiêek explains Sohn-Rethel’s formulations: Before thought could arrive at pure abstraction, the abstraction was already at work in the social effectivity of the market. The exchange of commodities implies a double abstraction: the abstraction from the changeable character of the commodity during the act of exchange and the abstraction from the concrete, empirical, sensual, particular character of the commodity (in the act of exchange, the distinct, particular qualitative determination of a commodity is not taken into account; a commodity is reduced to an abstract entity which—irrespective of its particular nature, of its “use value”—possesses “the same value” as another commodity for which it is being exchanged).45

Not only does commodity exchange reduce the social, cultural, and emotional complexity of an object, its qualitative features being reduced to quantitative units, but in the production of commodities, the division of labor reduces the quality of labor. Sohn-Rethel contends that when capital controls production, “it subjects manual labour to exploitation. The manual labour becomes impoverished, not only economically because of its exploitation, but also intellectually.” He suggests that only in the small-scale production of peasants and artisans is there a “unity of head and hand,” and with capitalist production “this artisan mode of production is ousted” by large-scale production based on the division of labor (). Sohn-Rethel’s Marxian critique of abstraction was nurtured in the context of the Frankfurt School’s deep distrust of the Enlightenment’s proclamations about science, progress, and rationality. In Anfange der burgerlichen

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Introduction

Geschichtsphilosophie (), Horkheimer attacked positivists “for treating the metaphysical assumption of nature’s uniformity as though it were an empirical fact,” and he argued that “this metaphysics was part and parcel of bourgeois domination of nature and culture.”46 In Dialectic of Enlightenment (written in ), Horkheimer and Adorno took up this critique of positivism and extended it to the Enlightenment’s tendency to reduce “nature into mere objectivity” and the Enlightenment’s use of mathematical formalism to render the world calculable.47 “Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities” (). They argue that “this universal interchangeability” () was ushered in when knowledge became “differentiated with the division of labor,” and that the Enlightenment’s embrace of abstraction and rationality was ultimately productive of “disaster” in the form of the “total schematization of man” (). “The more the process of self-preservation is effected by the bourgeois division of labor, the more it requires the self-alienation of the individuals who must model their body and soul according to the technical apparatus” (–). The “seeds of repression,” they argued, were sowed with the Enlightenment’s goal of “rational management of human society, knowledge and nature.”48 Foucault, influenced by Horkheimer and Adorno’s characterization of the Enlightenment as being as “totalitarian as any system” () and as possessing a propensity toward “classification and calculation” (), argued, in his work on surveillance and the birth of the disciplines, that the Enlightenment’s “formally egalitarian juridical framework” and “parliamentary, representative regime” also produced a disciplinary society, one where the “system of rights was supported by these tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems of micro-power that are essentially nonegalitarian and asymmetrical.” For Foucault, as well as members and fellowtravelers of the Frankfurt School, these disciplinary mechanisms, consisting of the collection, classification, and spacialization of knowledge combined with the “panoptic modality of power,” constituted “the other, dark side” of the Enlightenment.49 Particularly relevant to my analysis of natural history’s representation of tropical nature is Foucault’s work on tracing the way in which power and knowledge are linked in such Enlightenment practices as classification and cataloging. For Foucault, “‘a power of writing’ was constituted as an essential part in the mechanisms of discipline.” Description, “a system of intense registration and of documentary accumulation” (), becomes in the classical age “a means of control and a method of domination” (). Though Foucault analyzed these disciplinary practices as they impact the

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human subject and “constitute the individual as effect and object of power, as effect and object of knowledge” (), his theories about the relation between describability and the operation of power can be applied to the natural world. “These small techniques of notation, of registration, of constituting files, or arranging facts in columns and tables that are so familiar to us now, were of decisive importance in the epistemological ‘thaw’ of the sciences of the individual” (–). In these small techniques “are to be found a whole domain of knowledge, a whole type of power” (). One need only to substitute the words “plants” or “natural world” in place of Foucault’s “individual” and his focus on the human sciences to begin rethinking the ways in which describability and writing have constructed Enlightenment natural history, botany, and geography. This is precisely what has happen in the academy in a variety of fields: Foucault’s work on power and knowledge has stimulated a rethinking of the old positivist procedures within the history of science, museum studies, anthropology, and geography. These fields have found much historical evidence to support Foucault’s contention that “the formation of knowledge and the increase of power regularly reinforce one another in a circular process” (). While it is beyond the scope of this introduction to provide overviews of these fields of inquiry, I can point to the work which I have found illuminating and suggestive. For instance, in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, editors Clark, Golinski, and Schaffer praise recent “postpositivist” reappraisals of the history of science that seek to situate science within social and cultural history. Contributing to this shift from positivist histories celebrating the “progress” of science and the scientist as genius is Foucault’s insistence that central to the “Enlightenment’s disciplinary order” was “its own mechanisms for making knowledge.”50 This emphasis on the way in which knowledge about nature is socially constructed can be found within the field of geography as well. In the introduction to Geography and Enlightenment, editors Livingstone and Withers provide a theoretical overview of the problem of historicizing geography: “Like Foucault, we take the Enlightenment to be neither a definitive period nor an essential movement delimited by the lives of great thinkers, but rather as discursive processes of situated critical reasoning, processes to do with how knowledge was made, how people drew upon certain parts of the world in framing stadial theories, or came to base their notions of reason and order upon certain places.”51 Maritime historians have incorporated this inquiry into discursive formations that underwrote voyages of discovery; volumes such as Science and Exploration in the Pacific have taken up Bernard Smith’s bold challenge to

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examine the ways in which purportedly politically neutral voyages of scientific discovery engaged in global politics.52 In addition to Marxist theory and Foucauldian histories of science, my work has also been shaped by conversations in anthropology and museum studies about material culture and the meanings of objects. Since gardens and plants are material culture, things that people manipulate and derive meaning from, my postcolonial interpretation of colonial gardens and plant collecting has benefited from Appadurai’s The Social Life of Things and Elsner and Cardinal’s The Cultures of Collecting, both of which problematize the shifting values and meanings of objects as they move from one context to another in the processes of circulation and collection respectively. The idea that the physical qualities of an object cannot secure its meaning, as meaning is constituted within particular contexts and is therefore unfixable, has been nurtured by Susan Pearce’s work on objects and collecting, Nicholas Thomas’s study of exchange in the Pacific region, and Susan Stewart’s meditation on souvenirs. Quite suggestive has been Stewart’s analysis of the dynamics of collecting as the “impulse to remove objects from their contexts or origin and production and to replace those contexts with the context of the collection.”53 I have applied these ideas about the processes of decontextualization and recontextualization inherent to collecting to the problem of plants and the kinds of meanings they can have. Important to the project of recovering the meaning of tropical plants is a sense of the range of meanings they may have had in the cultures of “origin” (for lack of a better word), before they were taken up, literally and figuratively, by Europeans. Key in shaping my understanding of indigenous and traditional systems of knowledge is the work of Native Hawaiian activists and academics who have sought to decolonize the official history of Hawai‘i and the colonialist assumptions about Hawaiian culture, work such as Haunani Trask’s From a Native Daughter, Lilikala- Kame‘eleihiwa’s Native Land and Foreign Desires: Pehea La- E Pono Ai? and A Legendary Tradition of Kamapua‘a, the Hawaiian Pig-God, Manu Meyer’s dissertation on Hawaiian epistemology and Julie Kaomea’s dissertation on the representation of Hawai‘i in school curriculum. Finally, the kinds of tropes and genres that I focus on in this book are, indeed, crucial not only to eighteenth-century modes of thought about the tropics but also to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century ideas about the warm and moist regions of the world, which continue to be represented as paradise, as sites of unlimited bounty, as regions awaiting the tourist in search of the picturesque or the curious botanophile, or as areas ripe

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for investment and management. Today when such places as Hawai‘i and Jamaica are marketed to the world as tropical paradises, we haven’t come very far from Banks’s enthusiastic prognosis—“an arcadia of which we were going to be kings.”54 I believe that we all could benefit from examining our assumptions about the magical plenitude that tropical regions supposedly possess and the images that circulate in the popular imagination of the tropics as an exotic paradise. These ideas, though originating with classical poets such as Virgil, were recycled and rearticulated in a variety of eighteenth-century visual and verbal texts. By examining the construction of the idea of the tropics as a site of unlimited bounty and ease as well as a source of wealth for those who master the productive powers of nature, I believe we can better understand the world that we have inherited, one that has been shaped by both Enlightenment thought and imperial practices.

Chapter 

Tropical Bounty, Local Knowledge, and the Imperial Georgic

As the mind must govern the hands, so in every society the man of intelligence must direct the man of labour. —Samuel Johnson, Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland Or, if the garden with its many cares, All well repaid, demand him, he attends The welcome call, conscious how much the hand Of lubbard labour needs his watchful eye, Oft loit’ring lazily, if not o’erseen, Or misapplying his unskilful strength. —William Cowper, “The Garden,” The Task (ll. –)

This chapter explores the intersection of the concept of bounty and the problem of knowledge in the georgic poetry of Alexander Pope, John Gay, James Thomson, and James Grainger. I argue that English georgic poetry shared with the Enlightenment project the impulse to decontextualize and dehistoricize knowledge about nature. Georgic poetry, concerned with agricultural production, invariably divides labor into two categories: intellectual and physical. In constructing this binary, English georgic poetry participated in the Enlightenment redefinition of knowledge as abstract and universal rather than as culturally constructed and specific to a particular locale. In their attempt to valorize intellectual labor, georgic poets employed the trope of bounty to undo the power of direct producers—the peasants, slaves, and natives who grew plants and raised animals and who possessed a kind of knowledge that was based on practices specific to a region or cultural group and was transmitted orally and through custom across generations.1 Georgic poetry, in erasing indigenous knowledge and peasant technology surrounding plant reproduction, contributed to the disruption

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of local economies within Britain and abroad, particularly in its colonies. In this chapter. I examine briefly how the trope of bounty functions in the English rural economy figured by Pope, Gay, and Thomson; then, I focus on the georgic depiction of the tropics, specifically in the Pacific and the West Indies, with the aim of exploring how the georgic lent itself to imperial concerns such as the management of natural resources by colonial officialdom. I begin my examination of how the concept of bounty was used to displace native knowledge and agronomic skill with an anecdote from the journal of Sir Joseph Banks, that great Enlightenment promoter of natural history, and then move onto the georgic—its use of bounty, its construction of knowledge as abstract and universal, and its celebration of the global circulation of agricultural commodities.

Banks’s Arcadia To foreground the political implications that the concept of bounty can have in real-world encounters with the tropics, the following anecdote underscores the power of ideas to shape reality. Sir Joseph Banks, amateur botanist and gentleman who organized and led the botanical team that accompanied Captain Cook on his first circumnavigation of the globe, was responsible for overseeing the collection and analysis of exotic plant life.2 Writing in his journal about his first contact with what he calls “the Indians” of Tahiti, Banks describes what he perceived as the tropical bounty of these Polynesian islands. “[W]e walkd for  or  miles under groves of Cocoa nut and bread fruit trees loaded with a profusion of fruit and giving the most gratefull shade I have ever experienced . . . : in short the scene we saw was the truest picture of an arcadia of which we were going to be kings that the imagination can form.”3 Banks’s association of arcadia with Tahiti seems commonplace to us now—countless advertisements for tourist holidays represent Tahiti as a paradise—and in Banks’s time such an equation of tropical islands with a prelapsarian golden age was just as commonplace.4 Before Banks had laid eyes on Tahiti, he already knew what he was going to see. The image of Tahiti as a paradise—a place of leisure and natural abundance—stemmed not only from his reading of the journals of the voyage of the Dolphin, a previous British voyage to Tahiti, but also from the idea that tropical climates are naturally bountiful. This idea had been firmly planted in Banks’s mind and in the mind of nearly every eighteenth-century gentleman by the countless travel narratives and natural histories describing the

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Chapter 

tropical regions of the West Indies and by English georgic poetry, such as Thomson’s The Seasons, which was, incidentally, the only piece of literature that Banks included in the rather large library he took with him on the voyage. Banks’s use of the word “arcadia” is indicative of a frame of mind that led him into much trouble with the Tahitians. His conviction that he was in an arcadia prohibited him from recognizing that the Tahitians cultivated breadfruit; it did not just spring up from the earth as a blessing from Mother Nature. Even when he traveled inland and saw groves of newly planted breadfruit trees, he still did not see that it was the Tahitians, with their skill as cultivators, who were responsible for the abundance that first caught his eye. In thinking of Tahiti as an arcadia, a site of spectacular abundance, an abundance without end or limit, he seriously misjudged the Tahitians’ ability to provide enough food for Cook’s crew for the five long months they stayed there. Banks did not really consider that the breadfruit and coconuts, which the British sailors “purchased” from the Tahitians with nails and other bits of iron, might be in limited supply, nor that this supply had been cultivated by the Tahitians with care and industry and a sense of how many mouths this supply of food was going to feed. After three months of eating the Tahitians’ breadfruit, pigs, coconuts, and other fruits and vegetables, the crew of Captain Cook’s ship woke up one day to find that the usual supply of food the Tahitians brought them was not there. Banks remarks rather testily that the Dolphin’s crew did not have this problem; he speculates that perhaps “seasons of this [bread] fruit alter” or that the Dolphin’s crew frightened the natives into relinquishing whatever food they had. Adopting what he assumed was the Dolphin’s strategy for extracting food from the Tahitians, Banks put together a search party and armed himself with his gun, which he knew frightened the Tahitians, and proceeded inland to coerce the locals into providing Cook’s crew with more supplies. Footnoting this passage of Banks’s journal, editor J. C. Beaglehole discreetly comments: “it must be remembered that the Dolphin made a shorter stay than the Endeavour, and did not cause the same strain on food-supplies.” Clearly, Cook’s operations in Tahiti placed a great burden on the local economy.5 For Banks, “arcadia” implies a place where agricultural abundance is produced without labor. Arcadia, the magical land of ease, where leisured nymphs and swains frolic and dally, belongs to the realm of pastoral poetry. Banks’s pastoral vision—Tahiti as the Garden of Eden—blinded him to the reality that Tahitians labored to produce breadfruit. That Banks, who was in charge of collecting information about plant life, was incapable of seeing that Tahiti was not an arcadia, a site of unlimited natural bounty, testifies to

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the strength of the presupposition that the tropics are bountiful, a presupposition that was nurtured, I believe, by various representations of tropical climes that circulated in the cultured imagination of the eighteenth-century gentleman.6 It is my intention to argue that some of the most powerful and influential of those representations can be found in English georgic poetry. In what was perhaps the most beloved georgic of the period, James Thomson’s The Seasons (the most reprinted poem in the eighteenth century), there is a lengthy description of the delights and terrors of the “torrid zone.”7 In “Summer” the poet’s imagination leaves the bucolic English countryside to roam over the earth, describing nature’s animal and vegetable productions. He lingers over the tropical climes, enumerating the “wonders of the torrid zone” (l. ), its citrons, lemons, tamarinds, coconuts, pomegranates, and pineapples. The product of nature’s bounty, “this gay profusion of luxurious bliss,” is produced by “Ceres void of pain,” for “vagrant birds” and “wafting winds” are responsible for the generation of these “unplanted fruits” (ll. –). The natural bounty of the tropical zone is not the result of human effort but rather of seeds being “unplanted” by breezes and by birds. Thomson erases local labor and local knowledge by making Pomona and Ceres the agents of vegetable production. He underscores the lack of human interaction with the natural environment in the tropics by describing the lands that produce this tropical bounty as emptied of natives—“worlds of solitude/ Where the sun smiles and seasons teem in vain,/ Unseen and unenjoyed” (ll. –). In Thomson’s poem natives do not figure as producers or as consumers of tropical bounty; in fact, they do not exist at all. This elision of local labor and local knowledge is typical of the English georgic.

Georgic Labor The erasure of labor, as if no human effort is involved in agricultural production, is to be expected in pastoral poetry, but the georgic, modeled on Virgil’s Georgics, is supposed to be about the necessity and inevitability of hard, physical labor in the rural economy: “labor omnia vicit/improbus et duris ugen in rubus egestas” (“Toil conquered the world, unrelenting toil, and want that pinches when life is hard”).8 In The Georgic Revolution, Anthony Low argues that georgics are less a genre and more a “mode that stresses the value of intensive and persistent labour against hardships and difficulties.”9And yet, in its depiction of agricultural labor, georgic poetry of

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the eighteenth century consistently worked to erase the labor of the direct agricultural producer—the sower, the reaper, the haymaker, the winnower, in short, the peasant-proprietor and the waged laborer—and replaced it with the concept of bounty. Raymond Williams has commented on the power of the pastoral to elide work, the pastoral where “not only work, but even the turning produce of the seasons, is suppressed or obscured in the complimentary mystification: an innate bounty: ‘native sweets’.” Donna Landry has extended Williams’s insight into the workings of bounty to English georgics, which “tended to obscure the functions of labor, to naturalize the productivity of the soil as magical plentitude.”10 The georgic poetry of Gay, Pope, and Thomson engages in a subtle redefinition of labor, reconstituting it as related to but distinct from bodily exertion. In their georgic verse, reflection becomes work; reading and writing poetry, planning gardens and overseeing estates, fishing and hunting, all become labor. In addition, the virtue associated with real bodily labor is attached to intellectual labor and to country recreational activities such as walking, fishing, and hunting. Bounty is crucial to this reconfiguration of labor and virtue as it is used to unhinge the connection between agricultural abundance and the direct agricultural worker. Once this relation is obscured through the mystification of “magical plentitude,” then other forms of activity, such as walking, hunting, reading—all upper- and middle-class activities—can be refigured as labor, and what is even more important, as virtuous labor.11 This obfuscation of what actually constitutes labor can be traced to Virgil’s depiction of knowledge and work in his Georgics. Performing very subtle ideological work surrounding the issue of labor, Virgil’s Georgics splits the practice of agriculture into two kinds of labor: physical and intellectual. The farmer who labors with his body and his hands is present in the text, in passages that describe “relentless toil”12: . . . So that unless You harry the weeds with unrelenting mattock And scare the birds with noise, and with your billhook Cut back the branches overshadowing Your ground, and pray to the gods for rain, alas Too late you will eye your neighbour’s ample store And shake an oak in the woods to comfort hunger. (:–)

The farmer’s life is one long struggle against nature and the threat of “pinching poverty” (:). Farming is doing battle with nature for control of its reproductive forces; the farmer’s tools are “the weapons the hardy farmer needs,/ Essential for the sowing and raising of crops” (:–).

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In addition to the presence of this laboring farmer, there is another figure in this text, and it is the supervisory “I” who is telling “You” what must be done to “domesticate the wild by culture.” This “I,” the poet-farmer we can call him for convenience, knows everything there is to know about farming (or seems to). The speaker’s superiority is underscored not only by his knowing everything and telling the farmer what to do but by his knowing what is best for the peasant-farmer. The farmer who works with his hands does not know he is happy: “How lucky, if they know their happiness,/ Are farmers” (:). The poet-farmer stands outside the peasant-farmer’s experience and socially and culturally above him and can understand the significance of his life better than the peasant can. The voice that tells the farmer what to do is performing a kind of labor, too, only this labor is performed with the mind instead of the body. Both forms of labor in this poem are full of virtue, but important distinctions between the two are maintained. The peasant-farmer’s virtue lies in his toil and sweat while the poetfarmer’s virtue lies in his intellectual mastery of nature. The poet-farmer differentiates himself from the peasant-farmer’s hard work and innocent pleasures by imagining his own relationship to nature in a very different way. While the peasant pursues his daily life of direct cultivation of the farmland, the poet-farmer says, “For my own part my chiefest prayer would be” to have the muses “teach me to know . . . the causes of things” (:, ), to understand such things as the movement of the stars, the tides of the oceans, the variations in the patterns of daylight and nighttime. This poet-farmer figure wishes to master the mysteries of nature through intellectual understanding, and it is this intellectual mastery of nature that appealed to the gentlemen of the eighteenth century who fancied themselves agriculturalists, horticulturists, botanists, and landscape designers. This is the mastery of nature that Pope praises in “Epistle to Richard Boyle.” In the layout of his gardens and his house, in his planting of trees, and in his promotion of agriculture, Lord Burlington demonstrates his understanding of nature that allows him to manipulate it without doing violence to it for the benefit of his estate community and the pleasure of his visitors. Virgil’s Georgics appealed to England’s gentry and aristocracy because it allowed them to participate imaginatively in agricultural production. The Roman audience for this poem was patrician as well. In his discussion of the Georgics, L. P. Wilkinson asks: “for whom was it written, and what kind of farmer did it have in mind?” He argues that the poem was not written for farmers because it leaves out information that a real farmer would need to be successful, and some of the information on farming (particularly grafting

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and beekeeping) is incorrect. He concludes that “only a sophisticated reader could have appreciated the Georgics, and he would generally be an absentee landlord, if a landlord at all.” Wilkinson also points out how Virgil omits any mention of slavery in the poem, an omission that is very surprising since most farms relied on slave labor. Wilkinson concludes that this omission was intentional because Virgil wanted to avoid the potentially explosive topic of Caesarian landholding policies, and so he created an idealized figure, the colonus, “an old-fashioned yeoman” as Wilkinson says, without distinguishing between tenant and freeholder, someone who works a small farm with his hands. Wilkinson thinks that Virgil’s refusal to include the specifics of the real relations of agricultural production in Roman countryside “contributed greatly to his poem’s vitality in the long run. . . . The very vagueness made for universality.”13 The indeterminacy with which farmers are represented in Virgil’s Georgics allowed eighteenth-century readers, many of whom belonged to the landed gentry and aristocracy, to think of themselves as agriculturalists, in essence, to pretend that they were farmers, and to appropriate for themselves the virtue associated with tilling the soil. This vagueness surrounding the real relations of production is typical of most traditional English georgics, in particular Pope’s “Windsor Forest,” Gay’s “Rural Sports,” and Thomson’s The Seasons. Pope’s georgic landscape is nearly devoid of depiction of the laborer’s toil. Pope tends, as Donna Landry remarks, “to obscure the functions of labor” with phrases such as “Rich Industry sits smiling on the Plains.”14 Pope also obscures the real economic relations of agricultural production with his use of the word “swain,” a term that because it is poetic and archaic carried no determinate meaning for the eighteenth-century audience, hence its specific referent fluctuates throughout “Windsor Forest.” At one point the swain is a shepherd, occupying a position as low as one can get in the rural economy, and yet later in the poem it is a “swain” who is fishing, hunting, riding horses, and wielding a gun, activities that only the landed could participate in, as the game laws required sportsmen to possess property worth at least  pounds per annum. Still later the “swain” again metamorphoses, this time turning into a soldier bleeding on foreign soil. Though Pope had begun this georgic poem with a figure that seemed to refer to a direct agricultural producer, the shepherd, the vascillating image of his swain ensures that the real work of agriculture is barely present in the poem. While “Windsor Forest” does not recognize the contribution the laboring classes made to agricultural productivity, barely mentioning their activities,

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Pope does depict in detail what is presented as if the gentry’s version of labor: hunting, shooting, and fishing.15 The poem describes the netting of partridges in fall, the shooting of woodcocks in winter, fishing in the spring, and the coursing of deer in summer, and naturalizes these activities by stressing the seasonal aspect of hunting and implying that the hunter’s actions, because they are in harmony with the seasons, are as natural as the farmer’s. Also depicted is the life of a gentleman who has retired from the moral chaos of court life to spend his days wandering about his meadows, reflecting on the nature of the universe and the status of his soul. Reading and writing poetry make up an important part of this gentleman’s moral education, and Pope praises the many gentlemen-poets who have grown up within the neighborhood of Windsor. Like Pope’s sporting episodes in “Windsor Forest,” Gay’s “Rural Sports, A Georgic Inscribed to Mr. Pope” also details gentlemen’s sporting activities, especially fishing, and, like Pope, Gay stresses the seasonal aspect of fishing. As the farmer whose “revolving labours” reflect the seasonal cycle, so a sportsman must attend to seasonal patterns: “As in successive course the seasons roll,/ So circling pleasures recreate the soul.”16 Gay’s poem depicts the sport fisherman as being a man who possesses a great deal of knowledge about fish, their habits, and their habitats. In “Rural Sports” the poet/sportsman occasionally assumes a voice similar to the voice of the farmer-poet, the “I” in Virgil’s poem, and assumes that knowledgeable air and dictatorial tone, as if to say, “You must do this at this moment.” On fly fishing, Gay offers this advice: Mark well the various seasons of the year, How the succeeding insect race appear; In this revolving moon one colour reigns, Which in the next the fickle trout disdains. Oft’ have I seen a skillful angler try The various colours of the treach’rous fly . . . (ll. –)

But in offering this advice, Gay’s voice is playful, as if he is aware of the fragility of his status as an expert in this rural scene. Before teaching us all about fishing, he has already admitted that he is an interloper, a visitor from the city who seeks rest in the country. After his lengthy and detailed account of fishing, he moves on to coursing, shooting, and hunting but gives up describing the stag and fox hunt after a brief attempt, saying jokingly that he will leave this part to someone who knows more about it and can keep his seat as his imagination gallops across the countryside.

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But stay, advent’rous muse, hast thou the force To wind the twisted horn, to guide the horse? To keep thy seat unmov’d hast thou the skill O’er the high gate, and down the headlong hill? Canst thou the stag’s labourious chace direct? Or the strong fox through all his arts detect? The theme demands a more experienc’d lay: Ye mighty hunters, spare this weak essay. (ll. –)

Gay’s admission that he is from the city—“Long in the noisie town have been immur’d” (l. )— and that he is going to the country to rest and relax affects his depiction of rural labor in an interesting way. Class boundaries are maintained when he depicts himself reclining in the cool shade of the woods while plowmen are sweating in the heat of the day; he can rest assured of his superior rank. Now when the height of heav’n bright Phoebus gains, And level rays cleave wide the thirsty plains, When heifers seek the shade and cooling lake, And in the middle path-way basks the snake; O lead me, guard me from the sultry hours, Hide me, ye forests, in your closest bowers . . . Upon the mossy couch my limbs I cast, And ev’n at noon the sweets of ev’ning taste. Here I peruse the Mantuan’s Georgic strains, And learn the labours of Italian swains; In ev’ry page I see new landschapes rise, And all Hesperia opens to my eyes. (ll. –)

Gay describes himself as reading Virgil as he rests in the shade, simultaneously resting his body and working his mind. As a poet, he is also a worker who performs intellectual labor by reading and writing. He says he has come to the country in hopes of renewing his creative energies: . . . a calm retreat I chose, And sooth’d my harrass’d mind with sweet repose Where fields, and shades, and the refreshing clime, Inspire the sylvan song, and prompt my rhime. My muse shall rove through flow’ry meads and plains, And deck with Rural Sports her native strains, And the same road ambitiously pursue Frequented by the Mantuan swain, and you. (ll. –)

Gay’s retreat into the country is not like the rural retirement of a man of means, a landed gentleman, who reads for recreation and reflection. When

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Gay admits his lack of expertise as a hunter, he is calling attention to his own class position, which is not that of a country gentleman. Also, in calling attention to the problems of writing the poem, he reminds us that this is a georgic and that his reading of Virgil in the woods was preparation for the writing of the very poem we are reading. What looked like rest in comparison to the plowman’s labors, was really work, especially if compared to a gentleman’s reading in the woods. Gay’s reading of Virgil is not merely an act of pleasure and self-indulgence because he will use Virgil in the making of his poem, which is a product of labor and will become a commodity that circulates in the book trade. Gay’s position in this poem is simultaneously inside and outside the experience of rural leisure and recreation, simultaneously inside and outside labor. James Thomson’s treatment of rural labor in The Seasons is generalized, as is Pope’s, with phrases such as “the Power of Cultivation” (“Summer,” l. ) to represent the plowing, harrowing, reaping, and threshing of the men and women of the laboring classes. Although his poem contains occasional descriptions of rural life, such as sheepshearing, Thomson is interested not so much in the mechanics of farming as in describing natural phenomena, like summer storms, rainbows, lightning, and underground rivers. These descriptions are driven by a passion to understand the inner workings of such natural phenomena. He employs the latest scientific theories to explain precipitation, evaporation, the appearance of meteors, the migration of birds, and the origin of lakes and rivers. Shooting stars, for instance, are described as “the life-infusing suns of other worlds” (l. ). Thomson’s treatment of nature mingles an awe he experiences when confronted with the magnificence of God’s creation with a desire to master natural phenomena through intellectual understanding. In the following lines, Thomson invokes natural philosophy, asking science to tutor poetry so that it can, in turn, inform the world and speak of science’s gift of enlightenment to humankind: With thee, serene Philosophy, with thee, And thy bright garland, let me crown my song! Effusive source of evidence and truth! A lustre shedding o’er the ennobled mind, . . . Hence through her nourished powers, enlarged by thee, . . . The heights of science and of virtue gains, Where all is calm and clear; with Nature round, Or in the starry regions or the abyss, To reason’s and to fancy’s eye displayed— The first up-tracing, from the dreary void,

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The chain of causes and effects to Him, The world-producing Essence, who alone Possesses being: while the last receives The whole magnificence of heaven and earth. And every beauty, delicate or bold, Obvious or more remote, with livelier sense, Diffusive painted on the rapid mind. (ll. –)

Without natural philosophy, Thomson concludes, the lot of “unenlightened man” would be without agriculture, navigation, technology, and “devoid of every finer art and elegance of life” (), for without scientific knowledge there is “Nothing, save rapine, indolence, and guile,/ And woes on woes, a still-revolving train!” (ll. –). Thomson celebrates scientific explanation and empirically based investigation as a means to gain technological control over nature,17 echoing Virgil’s wish at the end of The Georgics’ second book: “Teach me to know the paths of the stars in heaven” (:). Likewise, Thomson achieves a division of labor similar to the one effected by Virgil when he depicts agricultural labor as the physical toil of peasants and marks this form of labor as distinct from the intellectual labor of scientific inquiry. Pope’s reflection, Gay’s reading, and Thomson’s scientific inquiry are all presented as some form of rural labor, rural because the intellectual activity takes place in the countryside or is in response to nature. These descriptions of intellectual labor occur in the context of peasant toil; in fact, the moral stature of the intellectual activities depends on their proximity to images of peasants working the earth. Virgil’s insistence on the moral value of agricultural labor is a given in each of these English georgics, and this work ethic is established early in each poem with images of plowmen. But these English georgics proceed to appropriate that virtue, borrowing it from the plowman and milkmaids and bestowing it on not only sporting gentlemen and reflective gentlemen but poets as well. By representing hunting, fishing, thinking, reading, and writing as labor, Pope, Gay, and Thomson elevate leisured activities into the realm of the morally serious and reduce the work of peasants to play, obscuring the real relations of production. Real physical toil is elided in generalized descriptions of plowmen and metonymic substitutions of hands for workers, and the virtue associated with that direct agricultural labor is attached to the recreational country pursuits of sportsmen and the intellectual and creative work of poets. That professional poets represent reading, writing, and reflection as virtuous activity is not surprising. Nor is it surprising that Pope, Gay, and

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Thomson generalize, slight, and sentimentalize agricultural laborers and their activities, using them only to establish the context for their own virtuous labor. Compare, as Donna Landry has, Pope’s generalized descriptions of labor with the georgic poetry of Mary Collier, who wrote from within the experience of labor. As Landry points out, Pope ascribes to nature the power to produce agricultural abundance and glides over the labor necessary to make nature productive, with phrases such as “Here Ceres’ Gifts in waving Prospect stand” (“Windsor Forest,” l. ) and “kind Seasons swell’d the teeming Grain” (l. ). Collier, on the other hand, gives us a very different image of labor: Until with Heat and Work, ’tis often known, Not only Sweat, but Blood runs trickling down Our Wrists and Fingers; still our Work demands The constant Action of our lab’ring Hands.18

Collier’s trickling blood is very different from Pope’s “joyful Reaper’s Hand” (l. ), which is beckoned by the waving grain. It is not even clear if it is the hand or the reaper that is joyful, and it does not really matter because the reaper and his hand are one and the same. That traditional English georgic poets worked to obscure the true relations of agricultural labor, appropriating to themselves the virtues of toil, is a phenomenon rooted in their own class affiliations and their relations to the means of production. One can, in fact, argue that in “Windsor Forest,” “Rural Sports,” and The Seasons, “cerebral” control of the land and its resources displaces the “blood” of the landowner whose legal control of the land depended on inheritance and the “sweat” of the agrarian workers whose labor justified their claims to partake of the agricultural abundance they produced. While these texts performed ideological work for their authors, they also performed ideological work for their readers, who, as country gentlemen, or would-be country gentlemen, or as professional men, could participate in a discourse on agriculture that included them in the picture as supervisors and managers of land, labor, and information. This georgic discourse enabled poets and their readers to appropriate the virtue that Virgil had assigned to hard labor and to construct themselves as active and patriotic producers in the rural economy. As the countryside was redefined by engrossment and enclosure—in short, by the dispossession of the peasant proprietor—so was it remade by georgic poetry into a site productive of virtue for the landed and professional classes. Williams and Landry have alerted us to the class dynamics at work in the use of the concept of bounty in the English georgic, and we have glimpsed

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briefly how this trope plays on the imperial peripheries in the Pacific—how it was used to ignore elaborate systems of labor and production and to transform agricultural products into commodities ripe for circulation in the world market. Now we must turn our attention to the representation of bounty, labor, and knowledge in James Grainger’s Sugar-Cane: A Poem. In Four Books to see how these georgic elements participate in the construction of an ideology that supports slavery, plantation economics, and the colonialist control of natural resources.

A West Indian Georgic The use of bounty to mystify the real relations of production and the construction of the poet as knowledgeable about rural life are two features of the traditional English georgic that lend themselves to a specific kind of ideological work on race and slavery that Grainger performs in his West Indian georgic.19 While Pope, Gay, and Thomson may have appropriated the virtue associated with the lifestyle and work of peasant-farmers to invest their own literary production with a moral valence, they do not try to completely erase the rural folk’s virtuous status derived from their physical toil.20 Perhaps they recognized that their value as professional poets depended on their appropriation of the vestiges of a residual rural moral economy. The direct agricultural producers in Grainger’s georgic are not buxom English milkmaids (as in Gay’s “Rural Sports”) and jolly vigorous swains, gamboling on the village green (as in Goldsmith’s “Deserted Village”); they are enslaved Africans, and Grainger tries his best to short-circuit their access to virtuous labor by associating them in his poem with beasts of burden. However, as I will argue, Grainger’s georgic does not succeed entirely in suppressing the moral value of the slaves’ labor, and this can be explained by his enthusiasm for the details of agricultural production and his closely observed depiction of the cultivation of tropical plants. James Grainger, a medical doctor employed by a sugar planter on St. Christopher to help maintain the health of his slaves, was inspired to write a poem on the production of sugar cane. Using Virgil’s Georgics as a model, he filled his lengthy poem with descriptions of the planting, manuring, and harvesting of sugar cane, describing slaves, their African origins, and the various diseases to which they were prone, as well as providing descriptions of the West Indian environment and climate, devoting several

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passages to the insects that plagued residents and the hurricanes that destroyed lives and property. Grainger’s “West India Georgic,” as his preface announces, deploys, like Virgil, a strong narrative voice that functions as the voice of experience, offering advice to the new planter on such matters as choosing the best land on which to plant and the best slaves to work those fields. This narrative voice, the “I” in the poem, works to separate the knowledge of nature and the technology of farming from the actual labor involved in agricultural production. The poet sets himself up as knowledgeable despite his standing outside the experience of direct agricultural production. Grainger fills his poem with facts about weather, soil, tropical vegetation, and sugar production, and he also includes lengthy, even excessive, notes about the origins and history of the plants he names in his lists of tropical vegetation. For instance, he encourages the planter not to clear the land indiscriminately but to retain its “golden shaddoc, the forbidden fruit,/ The white acajou, and rich sabbaca” because these plants provide nourishing fruits and signal where “a gray deep earth abounds/ Fat, light” and it is here that “vegetation wakes/ Pleased at the planter’s call, to burst on day.”21 “Shaddoc,” “acajou,” and “sabbaca” are each flagged with superscript numerals referring the reader to his notes, which for the “sabbaca” reads: “This is the Indian name of the avocato, avocado, avigato, or as the English corruptly call it, alligator-pear. The Spaniards in South America name it aguacate, and under that name it is described by Ulloa. However, in Peru and Mexico, it is better known by the appellation of palta or palto. It is a sightly tree, of two species; the one bearing a green fruit, which is the most delicate, and the other a red, which is less esteemed, and grows chiefly in Mexico. . . . Its wood is soft, and consequently of little use. The French call it bois d’anise, and the tree avocat: the botanical name is persea” (). The information in this note is quite comprehensive, based on indigenous knowledge as well as European and scientific systems of botanical classification, all of which further enhances the poet’s position as knower. The laborers, on the other hand, who actually till and sow the land are represented in the poem as “hoe-arm’d gang” () who must be managed: “Let not thy Blacks irregularly hoe:/ But, aided by the line, consult the site/ Of thy demesnes . . .” (). While “[t]hy Negro train” is the subject of the following lines, which describe planting, the impersonal words “some” and “others,” which refer to slaves, diminishes their active, thoughtful, and skilled engagement in the productive processes of sugar cultivation:

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The bundles some untie; the wither’d leaves Others strip artful off, and careful lay, Twice one junk, distant in the amplest bed. O’er these, with hasty hoe, some lightly spread The mounded interval, and smooth the trench: Well pleased, the master swain reviews their toil; And rolls, in fancy, many a full fraught cask. ()

While “some” is syntactically the subject of the sentence, the order of the words steals the agency from the slaves and gives it to the cane itself, its bundles, its leaves, and the hoe that covers the portion of cane that sprouts new cane, as well as to the master who supervises all this labor. In keeping with his tendency to credit the plantation owner or nature with the creation of agricultural bounty and to deny enslaved Africans agronomic knowledge and skill as producers, Grainger reduces their stature as agriculturalists to the purely physical form of labor. In fact, slaves occupy the same position in this poem as do livestock in Virgil’s poem. In Grainger’s descriptions of slaves’ hoeing, digging, and cutting of cane, their labor is equated with the labor of the oxen in the Georgics, which are harnessed to the plow to break the earth open and ready it for planting. The slaves’ status as less than human (and therefore outside virtue) and more like animals is reinforced in Grainger’s fourth book with his description of the various types of Africans and the illnesses that plagued them. Grainger employs botany’s system of classification in these passages, describing types of Africans, their physical and emotional disposition toward plantation work, their diseases, and cures for maladies and afflictions ranging from chiggers to miscarriages. The parallels between Grainger’s list of diseases that plague slaves and Virgil’s passages on animal husbandry, including remedies for cattle diseases, would not be lost on the eighteenth-century reader. Enslaved Africans occupy in Grainger’s poem the same space that sheep and cattle do in Virgil’s poem; slaves are the “animals” that need special care if they are to perform their duties on sugar plantations. Such implicit comparisons between slaves and animals reinforce Grainger’s georgic’s division between physical and mental labor. Grainger constructs two classes in his poem: the managerial class—the planter and his agents—who possess knowledge about technology and labor and yet do not labor physically, and the laboring class—the slaves—who are described as having no knowledge of their own. This split between intellectual and manual labor reinforces the class and racial divisions on the sugar plantation and fits in nicely with the capitalization of the sugar industry in

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the West Indies. The division of labor into discrete tasks, in this case, intellectual and physical labor, is one of the hallmarks of capitalism, as Adam Smith argues in The Wealth of Nations, and was conducive to what became in the West Indies the “factory in the field.” Sugar plantations operated as if they were factories with their division of labor, highly regimented routine, and regulated work force.22 The transition from small, mixed farming to large-scale, heavily capitalized monoculture, in short the capitalization of West Indian agriculture, is recapitulated in Grainger’s portrait of the ideal planter. He ends his first book with a description of the ideal planter, a passage that echoes Virgil’s description of the colonus, the farmer, who works his small farm himself and maintains his family by his labor. Virgil praises the farmer for his simple life and his hard work, and this life of labor spent close to the land as one full of virtue. Grainger’s portrait of the ideal planter tries to approximate Virgil’s virtuous farmer, describing the planter’s humble beginnings and his modest lifestyle, quite like Virgil’s colonus: Unused to labour; yet the orient Sun, Yet western Phoebus saw him wield the hoe. At first a garden all his wants supplied (For Temperance sat cheerful at his board) With Yams, cassada, and the food of strength, Thrice wholesome tannies . . . ()

Eventually the planter expands his farming from merely self-sustaining gardening to the planting of tobacco, which “gave wealth; and gold bought better land and slaves.” “Heaven bless’d his labour” (), and he planted cotton, cacao, coffee, and finally sugar. In time, a numerous gang of sturdy slaves, Well fed, well clothed, all emulous to gain Their master’s smile, who treated them like men, Blacken’d his cane lands: which with vast increase Beyond the wish of avarice, paid his toil. ()

Whose labor is rewarded here? Both heaven and prosperity have blessed the planter, who, though he began laboring with his own hands, eventually substituted slave labor for his own. Slave labor is part of the productive process; it goes unrewarded while the planter’s labor, his role as manager of land, labor, and capital, is recognized and blessed. Slaves, though they labor diligently and intimately with the soil, do not reap any rewards, heavenly or

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earthly, other than their master’s smile. Because Grainger figures slaves as being “like men,” which is to say they are not men, his poem has disbarred them from participating in the moral economy in which virtue is the fruit of labor. The problem with Grainger’s modeling his poem on Virgil’s georgic is that Virgil’s poem, despite the knowledgeable voice of the narrating poet, valorizes the peasant-farmer’s hard labor. In writing a georgic, Grainger evokes the well-known tropes of the virtue of agricultural labor and the simplicity of rural life, but in assigning that rural virtue to the planter and not to the actual agricultural laborers, the slaves, Grainger’s panegyric to sugar planters and their plantations fails to be totally convincing. Grainger’s sleight of hand, his substituting of planter for slave in the labor/virtue equation, puts a tremendous strain on the poem’s ideological frame and threatens to bring these internal contradictions to the surface. To deal with the ideological inconsistency of the planter accruing moral worth from his slaves’ labor, Grainger denies slaves the dignity of their labor either by suggesting the magical operations of nature’s bounty or by employing a natural history discourse that conflates Africans with animals. These contradictions were noted in the introduction to the poem’s  edition: “by what art is it possible to make dignified or attractive the description of merely mechanical toil, where, amidst squalor, and privation, and a mournful monotony of existence, man is degraded into something scarcely superior to the machine which is the companion and the rival of his efforts?” Davenport, the author of the introduction, asks how “can we be charmed by the picture which brings before our eyes the kidnapped slave, wielding the hoe, under a burning sun and the lash of a taskmaster.” Grainger’s subject, Davenport writes, “was always a repulsive one” and “inevitably calls up a succession of the most painful ideas.” Though he believes Grainger to be a “man of humanity” and sincere in his efforts, he wonders how it is that Grainger can, in his poem, speak to enslaved people and ask them “not to repine at their destiny, but to ‘pursue their pleasing task.’” Even more outrageous, is when Grainger “piously exhorts them to bend to Heaven in prayer for having ‘blessed their labour,’ we can at first scarce forbear to ask ourselves, whether he means to be bitterly ironical on the planters, or to add insult to injury, by a cruel mockery of the slaves” (–). While Davenport is right to be repulsed by the poem’s rosy view of slavery, Grainger’s Sugar-Cane is more complicated than he allows for since it presents an ambivalent portrait of the West Indian sugar-slavery nexus. It is important to note that Grainger is not completely successful in eliding

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Afro-Caribbean labor and knowledge from the agricultural process. Unlike Pope, Gay, and Thomson, who obscure the real relations of agricultural production by using rhetorical devices, replacing agrarian workers with abstract concepts such as “Industry” or “Plenty,” Grainger particularizes various forms of Caribbean agricultural production. When he describes fertilizing the soil and planting the cane shoots, slaves are implicated in the process: Whether the fattening compost, in each hole, ’Tis best to throw, or on the surface spread, Is undetermined: trials must decide. . . . But, if ’tis scatter’d generously o’er all, The cane will better bear the solar blaze: Less rain demand; and, by repeated crops, Thy land improved, its gratitude will show. Enough of composts, Muse; of soils, enough: When best to dig, and when inhume the cane; A task how arduous! next demands thy song. It not imports beneath what sing thy hoes The deep trough sink, and ridge alternate raise: If this from washes guard thy gemmy tops And that arrest the moisture these require. . . . As art transforms the savage face of things, And order captivates the harmonious mind; Let not thy Blacks irregularly hoe: But, aided by the line, consult the site Of thy demesnes; and beautify the whole. (–)

While slaves are not the subjects of any of the above lines, their presence is alluded to and even made visible in the phrase “thy Blacks irregularly hoe” though they are referred to as possessions, “thy Blacks,” and their sloppy work is in need of the master’s supervision. Passages like these weighted down with agricultural information that Grainger admitted “look awkward in poetry” () perform complex and contradictory ideological work.23 In his eagerness to explicate the cultivation of sugar cane, he provides details about the productive process that figure the slaves both as instruments of the planter’s will and as human agents. This ambivalent representation of slave labor is most acute in the passages of the poem that describe the slaves’ provision grounds, gardens in which they grew a vast array of fruits and vegetables. It is in these passages that Grainger inadvertently positions slaves as analogous to the planters, bestowing on the slaves the moral status of Virgil’s colonus. A closer examination

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of Grainger’s representation of slaves’ provision grounds reveals that despite his attempts to categorize slaves as if they were beasts of burden, in these passages slaves emerge as skilled agronomists who exercise self-discipline and enterprise in their management of their gardens, characteristics that are, as Roderick McDonald argues, “at odds with the notion of being chattel.”24 Although Grainger is enthusiastic about the provision grounds as a source of healthful food for slaves, he tends to dehumanize the slaves by minimizing, even ignoring their agricultural skill and ability to manage their time and labor that the provisions grounds required if they were to prove bountiful. In the following passage, “thee” refers to the planter and “them” are his slaves: . . . to every slave assign Some mountain ground; or, if waste broken land To thee belong, that broken land divide. This let them cultivate, one day, each week; And there raise yams, and there cassada’s root . . . There let angola’s bloomy bush supply, For many a year, with wholesome pulse their board. There let the bonavist, his fringed pods Throw liberal o’er the prop; while ochra bears Aloft his slimy pulp, and help disdains. There let potatos mantle o’er the ground, Sweet as the canejuice is the root they bear. () There too let eddas spring in order meet With Indian cale, and foodful calaloo While mint, thyme, balm, and Europe’s coyer herbs Shoot gladsome forth, nor reprobate the clime. (–)

The list of plants goes on for several stanzas to include cotton, coffee, cacao, limes, and citron. The repetition of “there let” underscores the planter’s agency (lending him the Godlike status of “let there be light”) as if he, in allowing the slaves to cultivate the land, is responsible for its fruitfulness. As this section proceeds to list these various plants, the slaves are dropped out of the picture almost entirely, and the plants seem to grow by themselves without human aid. For instance, the cotton grows spontaneously in less than fertile soil: “In this delicious clime the cotton bursts/ On rocky soils” (). And in the following line, the cacao tree offers its pods to be ground into “the food of health” (). This eliding of Afro-Caribbeans and their labor is made complete by a shift within this long list of plants from the planter as subject to the poet as the knowing subject. The “I,” the poet as subject, or in some cases the “Muse,” is even more active in knowing than

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the planter was in his permitting the land to be cultivated. “The Muse might tell what culture will entice/ The ripen’d melon to perfume each month,/ And with the ‘anana load the fragrant board” (). The poet is the authority on agriculture, telling the secrets of cultivating the pineapple, the mammey, the tamarind, the palmetto, and the medicinal effects of plants, such as cassia—“thy long pods, full fraught with nectar’d sweets/ Relieve the bowels from the lagging load” (). Grainger’s positioning of the poet as the expert on natural history and agricultural practice echoes Virgil’s and the eighteenth-century English georgics’ split between the hard physical labor of the peasant and the intellectual labor of poets and managerial labor of the gentlemen farmers. Grainger’s strategy of appropriating the slaves’ agronomic knowledge for himself and their labor for the planter works to a certain extent, emptying the slaves out of their own gardens. And yet, undermining his project of appropriation the slaves’ moral agency is the way in which the slaves’ provision grounds, described in Book IV, mirrors the garden of the colonus/ planter figure described in Book I: the slave, like the planter, grows yams, cassava, edda, cotton, and coffee and has hedges of citrus trees to protect the garden as well as tamarind trees to shade it and the laborer from the hot sun. A reader cannot help noticing that he or she has read this list of garden produce before, especially as Grainger’s footnotes refer the reader back to the notes in Book I in which he explains the botanical and historical significance of these various tropical plants. This mirroring of the slaves’ and planter’s gardens undermines Grainger’s attempt to dehumanize Africans and Afro-Caribbeans, for once he has made the case that the planter derives virtue from hoeing in his garden and nurturing these healthful plants, he cannot so easily undo this association of yams, cassada, edda, and plantains with virtue. This repetition of the list of plants imparts to the slaves that virtue the rest of the poem has worked so hard to deprive them of. In fact, in one line he nearly admits that the slaves are productive of virtue as well as wealth, citing “thy labourer’s honest wealth.” However, this is in the context of runaway slaves stealing the food growing in the gardens: “Negro fugitives, who . . . in bands will soon destroy/ Thy labourer’s honest wealth; their loss and yours” (). Here the poem sets up a favorite colonialist dichotomy—the good and the bad slave/colonial subject—which is a strategy designed to divide and conquer the oppressed. Grainger aligns the “good” slaves with their masters’ interests by pointing out that they both lose, the slaves food and the planters profits. By ending the line and stanza with “yours,” referring back to the planter, Grainger has tried to reabsorb

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the slaves’ labor and wealth into the planter’s economy, and to suppress the presence of that independent slave economy based on provision grounds that James Walvin describes as functioning at an “economically autonomous level.”25 But Grainger’s poem cannot contain the disruptive implications of figuring slaves as agronomists. He has suggested in his image of the hardworking, industrious Afro-Caribbean slave the potential for an independent peasant economy, one based on workers possessing their own labor and the products of their labor, an unsettling thought for a slave economy. The contradiction between Grainger’s desire to detail every instance of West Indian agricultural production—not just the sugar plantation but the slaves’ provision grounds as well—and his wish to minimize slaves’ agricultural expertise and labor destabilizes Grainger’s ideological hold over his material so that a portrait of Afro-Caribbean agricultural knowledge, skill, and virtue emerges in this West Indian georgic.

Imperial Georgic The competition between intellectual and physical labor for moral value is the central problematic of the georgic.26 The genre itself reproduces this conflict between two forms of labor, and each poet’s negotiation of this conflict can serve his own interests as well as the interests of what he perceives to be his own or his patrons’ class. Pope’s “Windsor Forest” seeks to reconfigure upper-class forms of recreation as georgic activity, which had been traditionally associated with direct and intimate contact with the soil. By slipping the reading and writing of poetry into the poem’s list of gentlemanly country pursuits, Pope elevates his own status to that of gentleman, or at least, one who partakes of gentlemanlike conduct. Unlike Pope’s attempt to finesse a higher class standing for his own occupation, Gay’s “Rural Sports” plays with the idea of labor, figuring his own poetry-making activities as simultaneously a form of labor and recreation. With his open admission of his lack of qualifications for describing a hunting scene, Gay calls attention to his poet-speaker’s position as an urban poet in the rural landscape and the fragility of his access to a gentleman’s status within rural hierarchies. Thomson’s depiction of rural England’s husbandry and agriculture shares with Pope’s the elision of the direct agricultural producer; however, Thomson makes expansive claims for poetry by linking scientific knowledge and religious awe in the poet’s description of nature:

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With thee, serene Philosophy, with thee, And thy bright garland, let me crown my song! . . . Tutored by thee, hence Poetry exalts Her voice to ages; and informs the page With music, image, sentiment, and thought, Never to die; the treasure of mankind, Their highest honour, and their truest joy! (–)

Thomson’s figuring of the poet-speaker as knowledgeable about nature lays claim to a kind of knowledge, often agronomic and scientific, that had currency in the rural and global economy and is suggestive of the ways in which this knowledge intersects with class, gender, and race to construct the image of the poet as a gentleman and a professional much like the botanist or the landscape architect.27 In constructing their imaginative efforts as labor and privileging the activities of the mind over the body, georgic poets claimed professional status and access to civil virtue that was denied to direct agricultural producers, the rural working classes. Even Virgil’s Georgics creates a hierarchy of labor in which contemplation and reflection as well as other forms of cognition are the highest forms of activity and manual labor is the lowest; and yet in Virgil’s poem manual toil is invested with virtue of hard work, with the struggle that never ends. The English georgic poet, however, tended to borrow the virtue associated with physical toil to lend value to his “work” while simultaneously obscuring that manual labor with magical plentitude. In Thomson’s and Grainger’s depictions of tropical bounty, this contest between local producer and poet as knower takes on a new dimension that goes beyond class conflict and competing masculinities to speak to colonial and imperial concerns. Played out in these georgic poems is the contest over knowledge between, on one hand, the European professional/managerial classes’s control and manipulation of botanical and agricultural information and resources, and, on the other, local knowledge, based on experience and custom, that was possessed by peasants, slaves, and indigenous peoples. While Grainger’s poem uses the georgic’s split between mental and physical labor to maintain racial and class divisions that undergird the sugar plantation economies of the West Indies, Thomson’s tropical landscape is emptied of native producers and consumers. The tropical bounty that Thomson describes in “Summer” is produced without human effort—birds, breezes, Pomona, and Ceres perform that labor. Absent in Thomson’s descriptions of the coconut and the pineapple, for instance, are the ecological

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systems that produced them and the local knowledge of natives who grew them. The erasure of a plant’s ecological and cultural contexts and the cataloging of this pell-mell mixture of plant life from Asia, Africa, South America, and the Pacific have the effect of removing plant matter from its local context and putting it into a global circulation that has England as its center.28 Bear me, Pomona! to thy citron groves; To where the lemon and the piercing lime, With the deep orange glowing through the green, Their lighter glories blend. Lay me reclined Beneath the spreading tamarind, that shakes, Fanned by the breeze, its fever-cooling fruit. Deep in the night the massy locust sheds Quench my hot limbs; or lead me through the maze, Embowering endless, of the Indian fig; Or, thrown at gayer ease on some fair brow, Let me behold, by breezy murmurs cooled, Broad o’er my head the verdant cedar wave, And high palmettos life their graceful shade. Oh, stretched amid these orchards of the sun, Give me to drain the coco’s milky bowl, And from the palm to draw its freshening wine! More bounteous far than all the frantic juice Which Bacchus pours. Nor, on its slender twigs Low-bending, be the full pomegranate scorned; Nor, creeping through the woods, the gelid race Of berries. Oft in humble station dwells Unboastful worth, above fastidious pomp. Witness, thou best anana, thou the pride Of vegetable life, beyond whate’er The poets imaged in the golden age: Quick let me strip thee of thy tufty coat, Spread thy ambrosial stores, and feast with Jove! (ll. –)

Thomson’s list of exotic fruits creates the impression that pineapples, coconuts, and tamarinds are lonely, unappreciated, and that they await the arrival of the adventurous Briton who has only to pluck this tropical bounty that offers itself as a gift to the passerby: “Give me to drain the coco’s milky bowl” (). To the pineapple, the poet says in language fittingly gendered, “Quick let me strip thee of thy tufty coat,/ Spread thy ambrosial stores” (–). With such decontextualizing catalogs and dizzying inventories, Thomson’s poem erases the real conditions under which such fruits grew as

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well as the politics of empire, ignoring the complicated and often violent systems of extraction (such as Banks was prepared to use) that the British employed to gain control over the world’s resources. Even though Thomson celebrates the British navy and its imperial sway over the world’s oceans, he glosses over what this navy actually does, and mystifies the complex, systematic, and often brutal expropriation of North American, Caribbean, and South Asian agricultural production. Thomson’s use of the catalog, an abstract, universalizing register, erases geographical and cultural specificity, and in its displacement of local knowledge and local labor, the catalog transforms agricultural production into commodities for circulation in the world economy.29 In erasing local knowledge and local labor, the imperial georgic functioned to stabilize the colonial order of the sugar islands as well as to reinforce British efforts to manage the global circulation of plant life. Bruno Latour has suggested that underlying principle of Enlightenment notions of knowledge, in particular, natural historical knowledge, is “how to be familiar with things, people and events which are distant.” The Enlightenment voyage of discovery, such as the one Banks was on with Captain Cook, is clearly one way to collect information about distant places in the form of visual and verbal descriptions of people, places, flora, and fauna as well as in the shape of actual specimens. Part of achieving control over the world’s resources involves, according to Latour, the rendering of “local particulars ‘universal’,” and this is achieved through rendering these particulars “mobile” and “combinable.”30 In the imperial georgic, decontextualized plant life—pineapples in Thomson’s “Summer” or sugar in Grainger’s “SugarCane”—circulates shorn of the real conditions under which it was produced; plants in these georgics are mobile, stable, and combinable. In eliding the human context in which plant life grew, the conditions under which plants were cultivated by natives and/or slaves, the imperial georgic contributed to this discourse on natural historical knowledge and the circulation of plant life that figured England as the center of a global market economy.

Chapter 

Provisional Economies: Slave Gardens in the Writings of British Sojourners

Labor is “deterritorialized”—without foundation or meaning, it neurotically succumbs to a process which deprives working people of knowledge even as it is essentially knowledge creating activity in the first place. —Felix Guattari and Toni Negri 1

Grainger’s georgic reveals, despite its efforts to conceal, the horticultural knowledge and virtuous labor of enslaved Afro-Caribbeans, who produced the agricultural bounty that fed planters and slaves alike and who provided most of the commodities that circulated in the internal market economy of the West Indies. The contradiction that marks Grainger’s poem, the tension between his representation of slaves as mere mechanisms of labor and the georgic’s valorization of labor, surfaces in other texts that have the British West Indies as their subject. These texts, written by travelers, planters, and their advocates, include natural and civil histories, travel narratives, advice manuals for would-be planters, and tracts defending slavery. The georgic’s concern with the agricultural technology and the hard labor that transform uncultivated land into productive fields informs several texts that describe the West Indies and defend its sugar-slavery economy. As several critics have argued recently, this georgic ethos extends well beyond the formal conventions of traditional georgic poetry to make itself felt in a variety of prose texts, such as natural histories, travel narratives, and even novels.2 As Mary Louise Pratt has demonstrated with her analysis of natural history and travel writing, these genres are polyglot forms that incorporate tropes, conventions, and discursive strategies found in other genres to create multidimensional and semiotically complex texts. My goal in this chapter is to explore plantocratic writing that appropriates a georgic mode to

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comment on the quality of slaves’ lives. Just as Grainger’s poem reproduces the conflicted status of the Afro-Caribbean agricultural worker, who, as a slave, must labor as would an animal or machine for his master, and who, as a peasant-producer, is responsible for the bounty of the West Indian market economy, so do these texts reproduce this contradiction through their ambivalent portraits of slave gardens. The number of books published about the West Indies in the latter half of the eighteenth century is far greater than that for any other geographical region, the debate about the slave trade, no doubt, contributing to this outpouring.3 For instance, many proslavery texts, such as Gordon Turnbull’s An Apology for Negro Slavery: Or the West India Planters Vindicated (), were published under the guise of offering the British public information that would help explain the importance of the West Indies and its slavery-sugar system to Britain’s prosperity. Of the many different kinds of books published about the West Indies, a few describe slaves’ gardens in greater detail than the usual page or two found in books such as Long’s History of Jamaica () or Bryan Edwards’s History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies (). The kind of text that I focus on in this chapter falls between two loosely defined categories of writing: natural history and travel writing. Natural history is characterized by its “objective” point of view, by its use of the list of topics to organize its contents, and by its historylessness and protoanthropological approach to human subjects, all of which have the effect of positing static, timeless cultures and unchanging natural environments. A variation on natural history writing is the “civil and natural history,” which is typical of much of the writing about the West Indies. With little reference to an observing self, natural histories partake of Enlightenment assumptions about the nature of the world—that it is observable, measurable, quantifiable, and mappable—and assumptions about the nature of knowledge—that it is “disembodied, gender-less, time-less, and place-less”— in short, objective.4 Unlike natural history, the travel account, while it does contain similar subject matter—the customs and manners of the people of a foreign country as well as descriptions of landscape and natural resources— is organized differently. Rather than natural history’s use of the list and its categorization by subject—rivers, mountains, cities, government—the travel account has as its organizing principle the traveler’s movement from place to place, which, along with chronology, provides the travel account with a narrative frame. Unlike the objective presentation of material in the natural history, the travel account is profoundly affected by the presence of a narrator. The traveler, whose personal reactions and observations color the

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information he or she conveys, is crucial to the structure and meaning of the travel narrative. The kind of writing that I examine partakes of natural history’s interest in plants, natural resources, and economies but has more in common with travel writing’s use of a narrator and chronology and geographical movement to structure the narrative. In addition, the writing I focus on was written by absentee planters and other sojourners rather than resident planters. Sojourners’ narratives tend to be less transparently partisan, more conflicted and ambivalent than most planters’ accounts, in part because sojourners tend to position themselves as outsiders who are looking in on a society distinct from their own. As Britons abroad, they identify with the British domestic audience their narratives address, and yet, because they have lived in the West Indies for several years, they write with a deeper understanding than the mere tourist and often with a sympathy that comes from personal ties and attachment to place that arise out of years of residence in the West Indies. Sojourners portray themselves as experts who possess knowledge based on a longstanding relationship with a particular place or group of people, and they position themselves as travelers writing home, addressing an audience with whom they identify and possess a shared history and culture. Because sojourners position themselves as Britons who have affective ties to places other than Britain, their narratives possess a doubleness and an inbetweeness that emerge from the sojourner’s split loyalties and identifications. For these reasons, sojourners’ narratives, full of ambivalence, self-contradiction, and complexity, are rich texts that reveal much about colonial society and imperialist ideology, and, for my purposes, they can tell us much about slaves, their gardens, and their contribution to the tropical bounty that caught the attention of nearly every traveler who witnessed the agricultural abundance of local markets. We catch a glimpse of the enormous vitality of these markets and their centrality in the lives of Afro-Caribbeans in John Luffman’s description of an Antigua market scene, which I discussed briefly in the introduction along with Brunias’s genre pieces. Luffman notes the hundreds of people crowded together, the excessive noise they produce, and the pungent smells emitted by this mingling of people, food, and animals. More chaotic and louder than any London market, this Caribbean scene features hucksters selling chickens, pigs, goats, vegetables, tubors, fruit, and even “stinking salt-fish and other offencibles” which “negroes will buy, even in the last stage of rottenness, to season their pots with.”5 Though it is not apparent from his language, Luffman was critical of the institution of slavery and, in particular, of planters’ treatment of slaves. In the course of critiquing slavery that relegated

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Africans and Afro-Caribbeans to hard and unceasing labor, Luffman suggests that the food which planters allotted slaves was insufficient in quality and quantity and argues that without the slaves’ gardens not only the slaves also the planters would starve. Of these gardens, Luffman writes: “these patches are found to be of material benefit to the country, their produce principally supplying the Sunday market . . . with vegetables. They are also allowed to raise pigs, goats, and fowls, and it is by their attention to these articles, that the whites are prevented from starving, during such times of the year as vessels cannot come to these coasts with safety” (). Luffman’s acknowledgment of the importance of slaves’ “attention” to agriculture and husbandry is rare in the writings of British sojourners and even rarer in planters’ treatment of what was referred to as provision grounds. Begrudging recognition of the economic importance of provision grounds as a cheap source of food for slaves emerged in plantocratic texts in the last quarter of the century, perhaps in response to the mass starvation of slaves during the American Revolution, which had prevented ships, loaded with American foodstuffs, the corn meal and salt herring on which slaves subsisted, from reaching the West Indies. The tension between Luffman’s derogatory language when describing African and Afro-Caribbean people and his recognition of the importance of their independent labor to the island’s internal economy stems, in part, from slavery as it was constituted in the British West Indies. Two economies, peasant-producer and plantation-slave, overlap and collide in the West Indies, producing conflicted images of slaves and slavery.

Scarcity and Provision Grounds Before turning to an analysis of sojourners’ narratives, I think it will be helpful to provide a historical framework to illuminate the politics of plantocratic ambivalence toward enslaved Africans and Creoles possessing agricultural expertise. Slaves on West Indian sugar plantations had two kinds of gardens: small plots of land, sometimes called kitchen gardens, in the yards surrounding their houses, and much larger plots of land, called provision grounds or polinks, on the margins of the plantation. Most households and family units had a kitchen garden. Slaves in Antigua and Barbados did not have provision grounds, as the land is fairly flat and mostly arable, and therefore nearly every acre was put into sugar cultivation. Islands like Jamaica and St. Vincent, with their more hilly terrain and central mountainous

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region, contained land too steep or inaccessible to be suitable for growing sugar cane. On these islands, planters, if they recognized the value of slaves’ gardens, would set aside marginal lands for provision grounds, which were sometimes located at great distances, in one case seven miles, from the slaves’ dwellings. While enslaved Afro-Caribbeans did not legally own their provision grounds, they developed customary rights to the land and owned the production of their labor.6 In both the provision grounds and the kitchen gardens, they grew vegetables, fruits, tubers, and plantains to supplement their otherwise meager diets. In the eighteenth century, slaves working on sugar plantations in the British West Indies were usually given by their master a weekly allotment of two to three pounds of salted fish and sometimes salted beef or pork as well as a few pints of corn meal.7 Salted cod or herring was shipped from New England in exchange for raw sugar, which was then refined into molasses and distilled into rum, this exchange making up a portion of the complex triangular trade of slaves and sugar that crisscrossed the Atlantic. A few pounds of salted fish and a few pints of corn meal, clearly, was not a very plentiful nor particularly healthful diet, and slaves, as a result, were malnourished and often prone to diseases that weakened and killed them. Describing a Barbados plantation in , Charles Bolton writes: “For want of proper food the negroes cannot have strength enough to undergo their daily task; this exposes them to the hurryings and lashes of their Drivers which tires, tortures, and quickly wears them out. It makes them run away, . . . it forces them upon robberies . . . ; it dispirits them and throws them into many distempers, which frequently prove fatal.”8 In his study of doctors and slave health in the eighteenth century, Richard Sheridan concludes that slaves in Barbados received only  calories a day from the imported food they consumed.9 The kind of labor that was extracted from slaves on sugar plantations was especially grueling: a high mortality rate among slaves has been traced by B. W. Higman to “extreme hours of heavy labor and the brutality of the gang-driven system.”10 Field slaves, working hard digging, hoeing, cutting, and hauling cane, expended enormous amounts of energy, and yet their food supplies could not meet their caloric expenditures. Slaves would have suffered malnutrition and even starvation were it not for their gardens. The foods—yams, cassava, plantains, and the like—grown in these gardens were, therefore, crucial to the good health and the survival of slaves in the British West Indies.11 Some slaves, however, did starve to death when planters were unwilling to take arable land out of sugar production so that slaves could use it for provision grounds. Planters thought they could make

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a greater profit by putting all their land into intensive sugar production and by purchasing foodstuffs from New England than by setting aside land for provision grounds. Planters were willing to rely on imported food even if it meant their slaves might starve when ships from New England did not arrive because of bad weather or war. Eric Williams estimated that , slaves died of starvation during the war of American independence because they were dependent on foodstuffs from New England to survive and the local West Indian economy could not feed the population of slaves.12 Some planters also preferred imported foodstuffs to provision grounds as a way to feed slaves because they liked to keep control over the food supply, using it as a way to discipline them. If slaves had been recalcitrant in their work, plantation managers could withdraw their weekly allowance of fish and cornmeal.13 If slaves had proved useful to their masters, food could be used to reward that behavior. For instance, slave women who had given birth to healthy babies often received salt pork and a yard or two of brightly colored cloth as a reward for contributing to their masters’ wealth.14 Slaves derived a form of independence from their masters with their provision grounds as these gardens gave them the surplus that put them beyond such methods of control. With the yams and plantains they grew, they could survive the delay or loss of a ship carrying salted cod, and they could survive the consequences of a master’s parsimony or vengeance. With their provision grounds, enslaved Africans and Creoles gained some, if small, measure of control over their health and well-being, and for this reason, these gardens were something that planters viewed with varying degrees of skepticism and even hostility.

Productive Powers Plantation owners were encouraged to set aside land for provision grounds by people who regarded themselves as enlightened humanitarians, men like Dr. Grainger, who urged the healthful benefits of fruits and vegetables that could be grown in provision grounds. In an effort to make the island less dependent on imported goods, the Jamaican Assembly passed a law in  requiring estates “to put in every year so many acres of provisions for the negroes.”15 While some planters took fairly fertile land out of sugar production for slaves to cultivate as provision grounds, more often planters would allot land that was already exhausted by sugar cultivation or that was so marginal it could not be efficiently cultivated with sugar. Ashton Warner, a

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slave who escaped St. Vincent and told his tale in London to British abolitionists, described how slaves were given land that had been “over-cropped, and was no longer productive for canes” or lands that were “unfit for planting” canes.16 This refusal by many planters to set aside productive land for their slaves’ nourishment is typical of planters’ rather hostile attitude to the whole idea of provision grounds even though they knew that these gardens would ensure the health and therefore the productivity of their slaves. While planter resentment toward provision grounds can be explained, in part, by fear of losing potential income, of greater concern to planters was, I believe, the threat of African agricultural expertise and entrepreneurial ingenuity that found expression in the provision grounds and in the local market economy that depended on the surplus crops of provision grounds. African and Creole agricultural skill and careful management of time and labor challenged planters’ notions about their own superiority as well as prevailing plantocratic beliefs about Africans and their mental and moral capabilities. Since plantocratic beliefs about Africans’ inability to manage themselves formed the basis of much proslavery propaganda, the abundance of provision grounds and markets presented planters with a contradiction that threatened the logic of their ideological justification for slavery. In addition to challenging plantocratic ideology, the slaves’ gardens provided the basis for a protopeasant economy that existed independent of and eventually in opposition to the plantation system. Out of these gardens, slaves created economic opportunities that ultimately enabled them to resist some of the consequences of slavery and to make the successful transition from slave to peasant economy with the abolition of slavery in .17 Ambivalence toward slaves’ provision grounds is revealed in the representations of these gardens in the poetry, journals, and travel narratives written by planters and their friends. Of the several strategies in the plantocratic discourse on provision grounds, two emerge repeatedly: one that attributes to nature’s bounty the natural abundance created by slaves, and the other, in its attempt to defend slavery, that insists that slaves, in having access to gardens, were more independent and prosperous than European peasants. For instance, Mrs. Carmichael, who had lived in St. Vincent and Tobago for five years as a planter’s wife, recurs to the trope of bounty in her treatise on the West Indies to undo her slaves’ agency in creating the agricultural abundance she depended on for her family’s sustenance. Sir William Young, Gordon Turnbull, and Edward Bancroft described the abundance of the provision grounds as a way to justify slavery as a humane institution, stressing slaves’ health and prosperity and access to money and

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property. Matthew Lewis recognized how “rich” his slaves were growing because of their provision grounds but was disturbed by this show of independence and instituted measures to curb the propensity toward prosperity in his slaves. These plantocratic writers recognized the importance of the abundance of the provision grounds but were made uneasy by the vitality of independent African labor. To understand planter ambivalence about provision grounds, we need to recognize that slaves produced surpluses in these gardens that circulated as commodities in the local, islandwide, and interisland economies. Often producing more food than consumed for immediate family use, slaves would sell or barter the rest, venturing to markets on Sunday, their only day off, to sell their produce. According to Sidney Mintz, “Jamaican slaves were producing not only most of their own subsistence but also an astoundingly large surplus of foods, the bigger part of which ended up on the tables of free people, including the planters themselves. In effect, what had begun as a technique for saving the planters the costs of supplying their slaves with food had then become an essential basis for the food supply of the non-slave population.”18 In producing enough food for themselves and for the local marketplace, enslaved Africans and their Creole descendants created surpluses that enabled them to purchase or barter for commodities such as cloth, tobacco, jewelry, crockery, and metalwork. The plantocrat Edward Long calculated that  percent of Jamaica’s currency was circulating in the slaves’ internal economy.19 Provision grounds not only provided slaves with the means to acquire commodities that improved the quality of their lives but also gave them the opportunity to exercise initiative and to make decisions about time, tasks, and labor. Roderick A. McDonald argues that importance of the internal economy generated by the provision grounds “rests less on the quantities of money accumulated than on its social implications”: “Participation in the internal economy fostered slave initiative at odds with the subservience characteristic of much of plantation life. The decision making and choices exercised within the economy contradicted the premises of slavery: in the economy’s operation, the slaves made planting, harvesting, and marketing decisions, chose how and when to spend the earnings they accumulated, assessed how to apportion their free time, and weighed the advisability of this or that theft.”20 Working in provision grounds, slaves exercised their skills as horticulturalists and as managers of their own time and labor, activities requiring an independence that was, as McDonald says, “at odds with the notion of being chattels.”21 Provision grounds, according to Dale Tomich, provided enslaved Africans with “the opportunity

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to construct an alternative way of life” that went beyond the plantation, and, as a result, “the bonds of dependence of the slave upon the master slowly began to dissolve, and the activities of the slaves gradually transformed the foundations of slave society itself.”22 For these reasons, the productive powers of the provision grounds were threatening to slaveholders. Slaves with provision grounds were, in Mintz’s terms, “the protopeasants: enslaved Africans and their descendants, . . . under the lash, yet asserting their own essential humanity, initiative, and intelligence, in the face of every cruel limitation.” This agricultural and economic system grew up alongside enslaved plantation labor, or as Mintz puts it, in the “crevices” of the plantation system. This Caribbean peasantry interacted in a complex way with plantation slavery. “Even where and when plantation and peasantry flourished together, they usually seemed to remain locked in some odd struggle with each other, at once interdependent (as when peasants both farmed their own plots and sold [that is, in the post-emancipation era] their labor during the cane harvests) yet in conflict (as when the plantation sought to acquire peasant landholdings for its own use by seizure, legal maneuver, or the use of governmental pressure.)” Provision grounds fed the slaves who worked the plantations and therefore helped to keep the plantation system viable. And yet slaves could use the foods they grew to gain some measure of protection from the vicissitudes of their masters’ avarice and cruelty and to assert their resourcefulness, independence, and pride in ownership.23

Planter Ambivalence We have seen how Grainger’s ambivalent portrait of slave gardens both celebrates and denigrates the labor that went into cultivating these plots of land. At the same time he waxes enthusiastic about these gardens, he also undermines Afro-Caribbean agency by locating his depiction of provision grounds within Book IV, which is devoted to the care and management of slaves. This last section in Grainger’s poem echoes Virgil’s discussion of how to care for cattle and sheep, detailing their diseases and cures for them. Grainger’s list of the fruits and vegetables that slaves grow in their gardens is not meant to be an acknowledgment of slaves’ skill, knowledge, or determination; this is reserved for Book I’s treatment of the virtuous planter’s cultivation of small tracts of farmland, a stage prior to his investment in a large-scale sugar plantation. The enumeration of slaves’ produce in Book IV

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is within the context of advising would-be planters on the health and welfare of slaves, providing them with insights Grainger had gained during his tenure as a sugar plantation doctor. Responsible for maintaining slaves’ health and ensuring their effectiveness as workers, Grainger became convinced that provision grounds were the key to maintaining the health and vigor of a plantation’s slaves. The two ideas Grainger stresses in this part of the poem—that healthy slaves are efficient workers, and that well-fed slaves are healthy slaves—were not obvious to his contemporaries. Grainger became an advocate of provision grounds, describing them in his poem as well as writing about their health benefits for slaves and cost-effectiveness for planters in a pamphlet, “An Essay on the more common West India Diseases” () . Though his poetic and scientific writings promoting these gardens sound more like treatises on animal husbandry than the work of a caring physician, he stressed the link between health and nutrition, urging planters to let slaves have provision grounds. Recognizing the link between nutrition and health, Grainger urged planters to assign slaves plots of land on which to cultivate what became the staples of the West Indian diet—yams, cassava, plantains, and eddoes—as well as West African foods such as millet, okra, rice, and watermelon and Mediterranean and North African plants such as lime, citron, orange, and coffee.24 Grainger’s list of produce grown by slaves in their provision grounds is confirmed by countless other sojourners and observers of the West Indian scene.25 For Grainger, an adequate diet for slaves made economic sense since healthy slaves were more productive as laborers, and since healthy females tended to give birth to more babies, increasing their owners’ wealth in chattel property. Grainger scolds those planters who do not feed their slaves during the wet season when the sugar cane does not need much attention: “Not less inhuman, than unthrifty those,/ Who, half the year’s rotation round the Sun,/ Deny subsistence to their labouring slaves” (–). He suggests that the planter import food for his slaves as well as providing them with provision grounds: But wouldst thou see thy Negro train increase, Free from disorders, and thine acres clad With groves of sugar, every week dispense Or English beans, or Carolinian rice, Iërne’s beef, or Pennsylvania flour; Newfoundland cod, or herrings from the main That howls tempestuous round the Scotian isles! ()

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This celebration of the circulation of commodities within the empire, which would have pleased any mercantilist, is Grainger’s attempt to persuade planters to provide slaves with enough food to preserve their health and, in doing so, preserve the planters’ investment.26 Grainger’s attention to the health and nutrition of slaves was closely tied to his concern with slave women’s fertility. With his phrase “to see thy Negro train increase,” he refers to the problem of slaves not reproducing themselves as a workforce. According to Philip Curtin, the “most striking demographic peculiarity of the South Atlantic System was its failure to produce a self-sustaining slave population in tropical America.” In his study of plantation labor practices, Richard S. Dunn asks: “Why did the slaves imported to the West Indian sugar islands die faster than they propagated, while the slaves imported to North America experienced marked natural increase?” In general, historians of the British West Indies have suggested that low birth rates on sugar plantations were caused by a combination of factors, all stemming from the severe conditions produced by the sugarslavery regime. Women failed to produce babies because, as Michael Craton and Richard S. Dunn argue, they were overworked and underfed, their fertility damaged by malnutrition, and they failed to produce babies, as Richard B. Sheridan contends, as a form of gynecological resistance, a refusal to perpetuate life under a labor regime dominated by the rigors of plantation monoculture and driven by the rapacity of managers and planters.27 Drawing on his analysis of Jamaican plantation records, Dunn argues that the high mortality rates and low birth rates for the Barham family estate of Mesopotamia were due to “deletrious effect of cane planting, weeding, and harvesting upon the strength and health of these slave laborers.” Field work was by far the most detrimental to the slaves’ health; field workers “executed strenuous manual work in regimented lock step, so that each member of the gang was forced to keep pace with the work of the others.” In combination with poor nutrition, field work destroyed the health of field slaves, condemning them to an early death in their mid-forties and damaging the “reproductive capability” of women, the majority of whom were employed as field workers as they were denied access to more skilled craft positions. During the period of  to , the records reveal that though sixty-one African women lived on the plantation Mesopotamia, there were only twenty-nine live births. The total number of deaths over this period was far greater than births. Absentee owner Joseph Barham was irritated by this lack of reproductivity and wrote to his attorneys who oversaw Mesopotamia to threaten his female slaves, for “unless they started to produce

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more children, he would punish them by reducing their food supplies.”28 Using food as a reward and its withdrawal as a punishment, a common practice among planters and their agents, was criticized not only by Grainger, who saw the economic benefits of healthy slaves, but by plantocrats who, like Sir William Young, thought of themselves as humanitarians, benevolent landlords, and kind masters. A promoter of provision gardens as a solution to the health problems that affected slaves’ productivity and reproductivity, Young was a prominent absentee planter who owned plantations on several islands.29 Visiting his estates in the West Indies, he wrote a record of his journey, A Tour through the several Islands of Barbadoes, St. Vincent, Antigua, Tobago, and Grenada in the Years  and , in which he urged other planters to follow his example and to encourage slaves to cultivate provision grounds as these gardens are the “best mode of feeding the negroes” (). What he likes about the provision grounds as opposed to the slaves’ dependence on the master’s distribution of food allotments is that the gardens encourage the work ethic, and the slave is rewarded “in proportion to his industry” (). Young argues that the provision grounds “affords him [the slave] a plenty that amounts to comparative wealth,” which places him on the same level as “any peasantry in Europe” (). He offers the example of Granny Sarah, a slave who, too old to work, is exempt from labor, and who “has a garden, or provisionground, to herself, in which, with a great-grand-child, about six years old, she works some hours every day, and is thereby rich” (). Young’s position on provision grounds combines a benevolent concern about the welfare of his slaves with an active and pernicious ignorance of the real conditions under which provision grounds were maintained. His eagerness to portray slaves as industrious is painfully ironic since field slaves labored from dawn to dusk, six days a week, sometimes more, under conditions that were physically and emotionally punishing. For slaves to find the energy and time to work on their provision grounds, which were often several miles distant from their homes in the plantation camp, speaks of a resiliency and determination that is nothing short of remarkable. Surrounding Young’s descriptions of provision grounds and embedded in his text is his defense of the institution of slavery. Writing for a British audience that had been made aware of the horrors of slavery by abolitionists, Young took every opportunity to defend the slave trade and speak positively on behalf of slavery. Key to his defense is his insistence that slavery is not inhumane, and that his slaves are happy, healthy, and even prosperous. “I particularly noticed the great extent of provision grounds, and the fine

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healthy looks of the negroes in general, arising from the plenty around them” (). Contrary to abolitionists’ reports, he claims to have witnessed no brutality: “I saw no marks of the whip on their backs, at least not here [Tobago] nor at St. Vincent’s. The punishments are either so unfrequent or so little severe, as to leave no traces for any length of time.” His editor, Bryan Edwards, could not refrain from making a remark that underscores Young’s naivete and his status as an outsider, for as an absentee, he was unfamiliar with the reality of plantation life and labor. Edwards’ note reads: “In the West Indies the punishment of whipping is commonly inflicted, not on the backs of the negroes (as practised in the discipline of the British soldiers) but more humanely, and with much less danger, on partes posteriores. It is therefore no proof that the negroes whom Sir William Young inspected had escaped flagellations, because their shoulders bore no impression of the whip. This acknowledgment I owe to truth and candour” (). This rather remarkable admittance of his friend’s error, remarkable because Edwards also was a plantocrat who supported slavery, undercuts Young’s authority as an observer, so when Young remarks that when he boarded a ship just arrived from Africa, the ship was as “clean as a Dutch cabinet” (), readers may wonder what measures the ship’s captain and crew took before coming into harbor to rid the ship of the dead and dying slaves who routinely “cluttered” the cargo holds of slave ships. An important part of Young’s attempt to persuade his readers that slavery is not a horrific or barbaric institution is to present himself as a benevolent master. In his text he transforms himself from a slave owner and a sugar planter into the morally sanctioned lord of the manor, and he transposes his slaves into a peasantry. Adopting the tone of an “Allworthy,” the just and kind landlord of an estate, Young tells us how happy his slaves are when he returns to his “ancestral” home in Antigua: “My good creoles, man, woman, and child, ran to meet me with such ecstacy of welcome, embracing my knees, catching my hands, clothes, &c. &c. that I thought I should never have reached the house. At length, in joyous procession, with handkerchiefs for flags, I was conveyed to the old mansion of my ancestors, and gave my good people a treat of rum, and all was dance and song” (). His duties as a good landlord include dispensing gifts, “ten barrels of herring” (), to the worthy, and listening to the grievances and requests of his dependents. He rewards women who have given birth with five yards of cotton “of the gayest pattern, to make a petticoat” (). Taking up the role of Solomon, he listens to his slaves’ complaints about unfair treatment from a steward and puts the matter right by firing this steward. Perhaps the joy the

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slaves expressed at his return was genuine; perhaps it was in expectation that the wicked overseer would be removed; or perhaps it worked to manipulate Young into being benevolent. Either way, he performs the role of the good master well. Young works hard in his narrative to erect the image of himself as the proper English gentleman who does his duty by returning (as need arises) to his ancestral home to superintend his dependents. Deploying the georgic trope of improvement, his descriptions of provision grounds are a part of his attempt to picture himself as an English landlord and his slaves as his tenants. Encouraging industry among one’s tenants was “enlightened” agricultural policy in Britain promoted by agriculturalists such as Arthur Young and Nathaniel Kent, and for Sir William to adopt this tone and approach with his slaves demonstrates his keeping up on the latest improvements in agriculture and affirms his moral fitness as a landowner.30 However, one passage in his Tour, in which he had meant to illustrate his philosophy concerning provision grounds promoting industriousness, reveals something other than what he had intended. I quote at length: On my estate at Calliaqua [on St. Vincent], forty-six acres of the richest ground are set apart for the negro gardens, where they work voluntarily in the two hours they have every noon to themselves, on the half-holiday in the week, and Sundays. . . . All this stock [pigs, goats, chickens] is plentifully fed from the negro’s garden, and how plentifully the garden supplies him will appear from the following fact. . . . When the new negroes [twenty children he just purchased] arrived on the estate, I thought the manager would have been torn to pieces by the number and earnestness of the applicants to have an inmate from among them. The competition was violent, and troublesome in the extreme. The fact is, that every negro in his garden, and at his leisure hours, earning much more than is necessary to feed him, these young inmates are the wealth of the negro who entertains them, and for whom they work; their work finding plenty for the little household, and a surplus for sale at market, and for feeding his stock. This fact was in proof to me from the solicitations of the Creole negroes in general (and who had large families of their own) to take another inmate, on conditions of feeding him, and with a right to benefit of his work. (–)

Young reads this incident of slaves competing for the “care of feeding and bringing up” of the newly arrived African children as a sign of how industrious and prosperous his slaves are. But the fact that the “competition was violent, and troublesome in the extreme” reveals not merely industriousness but some desperation motivating these slaves. For his slaves to cultivate forty-six acres on their “leisure days” and mid-day breaks must have been

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an enormous task, and one that could not be ignored as it was the main supply of food, especially since Young was only dispensing three pounds of salted fish per week.31 The idea that slaves have “leisure” time is a grossly inaccurate representation. Ashton Warner, a slave who lived most of his life on St. Vincent and then escaped to England, told of his experiences as a field worker to abolitionists who recorded and published his story in . Warner describes how the slaves worked twelve hours a day in the cane fields, starting at five in the morning and ending at seven at night, taking a one- to two-hour break in the middle of the day. During crop time, they had to work “half the night also, or three whole nights in the week,” and “after this the slaves have to prepare their suppers, for, if they have no very aged parents or friends belonging to them, they must do this, which occupie[d] them another hour.” Laboring under these conditions must have been exhausting for the workers; they needed what little free time they had for rest, and yet they were expected to work in their gardens. Warner explains: Besides the Sunday, they get part of twenty six Saturdays, out of crop-time, to cultivate their grounds. What I mean by saying they get only part of these Saturdays is this—that they are employed in their master’s work, such as carrying out trash, etc. from five to ten o’clock in the forenoon; and in the evening they must bring each his bundle of grass to deliver as usual at the calling of the lists, so that about seven hours, even of the day which is called their own, is occupied with their owner’s work. They are obliged to work on these days at the provisions ground if they wish ever so much for a holiday. If they are absent when the overseer inspects the grounds, they are flogged or put in stocks.32

The need for additional labor to cultivate these gardens must have been enormous. The slaves’ eagerness to acquire children as workers for their provision grounds arises out of their desperate need for help and rest as well as their desire to produce a marketable surplus. Young’s use of the word “apprenticeship” to describe these children’s work in the provision grounds contributes to his recasting of slavery as something akin to the peasantry of Europe. While Young may have failed to see that he was asking a great deal of his slaves by insisting that they play roles of both slave and peasant, asking them to do double duty and to perform in the very different realms of enforced labor and subsistence farming, his advocacy of provision grounds helped to lay the foundation for the success of small farming in postemancipation St. Vincent. As Virginia Heyer Young argues, the “availability of slave provision grounds and the production of surpluses on them allowed during slavery a measure of adaptation to the methods of peasant farming and

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marketing.”33 She suggests that these very provision grounds were the basis of a strong peasant agrarian economy that gave to the Afro-Caribbeans, in this case the Vincentians, the freedom to refuse plantation work in the postemancipation era, making it necessary for plantation owners to seek labor elsewhere, in India and China, for instance. Matthew Gregory Lewis, another absentee planter like Sir William Young, kept a journal of his trip to his West Indian sugar estates. Lewis presents himself in his journal as a benevolent master who has returned to make sure that his plantations are efficiently as well as humanely run.34 Writing in – and  after the abolition of the slave trade and the impending threat of the abolition of slavery itself, Lewis defends slavery, the source of his wealth, by stressing how happy and comfortable his slaves are, how well-fed and prosperous they are, and how much they are in need of his wise supervision. He enjoys recounting tales about his “people,” his slaves, and what he describes as their cunningness, recalcitrance, petty disagreements, and “odd” ideas about sickness and magic. Invariably the point of each of these tales is that these people, whom he describes as superstitious, lazy, and ignorant, need Lewis and his agents to provide for them, to manage their lives, and to preside over them as enlightened benefactors. Lewis adopts the tone and gestures of a paternal figure who is amused by the antics of his childlike charges. As a paternalist, he is somewhat disturbed, however, by what he sees as ingratitude; he wants his slaves to act as if they were grateful children, who obey and respect his authority, and to thank him for his small acts of kindness. It is not surprising then that any show of independence on the part of his slaves is disagreeable to him. Slaves’ provision grounds trouble Lewis because while these gardens maintain the health and contentment of his people, which is something he supposedly supports, they also create wealth and agency for his slaves. In managing agricultural land and gaining access to a market economy, his slaves earned a measure of independence that threatened Lewis’s notions of slaves as childlike dependents who needed the institution of slavery to keep them functioning. Though Lewis praises the productive powers of the provision grounds, he sees these sites as disruptive. Recognizing the potential of slaves to grow wealthy and independent on the surpluses from their gardens, he decides to dismantle the system that made this wealth possible. He declares that he has decided to redistribute the land allotted for provision grounds so that those slaves who through inheritance have accumulated several acres and houses as well would be forced to relinquish their holdings. “I made it public, that

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from henceforth no negro should possess more than one house, with a sufficient portion of ground for his family, and on the following Sunday the overseer by my order looked over the village, took from those who had too much to give to those who had too little, and made an entire new distribution according to the most strict Agrarian law” (). Ironically, this Robin Hood approach to land reform comes from a British landowner and plantocrat who had inherited many estates in England and the West Indies; and this policy of equitable division of land based on need is the very one that radical agrarian reformers like William Cobbett and Thomas Spence were advocating as a means of dismantling the political and economic power of the landed upper classes in Britain, something Lewis surely would have resisted. Proud of the way in which he has managed to redistribute wealth, Lewis describes how his slaves responded to his institution of a “just” system of landowning: “Some lazy and obstinate persons, of course, there must inevitably be in so great a number; but in general I found them excellently disposed, and being once thoroughly convinced of my real good-will towards them, they were willing to take it for granted, that my regulations must be right and beneficial, even in cases where they were in opposition to individual interests and popular prejudices” (). Calling those slaves who protested his administration of justice “lazy and obstinate” was Lewis’s way of discrediting their legitimate complaints. While it was ostensibly illegal in the British West Indies for a master to confiscate his slave’s property, confiscating slave property was something that abolitionists routinely reported as one of the many instances of slavery’s pernicious effects on property relations. Lewis does not recognize his so-called agrarian reform as a form of theft, for he seems to have forgotten what he had earlier in his narrative insisted on—that “my slaves are very rich (and their property is inviolable)” (). His need to dismantle the system whereby his slaves accumulated wealth and his refusal to recognize his actions as a form of confiscation bespeak his anxiety about the productive powers of his slaves, their accumulation of wealth, and their potential for independence that is consequent on the surpluses of provision grounds.

Supplying Sunday Markets Sharing Grainger’s and Lewis’s ambivalence toward slaves’ productivity, Mrs. A. C. Carmichael describes with much interest her slaves’ provision grounds, detailing all the vegetables and fruits grown in these gardens as

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well as explaining how the slaves cooked their produce. Mrs. Carmichael’s book, Domestic Manners and Social Conditions of the White, Coloured, and Negro Population of the West Indies (), has provided historians and anthropologists with detailed information about the conditions under which slaves as well as Creoles lived during the turbulent period just before emancipation. Writing of her five-year sojourn in St. Vincent and Trinidad in the s, she conveys an authority based on personal experience, for as the wife of a planter, she was the mistress of many slaves and took an active interest in their moral, physical, and emotional welfare. Her point of view is not that of a traveler writing observations to entertain and instruct his or her reader; rather, the genre in which she has chosen to write is the customs and manners section of a natural history, that protoethnographic tradition that describes cultural practices of “primitive” peoples. While Young and Lewis describe their impressions as outsiders, Carmichael establishes her credentials as an insider, someone who can understand what “really” is happening, things that are not apparent to the casual or uninformed observer.35 Like Lewis and Young, Mrs. Carmichael was a plantocrat, and she chose to defend slavery by describing how prosperous, well-clothed, and well-fed the slaves were in comparison to the typical British peasant. She argues that slavery, not free-wage labor, is in the best interest of slaves: they are cared for, given food, shelter, clothing, medicine, and moral instruction as well as a structured work life. She contrasts the lifestyle of slaves with that of the “free coloured,” arguing that “the coloured slave domestic is ten to one richer, and more comfortable, than the free one; and I never conversed with a free coloured domestic, who did not admit this.” Freed people of color, in her mind, suffered if unemployed or ill; they were “truly wretched, for they have nothing to trust to—no master, of whom they can demand all the necessaries of life, should they be sick, or unable, from old age, to work any longer.” She paints the life of a slave as one of comfort and security: “No accident, disabling him from work, deprives him of a home, food, clothing, or any necessary comfort, and he looks forward to old age without anxiety, or the chilling dread of poverty, for himself or his family.”36 While Carmichael may have sincerely believed that her slaves were happier and healthier under her care than if free, her position as a planter’s wife and as an apologist for slavery undercuts her claims of objectivity. One needs to read only a few pages of The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave ()— her account of being flogged, beaten, starved, overworked, and berated even when ill—to realize that Carmichael’s soft-focus version of slavery is questionable, if not grossly inaccurate.

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To support her argument that slavery is a system that is good for slaves, in that it protects their health and well-being as well as their property, Carmichael points to the productive powers of the slaves’ provision grounds and their market activities. Describing her first impressions of the “novel spectacle” of a Sunday market in Kingstown, St. Vincent, she writes: I saw, for the first time, bands of negroes proceeding from the different estates, some with baskets, and others with wooden trays on their heads, carrying the surplus produce of their provision-grounds to market. Accustomed to a devout observance of the Sabbath day, I could feel little pleasure in gazing on a scene which in other circumstances would have given me unfeigned pleasure—for it was something, to learn that negro slaves were in possession of, and could sell, the loads of surplus produce which I saw, and receive their cash in hand; and it was also something to see that they were, with the exception of very few individuals, dressed in that manner which indicates an approach to real comfort. (:–)

While she is not happy that market day is on Sunday, a day she thought should be reserved for religious observation, she is pleased to see slaves with a surplus, for this speaks well of slavery and counters abolitionist arguments that characterized slaves as bereft of industry and ambition because, as property themselves, they were denied property rights. Carmichael’s description of the provision grounds is unlike Lewis’s, Grainger’s, and Young’s in that it is informed by her point of view as a woman and as someone in charge of cooking and supplying her kitchen with produce. Not only does she explain how plantains are cooked—boiled, fried, roasted, made into soup—but she also includes how much they cost: “Two full grown bunches of plantains are worth from s. to s. d. sterling, if bought wholesale, but by retail they are exactly double the price” (:). She is very aware of the nutritional value of the foods prepared from the plants in the provision grounds, remarking on their wholesomeness as well as their monetary value. A passage describing one of the many items grown in provision grounds is typical of this double focus: “The pigeon pea is an uncommonly nice vegetable: its cultivation is easy, and every estate is full of pigeon-pea bushes. . . . They bear so richly that a negroe can pick in ten minutes, as many peas as would serve for soup for dinner to four or five grown persons: and if he choose to sell them, he would get from d. to d. according to the season” (:). The impression she gives is that growing vegetables is easy, and harvesting them is even easier. She employs the pastoral trope of nature’s bounty without human labor to underscore the ease with which plants grow in the West Indies, a trope suggesting that slaves,

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like those living in the golden age, do not labor in their gardens but merely reap what nature generously bestows. When she states that mint, sage, and marjoram “grow readily, by merely sticking a sprig in the ground” (:), and when she says that cassava, like the yam, is “of very quick growth, and gives immense returns” (:), she is suggesting that slaves reap a bountiful crop with very little labor, and she implies that they can therefore be lazy and yet prosperous. “The soil . . . is very fertile,—producing amazing crops, with hardly any labour” (:–). Like Grainger, she robs slaves of their labor and their knowledge of agricultural practices by implying the plants grow on their own without human intervention. It is clear from her detailed account of the food grown by slaves that Carmichael had learned over the course of her five-year sojourn in the West Indies how to purchase, prepare, and appreciate African and Creole foods. She details how slaves prepared dishes such as “plantain cakes,” mashed, cooked ripe plantains fried into round cakes, “superior to apple fritters” (: ); “souse,” salted, pickled pig’s feet “immersed in water well salted, lime juice sufficient to acidulate it, and plenty of country peppers” (:); and callaloo soup, “a most excellent dish indeed,” consisting of “green plantains, eddoes or yam . . . with an abundance of creole peas or beans, or the eddoe leaf, the calialou,” seasoned with a little salt fish or sometimes salt pork, and “well spiced with country peppers.” Her enthusiasm for “all the various soups, whether tanias, calialou, pigeon pea, or pumpkin,” is shared by other whites, as these soups “are to be found almost daily at the tables of the white populations, whose children are almost fed upon those messes. I never met with an European who did not relish all the different creole soups, or, as they are often called, “negro pot” (:–). She possesses knowledge about food, no doubt learned from slaves, most likely her cooks, that her male counterparts would not recognize, much less value, as knowledge. One of her methods for gathering information about slaves’ material culture— what they ate, what they wore, the kind of furniture and utensils they possessed—was by making the rounds in slave quarters, interviewing women while they cooked and cleaned during their “leisure” time. Despite her rather intrusive “personal investigation” into slaves’ “style of life” (:), Mrs. Carmichael fails to give an account of how slaves actually grew the plants in their kitchen and provision gardens. As we have seen, she relies on the trope of bounty—“the soil is so prolific and the climate so congenial” (:)—to explain the slaves’ surpluses: “the quick return of garden produce, often seemed to me like enchantment; and might very well have been ascribed by the negro to the agency of Jumbee,” a figure possessing magical powers in

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African folktales (:). What this passage reveals is that she has very little understanding of African and Amerindian agricultural practices. She does not have a clue how to grow cassava, or when to plant yams, and what is even more remarkable is that she feels no desire to intrude her inquisitive mind into this productive realm. With her pleasure in enumerating the produce grown in gardens and her obsessive recording the prices of produce— “I can state the exact price, from a reference to my accounts, having kept a daily detail of every article of expenditure” (:)—one might expect that she would have observed and kept a record of how slaves grew these exotic plants. Did they, for instance, use chicken excrement for fertilizer? Did they control slugs with ducks? Slaves, she tells us, raised chickens and ducks in their yards, but she provides no nitty-gritty information on slaves’ horticultural practices. The only time she registers some recognition of slaves possessing agricultural expertise is when she argues that slaves do not need extra time to garden during the cane harvest because that occurs in the dry months when “little or nothing can be done; what is planted, seldom or ever lives.” She continues: “If it [the plant] does survive, it does not come to such maturity as to be of good quality; but in general the soil is so dry that the root or seed dies in the ground. This I know from my own experience and the negroes’ information” (:). In her need to explain why it is acceptable to work slaves extra hard during the sugar cane harvest, stealing from them the little time they have for their own gardening, she abandons the trope of the magical abundance of the provision grounds and actually admits the possibility that growing plants can be difficult and that slaves possess important horticultural information. Carmichael’s silence on her slaves’ mastery of tropical agriculture can be explained as an unwillingness to admit that slaves possessed valuable knowledge. Her silence can also be explained as a form of willful ignorance: the African and American plants grown by slaves were so foreign to British people that they did not even try to master their reproductivity. With only one botanical garden in all of the British West Indies to disseminate information about tropical plants, perhaps agricultural information did not circulate in plantocratic society the way it did among the English gentry who read all sorts of farming manuals and treatises on such mundane topics as manure, turnips, and grass seed. Planters, too often absent to take any interest in tropical agriculture, or perhaps when present too focused on sugar production, might have felt unable to master tropical agriculture. Carmichael notes that English vegetables, like cabbages, peas, and onions, did not grow well in the Caribbean while African plants such as yams (nyami),

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eddoe, okra, ackee, plantains, millet, and watermelon did. Africans and their descendants knew techniques for raising African plants, and they also mastered growing Amerindian plants such as cassava, corn, and sweet potatoes. With the white population dependent on the slaves’ gardens for fresh vegetables and fruits, it is surprising that whites did not take a more active interest in managing the slaves’ provision grounds. Perhaps planters and their agents knew that they were far less capable as farmers than their slaves. After Carmichael has listed and described the slaves’ plantains, yams, cassava, eddoe, pumpkins, maize, various legumes and greens such as kidney beans, callaloo, and cabbage, and fruits like mangoes, avocados, and guavas, she writes: “there is not one slave upon an estate who cannot raise an abundance of these fruits, roots, and vegetables—far more than he can use for his own consumption” (:). The provision grounds are a cornucopia that creates an abundance that feeds both the slave and the market’s need for commodities. “There is not an instance of a negro who works well for his owner, who has not his provision-grounds in the greatest order, and full of all sorts of supplies, both for himself and the market” (:). The qualifying tone of the relative clause, “who works well for his owner,” somewhat mitigates her first assertion that every slave has an abundant garden, implying that some individual agency is at work in the garden alongside Nature, Flora, Pomona, Ceres, and Jumbee, that slaves deserve some credit for the produce grown and marketed. Other than this slip, Carmichael is fairly consistent in her depiction of provision grounds as sites of spectacular abundance, produced with the slightest of human agency. This agricultural abundance appears in markets; in fact, she says, “colonial markets are almost wholly supplied by the slaves” (:). The corn they grow in their provision grounds is used to feed poultry and pigs, which are also brought to market, so that “pork of a most superior quality may be had two or three times a week, and always on a Sunday” (:). Markets filled with pigs, chickens, ducks, goats, plantains, yams, beans, peppers, pineapples, guavas, and starches such as arrowroot and dried cassava were supplied by slaves who worked their provision grounds not only to feed themselves but to sell and exchange for other commodities. For most of the produce that she describes, Carmichael is able to provide a price tag. She wants her readers to understand that slaves are not only well-fed but prosperous as well: “There is not a negro who cannot easily accumulate his l. sterling every year, and very many save much more” (:). She vouches for the veracity of her description of the “many different methods by which slaves . . . live well and purchase fine clothing,” for she has “lived in town,

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where I was regularly supplied with all the fruits, roots, vegetables, poultry, eggs, pork, and also goat and kid, by the negro slaves, and from having walked again and again over the provision-grounds of estates” (:–). Carmichael’s description of provision grounds serves her larger aim of defending slavery by underscoring that the slave is the happy recipient of West Indian agricultural abundance and that the slave prospers under this system that gives to him the use of his provision grounds and lets him keep the rewards of his labor. Though Carmichael is eager to stress the slaves’ prosperity under slavery, she is ambivalent about the promises and dangers of the burgeoning island market economy, especially as it was driven by slaves’ productive powers and entrepreneurship. Carmichael delights in describing what she sees as the natural bounty of the slaves’ provision grounds, but she is less enthusiastic about their Sunday markets. Recording her early impression of the Sunday market as a problematic site, she is pleased to see the fruits of slaves’ industriousness but disapproves of the market being held on Sunday, a day she believes should be reserved for churchgoing, prayer, and reflection. Particularly irksome for her is the tone of the Sunday market, which is lively and colorful. Carmichael registers her surprise at the boisterousness and the freedom of movement and attitude that slaves display on market day: “I saw nothing of that servile manner which I had anticipated: all were frank, full of life and spirit, and talked to their master with a freedom which must be seen to be fully comprehended” (:). Other West Indian observers, Young included, were unsettled by this freedom of spirit and vitality with which slaves conducted their marketing activities. Young comments on how the town’s squares and streets are “crowded with negroes”; “their wrangles and conversation forcibly struck me” as their “language” was characterized by a “presumption of self-importance.”37 Slaves’ demeanor in the marketplace surprised both Young and Carmichael, but for Carmichael, whose stay in the West Indies outlasted Young’s by years, this scene lost its immediate charms. She indicates later on in her narrative that the slaves’ conduct during market days is disagreeable, calling the Sunday market “a nuisance” and of “no advantage” for the white population. However, she does recognize that “although so disgraceful a scene,” the Sunday market “is one of those customs which were it abolished other worse consequences might follow” (:), hinting at the potential for violence. Because these markets were held on Sundays, the slaves’ only day off, to abolish them in keeping with evangelical measures instituted in Britain would banish slaves from the marketplace and rob them of their potential

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to earn money and to acquire commodities. Carmichael, no doubt, realized that such measures would infuriate the slaves and make life dangerous for the white population. For Carmichael to hint at the potential for violence if Sunday markets were suppressed, she must have recognized that the rewards of cultivating these gardens went well beyond growing wholesome food for home consumption, but that the produce raised and sold gave slaves access to resources that made their lives much more comfortable and provided them with a measure of freedom (not only of speech) and autonomy not easily achieved under slavery. Sunday markets, run almost exclusively by enslaved Africans and AfroCaribbeans, were crucial sites of exchange in the pre-emancipation West Indian domestic economy and were dependent on commodities largely produced by slaves in their provision grounds. Growing produce for market required not only an expenditure of labor above and beyond the arduous tasks and duties assigned to slaves on sugar plantations but also agricultural expertise, knowledge of animal husbandry as well as a talent for merchandizing and bartering. In performing these various activities, West Indian slaves created a space from which to resist some of the consequences of slavery and the machinations of the British legal institutions that enabled slavery. Sunday markets were, as historian James Walvin notes, an “object of suspicion and dislike” by whites who were made uneasy by slaves’ independence and economic assertiveness and who disliked “that autonomous, selfconfident and assertive black presence on the streets.” While whites living in market towns were disturbed by the slaves’ “numbers, noise, the stridency of their language,” they were also dependent on them for much of the food they ate. Vending and higgling as well as working their garden plots enabled slaves to operate outside plantation slavery and to thrive “at an economically autonomous level,” forming in the process a distinct cultural identity, one that, Walvin notes, can be seen in the marketplaces of the present-day West Indies.38 * * * The market scene depicted in Brunias’s Linen Day, Roseau (see Figure ) has at its center a graceful and beautifully attired mulattress, who is escorted by a solicitous young man, himself either white or mulatto. She represents the highest rung on the ladder of social standing in Afro-Caribbean society as she is the most elegantly dressed and the fairest of all the figures depicted. The rest of the figures in the scene descend the class and racial ladder,

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ending at the bottom of the hierarchy with the figure of a man, most likely a slave, laying out on the ground his produce to sell, his bent back signaling his servitude and perhaps his exhaustion. Plantains, pineapples, and oranges can be made out in this dark corner of the painting. This figure represents the slave who is also the hard-working peasant-producer, someone who functions as both slave and peasant, producing an agricultural surplus that whites and blacks depended on for their food. Though Brunias has chosen to focus on the linen market, the most upscale of merchandizing that occurred in the British West Indies, his inclusion of this figure is a reminder of whose labor made the planters’ wealth and whose independent energies, agricultural skills, and entrepreneurial abilities were the foundation of the islands’ circulation of commodities.

Chapter 

Land, Labor, and the English Garden Conversation Piece in India

. . . entrusted with the Cultivation, Population, and Regulation of the lands . . . —Warren Hastings1

Johann Zoffany’s portrait of Warren Hastings, the governor general of Bengal, and his wife belongs to a genre known as the conversation piece, specifically the outdoor or garden conversation piece (Figure ). Enormously popular with the English gentry, especially in the mid-eighteenth century, the garden conversation piece was also a favorite with East India Company officials in the last decades of the century. Painted in the suburbs of Calcutta in the mid-s, this conversation piece of Hastings and his wife standing on the parklike lawn of his Alipore house performs ideological work around the georgic issues of land and labor, utilizing a particular visual and verbal discourse that had been developed domestically in Britain and then was transferred to India. I begin by reviewing some of the pictorial conventions of the traditional English garden conversation piece, and then I examine colonial garden conversation pieces, in particular those painted in India by Johann Zoffany and Arthur William Devis, son of Arthur Devis, himself a prolific painter of conversation pieces. This chapter examines the semiotic implications of the colonial appropriation of domestic forms, focusing on the contradictions entailed in the depiction of colonial officials in India within the conventions of a very English genre, heavily associated with sentiments about land, family, and heritage. Specifically, I examine how the incorporation of tropical plants and colonialized space disrupts, even subverts, the formal conventions and ideological codes of the traditional garden conversation piece.

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Chapter 

Representing Private Property Typical of the garden conversation piece is the depiction of the family on the grounds, usually the gardens or parkland, of their estate; some times glimpsed in the distance is the family’s palatial country house (Figure ). In terms of subject matter, the garden conversation piece lies somewhere between two distinct genres: the conversation piece and the country house portrait. The conversation piece depicts family members and/or friends in domestic interiors or outdoors on terraces, lawns, and pleasure grounds of estate parkland. Ronald Paulson suggests that the indoor conversation was “more conducive to the portrayal of a middle-class family and exact sociopersonal definition” while the outdoor conversation “displays an aristocratic family, garden imagery, and symbolism relating to art and nature.”2 Typical of this genre is the work of Arthur Devis, who in the midcentury painted both indoor and outdoor conversation pieces as well as country house portraits and garden views for his gentry clients3 (see Figures  and ). Devis employed a somewhat archaic style that emphasized “clarity of detail” over

Figure . Johann Zoffany, Mr and Mrs Warren Hastings, –, oil on canvas, . ×  cm. Victoria Memorial Hall, Calcutta.

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expression of personality to portray his patrons’ families, land, and possessions.4 The key to his success was his ability to define his patrons in terms of their possessions—houses, gardens, horses, dogs, children, and wives— for, as Paulson suggests, the “thrust” of the conversation was social and economic definition.5 Typical of his interior treatment is John Bacon and His Family (–), in which the two parents are surrounded by their children and objects such as a telescope, an oriental rug, paintings of ancestors, all participating in the enactment of family hierarchies and history. As D’Oench states, Devis’s “acute graphic perception of objects, costume, and possessions” was also quite effective in rendering outdoor conversation pieces. In fact, Devis’s only formal training was that of a view painter, working in Peter Tillemans’s studio, where he absorbed the seventeenth-century topographical tradition of painting English landscape. Devis’s Thomas Lister and His Family (–) employs the conventions of this topographical tradition in that “the spectator is elevated above the site and shown the house and property with graphic clarity” (Figure ).6 Devis’s ability to depict possessions was equally suited to outdoor conversation pieces, such as Robert and Elizabeth Gwillym and Their Family (–) (Figure ). As

Figure . Arthur Devis, Sir John Shaw and His Family in the Park at Eltham Lodge, Kent, , oil on canvas, . × . cm. Gift of Emily Crane Chadbourne, .. Reproduction, The Art Institute of Chicago.

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in most garden conversation pieces, this gentleman’s landed status is figured by his possession of an estate complete with house and gardens, and his dynastic legacy in land is signaled by the presence of his wife and children. The garden’s smooth lawns and parkland woods indicate his mastery over the terrain that extends beyond the house and garden gate to the estate and agrarian community.7 The garden conversation piece may also be understood as a subgenre of the country house portrait. Indeed, art and architectural historian John

Figure . Arthur Devis, Thomas Lister and His Family, –, oil on canvas, . × . cm. Gift of Emily Crane Chadbourne, .. Reproduction, The Art Institute of Chicago.

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Harris regards the garden conversation, which grew out of owners taking “pleasure not only in having their gardens painted but being portrayed in them,” as “never more than a minor vehicle for the display of the country house or garden.”8 The garden conversation piece, the country house portrait, and the estate portrait performed important ideological work in that they underscored the connection between land and family, a connection crucial to the eighteenth-century construction of social and economic elites based on dynastic landowning families.9 Portraits of landed families on the grounds of their country houses, in their gardens and parklands, were painted to celebrate, commemorate, and legitimate a family’s exclusive possession of a landed estate. The country house portrait and the garden view attempted to resolve on an aesthetic level the political, economic, and moral tensions aroused by the privatization of property that occurred over the course of the eighteenth century. These genres provided pleasing visual resolutions to class antagonisms produced by the enclosure of common land,

Figure . Arthur Devis, Robert and Elizabeth Gwillym and their Family, of Atherton Hall, Herefordshire, –, oil on canvas, . × . cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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the engrossment of farmland, the dispossession of the peasant-occupier, and the pauperization of the small farmer. Undergirding these changes in property relations was the redefinition of land as a commodity and the reconstitution of landholding as mere legal possession. Prior to this movement to intensify the privatization of property, landholding involved a complex set of moral, social, and economic relations between the landholder and his dependents, who included relatives, servants, tenants, villagers, peasants, and wage laborers. Landholding could not be reduced to ownership— the possession of a commodity—for, as Nigel Everett argues, landholding was, at least ideally and in the minds of a disappearing tradition of “Tory” landlords, an affective and social relation to the land and people of the estate community, one that was based on tradition, local custom, and inherited responsibilities. This change in property relations from a moral to a political economy surfaces in country house portraiture and garden views in the form of alienation.10 According to Ann Bermingham, the garden conversation piece celebrates the “self-identity of the proprietor and property” but also “betrays an alienation” between the proprietor and his property.11 This alienation is inherent to private property, the foundation of which is the transformation of land into a commodity.12 When land is reduced to a commodity, it is shorn of all historical, social, cultural, and affective ties that encumber property and reduce its ability to circulate freely on the market. As Howard Newby explains, ideas about land and property underwent significant changes over the course of the eighteenth century. Under “the new capitalist definitions of property rights,” land became “a discrete physical commodity . . . freed of social obligations . . . and separated from a network of social and economic relationships.” The new capitalist definition of property permitted landowners to do what they liked with their land—to enclose, to drain, to plant, and to build—“without reference to any social obligations, customs or traditional rights.”13 Strict Game Laws were passed to protect the landowners’ hunting and shooting privileges, and enclosure acts restricted access to land that had supported traditional activities such as gleaning, grazing, and gathering that were crucial to the well-being of small farmers and landless agricultural laborers. By the mid-eighteenth century, landowners exerted an unprecedented control over their property. Symptomatic of this exclusive possession of land as private property was the way in which landlords used scientific agriculture and landscape design to force the land (and its inhabitants) to conform to their needs and desires. In addition to transforming land into a commodity, capitalization of

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the rural economy involved what Max Weber refers to as rationalization: economic relations are purged of “irrational” ties based on custom, tradition, and social obligation, and defined in terms of “rational accounting” techniques; in short, economic relations were quantified. Agricultural writers, Arthur Young in particular, urged landowners to enclose and engross their lands, making them more cost effective, and to reconstitute land and labor as commodities to be “bought and sold under conditions of market competition and according to a calculation of profitable return.”14 Susan Staves describes this change in ideas about property as “a shift from qualitative distinctions (for example, forest versus meadow, freehold versus copyhold, life tenant versus terms of years) to quantitative valuation (equivalency in numerical cash terms).”15 These twin capitalizing strategies—commodification of land and the quantification of economic relations—transformed the rural economy in England during the eighteenth century, but at an uneven rate so that as late as the s, estate manager and agricultural writer William Marshall was urging landlords to rid themselves of rent rolls and other such customary practices and to insist on signed contracts to standardize and quantify their relations with their tenants. He was most critical of a “species of tenantry” known as a “tenant at will,” meaning the “only tie between the owner and the occupier being the custom of the estate, —or of the country in which it lies.” This customary practice of tenanting an estate, based on memory, family, word of honor, and face-to-face interaction, was too flexible and unstable for the new commercial climate and legalists like Marshall, who concluded that “legal contracts or written agreements” were the only profitable and “rational method of tenanting an estate.”16 Privatizing their land and transforming it into a discrete physical commodity were strategies the gentry used to dispossess the yeomanry and the laboring poor. But in erasing customary and traditional relations to land, the gentry also undermined their own affective and social relations to the land. In their eagerness to rid themselves of feudal-like encumbrances (the cottager’s right to glean the fields and to forage for dead wood, for instance) and to limit access to their land with the enclosure acts and punitive game laws, landowners, in privatizing their property, also stripped it of historical and cultural meaning. The peasantry’s customary ties to the land were erased, but so were the gentry’s customary relations to it, which included the obligation to superintend the estate community, to exert moral authority over cottage and village life, and to perform disinterested acts of charity with an expectation of receiving gratitude and respect in return. Possessing private property stripped of its social and moral relations, landowners had

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Chapter 

to face the psychological and ideological consequences of possessing a commodity rather than a legacy or heritage. While it is entirely possible that many landholders, especially those of the Whig oligarchy, were completely comfortable with and welcomed with enthusiasm the redefinition of property and the privatization and commodification of land, I believe that some landowners were anxious, even defensive about the implications of the privatization of property and dealt with this anxiety, in part, on the visual level by commissioning various kinds of paintings—country house portraits, garden views, estate portraiture, sporting art—that would reassert an organic relation between landholders and their land and articulate a sense of historical and traditional connection with their property. 17

Portraying the Landed Elite The garden conversation piece shares with the country house portrait, the garden view, and the estate view a concern with the politics of the visual representation of landownership. However, garden conversations, compared with country house and estate portraiture, present a slightly different visual and ideological solution to the representation of the house, gardens, and estate parkland. In order to assess these subtle differences, we need to examine in detail a few examples of country house and estate portraiture, reviewing some of their visual conventions and ideological components. Paul Sandby’s Hackwood Park, Hampshire () provides an ingenious solution to the ideological problems of portraying proprietors and their property (Figure ). Painted in the tradition of a topographical view, the picture affords us an expansive view of an enormous estate. Like many landscapes of estate property, Hackwood Park places the manor house in the distance, but unlike many paintings of this genre, the hall is so very distant that the viewer can overlook it. What captures our attention, instead, is a group of reapers just finishing a mid-day break from their labors. Placing figures of peasants in the foreground is typical of this genre, a device Sandby and others used frequently, but what is more unusual is his use of humor in the representation of these workers. Initially our attention is caught by the light on the shirt and staff of a laborer positioned in the bottom center of the painting. Our eye is then drawn counterclockwise around the circle of relaxing laborers, guided by the circular shape of the lit field and dark border of bushes. We may find ourselves looking again, making the circuit of happy, satisfied faces, finding amusement in the gaping mouth and thrown-back

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head of the sleeping man and finding pleasure in contemplating what is about to be his rude awakening at the hand of a fellow worker, a woman who teasingly holds out a pitchfork with which to prod him awake. The tree above the workers, with its arcing branches, moves our attention up and out into the wonderful sky with its swirling clouds, which send us back to the tree and then out again into the fields, where, guided by a line of trees, we finally see the Duke of Bolton’s country house. Why is this painting a solution to the problems of representing the proprietor and his property? It is not a conversation piece, like Devis’s Thomas Lister and Family; Sandby does not depict the Duke or his family. What he does create is a sense of the Duke’s superintending presence. We see the kind of landlord the Duke is by the well-cared-for state of his agricultural land, and we see his influence in the happy faces of the ale-drinking and prank-playing reapers. His workers are content and yet, more importantly, they are productive, for they have worked hard—half a field of hay has been cut and stacked. Sandby uses the estate and its laborers to represent

Figure . Paul Sandby, Hackwood Park, Hampshire, –, oil on canvas,. × . cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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the man, who, though he is absent, exerts his power on behalf of those who live on the land. In Hackwood Park, the estate is not represented as a site of accumulated wealth, nor is it displayed as person’s private and exclusive property. Hackwood Park is represented as an organic community that owes its existence, its productivity, and well-being to the stewardship of its landlord. Sandby depicts the paternal ideal, and in doing so, thoroughly mystifies the power differentials that undergird property ownership, successfully downplaying the exercise of power in possession.18 The inclusion of agricultural land and laborers in Sandby’s estate portrait suggests a complex set of moral and political ideas about landownership and the nature of property, which in this painting is portrayed not as a commodity possessed exclusively by the owner but rather as a lived relation between people, albeit a hierarchical relation, one based on duty and deference, responsibility and obligation. Affective ties define landholding, not merely mercantile or legal codes. Farmland and fields of grazing sheep and cattle, as well as suggesting a community beyond the walled garden of the country house, refer to a georgic ethos, which, as Michael Rosenthal has demonstrated, carries with it ideas of virtue and industry for the agricultural workers and owners of property as well. On the whole, Sandby’s Hackwood Park is a skillful resolution to the tensions surrounding landownership, presenting pleasing and idealized images of georgic labor and superintending paternalism. Country house and estate portraiture assert the power of the landed classes to rule the rural scene but usually soften this expression of power by alluding to an organic community knit together by reciprocal ties of duty and deference. Retaining the visual vestiges of a quasi-feudal communal life, most country house portraits and estate portraiture present an idealized version of country life, with references to bountiful harvests, happy and industrious peasants, and the comforts of village life, all of which suppress the brutal economic reality of capitalized agriculture and the commodification of land. However, not all country house portraits negotiated the ideological terrain of property ownership by referring to land, labor, and community beyond the private parkland of the manor house. Like Devis’s Thomas Lister and Family, many country house portraits and garden views focus entirely on the lawn, shrubbery, and trees immediate to the house, locating sitters in front of the house, which is variably prominent in the background of the painting. Typical of this kind of painting are extensive views of flat, smooth lawns stretching beneath a few parkland trees, with the house in the distance.19 These lawns, the kind that Capability Brown,

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the influential landscape designer, promoted, convey an image of absolute power: “Everything appears to be owned and controlled, clearly under the eye and authority of the proprietor.”20 Images of Brownian landscape with expansive lawns, infrequent clumps of trees, and artificial lakes and hills convey vexed messages about the landlord’s power to impose his will on the land. Brown and his followers were (in)famous for relocating villages, rearranging the banks of streams, sinking artificial lakes, cutting down avenues of ancient trees, and removing other such offending “eye-sores” from views of the house.21 This aggressive landscaping, which removed familiar forms and replaced them with a template of manufactured parkland vistas, was analogous to enclosure, for, as Oliver Goldsmith recognized, such landscaping practices were expressive of landlord’s complete power over his land and “the triumph of the private interest over the public.”22 Country house portraits and garden views with Brownian vistas tended to exclude images of agricultural land or labor, for such images would imply the community beyond the parkland and introduce into the painting questions about the exercise of power within this rural economy. The problem, then, for painters of garden conversations was how to make the landowners seem a natural part of the landscape while at the same time making sure that the landscape was recognized by viewers as an extension of the proprietor’s will. Without rows of wheat, grazing sheep, or the laboring bodies of agricultural workers, the garden conversation piece could not figure landowners as members of an organic rural community; however, there were other ways to naturalize the landowner’s relations to the land. One of these was to stress the “formal correspondences” between the sitters and the landscape.23 For instance, in Gainsborough’s John Pamplin, “his outstretched legs,” as Paulson notes, “are precisely mirrored in the branches of the tree against which he leans.”24 Another way for the garden conversation piece to assert an organic tie between proprietor and property was to use the bodies of animals to forge these links. Portraits of domesticated animals were one way a landowner could proclaim his tie to nature and to his land. Paintings of prize bulls, Ryeland sheep, enormous Staffordshire pigs, Clydesdale work horses, favorite racehorses, and dogs of specific breeds testified to the landowner’s emotional and financial investment in producing the best breeds of domestic animals. While farmers did not have the leisure time nor could they afford to dabble in the expensive art of breeding animals, the gentry and aristocracy were expected to take an interest in this aspect of “scientific” agriculture. Animal breeding took on patriotic overtones when agriculturalists argued that fitter and more productive

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livestock benefited all.25 Paintings that display prized animals celebrated the landlord’s patriotic investment in the health of his estate while simultaneously reinforcing the gentry’s and aristocracy’s privileged access to property based on birth, blood, and “breeding.” Sporting art also worked to create the feeling that the landed classes belonged on the land.26 Just as landscape painters placed agricultural workers in their pictures and depicted them performing the “natural” activities of sowing, reaping, and herding, sporting artists tried to naturalize the hunting activities of the gentry and aristocracy, making stag, hare, and fox hunting and the breeding of hunting dogs and horses the equivalent of “natural” labor. One painting that stresses parallels between the laborers’ and the gentry’s uses of the countryside is Bifrons Park, which had been attributed to Jan Siberechts (Figure ). At the center of the painting stands the red brick mansion, its walled kitchen and pleasure gardens, and beyond it stretch fields dotted with livestock and a horizon punctuated with church spires and columns of smoke. In the foreground a hawking party, consisting of gentlemen and ladies, rides up a rise in a road that cuts through a field filled with gleaners gathering the remnants of the wheat harvest. Hawking, hunting, and shooting all take place in proximity to, or as the case with Bifrons Park, in the context of such georgic activity, lending to sport the virtue associated with agriculture. Arthur Devis drew on these traditions of sporting and animal art, which, in addition to its display of privileged activities, functioned to naturalize the landed upper classes’ position in the rural economy. To bring ideological and aesthetic coherence to Leak Okeover, Rev. John Allen and Captain Chester in the Grounds of Okeover Hall, Staffordshire (–), Devis relied on a white dog, whose deferential gaze lights on Leak Okeover, the lord of the manor, and a prancing pony to tie the figures into the landscape (Figure ). In Devis’s Mr and Miss Bonner, the bodies of the sitters imitate the natural forms that surround them. Mr. Bonner’s upright posture and his bent knee mimic the shape of the tree behind him while the relationship between his two hunting dogs, one sitting upright on its haunches and the other lying under command on its belly, is repeated in the hierarchical and spacial relationship between the Bonner brother and sister. Through the bodies of animals and through the imitation of natural shapes, the garden conversation and country house portrait could portray the relation of the sitter to his property as a natural one, based on organic ties to land and by extension to community, and, thereby, could obscure or soften the legal and economic implications of their domination of property.

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Landscape in Anglo-Indian Conversation Pieces Garden conversation pieces that portray the Anglo-Indian equivalent of country houses and their owners sitting in English-like parkland grew in popularity when artists such as Johann Zoffany and Arthur William Devis (the elder Devis’s son) arrived in India in the s and s.27 Zoffany and Devis produced outdoor conversation pieces for their Anglo-Indian patrons, who were prosperous British colonial officials eager to establish their credentials as a ruling elite. Drawing on familiar forms of visual imagery that were associated with social status and political power, company employees chose to be portrayed as if they were landed gentry. In suggesting organic and hereditary ties to land, the garden imagery of the outdoor conversation piece lent a landed pedigree to these company employees. Along with giving colonial officials a means by which to augment their social status, the garden conversation piece also provided them with a way to express and resolve on a visual level some of the tensions produced by living in a conquered land. Because Anglo-Indians used the garden conversation piece for reasons both similar and dissimilar to their English

Figure . Artist unknown. Formerly attributed to John Wootton (–), and previously to Jan Siberechts (–c.). Bifrons Park, Kent, c. –, oil on canvas, . × . cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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counterparts at home, my discussion of the colonial garden conversation piece attends to ways it resembles and diverges from the traditional conversation piece, focusing on the treatment of house, plants, and grounds as well as the portrayal of family members and servants. While traditional estate portraits depict agrarian landscape, suggesting that the country house and its environs are part of a larger organic community, the garden view focuses on the gardens and grounds of the country house with only slight reference to what lies beyond the garden gate. However, because of its association with other forms of estate portraiture, the garden conversation, though its scope was limited to the house’s grounds, could imply an estate beyond the garden boundary. In this way, the garden conversation piece could confer on its patrons a social status beyond their material conditions. For East India Company employees, the garden conversation piece was the perfect pictorial medium in which to figure themselves

Figure . Arthur Devis, Leak Okeover, Rev. John Allen and Captain Chester at Okeover Hall, Staffordshire, –, oil on canvas, . × . cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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as an elite equivalent to the landed gentry back home. It is not accidental that such country house and garden views became quite popular in India at the end of the century, long after the midcentury affection for such paintings had subsided in England. What was so attractive about garden views to this colonial elite was that this genre, in addition to gentrifying company employees, could also express for them in familiar, almost comforting visual terms their very complicated and rather fraught relations with India, its people and the land. Johann Zoffany’s Mr and Mrs Warren Hastings (see Figure ) captures the social ambitions of the Anglo-Indian community as well as the contradictions surrounding landholding under colonial rule. In its representation of what appears to be a Palladian mansion set in parkland, this painting partakes of the tradition of country house portraiture. With its use of pictorial conventions, it alludes to those “Tory” ideas about landholding as a form of social responsibility based on local, inherited, and reciprocal ties of duty and obligation. Standing in the foreground with a vast lawn stretching behind him, Hastings poses with his wife and her maid as if he were a member of the landed gentry and the mansion behind him a manor house. In figuring himself as country gentleman, Hastings lays claim to a heritage and tradition that was not exactly his.28 In fact, he became, for many of his contemporaries such as Edmund Burke, the antithesis of the English paternal ideal. To them he was the quintessential nabob: the corrupt, rapacious, wealthy figure who was portrayed in plays, novels, poems, and prints either as a gauche, naive, upstart outsider, or as a degenerate and despicable adventurer, whose presence could endanger the morals and manners of traditional English society.29 Like all garden conversation pieces, Zoffany’s painting of Hastings defines the man in terms of his possessions: his property, his house, his wife, and his dependents. However, unlike the elder Devis’s painting of Thomas Lister, who asserts his command over the people and things that define him, Zoffany’s painting of Hastings is so full of contradictions that the formal codes and visual idioms of the conversation piece cannot quite contain them. To understand the depths of the contradictions at work in this painting, it will be helpful to review some of Edmund Burke’s ideas on land tenure as well as the language of his indictment of Warren Hastings for high crimes and misdemeanors against the Indian people. Though we must recognize that Burke’s inflated rhetoric is deeply biased and that much of his attack on Hastings was shaped by Philip Francis, Hastings’s enemy on the Supreme Council of Bengal, the language of Burke’s indictment, as Kate

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Teltscher remarks, reflects much of the popular writing on India that had been circulating in the press a decade or more before the trial.30 Building on this public discourse and borrowing ideas from the physiocrat Francis, Burke portrayed Hastings as the enemy to traditional landholding practices, both Indian and English.31 According to Burke, Hastings had violated the English code of gentlemanly conduct when he employed harsh techniques and corrupt agents to collect revenues for the East India Company. P. J. Marshall concurs with Burke’s assertions: “the revenue farmers had plundered the countryside and it seemed that they had often been able to do this because of corrupt bargains struck between them and the Company’s servants, including Hastings himself.”32 Hastings’s quest for revenues was productive of, in Burke’s famously inflated rhetoric, “arbitrary, illegal, unjust, and tyrannical Acts,” which were responsible for the “Destruction, Devastation, Oppression, and Ruin” of Benares, Bihar, and Bengal.33 Of the many charges of corruption that Burke and the managers of this impeachment trial lodged against Hastings, most pertinent to our discussion are those surrounding Hastings’s methods of revenue collection, which involved the redistribution of land. Hastings established a “form of revenue farming,” and while the “system clearly lent itself to innumerable abuses,” he was, according to David Musselwhite, utilizing the remnants of the Mughal tribute collection system.34 The Mughal system hinged on zamindars who collected revenues for rulers. One source of debate is the confusion that existed in British minds over what a zamindar was. For Hastings they were revenue collectors, and for people like Burke and Francis, they were landholders much along the lines of the gentry in Britain. Francis, according to Marshall, was responsible for promoting the idea that “the Bengal zamindars were not simply the possessors of certain revenue rights that had become hereditary, but that they were the outright owners of the lands from which they collected revenue.”35 Burke accused Hastings of setting the revenues too high considering the condition of the land in Bengal and Bihar, which had been ravaged by warfare, famine, and depopulation in the years previous to Hastings’s tenure as governor general. Burke further accused Hastings of instituting a system of land tenure that promoted rack-renting, a practice with which Burke, as an Irishman, was well acquainted. Burke translated the remnants of the Mughal system of tribute collection into the more familiar language of British landholding practices with phrases such as “quit-rents” and “ground rents” (:), turning zamindars into English country squires: “Zemindars have a perpetual Interest in the country; that their Inheritance could not be taken from them; that they are the

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Proprietors; that the Lands are their Estates, and their Inheritance; that from a long Continuance of the Lands in their Families, it was to be concluded . . . that solid advantages might be expected from continuing the Lands under the Management of those who have a natural and perpetual Interest in their Prosperity” (:). By figuring zamindars as country gentleman, whose relation to property is one of heritage and attachment, Burke had hoped to create sympathy for the zamindars in his audience, the House of Lords, by drawing parallels between landholding practices in Bengal and England, and to stir up resentment against Hastings for his dispossession of the zamindars. Hastings “put the Lands of Bengal up to a pretended public Auction,” encouraging “Strangers to bid against the Proprietors,” and in this way the “Proprietors were ousted of the Possession of their Estates” (:). The lands “generally fell into the Hands of desperate or knavish Adventurers” (:), and the short leases, sometimes as little as a year, were conducive, as Burke points out correctly, to rack-renting: “the Farmer, who holds his Farm for One Year only, having no Interest in the next, takes what he can with the Hand of Rigour; which, even in the Execution of legal Claims, is often equivalent to Violence; that such Farmer is under the Necessity of being rigid, and even cruel; that he will be tempted to exceed the Bounds of Right, and to augment his Income by irregular Exactions, and by racking the Tenants” (:). Hastings’s policies encouraged strangers and adventurers instead of hereditary landlords, and short-term leases instead of “perpetual interest”; both techniques were aimed at extracting the maximum revenues from the land in a short amount of time without providing assurances that any of those revenues would be reinvested in the economy from which they were extracted. (Again, the ghost of Anglo-Irish landholding practices haunts Burke’s description of the events in Bengal.) For Burke, what was most troubling about Hastings’s revision of the existing system was his “Contempt and Disregard of Property, Title, and Right” of the zamindars and his “total Neglect of Tenderness and Humanity to the Distresses and Calamities of the Inhabitants” (:). According to historian Ranajit Guha, Hastings’s policy of “revenue farming” did indeed undermine native landowning elites and hereditary property rights by auctioning “estates at the end of each term of settlement” and farming “them out to the highest bidders for leases not extending beyond five years.”36 Francis’s critique of Hastings’s system was, as Guha explains, “that a lack of permanence was inherent in the farming system itself. The farmers had no abiding interest in the lands settled with them; their leases were far too short to permit this; and all that was achieved in this process was the expropriation of zamindars of long standing. In

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short, the consequence of revenue farming was the subversion of property and there could be no form of instability more dangerous than this.”37 For Hastings to have commissioned a portrait of himself as if he were a gentleman visiting his country estate seems ironic given Francis’s and Burke’s charges against him as a destroyer of hereditary property. Hastings represented to country Tories and even some Whig landowners all that was wrong with the new “monied interest” and with the returning “nabobs,” whose wealth and ability to buy landed estates and seats in Parliament threatened the landed classes’ control over government.38 Zoffany’s portrait was painted before the impeachment trial and Burke’s attack on Hastings as the enemy of tradition, but well after Hastings’s institution of rapacious land redistribution and revenue-collecting policies. That Hastings allowed or even encouraged Zoffany to employ the visual trope of estate parkland, which carried with it connotations of organic community, to represent this governor general of Bengal must have seemed outrageous, even scandalous, in its assertion of hereditary landed status, especially to someone like Philip Francis. Zoffany’s treatment of shrubbery in Mr and Mrs Hastings raises questions concerning affective and historical ties to land. Most traditional garden conversation pieces contain judiciously placed and ideologically resonant trees that convey ideas about a sitter’s roots in an ancient, organic community.39 Zoffany’s use of trees in this picture is reminiscent of his handling of vegetation in another of his paintings, The Drummond Family (Figure  ), which, as Ronald Paulson has suggested, conveys a sense of the timeless, organic relation between land and family.40 In fact, Paulson’s reading of the Drummond painting, in stressing the placement of the children around the “enormous old tree, signifying the continuity of the generations,” relies on Edmund Burke’s idea of society as “a carefully balanced whole which embodies the accumulated wisdom of the past.” Paulson summarizes Burke’s notion of community and continuity eloquently: “Central is the sense of place which promotes the moral conditions necessary for a stable social order: a sense of continuity in the collective life of man, personal attachment to the past, and a sense of the firmness and gravity of land and society. The self only exists as a part of and in relationship to his society, its social forms, institutions, and past.”41 However, the tree behind the Hastings group is not an oak or an elm, as in Drummond Family ; it is a jackfruit tree, which produces pendulous and aromatic fruits, larger than human heads, that sprout from the trunk of the tree.42 This tropical tree does not carry with it the English associations of patriotism, family heritage, and traditional ties to place that an oak tree does. Though the jackfruit tree

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works on a visual level, framing the figures, mimicking their upright posture, and offering a dark background with which to contrast and highlight Mrs. Hastings’s white skin and Hastings’s white breeches and waistcoat, it thwarts the chain of associations that trees usually set into motion in conventional outdoor conversation pieces. It unsettles the formal correspondences that link the figure to the landscape setting, and in fact highlights the “alien” quality of this landscape, thereby undercutting any allusion to affective, historical, or organic ties to this land. An extensive vista in an outdoor conversation piece usually implies mastery over the terrain and the people subject to the landowners’ authority.43 For instance, in Gainsborough’s famous conversation piece Mr and Mrs Andrews, Mr. Andrews, who has just returned from a day of shooting, towers over his demur wife and exerts his power over his land, which has benefited from the latest agricultural innovations.44 His dog stands obediently at his feet, ready for his commands, emblematic of Andrews’s mastery over the natural landscape. Unlike Andrews, Hastings does not appear to be in control of the scene portrayed. He seems to be showing his wife their home, as if it were a gift he was bestowing on her. His extended arm points in the direction of the house, and his hat in hand, a sign of deference,

Figure . Johann Zoffany, The Drummond Family, c. , oil on canvas, . × . cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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implies that all that stands behind him is hers. His eyes look to her face for approval, and his right hand clasps hers in an unusual gesture of intimacy for the conversation piece. Men often are represented as looking fondly on their wives by Zoffany, and in Colonel Blair with his Family and Ayah, Mrs. Blair rests her hand on top of her husband’s. However, Hastings seems even more devoted to his wife than usual, and in his eagerness to please her, he seems quite deferential. In most conversation pieces, the husband stands while his wife sits, or if he sits, as in Zoffany’s Sir William Young and his Family, he is placed at the center of the arrangement of figures, all of which works to stress his authority within the family and to establish gender and generational hierarchies. This convention is subtly overturned with Hastings’s upward glance into his wife’s face and his tender grasp of her hand. Her elongated body, her height—at least as tall or taller than her husband— and her placement between her maid and her husband make her the apex of a slight triangle, suggesting that her power derives from being the focus of her husband’s attentions. Unlike wives in most conversation pieces, who are displayed along with the gentleman’s other possessions—houses, dogs, horses, and children—Mrs. Hastings is presented as if she were the queen of Warren Hastings’s heart. Instead of this painting establishing Hastings as lord of the manor, as is the case with most garden conversation pieces, Mr and Mrs Warren Hastings suggests that Marian Hastings has control over her husband’s affections and can extract from him such tributes as this house behind him. Indeed, Hastings’s affection for his wife was well known. As Mildred Archer reports, “adored by Hastings who lavished love and money on her, Marian had a passion for opulent and eccentric dresses not wholly relished by Calcutta gossip.” One of her satin riding habits, trimmed with pearls and diamonds, was said by contemporaries to be worth between twenty-five and thirty thousand pounds sterling.45 Such gossip hints at Hastings’s enormous expenditures, which aroused suspicions, especially in critics such as Burke, about his abusing the perquisites of his office; in particular, Hastings purportedly was extracting huge sums of money in the form of gifts or unpaid loans from Muslim and Hindu rulers and landowners. Zoffany’s treatment of Mr. and Mrs. Hastings provides just enough detail to encourage speculations, which still linger, connecting Hastings’s adoration of his wife with accusations against him of corruption.46 Employing the conventional features of garden conversations to portray this couple, Zoffany produced an image that is deeply conflicted. The essence of country house portraiture and the garden view is the celebration of

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inherited property and the assertion of an organic relation between the proprietor and the property. The historical facts of who Hastings was fly in the face of this cultural tradition: the property in this portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Hastings was not inherited by Hastings, nor was there any organic or traditional relation between him and the land, nor any reciprocal relation between him and the surrounding community. Money, not inheritance or tradition, is the foundation of his relation to this land; and money, for many eighteenth-century political philosophers, was “precarious and uncertain,” the very opposite of Burke’s notion of a “natural and perpetual Interest” in the land.47 For Burke, all the solidity of property, weighted with tradition, anchored in the past, was lost when land became a commodity. Even for Adam Smith, promoter of the new political economy, land was the foundation of social and economic relations, the basis of true wealth and civic virtue; money was unstable because it was mobile and ultimately based on imaginary credit. Smith argued, as did Burke, that landowners had a “fixed and permanent interest in their country of residence” and a “permanent interest . . . in seeing that society is prosperous and well-governed.”48 Once land moves out of the category of tradition and custom and into that of the commodity, it becomes as unstable as the money market and profits from corporate ventures, and it cannot nurture those ties of duty and obligation that bind landholders to their dependents in the reciprocal relations of the old hierarchical social order. With his policies of “revenue farming” and his own extravagant expenditures, Hastings represented someone who acted, in the words of clergyman Thomas Gisborne, in a “sordid and ungenerous manner” by putting his “private advantage” over the needs of the country he was charged with governing.49 Hastings himself remarked that “the primary needs of the Company conflict with the interests of the Indian peoples who are subject to its authority.”50 Hastings’s charge was to produce revenues for the company, and to achieve this he instituted revenue farming, which undermined hereditary property relations. For Hastings to be portrayed as if he were lord of the manor was insulting not only to Tory notions that linked landownership with social responsibility but also to traditional Mughal landholding practices.

Labor in Anglo-Indian Conversation Pieces Having traced some of the contradictions that inhere in Zoffany’s representation of land in Mr and Mrs Warren Hastings, I turn to the representation

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of Indians in Zoffany’s as well as the younger Devis’s conversation pieces portraying company officials. If Hastings were right that the goals of the East India Company necessarily conflicted with the welfare of the Indian people, then how, if at all, is this conflict represented in these portraits, most of which are filled with the figures of Indian servants and some with minor Indian officials and company employees? To understand the relationships between master and servant as represented in colonial conversation pieces, we must return again to the codes and pictorial conventions that traditional conversation pieces employ to depict labor, agricultural as well as domestic. Rarely do English servants appear in traditional indoor or outdoor conversation pieces. Arthur Devis’s Robert and Elizabeth Gwillym and Their Family (see Figure ) in which a servant is carrying a message from the house to the garden where the family is sitting, is exceptional in its inclusion of a household servant in a family portrait.51 Though a huntsman holding the reins of a hunter may have occasionally made it into a sporting conversation piece, very rarely do domestic servants—footmen, butlers, housekeepers, messenger boys, scullery maids, or cooks—appear in the traditional conversation piece, with the significant exception, however, of “black” servants, that is, servants from Africa and the Caribbean. As literary critics and art historians have argued, it was quite fashionable in the earlier part of the century for the upper classes to be portrayed with a black servant, frequently a boy dressed in oriental garb with a gold or silver collar around his neck. The Oriental costumes of black servants featured in paintings such as Kneller’s Duchess of Ormond and Richardson’s Lady Mary Wortley Montagu were not necessarily referring to New World slavery but to that of the Ottoman empire.52 The Orientalized black servant set into motion discourses that linked women’s beauty and sexuality to international trade and imperialism through the trope of women’s appetite for exotic luxury goods, such as silk, brocade, sugar, coffee, tea, and chocolate. In addition to these associations of exotic commodities and imperial trade, the black servant later in the century also referred more specifically to wealth derived from the West Indies. A conversation piece of Sir William Young and his family includes the figure of a black servant, a slave judging from his silver collar, to mark this family’s pride in their legacy as owners of West Indian sugar plantations.53 The inclusion of Indians as household servants in Anglo-Indian conversation pieces grew out of this tradition of including the black servant, an emblem of both colonial labor and imperial trade, in domestic scenes. In a conversation piece by Zoffany, Colonel Blair with his Family and an Ayah

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(), a British family is shown in a domestic interior with their Indian servant girl, who is dressed in her native clothing of pantaloons, long shirt, and scarf covering her head. While the presence of Indian servants in these paintings refers to labor regimes, including indigo and sugar plantations, that were dominated by British authority, there is a way in which their presence also harkens back to the earlier representations of black servants in portraits of court beauties and carries into Anglo-Indian conversation pieces ideas about imperial trade and the consumption of exotic commodities. This can be seen in Zoffany’s Mr and Mrs Warren Hastings, which contains the figure of a servant, a young Indian woman, who, attired in modest European dress, stands next to Mrs. Hastings and holds her feathered hat. The browns in the servant’s dress act as a foil to offset the lustrous sheen of the satiny yellow of Mrs. Hastings’s expensive dress. Marian Hastings, as a consummate consumer of exotic luxury goods, stands metaphorically atop an apex of colonial labor, her image rendered as a fetish, the repository of an excess of labor. Though colonial conversation pieces, which contain one or two “black” bodies, can be explained as an extension of conventions already established in traditional conversation pieces, the proliferation of Indian servants in several other paintings suggests an additional dynamic at work, one having to do, as Richard Leppert suggests, with representing imperial hierarchies. Leppert argues convincingly that “imperialism encourages the creation of a new convention of portraiture: not the absence of servants but an abundance of them.”54 Two examples of garden conversation pieces with an abundance of servants, underscoring Britain’s imperial mastery of India, are Arthur William Devis’s The Auriol and Dashwood Families and Zoffany’s The Impey Family (Figure ). The Devis picture contains an Indian boy and four Indian men, two of whom are servants, one pouring hot water for tea into an urn and another holding the coiling pipe of a hookah; the other two men seem to be engaged in business, one delivering a rolled missive and the other, holding a ream of paper, whom Archer identifies as “a broker holding a sheaf of bills.” Zoffany’s The Impey Family is crowded with eleven Indians, four of whom are servants and others who, as musicians, are entertaining the five members of the Impey family. Commenting on this painting, Leppert writes, “the native peoples mark Impey’s wealth and power.” Because “the jobs assigned to individuals could be ridiculously specific and confining,” the “gulf ” between master and servant is emphasized; “the home serves as the perfect microcosm of imperial order.”55 The large numbers of servants in these Anglo-Indian conversation pieces stand in for India, with its

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vast population and plentitude of natural resources. Clearly under command of their British masters, Indian servants, with placid, still faces and empty, distant looks in their eyes, are depicted as nonthreatening, deferential, and dutiful, and as if they have accepted this new regime of conquering masters. Though the black body, orientalized and made decorative, was incorporated into the representation of ruling elites, no such pictorial conventions within group portraiture existed to aestheticize white domestic labor. The invisibility of white domestic labor in traditional conversation pieces is puzzling, but perhaps portraying the upper classes’ triumph over their “own” people, celebrating their right to the working classes’ labor, might have seemed inappropriate, unseemly, or imprudent and provocative. Such images might have stressed rather than harmonized class divisions in England, revealing exploitative relations too openly. Or perhaps, as Nigel Everett suggests, class-based feelings of disgust for the “common” people operated in the upper classes’ desire to erase the bodies of white servants.56 However,

Figure . Johann Zoffany, The Impey Family Listening to Strolling Musicians, Calcutta, –, oil on canvas,  × . cm. Private collection. Photograph courtesy of Christie’s.

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pictorial conventions involving the georgic enabled the representation of white labor as long as that labor was clearly marked as agricultural. For instance, in the country house portrait Bifrons Park (see Figure ), agricultural workers—reapers, plowmen, shepherds, milkmaids, haymakers, and gleaners—dot the landscape. As John Barrell and Michael Rosenthal have noted, the georgic landscape, peopled with industrious laborers, is a landscape invested with virtue. So virtuous is an agrarian landscape that even the gentry’s recreational activities of hunting and shooting take on the qualities associated with the georgic and bask in the warm glow of virtuous exertion. Agrarian landscapes are figured as organic communities, where the elite partake along with the underclasses, the benefits of and exertions required by nature, albeit in a hierarchical arrangement tempered somewhat by notions of reciprocity and shared attachment to locale. If white servants had been represented not as dots of color in an agricultural scene but as fully rendered individuals complete with facial expressions, these servants would lose their invisibility, their status as objects, and rise into subjecthood. Perhaps feelings of unease dictated the absence of white servants in conversation pieces, an unease that grew out of a recognition that representation and subjectivity are intertwined. Class hierarchies based on difference are threatened when objects become subjects. However, black servants, even when portrayed in conversation pieces, maintain their difference through racialist and nationalist categories as well as visual traditions that relegate them to the realm of the decorative; for these reasons, their presence does not threaten colonial hierarchies in the same way that white domestic servants could have threatened class hierarchies at home.57 The absence or presence of white laborers in traditional country house and garden conversation pieces seems to be determined by whether the labor is performed indoors (absence) or outdoors (presence). Another causal factor seems to be the proximity of white laboring bodies to the landed sitters: the farther away, the more likely they are to be represented. With colonial conversation pieces, these dynamics are reversed: Indian domestic servants are present in abundance while Indian agricultural laborers rarely appear. One obvious explanation for this absence is that most Anglo-Indian outdoor conversation pieces do not portray landscape beyond the house and its grounds. Even in the few that contain extensive views beyond the garden, the panoramas do not include the figures of Indian laborers. For instance, the Devis piece The Hon. William Monson and his wife, Ann Debonnaire, contains, along with the Monson couple, an Indian man, clearly a servant, who stands at attention with a blank stare on his face, patiently

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holding his master’s hat (Figure ). Other than these three people, the landscape is empty; the expansive view, stretching behind them across a lawn with a columned villa, contains a wide river with a small boat and the river’s distant shores. Vistas emptied of native inhabitants suggest that there is no formal or structural relationship between the grounds of the house and the surrounding native environs. Even when the garden can be identified as part of an estate, as is the case with The Auriol and Dashwood Families, a conversation piece that Archer places on John Prinsep’s indigo plantation, no Indian labor other than domestic and bureaucratic is represented. Agrarian and even commercial Indian labor as well as Indian communities seem to be unrepresentable, at least within the conversation genre. With one exception, Devis’s William Dent with his Brother, John, and an Indian Landlord, Anand Narain (Figure ), which will be discussed in the next section, the colonial conversation piece focused exclusively on the families and friends of the Anglo-Indian elite. Only those Indians who were structurally

Figure . Arthur William Devis, The Hon. William Monson and his Wife, Ann Debonnaire, c. , oil on canvas, . × . cm. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, William Randolph Hearst Collection. Photograph ©  Museum Associates/LACMA.

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incorporated into British systems of command, such as household staff and company employees, were represented. This is not to say that British painters did not depict an India beyond British circles, for both Zoffany and Devis did, in fact, draw and paint Indian life; Devis even began a large project of drawing pictures of Indian occupations with the idea of producing a book of engravings that recorded Indian life and work.58 An explanation as to why Indian agrarian and commercial labor is rendered invisible in the Anglo-Indian estate portraiture and outdoor conversation pieces lies in Hastings’s own formulations about the role of the East India Company in governing the people of Bengal, Bihar, and Benares. During Hastings’s tenure, there was little attempt to obscure the fact that the goal of the company was to extract as much wealth from India as possible. Defending his land revenue policies at his impeachment trial, Hastings argued that he did not ruin and depopulate “the provinces entrusted to my care,” nor did he oppress “the native inhabitants by my extortion.” He says, “My Lords, in refutation of the First, namely, that I ruined the country committed to my care, I need only say, I increased the revenues of my government from three million to five. They have increased since my departure, and are still increasing; infallibly proving thereby an increased population, and a good government in former years. The accounts delivered annually to the House of Commons by the Minister in India are, indeed, the best answer that can possibly be given to the Charge which I am now speaking of.”59 Hastings’s description suppresses the violence on which such expropriations were dependent, for collection of taxes was enforced by the military. Though Hastings appears to have seen no contradiction between the company’s profit-making goals and its governance of northern India, it is to be wondered how such a huge drain of wealth would not have harmed the local and regional economies of India. This wealth was not reinvested in the land from which it was expropriated, except when it was used to pay for military and bureaucratic infrastructure that was required for the collection of revenues. Not yet developed was Cornwallis’s institution of a supposedly disinterested bureaucracy; nor was the nineteenth century’s imperialist ideology of the white man’s burden fully articulated. Without these doctrines fully in place, the contradictions of a commercial entity, the East India Company, acting in a judicial and administrative capacity in India became, with Burke’s efforts, troublingly apparent.60 As P. J. Marshall states, “social justice was less of a concern to the Company than the security of its revenue.”61 If the exigencies of the East India Company dictated a conflict of interests with the Indian people, then why the popularity among the Anglo-Indian

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elite of genres, such as the garden view and outdoor conversation piece, which are laden with organic or communal imagery? Though Zoffany and Devis depicted Anglo-Indians through traditional genres that had been developed out of a need to resolve tensions surrounding landownership and domination of rural economies within Britain, they tended to restrict themselves to garden views, which were better suited than estate portraiture to the political reality of India. The garden view, with its narrow focus on the grounds of the mansion, avoided depicting a landscape that could not convey through Indian laboring figures the georgic virtue so often evoked in traditional country house and estate portraiture. In short, the garden view simultaneously implied through association but avoided representing what was impossible in India: the ideal of an organic, hierarchical, but mutually constitutive community, one based on reciprocity and shared goals. The Anglo-Indian ruling elite could not pretend, as had their counterparts in Britain, that they existed in some harmonious relation with the populace, nor did they gesture in the direction of some shared past or refer to a future built on common goals. The British in India did not possess traditional practices or residual rituals that referred to the moral economy of a quasifeudal past, which the gentry could call on to temper or mystify the relations of exploitation that undergirded the English rural economy.

Devis’s Hybrid Conversation Pieces The colonial garden conversation piece was not always successful in suppressing questions about the moral legitimacy and economic practice of landholding as it was constituted in Bengal and Bihar by the East India Company. As long as formal correspondences between sitters and landscape were minimized and the presence of servants did not compete with their employers for the viewer’s attention, the garden conversation piece was up to the task of expressing the subtleties of British power over Indian land and labor. However, in several of his garden conversations, the younger Devis failed on both counts, producing some very beautiful but conflicted images that gave too much prominence to servants and failed to contain the formal correspondences between sitters and plants. Exacerbating the tendency for instability within the colonial garden conversation was Devis’s attention to detail, an attention most likely derived from his experience as natural history draftsman. Previous to his arrival in India in , he had been employed as the illustrator for the voyage of the

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Antelope to Asia and the South Pacific. Mildred Archer speculates that his experience as the expedition’s artist shaped the way he approached Indian people and places, so that he rendered them with a high degree of specificity. In attending to the task of representing not an idealized landscape but an actual one, Devis went beyond the requirements of the genre in which he was working, providing more detailed information than necessary or desirable. By bringing natural history’s closely observed detail to bear on his depiction of his sitters and their gardens, Devis introduced elements and ideas that contradicted the goals of the genre. In his handling of figures, Devis bestows just as much attention on the servants as he does on their patrons, rendering them as fully realized human beings. Not relegated to the margins nor subordinated visually, Devis’s servants are portrayed with careful attention to the details of dress, expression, and gesture. In The Honorable William Monson and His Wife, Ann Debonnaire (Figure ), a servant stands next to the couple, holding Mr. Monson’s walking stick and hat. The servant’s clothing is rendered so precisely that we can see the silken border on his jama and the folds of his cummerbund wound around his waist. His face, with its drooping moustache and eyes staring resolutely into the distance, possesses at least as much individuality as Mr. Monson’s, and possibly more than Mrs. Monson’s sweetly placid face, which conveys very little affect at all. So detailed is Devis’s depiction of the servant that we can even count the toes of his bare feet. Though the servant stands a bit behind the couple, his figure balances the composition. Structurally, he is a part of this group, not an embellishment but the third figure in a group of three who are tied together through color and composition. The servant’s head makes up the third corner of a triangle, the other two corners defined by Mr. and Mrs. Monsons’ heads. His red head-covering and red-striped trouser legs echo Monson’s red jacket, and though he is smaller than Monson and stands a bit behind the English pair, his masculine presence, marked by this red, frames Mrs. Monson and the subtle beauty of her beige gown. Devis’s treatment of this servant, especially his detailed rendering of his dress, owes much to the ethnographic tradition of recording another culture’s different attire; however, Devis goes beyond the ethnographic tradition by portraying Indians not as types with one generic face or expression, but as individuals. Devis’s attention to detail combined with compositional arrangement that gave weight to the presence of servants produced a powerful record of British-Indian interactions within the company domain of office, home, and garden. His indoor and outdoor conversation pieces document hierarchical

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relations between company officials and their Indian employees and servants. As with most conversation pieces, Devis’s pictures evince a concern with power and control over space and those who occupy that space. Mr. Monson towers over his wife, taking up a proprietary posture that can be seen in Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews as well as any number of the elder Devis’s conversation pieces, and Monson’s massive, elongated body contrasts not only with his wife’s smaller, rounded figure but also with the servant’s more delicate frame. Mr. Monson dominates the picture, which is typical of the conversation piece, and yet Devis has introduced elements that subtly undercut Mr. Monson’s authority. Mr. Monson and the servant occupy similar space in relation to Mrs. Monson, setting up an equivalency between the two, though acknowledging cultural and class difference through clothing. The shared red strengthens the visual conversation between these two men, drawing our attention back and forth between their red and white clothing. Even their feet speak to each other, one pair shod and the other bare. The strong line created by Monson’s torso and legs, both clothed in a bright white, captures our attention, but this line is countered by the tree behind the servant: the tree appears to move up and out from the body of the servant, lending to him a counterweight that balances the visual impact of Monson’s body. All these elements work to undermine those hierarchies, based on race, class, and gender, that the conversation piece was meant to maintain. In addition to the contradictions inherent in representing land and labor in India, the garden conversation often bore the marks of visual and ideological dissonance created by the incorporation of tropical plant life. We have seen how Zoffany’s use of a jackfruit tree to frame Hastings and his wife unhinges the visual equivalencies that undergird the garden conversation piece, equivalencies between tree trunks and manliness, smooth lawns and the command of space, venerable oaks and family lineages, all of which work to suggest the organic ties between property and the proprietor. The cultural meanings attached to Indian plant life resonated in ways that were beyond the control of British artists and sitters. Devis, in particular, had a tendency to blur the boundaries between the sitters and the natural setting, and his attention to the specifics of place as well as his closely observed depiction of plant life disrupted the way in which the genre visually linked land and landowner through formal correspondences between people and plants. An important element in the outdoor conversation piece is, as Paulson points out, the way in which bodies mimic natural forms, and in doing so,

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establish organic ties between proprietor and property. For example, as mentioned earlier, in the elder Devis’s Mr and Miss Bonner, Mr. Bonner’s posture echoes the shape of the tree against which he stands, suggesting that he, like the venerable tree, is rooted in the land and local tradition. Working less emblematically and more aesthetically, Gainsborough would often paint people and landscape in a similar manner. For instance, the feathery brush strokes he used to paint a person’s hair would be the same he used to depict a tree’s leaves. In The Morning Walk Gainsborough’s brushwork naturalizes the happy couple’s presence in the wooded parkland by applying the same texture to Mrs. Hallet’s hair, their dog, and the shrubbery behind them. With such painterly techniques, as Bermingham argues, “Gainsborough attempts to overcome the separation of man and nature.”62 While such a statement suggests the Romantic period’s obsession with man’s spiritual relationship to nature—and this may indeed apply to Gainsborough’s work— the conversation piece, as a subgenre of the country house portrait, was not interested in such metaphysical concerns as universal man’s alienation from nature. Instead, the conversation piece is, as Paulson suggests, about social definition based on land as property and heritage. Those correspondences between natural and human forms that are found in conversation pieces work to validate the owner’s legitimacy as sole possessor of this land. The problem, then, with Anglo-Indian conversation pieces, as we have seen, is that to imply that the Briton figured standing on his lawn beneath his trees is structurally linked to the land is to send a very confused message about the Briton’s ties to India. Within the traditional English conversation piece, an implicit nationalism is at work in associating the trunk of an oak tree to the trunk of a landowner’s body: both body and tree are products of British soil. Social definition in terms of race and nation, as well as class, emerge in this linkage of soil to trees and to bodies. In India, however, standing on soil that produced jackfruit and banyan trees, the British colonizer, though shaped by his experience in India, perhaps even produced by it, was a stranger and someone who dominated, not “naturally” through inherited social structures, but through economic coercion and the force of law. Of his many conversation pieces, Devis produced two so complex in their treatment of land, labor, and plant life that they defy the conventions of the garden conversation. Most conversation pieces depict families, featuring a gentleman with his wife, children, siblings, and even parents. Devis takes a family group, the Dents, and, instead of portraying them as a group at leisure in their pleasure gardens, divides the family into two paintings, one of Mrs. Dent and her children in their gardens, and the other of

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Mr. Dent, accompanied by his brother, supervising a feoff ceremony on the grounds of his new house (Figures  and ). Both portraits include the house and lake but treat the landscape in very different ways. Atypically, this pair of pictures focuses on the depiction of gendered, separate spheres of activity. Mrs. Dent occupies, with her children, the private domestic sphere while Mr. Dent is placed in the public sphere of manly exertion. Even more atypical is the depiction of labor in Mr. Dent’s portrait. The landscape he occupies is crisscrossed with commercial interactions, including the feoff ceremony, in which a laborer digs up a clod of earth as a symbol of the exchange that is taking place between the owner of the property, Anand Narain, and Mr. Dent, who is leasing this land on which he has built a Palladian country house. The feoffment ceremony implies that the lease Dent is in the process of obtaining is most likely a lease in perpetuity, which under common law approximated freehold land. Also figured are laborers carrying bundles, most likely of salt, toward a barge that floats on the same

Figure . Arthur William Devis, William Dent with his Brother, John, and an Indian Landlord, Anand Narain, , oil on canvas, . × . cm. Private collection. Photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s.

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lake that is featured in Mrs. Dent’s portrait. With these bundles, Mr. Dent’s position within the Bengal Civil Service, as salt agent, is evoked. To foreground work, not only that of laborers but also that of bureaucratic and company employees, is a radical break with traditional conversation pieces. As Ann Bermingham has pointed out, georgic landscape is usually represented, if at all, in the margins or far distances of garden conversation pieces. Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews, she argues, is an anomaly in its depiction of a landowner standing in the midst of the harvested wheatfield, a landscape bearing the marks of fieldhands’ labor. Devis goes well beyond Gainsborough’s allusion to labor by depicting workers in the act of working. Also pushing the boundaries of the genre is the way in which Devis accentuates the formal correspondences between his sitters and the natural

Figure . Arthur William Devis, Louisa Dent and her Children, , oil on canvas, . ×  cm. Private collection. Photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s.

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setting. The swirls and curves in Mrs. Dent’s hair, shawl, and dress mimic the twisted shape of the pipal tree’s trunk, in front of which she sits. Likewise, Mr. Dent stands beneath a tall, straight tree; his posture echoing the tree’s upright thrust. Such mimicry suggests that the Dents may be less in control of the landscape than they are a part of it. Though the Dents’ Indian property has been shaped to suit British tastes with its stretches of lawn, sunken ponds, and clumps of trees, all reminiscent of Brownian landscapes, questions about their mastery over Indian landscape arise as they seem to be absorbed into it. Most disruptive of the genre’s conventions is Devis’s detailed treatment of trees, which renders them identifiable; and, as such, these trees, a neem and a pipal tree, carry cultural meanings over which the artist and his sitters have incomplete control. These trees, not easily subsumed by the codes of the garden conversation, fail to speak softly and deferentially of the sitters’ relation to the land; instead they have stories of their own, significances beyond the power and knowledge of Anglo-Indian colonial officials. Devis’s trees in the Dent portraits compete with the Britons and refuse to be merely props in the telling of stories about British imperial power. The neem tree (Azadirachta indica), like the oak and elm, conveys ideas and narratives, but these ideas and stories are Indian, not British. Pipal and neem trees, for Hindus, connote idyllic Indian village life, for, as the author of The Trees of Calcutta writes: “the two sacred figs, the peepul and the banyan, must again be mentioned, for it is difficult to imagine a Bengal village without them, and beneath their spreading limbs much of the life of the village is carried on,—the games of the children, the evening deliberations of their elders, and the devotions of the pious Hindus.” Furthermore, the pipal and the neem tree are paired in the Hindu imagination and myth as mates; the neem tree is thought of as female tree despite the tall and upright thrust of its trunk, and the pipal or peepul, despite its curves, is male. “The peepul is considered to be the male counterpart of the neem, or margosa, tree (which is regarded female), and a wedding ceremony is sometimes celebrated between the two trees by planting a young neem close to a peepul and conducting the usual rites connected with marriage. These and other beliefs and customs cause the peepul to be regarded with great reverence and the destruction of a tree is considered a sin.”63 Devis and the Dents may have known that these trees convey ideas about married couples and may have tried to incorporate these ideas into this pair of paintings. The binaries set into play by this husband and wife pairing of portraits—feminine/masculine, leisure/work, beauty/money— are echoed by the neem’s perpendicular shape and the curves of the pipal

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tree, suggesting that the gender politics of the separate spheres are grounded in natural differences. But did Devis and the Dents misunderstand the Hindu meaning attached to the neem and pipal trees? Did they really mean to have Mrs. Dent’s form mimic a masculine tree and Mr. Dent’s figure to imitate a feminine tree? To the uninitiated, the trees seem to support a gendered division of labor, but when their Indian servants looked at these paintings, what did they think? Did they snicker at the foolishness of their masters who had confused the male and female identities of the pipal and the neem? Or perhaps the neem tree in Mr. Devis’s portrait stands in for Mrs. Dent and vice versa, suggesting that the separate spheres of female and male activity are not so separate after all.64 These ambiguous images convey the precariousness of British knowledge of and control over India. In representing Anglo-Indians in their gardens, Arthur William Devis produced hybrid images that raise questions about British authority in India. The power to impose one’s will on the land and its people is what the garden conversation piece is all about, sharing with its cousins, the estate view and country house portrait, the representation of landed elites’ naturalized control of the rural economy. With Louisa Dent’s swirling gown and her husband’s upright posture mimicking tropical plants redolent with Hindu meaning, these pictures suggest an organic relationship between British sitters and the Indian landscape, which unsettles rather than asserts the power of Britons to domesticate India for their pleasure and profit. Undercut and disturbed is that easy superiority that is to be found in the countless traditional conversation pieces that represent English landowners on English land, the uncontested masters of their domain. The question remains, then, why the popularity of the garden conversation piece in British India? Why employ a genre laden with imagery that figures organic ties to land and implies moral ties to a rural community? One reason, perhaps, why the garden conversation appealed to Britons as a way to document their sojourn in India was that it provided them a visual vocabulary that articulated their mastery over an alien terrain in familiar terms. The discourse on English country life, complete with its mystifying idealization of the gentry’s role in the agrarian scene, enabled them to simultaneously convey their mastery while mystifying their violent and exploitative relations with India. Even more important, perhaps, for its patrons was the kind of ideological work that the garden conversation could perform around identity issues. The garden imagery of the outdoor conversation piece helped to obscure the mercantile and bureaucratic occupations of these employees of the East India Company. Finally and most importantly,

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the garden conversation signaled their status as a ruling elite on a par with the landed gentry back home in Britain. Anglo-Indians, like their West Indian counterparts, always intended to return home, bringing enough wealth to marry or buy into the landed ruling classes of Britain. To be portrayed as if they were English country gentlemen may have been premature and even presumptuous for these company employees, but such portraits allowed them to imagine simultaneously the world in which they lived and the world in which they hoped to live, giving them a doubled sense of place and identity. Yet we can see in this colonial mimicry of the domestic landed elite the potential for unintentional parody of not only the conventions of the traditional conversation piece, but also of their own desires, for in their repetition of English formulas, these company employees reveal their desperation to legitimate their power in this alien land.

Chapter 

Picturesque Ruins, Decaying Empires, and British Imperial Character in Hodges’s Travels in India

I want to explore landscape as a place of amnesia and erasure, a strategic site for burying the past and veiling history with “natural beauty.” —W. J. T. Mitchell 1

India’s countryside, sometimes glimpsed in portraits through windows or from garden terraces, was not depicted in any systematic way by British artists until the arrival of William Hodges, the first professional landscape artist from Europe to work in India. Hodges held a unique position among artists of his time; he served as a draftsman for two of Britain’s most famous imperial agents, Captain James Cook and Warren Hastings, governor general of Bengal. Under their auspices, Hodges produced an astonishingly beautiful and complex visual record of the deeds of empire. In  Hodges accompanied Cook and his team of scientists on Cook’s second circumnavigation of the globe, and in  he went to India, where he had hoped to make his fortune drawing and painting exotic landscapes for colonial officials.2 After nearly four years in India, Hodges returned home with over ninety drawings of South Asian landscapes in pencil, ink, and wash. From these drawings he produced many oil paintings, which, along with those he had painted in India, he exhibited in the Royal Academy. Between  and , he published a set of forty-eight aquatints also based on his drawings, titled Select Views in India. In the early s, a friend, the poet laureate Henry James Pye, encouraged him to write a book about his experiences in India. In  he published Travels in India during the Years , , , and , a description of his sojourn in India, complete with fourteen engraved illustrations based on his drawings.3

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Travels in India is a remarkable text. As one of the earliest, if not the earliest, published travel accounts by a professional British artist, this book links aesthetics to colonial practice in complex and subtle ways. Combining illustrations with narrative, Hodges’s book constructed a particular vision of India that promoted the British imperial project in northern India and functioned as a defense of Hastings’s conduct as governor general of Bengal. Specifically, Hodges’s deployment of the visual and verbal discourse on ruins worked metonymically to construct the Mughal imperium as decadent and decayed, as an entropical force of ruination and devastation that invited British intervention and eventual usurpation. In addition to justifying Hastings’s expansionist policies, Travels engages explicitly with questions concerning the role of the artist in the production of knowledge about lands beyond Britain’s bounds, lands which were to define Britain’s imperial character after the loss of its American colonies. For Hodges, landscape was a social text that must be read to be understood, and in this book he offers the landscape artist as an expert at reading terrain as an object of inquiry. With this claim, Hodges distanced himself from his contemporaries’ limited view of landscape artists as mere topographers and recorders of visual facts.4 For Hodges, landscape painters, with their well-trained visual abilities, were at least as adept at deciphering the significance of cultural and natural topographies as the “experts,” who, in the case of India, were company employees who combined their official duties with their activities as amateur linguists, historians, antiquarians, and protoethnographers. Ultimately, what emerges over the course of Hodges’s narrative is a demonstration of and argument for artists as producers of knowledge about the unknown, for artists, Hodges suggests, possess aesthetic sensibilities and critical abilities that qualify them to engage with the liberal arts and philosophical questions concerning culture, character, and the nature of civilization. This chapter examines the range of aesthetic and learned discourses Hodges deploys in his narrative and in his illustrations, focusing on his frequent recurrence to the trope of the ruin. I argue that Hodges’s use of the “ruin sentiment” enables him to signal his cultural sophistication, to pose as an Orientalist, and to construct an imperial identity around a melancholic identification with Mughal artistic achievement.5 It is my contention that Hodges’s display of aesthetic and learned discourses participated in the construction of a particular kind of British imperial identity, one grounded in aesthetics and connoisseurial expertise, which was to gain ascendency in the Raj during the nineteenth century.

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Aestheticizing India Much of Travels in India details Hodges’s experiences as he followed Governor General Hastings and his military forces on their northern tour through the provinces of Oudh, Benares, and Bihar. Hastings had hoped that a show of military force would make for more efficacious collection of revenues for the East India Company from various rajahs, nawabs, and zamindari in these regions. Hastings had asked Hodges to draw the countryside, in particular the various cities and forts, often under siege by British forces, as they progressed through the region. Hodges tells us with pride that not many men in his profession had the opportunity of watching British troops lay siege to a fort. Not only did Hodges travel with Hastings’s entourage, he also journeyed with various British Residents and military officers while they performed their official duties. Though a significant portion of the narrative is taken up with describing the movement of Hastings and his troops through Oudh, Bihar, and Benares and the resistance they meet as they journeyed, Hodges’s illustrations depict a serene landscape dotted with ancient fortresses and picturesque ruins. For instance, the illustration featuring the hillfort at Bidjegur (Bijaigarh) depicts a site of conflict between the military forces of the East India Company and the Rajah of Benares (Figure ).6 Though Hodges was present when company troops lay siege to the fort and bombarded it with cannon fire, there is no hint of violence in this picturesque rendering of the fort. Hodges had been criticized by contemporaries for enhancing the picturesque quality of his illustrations to the detriment of their topographical accuracy.7 In his illustrations of fortresses, temples, mausoleums, walled cities, and mosques, Hodges does, indeed, employ the idioms and conventions of the picturesque: the framing of the scene with side-screens, the tripartite treatment of distance, a focus on texture and light, and the inclusion of subject matter associated with the picturesque.8 (For an example of a picturesque scene, see William Gilpin’s drawing View into a Winding Valley [Figure ].) Hodges’s A View of Bidjegur (Figure ) employs the picturesque’s repertoire of motifs: the ruined fortress high atop a wooded hill; a winding road that disappears around a bend, marking the shift into the middle distance; the loitering figures, one seated and one leaning on a staff; rugged boulders surrounding a spring of water; and a humble, tumbledown hut. Functiong similarly to Gilpin’s use of the same picturesque elements, these idioms, derived from seventeenth-century classicized landscape

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paintings by Claude Lorrain, Poussin, and Dughet (see his View of Tivoli with Rome in the Distance [Figure ]), create the illusion of a timeless serenity that mimics an Arcadian past.9 In the view of The Pass of Sicri Gully (Figure ), the tripartite division of space with a textured foreground, middle distance, and hazy background is typical of landscapes championed by admirers of the picturesque, though Hodges’s classicizing treatment of space may owe more to his apprenticeship under Richard Wilson than to the dictates of the promoters of picturesque aesthetics. Hodges’s rendition of the Bijaigahr hill fort is typical of his approach to the problem of representing the natural and cultural landscape of the South Asian subcontinent. Though Hodges had painted beautiful landscapes of places as remote as Tahiti and Tonga, India’s landscape proved a challenge for him.When he first arrived, he lived in Madras, where he felt that there was nothing for him to paint; he complained that he wasted almost a whole year in the south, mostly waiting out the results of a siege, and was seriously considering returning to England, when he was invited to

Figure . William Gilpin, View into a Winding Valley, pen and wash on paper, . × . cm. Leeds Museum and Galleries (City Art Gallery). UK/Bridgeman Art Library.

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Bengal by Hastings. Bengal, and the provinces west and north of it, presented Hodges with a very different landscape from that he had encountered on Cook’s voyage. In contrast to the lush, wooded, mountainous islands of the South Pacific, northern India did not typify European ideas about the tropics. Though much of the Indian subcontinent falls within the Tropic of Cancer and is therefore technically “the tropics,” it resists Eurocentric notions of tropicality with its highly cultivated landscape, densely populated cities, and beautifully and elaborately built palaces and fortifications, all of which challenged Europeans’ sense of cultural superiority.10 Hodges solved the problem of what to paint by focusing on India’s built environment, almost always arranging the landscape’s composition so as to make a building—a fort, a palace, a mosque—the focal point, and by classicizing these architectural elements, encoding them within familiar spacial dynamics derived from seventeenth-century French depictions of the Roman campagna.11 By imposing these classicizing codes onto this foreign terrain, Hodges domesticated India, creating pleasing images that made this land palatable to educated British tastes. Not only do his illustrations function as

Figure . B. T. Pouncy, after William Hodges, A View of Bidjegur, from Hodges, Travels in India, During the Years , , , &  (). Hamilton Library, University of Hawai‘i at Ma-noa.

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learned citations of highly regarded European masters but the language he uses to describe the Indian countryside and urban centers he traveled through is also highly aestheticized, deploying the classical tropes of pastoral and georgic poetry as well as displaying a connoisseurial and antiquarian expertise in his treatment of Hindu and Mughal arts and architecture.

Georgic and Antigeorgic Tropes Though India had been represented in seventeenth-century European travel narratives as a site of natural tropical bounty, exotic plants and animals, and extraordinary wealth derived from intensive agricultural production and complex commercial exchanges, the India that Hodges represents is alternately a garden and a grave.12 In his narrative, agricultural production thrives under British rule, and prosperity for industrious peasants is ensured by British order. Hodges deploys georgic and pastoral tropes to describe fertile and prosperous lands under the company’s authority. For instance, from the top of the pass at Terriagully, “a beautiful scene opens itself to the view: namely, the meandering of the river Ganges through flat country, and glittering through an immense plain, highly cultivated, as far as the extent of

Figure . Gaspard Poussin Dughet, View of Tivoli with Rome in the Distance, oil on canvas,  ×  cm. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. UK/Bridgeman Art Library.

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the horizon, where the eye is almost at a loss to discriminate the termination of sky and land.”13 Along the banks of the river, there are “extensive glades,” “fine turf,” and “timber trees of considerable magnitude,” all of which remain “verdant through a great part of the year” due to India’s climate of heat and moisture (). He concludes that this country around Colgong is “the most beautiful I have seen in India” (), and here the Ganges “gives the prospect inexpressible grandeur” (–). He praises the local British Resident, Augustus Cleveland, for his good management of the region under his benevolent rule: “The care that was taken in the government, and the minute attention to the happiness of the people, rendered this district, at this time, () a perfect paradise” (). Here the industry of the peasantry is rewarded with plenty, and Bengal, under the rule of Governor General Hastings, boasts of agricultural bounty and paradisiacal green: “The periodical rains had now commenced, and every natural object presented a new face, with such a freshness of verdure, and with such vigour and fullness of foliage, that all nature appeared in the utmost luxuriance” (). In contrast to British-controlled India with its flourishing plant life and prosperous peasants is Muslim-ruled India. Hodges notes, as he journeys from Allahabad to Lucknow, that peasants appear impoverished and

Figure . W. Angus, after William Hodges, The Pass of Sicri Gully, from Hodges, Travels in India (). Hamilton Library, University of Hawai‘i at Ma-noa.

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Chapter 

distressed. Though he believes the country “capable of producing the finest crops,” it is through neglect rather than “natural sterility” that the villages look so miserable. “After leaving the flourishing district of Benares, I could not help viewing with a melancholy concern the miserable appearance of all the territories which were under the absolute direction of Mussulman tyrants” (–). Lucknow impresses him as a squalid city despite the nawab’s grand palace: “The city is extensive, but meanly built: the houses are chiefly mud walls, covered with thatch, and many consist entirely of mats and bamboo, and are thatched with leaves of the cocoa nut, palm tree, and sometimes with straw. Very few, indeed, of the houses of the natives are built with brick: the streets are crooked, narrow, and the worst I have seen in India. In the dry season the dust and heat are intolerable; in the rainy season the mire is so deep, as to be scarcely passable” (). Even the palace of the nawab Asoph ul Dowlah (Figure ) does not meet with his approval: “the exterior of the building is not to be commended: it reminded me of what I had imagined might be the style of a Baron’s castle in Europe, about the twelfth century” (–). As he travels from Lucknow to Etaya and then on to Agra, he observes that the land is “very little cultivated,” “the villages are

Figure . J. Fittler, after William Hodges, A View of the Palace of the Nabob Asoph ul Dowlah at Lucknow, from Hodges, Travels in India (). Hamilton Library, University of Hawai‘i at Ma-noa.

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poor,” and “the few inhabitants appear very wretched” (). In describing this landscape, he deploys what might be called an antigeorgic trope, stressing the failure to attend to agricultural production: “Through the whole of the last day’s journey I observed scarcely a spot in cultivation; the villages, of which there are several, were in ruins, and the whole presented almost one uninterrupted scene of desolation” (). Even when he comes across “some few spots of cultivated ground,” he uses these instances as examples of how neglected the rest of land is: “the richness and fulness of the grain sufficiently shew what the whole of the country is capable of producing, were it in cultivation” (). One of the few cultivated spots happened to be a village governed by a Hindu religious leader. Hodges concludes that “as the spirit of the Hindoo government is favourable to agriculture in the highest degree, this spot appeared to be a perfect garden” (). When he goes on to suggest that Hindu governors and proprietors “do not destroy the endeavours of the poor, as the Mussulmans” (), Hodges makes it clear that the countryside along the Jumma River suffers from its Muslim leaders’ misrule. With these images of desolation and neglect, Hodges conveys a sense of pervasive ruin that haunts Mughal-ruled India. Not only is the natural landscape of northern India blighted by Mughal misrule, the cultural landscape with its architectural ruins bears the marks of this abuse of power. With the word “ruin,” he links the decline in agricultural production to the decay of forts, palaces, cities, and monuments built by Mughal emperors. These ruined landscapes stand in for each other: the ruined fort becomes an emblem of a ruined agricultural landscape and loss of prosperity that could be rectified by the company’s benevolent and disinterested rule. The trope of ruins enables Hodges to link an intemperate climate with its blazing sun with its intemperate rulers, whom Hodges depicts as luxuryloving tyrants, following in a longstanding European tradition of portraying Levantine and Asian rulers as Oriental potentates. Hodges blames the poverty he describes in Mughal-ruled India on its leaders’ moral and managerial failures: “The private luxury and vices of the Mussulman princes too frequently reduce them to a state of real poverty, even with large revenues; and too often they delegate to artful, designing, and avaricious characters, the management and concerns of the state, and become virtually the plunderers instead of the parents of their subjects” (). Visually, Hodges joined the two ideas—intemperate climate and intemperate rulers—in images of magnificent edifices with twisting vines and waving tufts of weeds sprouting from these buildings’ cracked and crumbling surfaces, suggesting that the subtropical climate, which encouraged luxurious growth, also encouraged

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Chapter 

luxurious tastes and excessive appetites, which ultimately led to the fall of an empire.

Hodges’s Melancholy Hodges’s focus on ruins not only conveys disapprobation for the Mughal regime’s georgic failures but also enables him to explore a particularly bittersweet pleasure produced by the sight of architectural ruins. With his arrival at Agra, Hodges’s tone shifts from disdain aroused by sight of the impoverished countryside to one of pleasing melancholy as he openly acknowledges how moved he is by the beauty of Agra’s ruins. Within the text of Travels, he positions himself as a connoisseur of picturesque Hindu and Mughal ruins, and in doing so, he establishes his cultural authority as a man of taste and delicate sentiment, which in turn legitimizes his commentary on Mughal culture, politics, and social practices. Of the “once splendid and imperial city of Agra” (Figure ), Hodges writes: “The whole of this spot, as far as the eye can reach, is one general scene of ruined buildings, long walls, vast arches, parts of domes, and some very large buildings, as the Cuttera, built by the great Shah Hest Khawn, in the reign of Aurungzebe; here are also several Tombs” (–). Surveying Agra’s ruins, Hodges anchors the city’s lost vitality in the unretrievable past of the great sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mughal emperors’ reigns. Everywhere Hodges looks are ruins, confirming that Mughal power to create magnificent structures of “eastern elegance” () is played out, dissipated by the extravagance and intemperance of its rulers. The whole space between these two walls is one mass of ruins. The inner wall is but in indifferent repair, and within it is easy to discern that it is chiefly composed from the ruined buildings, except, indeed, towards the Delhi gate of the fort, where is the great Musjud or Mosque, built of red stone, but greatly gone to decay. Adjacent to this spot is the Choke, or Exchange, which is now a mere ruin; and even the fort itself, from its having frequently changed masters, in the course of the last seventy years, is going rapidly to desolation. . . . It was impossible to contemplate the ruins of this grand and venerable city, without feeling the deepest impressions of melancholy. I am, indeed, well informed, that the ruins extend, along the banks of the river, not less than fourteen English miles. (–)

In addition to noting the ancient grandeur of these ruins, Hodges mentions in this passage his own response of melancholy, a theme he develops in the next section on Akbar’s tomb at Sikandra:

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At some small distance from the principal building rises a high open gate, entirely of white marble, of exquisite beauty. A blazing eastern sun shining full on this building, composed of such varied materials, produces a glare of splendour almost beyond the imagination of an inhabitant of these northern climates to conceive; and the present solitude that reigns over the whole of the neglected garden, excites involuntarily a melancholy pensiveness. After viewing this monument of an Emperor, whose great actions have resounded through the world, and whose liberality and humanity were his highest praise, I became desirous of seeing even that stone which contained his crumbing remains. (–)

Though exquisitely beautiful, the ruins he surveys reassuringly relegate Mughal cultural achievements and Mughal political power to the past: “From the summit of the minarets in the front a spectator’s eye may range over a prodigious circuit of country, not less than thirty miles in a direct line, the whole of which is flat, and filled with ruins of ancient grandeur” (). Hodges assigns a cause for this decline of Mughal greatness: “This fine country exhibits, in its present state, a melancholy proof of the consequences of a bad government, of wild ambition, and the horrors attending civil dissentions; for when the governors of this country were in plentitude

Figure . J. Walker, after William Hodges, A View of Agra, from Hodges, Travels in India (). Hamilton Library, University of Hawai‘i at Ma-noa.

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Chapter 

of power, and exercised their rights with wisdom, from the excellence of the climate, with some degree of industry, it must have been a perfect garden; but now all is desolation and silence” (). Hodges represents Agra and other Mughal-ruled cities as decayed beauties, once glorious monuments to their masters’ excesses, but now in state of decline through neglect. The discourse on ruins, with its combination of aesthetic appreciation and moral disapprobation, allows Hodges to frame Mughal India within the trope of fallen empires and to attribute this decline to the evils attending luxury and tyranny.14 In his lamentation for the passing of Mughal prosperity, military glories, and cultural achievements, Hodges constructs a double portrait: one of a beautiful but decayed Mughal India, and the other of himself as melancholic observer. When he tells his readers that on viewing the neglected gardens and ruins surrounding Akbar’s tomb he was moved to contemplate the vagaries of history and to indulge in a state of elevated sensibility, he is also claiming a kind of social distinction for himself. His melancholic reverie is, in part, his attempt to appear to be, as Addison would say, “a Man of Polite Imagination,” whose elite status is signaled by his “capacity for aesthetic pleasure,” which distinguishes him from the vulgar masses.15 This heightened state of feeling, a complex interplay of aesthetic pleasure and moral response, lends him cultural authority that gives weight to his pronouncements on South Asian culture and history. His melancholy takes on a political cast as it engages with the trope of ruined empires. His bittersweet feelings are aroused not by regret and longing for the return of the glorious reign of Akbar, “the greatest and richest empire” (), but by a nostalgia for that which is completely unrecoverable. For Hodges as well as for all those ruin enthusiasts in Britain, loss is a necessary condition for the creation of nostalgia. For those who love ruins, it is the assurance that a previous political order and social system are indeed lost that enables their pleasurable feelings of sadness.16 Anne Janowitz contends in her study of ruin poetry that melancholy, the “peculiar pleasure” of viewing ruins, “comes from the contemplation of the absolute pastness of the past within the aesthetically controlled shape of temporal transience.” This melancholy is the result of the “social function” of landscape having been “evacuated” and becoming “an empty world” where “private functions and feelings can then fill it up.”17 The picturesque framing of Hodges’s visual and verbal views of Agra’s ruins produces, as Sara Suleri says, “an elegiac acknowledgment of their vacated power.”18 The implicit logic of the ruin trope is that if the Mughal empire is in the past, then British rule is needed—

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if Indian fortresses are abandoned ruins, there is a gap in the rule of imperialist order and an emptiness for colonizers to fill.

Artist as Orientalist Hodges’s picturesque visual and verbal views of Mughal ruins performed ideological work beneficial to the colonial project in India. By “transforming history into still life” and by invoking “the past as aesthetic” to “deny its historical power,” Hodges’s illustrations and descriptions impose the stasis of the eternal past on India.19 In general, picturesque landscapes featuring ruins display the power of time and nature to erode cultural production, naturalizing human constructions and returning them to dust from which they came. In nearly every drawing of Mughal architecture Hodges produced, the effects of time and weather are stressed. Using picturesque motifs of “pinnacles with clinging ivy bound” and “weeds and tufts” protruding from walls and rooftops, Hodges suggests decay and a return to nature in his images of Mughal palaces, forts, sepulchers, and walled cities.20 Even when the image is not of a ruin but a functioning, intact building such as a mosque, either he frames it with trees and a profusion of plant life, as in the drawing Mosque at Mounheer, which suggests the structure is less a cultural production and more a natural production; or he places a dilapidated thatched hut next to the mosque, as in Mosque at Gangipoor, the hut being a much-used picturesque trope associated with an impoverished peasantry and a state of rural decline.21 In choosing the picturesque mode to portray Mughal architecture, Hodges located an effective Mughal state power in the past, and in so doing, his representation of India performed significant ideological work in terms of participating in what Edward Said has taught us to recognize as classic Orientalist discourse.22 Typically, British Orientalist doctrine, as Homi Bhabha contends, depicted “India as a primordial fixity—as a narcissistic inverted other—that satisfies the self-fulfilling prophecy of Western progress.”23 Hodges’s depiction of India as decayed and stagnate participated in the ongoing construction of Britain as modern and progressive by implicitly employing the stagist model of human history.24 Based on ideas about progress that had received their fullest articulation in the work of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such as Lord Monboddo and John Millar, this theory posited that all societies progress at different rates through four stages of economic development, the first based on hunting, the second

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based on herding (pastoral), the third based on agriculture (georgic), and the fourth and highest based on commerce, which these philosophers argued produced the most elegant and sophisticated arts, letters, and laws. England, of course, was a commercial nation and in the highest developmental stage, while Mughal India was seen as feudal, one stage behind England, and other parts of India were even further behind, still in the hunting and pastoral stages.25 Hindu culture was, for instance, characterized as ancient and therefore nonevolved. Hodges delighted in Benares as it was a site where sophisticated Mughal culture existed simultaneously with Hindu society, which he describes as belonging to a nearly prehistorical era. “[T]he same manners and customs prevail amongst these people at this day, as at the remotest period that can be traced in history. . . . According to universal report, this is one of the most ancient of Hindoo cities; and if the accounts of their own antiquity may be depended upon, it is, perhaps, the oldest in the world. It certainly is curious, and highly entertaining to an inquisitive mind, to associate with a people whose manners are more than three thousand years old” (). For Orientalists like Hodges, Hindu culture was static and unchanged since the earliest stages of human society, while Mughal society, on the other hand, was depicted as much more evolved. India’s glorious ruins were the product of the Mughal feudal society that had not progressed to the next developmental stage because, as Orientalists believed, of the ruinous influence of climate and intermarriage with the native populations, which were in more primitive stages of development.26 This stagist notion of history, while it posits progress as natural, also incorporates stagnation or regression as possibilities into the charting the various histories of mankind. Mughal society, according to British Orientalist thinking, had stopped progressing with the death of the great Mughal emperors of the seventeenth century. The melancholy that Hodges feels on viewing Mughal ruins can be read as his acknowledgment of the potential possessed by Mughal culture to progress to the highest development stage and his regret that Mughal society was the victim of cyclical forces of decay that seemed “inevitable” in India, with the exception of British rule. Hodges’s concern with architecture as a measure of a society’s degree of civilization predates by more than half a century the work of James Fergusson, who argued that architecture was the only reliable means of constructing “a scientific history of India,” for it is only in a king’s “buildings that we can measure his greatness or ascertain . . . what the degrees of civilization to which either he or his people had attained.”27 Fergusson’s as well as Colin Mackenzie’s ethnological obsessions

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undergirded the British Orientalist discourse that characterized India as simultaneously without history and as living in the past. This Orientalist doctrine, rife with contradiction, postulated India as possessing “a double lack of history.”28 According to Bernard Cohn, this double lack of history meant that, first, India’s past appeared to the British as undocumented, lacking written chronicles, and in need of British expertise to write that history, and second, “India has no history as it has not progressed” (). Cohn summarizes this Orientalist thinking that pervaded British explorations of the subcontinent’s cultural productions and political institutions: “Europe was progressive and changing, India static. Here could be found a kind of living fossil bed of the European past, a museum which was to provide Europeans for the next two hundred years a vast field on which to impose their own visions of history. India was found to be the land of oriental despotism, with its cycles of strong but lawless rules, whose inability to create political order based on anything but unbridled power led inevitability to its own destruction in a war of all against all, leading to anarchy and chaos” (). By the nineteenth century this doctrine was refined to include the idea that in addition to these cycles of “inevitable decay and degeneration into chaos,” which recurred at the political level of the state, India was also possessed of ‘unchanging institutions based on family, caste, and the village community” (). Britain would be exempted from this cycle of decay because of its love of liberty, which, as popular belief held and Richard Dyer states in his poem “Ruins of Rome,” acts as an antidote to the deleterious effects of luxury.29 This combination of ideas—the notion of India as a collection of unchanging, primitive social institutions and the notion of India’s political history as one of the rise and fall of despotisms—enabled Orientalists to construct an image of India as decayed (and therefore subject to the operations of time) and as timeless (impervious to the operations of time). The interpretative power of this model—India is timeless and yet caught in time’s cycle—was enormous as it enabled contradictory evidence to be processed and contained within this Orientalist trope.

The Messy Business of Empire Hodges’s emphasis on Mughal architectural ruins places Mughal political agency and military strength in a bygone era; however, the Mughal fortresses that Hodges depicted in his illustrations A View of the Fort of Gwalior (Figure ), A View of Bidjegur (Figure ), and The Pass of Sicri Gully

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Chapter 

(Figure ) were not ruins in the sense that England’s Tintern Abbey or Roslin Castle in Wales were ruins. These Indian hill forts may have appeared as if they were old and somewhat dilapidated, but they were not the abandoned and empty monuments to a long-gone regime; they were in active use by what the British called “rebels”—those who resisted British control of India. The calm rusticity of the classicized, Arcadian landscape belies the violence of the company’s encounters with Mughal and Hindu rulers, and Hodges’s emphasis on picturesque ruins to describe Mughal grandeur attempts to fix India’s days of military and state power in the past, sweeping away the threat of Indian insurgency as if it were a temporary inconvenience to be dealt with by the British in their quest for control. Though employing a combination of discursive and visual strategies designed to minimize the extent and seriousness of Indian insurgency and to mystify British aggression, Hodges’s book does reveal, in spite of itself, its central anxieties having to do with the incomplete and sometimes incompetent exercise of British power. Despite the illustrations’ emphasis on the decorative to the exclusion of the political and the social, and despite the narrative’s focus on aesthetic and antiquarian issues, Hodges’s book conveys the confusion and even terror British forces felt when met with armed

Figure . W. Byrne, after William Hodges, A View of the Fort of Gwalior, from Hodges, Travels in India (). Hamilton Library, University of Hawai‘i at Ma-noa.

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resistance. To see how Hodges’s book reveals what Kate Teltscher identifies as endemic to “all colonial regimes: a fundamental sense of insecurity which can rarely be allowed direct expression, but which keeps surfacing to be repeatedly allayed,” let us turn to the illustration of Bijaigarh (Figure ) and the accompanying text about the siege that Major Popham successfully concluded with the surrender of the fort.30 Hodges’s narrative assumes the brisk air of adventure tale, complete with what is represented as the rescue of damsels in distress. The text opposite the plate reads: The stronger fortress of Bidjegur yet held out against the troops commanded by Major Popham; and I was happy to receive the commands of Mr. Hastings to proceed to Bidjegur to make drawings of that. . . . [T]he fort is seated on top of a high mountain, covered from its base to its summit with wood. . . . Here I enjoyed an opportunity which falls to the lot of but a few professional men in my line; I mean that of observing the military operations of a siege. . . . [T]he walls were battered; and, after, a practicable breach was made, the garrison thought fit to surrender. In the garrison were found the mother and other female relatives of Cheyt Sing, to whom every delicate attention was paid. A view of Bidjegur, taken on the spot, is subjoined. (–)31

This account provides a narrative, complete with protagonists, enemies, and victims, and which takes place in real time, possessing a beginning, middle, and end. The India represented in the illustrations is timeless and static while the British troops are portrayed in the narrative as if they are actors in history who move through space and time, triumphant over rebels who threaten British order and British morality. India exists in the distant and undifferentiated past while Britain has a firm grip on the present and is marching to the future. This straightforward account, along with the picturesque image, smooths over a very messy and chaotic conflict between Warren Hastings and Chait Singh, the rajah of Benares. Earlier in the narrative Hodges gives his readers a glimpse of the turmoil that lies beneath the jaunty military story of siege and surrender, telling how he, along with the rest of the British party accompanying Hastings, had to flee the city of Benares, as it was under attack by Chait Singh’s followers. The decision to leave “was suddenly taken,” he writes, and “I was under the necessity of leaving behind me the whole of my baggage, excepting my drawings, and a few changes of linen, which I had thrown into my pallankeen, and which in the confusion of the night I lost sight of, but found [by?] my servants the following day” (). On the preceding day, before Chait Singh’s forces had successfully repelled

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British troops who had recklessly attacked “Ramnagur, a fort and town on the opposite side of the river to Benares” (). There, as Hodges tells us, British forces met with disaster: “The streets of this town are narrow, and every house being built with stone, they became each a fortification, which was filled with the Rajah’s people. The consequence of this rash conduct was, the loss of Captain Mayasser, Captain Doxat, thirty-three of the corps of the chasseurs, two guns, one howitzer, and one hundred and three men of all denominations” (–).32 Prior to this deadly encounter, British forces had tried to arrest Chait Singh for failing to pay his taxes to Hastings’s government. Major Popham’s grenadiers had surrounded the rajah but were distressed when they realized that they had no ammunition and their muskets were unloaded, especially as it became clear that the rajah’s people were not going to see their leader arrested and humiliated by Hastings. What ensued Hodges describes as a “horrid slaughter” (). Who was this Chait Singh, who fought off British troops and forced Warren Hastings and his entourage into running away? And what does Chait Singh have to do with the illustration of Bijaigarh? Chait Singh’s name appears with some frequency in Edmund Burke’s impassioned speeches at Warren Hastings’s impeachment trial for high crimes and misdemeanors against the Indian people. Burke portrays Chait Singh as a victim of Hastings’s rapacious revenue policies and unprincipled methods of enforcement. In high-flown rhetoric Burke argued that Hastings set out to “harass, distress, and finally to ruin” Chait Singh in direct contradiction to his role as governor general and representative of British justice. Hastings’s arrest of Chait Singh, according to Burke, precipitated civil war: “an unjust War arose, much Blood was shed, the collection of Revenues impeded, and the whole country was thrown into Confusion” as the war “did extend itself into the neighbouring Provinces.”33 Hastings’s intention, according to Burke, was to destroy Chait Singh, whose only crime was his refusal to comply with Hastings’s exorbitant demands for revenue. Burke accused Hastings of acting “contrary to the Trust reposed in him, to the Faith in solemn Treaties, . . . and thereby greatly disgraced and discredited the Character of the British Nation in India . . .” (:). In addition to Hastings’s less than honorable treatment of Chait Singh, Burke made Hastings’s order to attack the fort at Bijaigarh central to one of his articles of impeachment, for this fort was the residence of Chait Singh’s mother. As Sara Suleri has argued, it was this attack on women that particularly distressed Burke. He unleashed his fury at Hastings, accusing him of licensing plunder and

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pillage, for in Burke’s words, Hastings “did stimulate the Army to Rapine and Outrage, . . . by directing that the Fort, and all the Property it contained should be secured for the Benefit of the Detachment employed in reducing it, and by abandoning to the Soldiery all the Property of the said Women of every Sort, contrary to the Practice of civilized Nations, and particularly offensive to the Manners of the East, and the Respect there paid to the Female Sex” (:). Though Hodges witnessed the siege and its aftermath, his illustration does not hint at this kind of activity, nor does the narrative for that matter, which employs the trope of white men saving brown women from brown men, a trope that Gayatri Spivak argues is endemic to colonialism.34 Not portrayed in the illustration are British troops, Major Popham, Chait Singh, his mother and female relatives; the only figures are weary travelers who rest by the side of the winding road in the picturesque setting of a mountain pass. Genre, of course, determines what is included and what is absent from this image, and the picturesque precludes action. However, since Hodges chose the picturesque mode of presentation, he was deliberately avoiding representing what may have put Hastings’s attack on Chait Singh in a bad light. Hodges was perfectly capable of representing troops and conflict—he had already done so with his paintings of Cook’s voyage in the South Pacific (Figure )—and his focusing his drawings on picturesque views must be read as a political act. Hodges did, indeed, produce an image of the siege of Bijaigarh that conveyed British aggression against Chait Singh’s fortress, but this image was not for public consumption. He painted an oil for Captain Justly Hill that echoes the illustration but with a major difference (Figure ). Based on the same sketch as the book’s illustration, the painting sets the hill fort at a distance, but does away with the picturesque foreground of a winding road with loitering peasants, replacing that with dark, undifferentiated shrubbery, and adds a figure standing atop the hill on the left in the middle distance. This figure is a red-coated British soldier, who is standing next to a cannon aimed right at the Bijaigarh fortress. Though Hastings’s own copy of the same scene possesses no cannon, he would have found this painting pleasing as it memorializes what he regarded as a turning point in his career, in particular, as evidence of his having successfully put down an insurrection and having extended his power over zemindars and rajahs beyond his immediate jurisdiction of Bengal. What Hodges did not portray in his book’s illustrations and prose reveals much about his political affiliations. Excluded from the book’s illustrations

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of hill forts is the conflict between the company’s troops and Chait Singh; only a serene and ancient India is pictured. Hodges’s prose text also avoids describing Chait Singh’s resistance, focusing instead on the vigor and ingenuity of the British military expeditions that restored British order. Perhaps Chait Singh’s insurgency was too distressing to depict in a forthright manner; perhaps Chait Singh disturbed the neat binary of old and new empires, the exhausted and effeminate rajahs on one hand, and the bold and clever Britons on the other; and perhaps he threatened the fiction that Britons, not contemporary Indian rajahs and nawabs, were the just inheritors of Akbar’s empire. The times that Chait Singh does appear in Hodges’s text, he is represented in such a way as to dismiss his authority and agency. When Hodges participates in the vilification of Chait Singh—“the cruel and sanguinary disposition of Chait Singh” ()—he participates in a strategy designed to contain Chait Singh’s disruptive effect by suggesting that rajahs, such as he, were, due to their “tyranny” and “treachery,” not worthy of ruling their lands. Hodges invokes the Orientalist tropes of Asian despotism and misrule, tropes which, Teltscher argues, justify “British intervention.”35 Hodges pities the district surrounding Agra, for “in its present state,” it is “melancholy proof of the consequences of a bad government, of wild ambition, and the horrors attending civil dissentions” (). Contrasting the desolation and

Figure . J. K. Sherwin, after William Hodges, The Landing at Erramanga, one of the New Hebrides. Plate LXII in vol.  of Cook, A Voyage towards the South Pole, and Round the World (). By permission of the National Library of Australia.

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destruction that he witnesses at Agra with the “flourishing” gardenlike state of British-ruled Bengal (, ), Hodges’s text, as Teltscher suggests, discredits native rulers as “corrupt and incompetent”and implies “that the Company rather than the emperor in Delhi, is the rightful successor to Mughal rule.”36 In addition to stressing the despotic nature of local rule, Hodges rewrites Chait Singh’s insurgency as chaos as well as evidence of his misrule. The seriousness of Chait Singh’s insurgency is visually and verbally unrepresentable in Hodges’s illustrations and text. Such insurgency would not fit into the paradigm that Hastings and the men who surrounded him were in the process of developing: the idea that the British, by virtue of their linguistic and cultural expertise and antiquarian knowledge, were worthy of inheriting the remnants of Akbar’s empire because they would bring reason and order to India, forging a whole out of the disparate parts and thus pay homage to the memory of Akbar’s glorious reign, restoring in some deflected way Akbar’s glory. Hodges’s portrait of ruined Mughal grandeur, in suggesting that India’s days of military and state power belong in the past, works to downplay the threat of Indian insurgency. The closest that Hodges comes to admitting the seriousness of Chait Singh’s insurgency is the following summary statement:

Figure . William Hodges, The Fort of Bidjegur, c. , oil on canvas, . × . cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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I took my leave for the present of the gentlemen attending the Governor General, who, in the space of two months out of the six since we had left Calcutta, had been witness to a revolt that had nearly shaken the British power in India to its base; but, by the vigorous exertions of the officers, seconded by the courage and perseverance of the troops, under a well regulated plan for the recovery of the power of the East India company, everything terminated in a manner that served to impress the powers then at war with the English with the most formidable opinion of the vigour and energy of the British Government. The conduct and gallantry of both officers and troops, in the hour of their utmost distress, were not improbably a means of facilitating the permanent peace with Mahratta powers, and particularly with Madajee Scindia, which immediately followed. (, italics mine)

Despite his recognition of the gravity of the revolt, Hodges remains loyal to Hastings, crediting him not only with enforcing British rule in this instance but also laying the groundwork for further counterinsurgency measures. The language of agency and self-discipline that Hodges ascribes to British forces reinforces the binary at work between a degenerate, enervated, and yet chaotic India, and the vigorous, well-regulated Britain, all of which situates Britain, not India, as the subject of history and agent of progress. One must remember that Hodges was the beneficiary of Warren Hastings’s patronage; in fact, the ninety drawings that Hodges had made while in India and many of the oil paintings based on these drawings were in Hastings’s possession when Hodges died. It is significant also that Hodges published his Travels in  and the second edition came out in , the final years of Hastings’s nine-year-long impeachment trial. Ultimately, one reason to publish this book was to explain and defend Hastings’s method of government in India. Hodges’s narrative and illustrations function, in part, as an apology for Warren Hastings. In Hodges’s claim to objectivity, he subtly critiques Burke’s attack on Hastings as an inappropriate attack on the project of colonialism. Hodges writes: “It is not my business to enter into the question respecting the rights of the government in different countries and those of the governed. Facts are my object, and such alone as fell within the limited and confined sphere of my notice” (). He thus reminds his readers of what some have regarded as Burke’s inappropriate condemnation of what was ultimately the business of the East India Company: to extract as much wealth from India as possible and in the most cost-effective way. Hodges’s loyalty to Hastings did not go unrewarded. When Hodges died in , Hastings contributed to the care of his widow and six children, though Hastings himself was financially ruined by the expense of his defense at his impeachment trial.

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British Imperial Character Hodges’s text expresses anxiety over the appearance and practice of colonial power. Returning once again to his melancholy, I would like to link Hodges’s response to Mughal ruins to what Burke called “the character of the British Nation in India” (:) and the fashioning of a British imperial identity, one that could negotiate the contradictions of a commercial entity, the East India Company, acting in a judicial and administrative capacity in India. At the risk of hanging too much on the meaning of one word, I would like to suggest that his melancholic response to Mughal ruins is characteristic of the process by which company officials positioned themselves as rightful inheritors of the rights, privileges, and duties of the Mughal imperium. To tease out the link between Hodges’s melancholy and the construction of British colonial character, I turn to Freud, who, drawing on his earlier work in “Mourning and Melancholia,” describes melancholia as a process of internalization: “an object which was lost has been set up again inside the ego— that is, that an object-cathexis has been replaced by an identification. . . . [T]his kind of substitution has a great share in determining the form taken by the ego and that it makes an essential contribution towards building up what is called its ‘character.’”37 Hodges’s melancholy suggests an admiration that borders on identification with the grandeur of Akbar’s lost regime. While it may seem anachronistic to apply Freud’s analysis of mourning and melancholia to Hodges’s rather hackneyed use of the term, Freud’s insights into to how melancholia does the work of identification are of value in explaining the construction of British imperial identity, for, to quote Judith Butler, “Freud argues, the ego is said to incorporate that other into the very structure of the ego, taking on attributes of the other and ‘sustaining’ the other through magical acts of imitation.”38 In a meditation on Freud’s discussion of melancholy, Slavoj Êiêek suggests that melancholy arises not out of the need to deal with the loss of a loved one, for this can be achieved effectively through mourning, but, melancholy, unlike mourning, arises out of a conflicted and unresolved relationship with the lost other; it represents not a letting go of the lost object but a latching onto it, reproducing the conflicted, ambivalent relationship in the incorporation process.39 If character, as Freud suggests, is shaped through the imaginative acts of mimicry and incorporation of the other’s attributes, then how does this process relate to Hodges’s revelation of melancholy in the midst of his very pro-Hastings narrative? Hodges’s admiration for Mughal architecture can be read as a form of melancholic identification with Akbar’s regime, an

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ambivalent identification that was shared by Hastings and his followers, who saw themselves as appreciating and inheriting Mughal cultural and political traditions. As many commentators on Hastings’s trial have suggested, what was at stake in the trial was British imperial identity. What was to be the character of the British empire in India? What was the proper code of conduct for a colonial official? Does one behave as a Briton, dispensing British law and custom to a foreign subject people, or does one become like India’s previous colonizers, in this case, the Mughal empire, and adopt Mughal precedents and structural relations? As Burke reminds the House of Lords concerning Hastings’s style of government, “the rule upon which you are to try him is this: what should a British Governor in such a situation do, or forbear to do? If he has done and if has forborne in the manner in which a British Governor ought to do and to forbear, he has done his duty, and he is honourably acquitted” (:). Burke insists that Hastings did not behave as a British official should have, that he did not act with “that spirit of equity, that spirit of justice, that spirit of safety, that spirit of protection, that spirit of lenity, which ought to characterise every British subject in power” (:–); instead Hastings, Burke avers, acted as if he were an Oriental despot. Although Burke interprets Hastings’s adoption of the forms of Mughal government as the “the exercise of arbitrary power” (:), Hastings justified his conduct as governor general as acting in concert with the expectations of those subject to his rule. Burke parodies this explanation, ventriloquizing Hastings’s defense: “I was unfortunately bound to exercise this arbitrary power, and accordingly I did exercise it” (:).40 Burke rejects this defense as a perversion, as a form of “Geographical morality” (:), where locale dictates conduct, for, as he sarcastically comments, “when you have crossed the equinoctial line all the virtues die” (:). Because Burke was convinced, as P. J. Marshall argues, that “Hastings was trying to defend evil actions in India on the pretext that he had inherited unfettered power from the Bengal Nawabs,” Burke “spent much time and effort in demonstrating that Islamic government was a government according to law” (:), not the exercise of arbitrary and capricious power.41 However, as Kate Teltscher demonstrates, despite Burke’s attempt to dismiss contemporary stereotypes about Islamic rule, Burke also made use of the tropes of Oriental despotism and Oriental contagion in his attack on Hastings, whom he characterized as “not a British Governor, answering to a British Tribunal, but as a Soubahdar, as a Bashaw of three tails” (:). According to Teltscher, in this characterization Burke drew on the past decade or so

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of anticompany literature that had depicted British East India Company officials as transformed by their contact with India, changed from vigorous, rational, and honest men of action into effeminate, rapacious, and cruel masters who mimicked Mughal nawabs and rajahs.42 Teltscher argues most convincingly that “in this instance, and at other points in the trial, Burke is having it both ways: repudiating the idea of oriental despotism, while opportunistically making use of its negative associations.”43 Burke vacillates between depicting Hastings as an Oriental despot and as a villain hiding behind his Orientalist perversion of Mughal rule, and in so doing he reveals the instability of colonial identity and the ambivalence of colonial discourse.44 This ambivalence in Burke’s rhetoric on India is also apparent in Hodges’s conflicted relation to Mughal cultural and political accomplishments. Hodges, with his melancholic identification, conveys a combination of admiration, fear, and condemnation that contributes to a blurring of boundaries between British and Indian subjectivities. His meditation on Agra’s ruins serves two contradictory functions: one is to anchor Mughal agency firmly in the unrecoverable past, and the other builds an identificatory bridge over the divide he had worked so hard to construct between India’s static, timeless, and undifferentiated past and Britain’s agency and progress. Though his melancholic identification seems to undermine the very distinctions he had used picturesque ruins to create, the magical thinking that structures this melancholic response to Mughal grandeur enables him to posit a Britain that is both subject of modernity and the inheritor of the Mughal imperial legacy. This contradictory position rested on the idea of British connoisseurship and Orientalist expertise. For Britons to possess knowledge of Mughal art, architecture, literature, and court protocol was to assert their claim as proper caretakers of the Mughal imperium and to disqualify native rulers as unworthy of inheriting their ancestors’ cultural and, by way of extension, political legacy. Hodges’s book is an early attempt in the history of the Raj to deploy aesthetic taste and connoisseurship in the justification of colonial aggression and counterinsurgency measures and to insist on the artist’s role as an expert and a producer of knowledge that would aid in this enterprise. For an artist to claim, as Hodges does in his book, that his landscapes were capable of depicting a country’s manners and morals was to assert a kind of cultural authority that was usually reserved for gentlemen and scholars. Hodges believed that landscape painting should serve a “moral purpose.” He strove to “give dignity to landscape painting,” lending it that

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nobility of purpose that history painting possessed in the eyes of his contemporaries. With such a claim for landscape painting, Hodges counters contemporary theories of art, such as those promulgated by Sir Joshua Reynolds, that disbarred landscape paintings, in particular, topographical landscapes such as Hodges painted of the Pacific and the Indian subcontinent, from participating in civic humanist discourse because they depicted particular places. Reynolds had placed landscape very low in his hierarchy of types of paintings, with history painting at the top since its narrative strain and its mythic characters appealed to “whatever concerns us universally.”45 Reynolds distinguished between Italian and Netherlandish schools of landscape, preferring Claude’s idealized landscapes to Rubens’s particularized and accidental nature with its fluid temporal dimensions (for example, rainbows, shafts of light, shadows). For Reynolds, idealized landscapes suggested an abstracting mind at work. Topographical views, on the other hand, because they were portraits of particular places, could never speak, in Reynolds’s schema, beyond what they represented. Countering such dogma, Hodges’s book is a testimony on behalf of landscape painting, which because it engages in the construction of truths about natural history as well as cultural and social practices, can convey knowledge through its representational practices: “Pictures are collected from their value as specimens of human excellence and genius exercised in a fine art; and justly are they so: but I cannot help thinking, that they would rise still higher in estimation, were they connected with the history of the various countries, and did they faithfully represent the manners of mankind” (–). With this statement, Hodges uses the gentlemanly discourse on comparative history of civilizations to emphasize the role of the landscape artist in generating such knowledge. His election in  to the Society of Antiquaries “as gentleman well known to the Public by his extensive travels and the valuable views” testifies to his having achieved some success in attaining the reputation of not only “an artist of high rank” but also a gentleman and a scholar.46 Not simply an illustrated travel narrative, Hodges’s book circulated in the discourse on empire at a specific moment when British imperial character was on trial. Functioning as a defense of Hastings’s government, Travels in India sought to portray British colonialism in India in a positive light and to downplay the seriousness of Indian insurgency and the ruthlessness of British rule. To do this, Hodges deployed a variety of discursive techniques, among them georgic and antigeorgic tropes, the “ruin sentiment,” and the picturesque mode of representation. Suppressing the political significance of the contested terrain he portrayed in his illustrations, and

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locating Mughal and Hindustani power firmly in the unrecoverable past, Hodges’s illustrations and descriptions of South Asian landscape worked to minimize the threat that Muslim and Hindu forces posed to British government in India and to contain the chaos and confusion that occurred in the course of extending British imperial control over northern India, making the East India Company’s expansionist policies palatable to English sensibilities.

Chapter 

Seeing, Writing, and Revision: Natural History Discourse and Captain Cook’s A Voyage towards the South Pole, and Round the World

These Marine Gentlemen’s narratives must have been better told by themselves, than by those uninterested in their scenes of pleasure and distress. —Morning Chronicle, January ,  better flavoured than I have any where tasted —James Cook, ship’s journal 1

In this chapter, I explore James Cook’s representation of the natural landscape of the South Pacific. I focus on the writing Cook produced on the second voyage and afterward in London as he revised his journals from the voyage into a book manuscript. Of the three Admiraltysanctioned books that recorded Cook’s three different circumnavigations, A Voyage towards the South Pole, and Round the World () was the one that Cook was most actively engaged in producing. Driven into authorship by frustration and anger over the publication of John Hawkesworth’s disastrous collage of various accounts of Pacific voyages, Cook took up the challenge of transforming his journals into a published account of his voyage. Anxious about his abilities as a writer, Cook worked long and hard revising his journals and happily collaborated with the Admiralty-appointed editor, Dr. John Douglas, canon of Windsor, to whom Cook deferred on issues of taste and style. Reworking the journals’ plain and direct style, Cook made revisions with an eye toward the reading expectations of an educated

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general audience as well as a particular audience of naturalists, geographers, and other men of science. I argue here that the kinds of changes that Cook made were a product of his efforts to make his journal entries conform to the polite discourse of natural history. Though lacking a gentleman’s education, Cook sought to legitimate his observations by adopting literary, natural history, and aestheticizing practices that would transform his “mere” record into a learned and culturally sophisticated product, one that would be recognized as adding to England’s fund of knowledge. In adopting the high style associated with gentlemanly travel and polite science, Cook, and to a much lesser extent his editor, produced a text that lacked the immediacy and the energy of his journal entries. Specifically, Cook removed the processes by which he apprehended the unknown, and in particular he excised references to his body and its engagement with the process of knowing. What is fascinating about Cook’s revisions, particularly those that adopt the polite discourse of natural history, is that they reveal an anxiety about his own cultural competencies. Played out in Cook’s bid to elevate his prose are larger societal, class-based struggles for status and authority. In Cook’s adoption of what Pierre Bourdieu calls the “aesthetic disposition” and “transposable disposition”—bourgeois representational strategies that enable distancing from the object contemplated—Cook engaged in a kind of ventriloquism that resulted in a hollow mimicry of those gentlemanly travel narratives he was striving to imitate. It may be helpful here to recall Hodges’s efforts to produce a travel narrative replete with pastoral and georgic tropes and antiquarian and connoisseurial discourses to elevate his style and lend it an air of authority appropriate to a gentleman scholar. Cook shares much in common with Hodges, not only in that they spent three years together on board the Resolution, but in that they produced travel narratives that were serious attempts to win approval from Britain’s educated elites. The writing and illustrations produced during Captain Cook’s second voyage provide us with the opportunity to examine the processes by which the pressures of publication (which included but were not limited to editors, engravers, and printers) transformed journal entries and sketches into standardized and codified illustrated travel narratives. The modifications that William Hodges’s sketches underwent as they were readied for publication mirror the alterations of Cook’s journal as it was transformed into a book. I begin my analysis of Cook’s style with a brief discussion of the illustrations that William Hodges produced for the published account of the second voyage.

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Chapter 

Hodges’s Illustrations On his second circumnavigation around the globe, Captain James Cook was accompanied by a scientific team consisting of William Wales, an astronomer; Johann Reinhold Forster, a natural historian; his son George Forster; and the landscape artist William Hodges, who was charged with drawing coast lines, weather patterns, land and seascapes, and indigenous peoples and their surroundings. These men, or “the gentlemen,” as Cook refers to them in his journal, replaced the initial team organized by Sir Joseph Banks, who pulled out of the expedition when he realized that the quarters allotted to him would be insufficient for the large retinue he had planned to take with him on this second voyage, which was to include Johan Zoffany as the voyage’s artist. Hodges was appointed as the artist for Cook’s second voyage upon recommendation from Lord Palmerston, a member of the board of Admiralty; he was engaged to “make Drawings and Paintings of such Places as they may touch at worth notice, in their intended voyage.”2 Hodges produced landscapes on the voyage in pencil, ink, and wash as well as in oil, some of which he drew or painted on the spot, or on board after the incident that he either eye-witnessed or heard about from the officers and crew who had witnessed events. He also painted some scenes in London, some of them expressly for Cook’s Voyage.3 After nearly a year and a half of intense work readying his images for publication, for which Hodges received  pounds a year from the Admiralty, A Voyage towards the South Pole finally was published in . The book was immediately criticized by the Forsters, who sneered at some of Hodges’s illustrations for their lack of ethnographic veracity. In particular, George Forster attacked those images of landing parties, in which Pacific Islanders were depicted with beards and flowing robes reminiscent of Greek statesman: “The connoisseur will find Greek contours and features in this picture, which have never existed in the South Sea. He will admire an elegant flowing robe which involves the whole head and body, in an island where the women very rarely cover the shoulders and breast; and he will be struck with awe and delight by the figure of a divine old man, with a long white beard, though all the people of Ea-oowhee shave themselves with muscleshells”4 (Figure ). As Bernard Smith has argued, Hodges’s impulse to classicize Pacific Islanders grew out of his attempt to satisfy the neoclassical aesthetic that dominated the London art scene. Under the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the Royal Academy (of which Hodges aspired to be a member) held that history painting was the highest form of artistic

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production since it combined narrative and moral elements in its depiction of human figures and, as a consequence, rose above representation of the particular to address universal questions about human nature. Reynolds insisted that landscape and still life were at the bottom of the hierarchy of painting since they were concerned with depicting particular places and objects. In fact, Reynolds relegated these genres to the realm of drafting and craft, reserving the title of artist and gentleman for those painters who deployed the tropes of liberal humanism to depict ideal or universal qualities in their subject matter.5 Hodges, very much under the sway of such neoclassical dogma, strove to elevate his drawings of exotic peoples and places so that they might speak of the human condition. In short, Hodges tried to transform his ethnographic drawings into history paintings. Smith argues that Hodges’s art on this voyage embodies this tension between ethnographic accuracy demanded by the voyage’s scientific agenda and his own aesthetic sensibilities that sought to elevate landscape into a form capable of addressing the grand style’s valorization of the universal over the particular, a preference for the depiction of general human nature above specificity of place, and an emphasis on the moralizing capabilities of narrative. Though Hodges had been hired as landscape and ethnographic draftsman and assigned to record the details of particular people and places (which he did indeed do), when given the opportunity to publish his work, he brought with the aid of Italian-trained engravers his illustrations for the book into

Figure . J. K. Shirwin [Sherwin], after William Hodges, The Landing at Middleburg one of the Friendly Islands. Plate LIV in vol.  of Cook, A Voyage towards the South Pole, and Round the World (). By permission of the National Library of Australia.

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line with the Royal Academy neoclassical taste by elongating bodies of both Britons and Islanders, bestowing beards and togas on Tongans and Tahitians, and giving the Islanders gestures and poses reminiscent of Roman statuary. Joppien and Smith contend that “Hodges’s ‘Landing’ paintings, unlike his other work relating to the voyage, were designed and painted in accord with the conventions of history painting,” which involved “the use of attitudes borrowed from classical sculpture and the masters of Italian painting” (Figure ).6 Some recent critiques of these images stress Hodges’s Eurocentricism in his depiction of Pacific Islanders, but in applying classical tropes to Pacific Islanders, Hodges thought he was dignifying his subject matter, making a claim for the significance of these interactions that would go beyond detailing the exotic to articulating universal truths about encounters between disparate peoples.7 Though Hodges tried to elevate his subject matter in his illustrations for Cook’s book by classicizing them, these images remain complex in their mixed use of the conventions of reportage, ethnography, portraiture, and history painting.8 The story of Hodges’s illustrations can illuminate similar dynamics at work in the preparation of Cook’s manuscript for publication. At the core of Hodges’s attempt to elevate his ethnographic and landscape drawings into the realm of human history and universal truth lies not only ambition but anxiety over professional stature and class status. As we saw in the last

Figure . J. Basire, after William Hodges, The Landing at Mallicolo, one of the New Hebrides. Plate LX in vol.  of Cook, A Voyage towards the South Pole, and Round the World (). By permission of the National Library of Australia.

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chapter, Hodges had aspired to be a gentleman and an artist, a man of taste and imagination, not just a paid craftsman dutifully copying what he saw. In Travels in India, published in , this tension between his position as a professional draftsman and his ambitions as an artist and a man of taste is palpable in his discussion of Hindu architecture. He apologizes for his lack of expertise: “I am aware that I stand in need of every candid allowance on the part of my readers. It is evident that the studies absolutely requisite to any degree of proficiency in a liberal art, and the practice of that art afterwards as a profession, can leave but little leisure for the cultivation of literature; and perhaps my engagements [Cook’s voyage] have been even more unfavourable to this object than those of most artists” (v, italics mine). Though Hodges knew that his topographical views lacked the status of history painting, he thought his views of Mughal architecture could rise out of “mere” topography to delineate the history and manners of a great people. “I cannot help thinking, that they [his views] would rise still higher in estimation, were they connected with the history of the various countries, and did they faithfully represent the manners of mankind” (), an ambitious goal for a man of such humble origins.

The Challenge of Authorship Like Hodges, Cook was an ambitious man, who, despite his working-class origins, was able to take advantage of his remarkable talents and skills. A brilliant navigator, chart maker, and naval commander, Cook was painfully aware, like Hodges, of his shortfalls as an author. In one of the drafts of his introduction, Cook acknowledges his limitations as a writer, and even apologizes for his stylistic deficiencies: “I have neither Natural, or acquired abilities for Writing; I have been, I may say, constantly at Sea from my youth and have draged [sic] myself with the assistance of a few good friends through all the stations on board ship belonging to a Seaman, from a Prentice boy to a Commander. After such a candid confession, I shall hope to be excused for all the blunders that will appear in this journal.”9 Cook had counted on Johann Reinold Forster to collaborate with him to produce a history of the voyage, but Forster changed his mind and refused to give his manuscripts to the Admiralty. In a letter to Douglas, Cook described how the Earl of Sandwich had tried to negotiate with Forster but had failed. Cook wrote: “I apprehend I shall have to Publish alone. . . . He [Forster] has quite deceived me, I never thought he would have separated himself from

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Chapter 

the Admiralty, but it cannot hurt me and I am only sorry my Lord Sandwich has taken so much trouble to serve an undeserving man.”10 In the end Forster did not publish a history of the voyage; instead he published Observations made during a Voyage Round the World (), a natural history of the Pacific Islands that the Resolution and Adventure visited. Abandoned by Forster, Cook had to face the daunting task of transforming his log and journal into a book that narrated the history of the voyage. During the voyage Cook had kept a captain’s log and at least one journal, but no history of the voyage. These distinctions are important, for a log, a journal, and a history are generically different, each having its own structure, subject matter, organizing principle, and set of readerly expectations as well as ideological implications. Though changing the shape of Cook’s text from that of a journal into that of a book with chapters may seem mere packaging and relatively superficial alteration, such emendations have rather profound implications. Hayden White has written eloquently on the ideological and moral significance of the differences between a chronicle and a history. What differentiates history from a chronicle is that history implies causality, that the relationship between incidents is one of cause and effect; whereas the chronicle makes the passing of time the organizing principle and leaves causation hovering on the margins. Implicit in history’s interest in tracing origins and ferreting out causes, as White argues, is judgment, and not far behind that is morality.11 To tease out some of the differences between the three forms that Cook’s narrative takes—the log, the journal, and the history of the voyage—I will focus first on the significance of the differences between Cook’s log and his journal, and then move on to the differences between the journal and the final product, the book.

The Log as Genre A brief summary of the various Cook-authored texts from the second voyage will be helpful here. Extant are various logs from the Resolution, among them: one in Cook’s hand, dating from – (Add. MS ,), a fragment of the log (Add. MS ,), and a copy of a log, dated from  July  to  December  (Add. MS ,). Of the various extant journals, there is a journal in Cook’s hand that is incomplete, dating from November ,  to November ,  (Add. MS , ) (this is the journal that J. C. Beaglehole chose as the primary text on which he based his reconstruction of Cook’s journal); there is another journal, also in Cook’s hand, clearly a

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revised and expanded version of the aforementioned manuscript (Add. MS ,—what Beaglehole calls B); there are three copies in Cook’s clerk William Dawson’s hand; and finally, there is a volume of fragments (Add. MS ,). To make sense of these various documents, I have relied on Beaglehole’s brilliant textual introduction to his edition of Cook’s Resolution journal, in which he argues that there is a missing journal, one that perhaps preceded Cook’s heavily revised journal—MS ,. To simplify things, I am going to focus on the differences between those texts written during the voyage, namely the holograph log and journal (,), and those texts produced after the voyage, these being the revised holograph journal (,) and printed book. What Beaglehole calls Cook’s journal (Add. MS ,) consists of seven notebooks made of folio paper; these notebooks have been bound together, presumably something that happened in the nineteenth century. Each notebook covers a period of time; for instance, the first covers November ,  to January , , and the second January  to May , . However, this journal is not really a journal; it is an amalgam, mixing a log format with a journal’s focus on narrative and natural history observations of natural and cultural landscapes. After a brief narrative describing the commissioning of the ship (“I received a commission to command His Majesty’s Sloop Drake,” f. ) and listing of the ship’s crew and supplies, the text settles into the log format. The layout of a log is based on having one folio sheet of paper that is divided in half, with the left side filled with vertical columns, each with a heading, such as “date,” “winds,” “courses,” “temperature,” “latitude and longitude.”11 On the right side is space to write down “Remarks” or “Remarkable Occurrences.” Horizontal lines mark off each day, with the name of the day placed on the left-hand border of each horizontal column; these lines run across both sides of the paper so that one can look at a date and find pertinent facts about navigation, weather, sea conditions, and then read in the right side of the notebook whether anything of note occurred. (See Figure .) This mingling of log and journal form is captured aptly in the title the bound manuscript bears: “Log-Book and Journal of Capt. Cook Nov. –Nov. . Holograph.” Though Beaglehole thinks the British Library’s manuscript is “erroneously” titled, he does say most emphatically that “the basis of all Cook’s journalizing is his log.”13 Indeed, the log format underwrites the shape of the journal. However, Beaglehole’s description of the manuscript does not adequately convey the way in which it looks like a log, and in Beaglehole’s published reconstruction of the journal, this sense that

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Add. MS , possesses this quality of being a log is lost. My insistence on recovering the appearance of this manuscript derives from my belief that one of things that makes this manuscript so fascinating is that we can see Cook moving between two genres to try to account for his experiences. There is a way in which the log format fails to be completely adequate in its allowance for narrative and observation. It simply could not contain the narrative element of Cook’s writing, so that there are points in the log where Cook’s journalizing takes over and transforms the text. This mixed-media text presents intriguing epistemological problems having to do with language and the discursive conventions that enable and delimit representation. It is tempting to argue that the log possesses Cook’s most unmediated observations, that the log is raw data while the revised and edited journal is further removed from the moment of observation. Indeed, entries into the log (,) and loglike entries in the journal (,) present themselves as if unmediated observation. These are the moments when Boswell’s characterization of Cook as a “plain, sensible man” seems most apt. The manuscript’s loglike portions lack an allusive quality, evince little rhetorical play or metaphorical range. Cook’s plain-spoken, unadorned language is referentbased. As Beaglehole says, “He may almost be said to exhibit, as a writer, a magnificent lack of imagination. He regards words unromantically, as concrete things with a precise use.”14 Though Cook assumes that language is transparent and that a word stands in for the thing it names, I am not suggesting that language is referential, for a phrase such as “saw flying-fish” is metaphorical, even poetical.15 This brings us back to Vico’s poetic geography and naming the newly encountered with terms forged from the old and familiar. But even given the slippery nature of naming the new, there is a way in which Cook’s plain style in the log portions of the journal is remarkably spare and direct. It is this quality that prompts me to invoke Bruno Latour’s ideas about the way in which science operates through levels of ever-increasing abstraction by which “each stage extracts elements out of the stage below so as to gather in one place as many resources as possible,” thus creating networks that can “mobilise, cumulate and recombine the world.”16 If we apply Latour’s model of how science works to what happens when literary tropes and visual codes are applied to representation, we might be tempted to suggest that the log portions of Cook’s journal, as they are the least aestheticized or tropified portions of his text, are therefore the least mediated form of representation he produced while writing about this voyage. Though it is tempting to see the log and the log portions of the journal as Cook’s most straightforward writing concerning this voyage, there is a

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way in which much of the log is highly mediated and highly scientific in Latour’s terms. The left-hand side of page in the log and much of the journal is a compilation of statistics, of numbers and abbreviations that stand in for highly abstracted forms of information, much of it derived from instruments that mediate direct, bodily experience (Figure ). For instance, seeing with the eye and seeing with an ocular instrument such as a telescope are very different social practices; the telescope reduces the range of the seeing eye and focuses it on a specific point in the far distance, thus limiting what the eye sees to this specific point. This is one level of abstraction. Noting the ship’s course, north by northeast, for instance, involves a whole host of instrumental mediations and levels of abstraction. What appears to be pure observation in the log’s left-hand page is really highly abstracted information and not simply that which is close “to the event.” Though the language on the log’s left-hand side seems simple and unadorned, with phrases such as “Winds N WBW, SW, Variable, Calm SE,” these notations represent a highly abstract and codified system.17

Figure . Logbook and journal of Captain James Cook in the Resolution during his second voyage round the world;  July – Nov. . Autograph. Paper. Folio. British Library, Add. MS ,, f. .

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The log and log portions of the journal are therefore very complex systems of representation and should not be understood as simple observation. I would suggest that the narrative sections and the descriptive passages in the section of the log reserved for “Remarks” or “Remarkable Occurrences” can get us closer to what Cook saw than the log’s statistical side. But since Cook did so much rewriting during and after the voyage and produced a journal, as Beaglehole persuasively argues, that no longer exists, it is a tricky business to locate those moments of least abstraction and least figurative language. The search for “pure Cook,” as Beaglehole puts it, may be fraught with textual difficulties, but MS , presents us with moments where, as Beaglehole says, “Here we are very close to the events.”18 One such moment is the ship’s stay at Dusky Sound. What Cook saw there could not be contained within the log format, and what he wrote spilled over the physical boundaries of the log with its left-hand pages’ vertically ruled lines and its small space allotted to “Remarkable Occurrences” (Figures  and ). In the

Figure . Logbook and journal of Captain James Cook in the Resolution during his second voyage round the world;  July – Nov. . Autograph. Paper. Folio. British Library, Add. MS ,, f. .

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middle of the second notebook, Cook abandons the log format, which he had used exclusively in the first notebook, and switches to the journal format to describe the ship’s encounter with Dusky Sound. In the third notebook, he resumes the log format but intersperses journal entries throughout this notebook; in the remaining notebooks the journal format dominates the writing, reducing the number of log entries to a minority. The obvious reason for the mixing log and journal formats is that these genres are suited to what they describe: the log for the sea portions of the journey and the journal for reporting what happened on land. The log format, as stated above, is abstracted, scientific language that conveys just enough information so that another ship could presumably reproduce the journey from the documentation provided by latitude and longitude readings and by charts mapping coastal waters as well as information about weather and swell patterns. The journal mimics this kind of facticity with its natural history description of natural and cultural landscape. However,

Figure . Logbook and journal of Captain James Cook in the Resolution during his second voyage round the world;  July – Nov. . Autograph. Paper. Folio. British Library, Add. MS ,, f. .

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much of the journal is driven by narrative and by the reporting of events that were unique to this voyage and not the stuff of a reproducible science. Though similar things may happen on similar voyages, the assumptions that operate in the codified language of the log do not fully extend to or completely encompass the journal’s accounting of the voyage. This tension between the assumptions underlying the form of the log and the journal’s form is nearly erased in the book version of the voyage. The book’s focus on narrating the voyage submerges the log and its emphasis on time. Though retaining vestiges of chronological time by means of dates printed small in the margins, the book version of Cook’s voyage emphasizes movement through space. In contrast to the journal and the log, the book demotes time as the organizing principle, rendering it marginal.

Better Told by Themselves I begin my examination of the transformation of Cook’s journal into a published book with a complaint about the quality of British maritime books, voiced by a reviewer in the Morning Chronicle of January , . It is unfortunate for this country that she is never so happy in the choice of her Navigators as France. We force men into inches, without considering whether they will fit the space alotted or not. The navigators and explorers of France, have themselves always given the narrative of their voyages to the public, as well as the Spaniards and Portuguese; and recently we read with pleasure the excellent exotick accounts of Condamine, Belin, Bouganville, &c. But we were obliged to get Mr. Ben Robbins to write Anson’s Voyage . . ., and Hawksworth, to tarnish the Journals of Cook; and now Dr. Douglas, who digested and corrected Cook’s Second Voyage, is finishing, grammatically, the last, which ended with the command of Capt. King: and surely these Marine Gentlemen’s narratives must have been better told by themselves, than by those uninterested in their scenes of pleasure and distress.19

The reviewer’s complaint about the poor quality of British voyaging narratives centers on the way in which editors had interfered with the final product. He refers to John Hawkesworth’s notorious rewriting of the journals from Cook’s first voyage around the world: Hawkesworth produced a composite of several captain’s journals that ultimately represented his own philosophical concerns about Pacific people and places. The reviewer also castigates John Douglas, who had edited Cook’s journals from the second voyage and was in the process of editing Cook’s incomplete journal of his third voyage, incomplete because Cook was killed on this voyage in a dispute between

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Hawaiians and Cook’s crew over the alleged theft of a cutter. I concur with this reviewer’s low estimation of A Voyage towards the South Pole, Cook’s account of his second voyage. But I suggest that the reviewer is wrong to assume that Douglas was entirely responsible for diminishing the narrative’s intensity. Though Dr. John Douglas, the canon of Windsor, had been appointed by the Admiralty to help Cook with the task of revising the journals from his second voyage for publication, his rewriting of Cook’s manuscript did not come anywhere near the extensiveness of Hawkesworth’s rewrite, or even of his own subsequent rewriting of Cook’s third voyage. With his revision of the second voyage’s journal, Douglas confined himself mostly to shaping Cook’s stream of unpunctuated and misspelled prose into grammatically correct sentences and coherent paragraphs. Cook trusted Douglas completely and deferred to his better judgment on all matters pertaining to style and taste. “I leave it intirely to you to make such alterations as you see necessary and even to strike out any part, or passage which you may think superfluous.”20 Cook asked for Douglas’s assistance on producing a book that would be acceptable to “the nicest readers”: “My desire is that nothing indecent might appear in the whole book and you cannot oblige me more than by pointing out whatever may appear to you as such—.”21 Cook wrote to Douglas often during their months of collaboration, when they were sending manuscripts back and forth between Windsor and Mile End. In January , he apologized for not having the time to attend to transcribing his journal as his preparations for the next voyage had already begun: “These things have retarded the copying my Journal[.] five Books are done which I shall send you by the Machine tomorrow, and if you please you may return those you have gone through by the same Conveyance.”22 Later, in March, Cook wrote to Douglas: “You will herewith receive five Books more of my manuscript, having kept the remaining three, as they want some attention.”23 Cook frequently expressed his approval of Douglas’s emendations: “I have not had time to look over the corrections which you have made, but have not the least doubt but they were necessary, and that I shall be perfectly satisfied with them—.”24 Dr. Douglas protested the reviewer’s accusation that he had “digested” Cook’s journals; he argued that his changes, while extensive, were not substantive. Beaglehole supports Douglas’s claims, arguing that Douglas’s changes, while extensive, were ultimately “minor” and a question of style: “The quarter-deck rapidity has been slowed down; the gale, as it were, somewhat tempered; that elegantly professional punctuation has not turned the sailor into the canon of Windsor, but he has been brought home from the strand of Tongatapu to the Strand

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of London.”25 Whether stylistic changes can be called “minor” is another question, one which Ian MacLaren has persuasively answered in the negative, demonstrating conclusively that Douglas’s stylistic changes to the third voyage manuscripts profoundly affected the narrative’s meaning.26 Though I am in agreement with MacLaren, it is my intent to shift the blame away from Douglas for the stultified prose of A Voyage to the South Pole and to suggest that it was Cook himself who did much of the revision that ultimately and profoundly altered the tone of the text. I base my assertions on a comparison of the two journals and some fragments held in the British Library—the holograph journal produced on the voyage between July  and November  (Add. MS , ), the holograph journal Cook produced while in London in  and  (Add. MS ,), and the fragments (Add. MS ,) that reveal the revision process. For the sake of clarity, let me say that when I refer to the journal, I am referring to MS ,, the journal produced on the voyage, and when I refer to changes made for the publication of the book, most of these are to be found in the revised journal MS , and some in ,.

Revising for Publication Cook was very aware that his journal, which was much more of a log than journal, was not in the proper form for publication. During the rewriting of this log-driven journal into a travel narrative, Cook consulted Hawkesworth’s and Anson’s Voyages, using them as models, and he tried to shape his journal, which was organized chronologically with daily entries, into a narrative. In one letter to his editor, Cook informed Douglas of his progress on transforming daily entries into a travel book: “I have divided it into Books and Chap. takeing the former Voyages and Lord Ansons for my guidance, but submit the whole to your better judgement, with full hopes that you will make such alterations as you may see necessary.”27 Noting also that Hawkesworth used the past tense, Cook asked Douglas what to do, since his journal “was first written in the present time.”28 The handling of time was something he felt he had to explain to his readers. He reworked the following passages, the first one appearing in a draft of his “Preface,” and the second one appearing in the draft labeled “Explanations”: I have not kept this Journal according to the usual form, nor have I mentioned the transactions of every day. The method by which it is kept As there were many days,

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happened both at Sea and in Port in which no one interesting subject occured . Such days are not noticed passed over in silence when ever the [?] were omitted. Somedays It will be found, that some days have been passed over unnoticed; on such days no interesting circumstances occured. On reading over the Journal, I found I had omitted some things and others were not sufficiently explained; these defects are attempted to be made up by notes. In short I have given the most candid and best account of things I was able; I have neither Natural, nor acquired abilities for Writing; I have been, I may say, constantly at sea.29

Most maritime-book readers would have understood the skipping over material that is without incident; it is Cook himself who was ill at ease with the selective approach of narrative writing. He is the one who misses the daily entry of the log format and needs to justify to himself its absence. Cook also consulted the other Resolution journals written by his officers, and, in particular, the one written by William Wales, the astronomer on board. Cook borrowed from Wales some of those gentlemanly turns of phrase and those reflective passages in which the author ponders larger questions about human nature. This gentlemanly natural history discourse was based on comparison and classification, cognitive operations involving what Bourdieu calls a “transposable disposition,” which means the ability to apply “a set of perceptual and evaluative schemes” to “other cultural experiences,” enabling the observer to perceive and classify unfamiliar material. The gentlemanly tendency to generalize from observed details and to reflect on larger issues marks natural history discourse with qualities that require particular bourgeois cultural competencies, derived, Bourdieu argues, from a combination of elite education and the informal inculcation of legitimate culture within the family.30 This generalizing capability is what Cook lacked as a prose writer, though this is not to say that he could not perform the abstract thinking implicit in navigation and its mathematical problems. However, Cook’s mastery of navigation could be seen in Bourdieu’s terms as his having mastered a technique rather than the abstract thinking associated with bourgeois cultural competencies. Dorinda Outram has even suggested that explorers’ instruments, such as telescopes and quadrants, were thought of in Enlightenment science as extensions of the senses rather than tools enabling abstraction and “the production of standardized and hence potentially universal knowledge.”31 Uncomfortable with the role thrust on him by the Admiralty, Cook made no claims to be a naturalist; in fact, he wrote, “I am no natural historian.” He knew that he lacked the language and, dare we say,

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the ability to reflect on universalizing principles at work in the natural and cultural landscape he viewed, for as Boswell said of him, Cook “did not try to make theories out of what he had seen.”32 To compensate for his reluctance or inability to generate theories from what he observed, Cook drew on Wales’s journal, for Wales, the astronomer, could quote Shakespeare’s and Thomson’s poetry from memory and wrote quite eloquently about the landscapes and people of the Pacific. Beaglehole refers to Wales’s journal as “a source book for Cook,” and in his deft style, Beaglehole goes on to ever so discreetly accuse Cook of plagiarism: “a close student of Cook may occasionally wonder how he hit on an isolated and vivid phrase, such as the description of the man at the Marquesas, baling blood and water out of his canoe ‘with a kind of hysterical laugh.’ To find Wales’s journal is to find the explanation of a great deal.”33 As Carol Percy has argued, this practice of borrowing language from the “gentlemen,” Cook’s word for the civilians who accompanied him on his voyages, predates the second voyage, most notably with Cook’s consulting Banks’s journal on the first voyage.34 In his anxiety to transform his log-driven journal into a narrative and to elevate his workmanlike prose with natural history observation and reflection, Cook himself excised from his journal much of what Beaglehole describes as “pure Cook” and the writing that is “close to the event.”35 What Cook edited out of his journal was the processes by which he made sense of the new places and people he encountered. As a consequence of his selfcensorship, the published book lacks the immediacy of an intellectually and emotionally engaged observer, that very quality the Morning Chronicle reviewer found wanting in British voyaging narratives.

Natural History as Polite Science The changes that Cook made to his journal reveal an effort on his part to adopt the tone and language of natural history, a form of scientific writing that tended to elide the processes by which facts were constructed as such. Natural history, as opposed to first-person travel narratives, is structured around enumeration and description of natural phenomena, the list being its organizing principle. Typically, natural history provides a catalog of a region’s natural resources and productions and tends to represent nature as abstracted from the experience of it. Enlightenment natural science was suspicious of the accuracy of eyewitness accounts since they were dependent on the moral authority of the individual reporting the facts. That a fact’s value

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was dependent on an individual’s veracity and character was a source of anxiety for those invested in the new science of facts. To support notions of objectivity and the possibility of generating general principles, Enlightenment science tended to elide the conditions under which facts were produced and tended to present facts as if they were discrete, already formed natural productions, there for the scientific observer to gather up.36 Much is at stake in eliding the body as a way of knowing from natural history discourse, for the body is notoriously unreliable because it is unstable and idiosyncratic. As Dorinda Outram writes, “Enlightenment philosophy also went to some lengths to question the very possibility of the integrity of the knowing subject. A strong sense of the self that knows itself to be a self, and is thus capable of being a locus of moral identity, seemed increasingly for the Enlightenment to be placed in question by the very operations of the senses on which explorers relied to make contributions to knowledge.”37 As Enlightenment science, in its quest for truth, wavered between the twin poles of eyewitness accounts and experimental evidence, natural history discourse played out this ambivalence about observation as a path to natural facts by suppressing the narrative and bodily experiences of the observer. Cook’s journal (,) contains a few pages that can illuminate for us the differences and tensions that exist between the two genres of the firstperson, eyewitness account and natural history’s catalog of natural facts gathered at a distance. In volume  of his journal, folios  to  bear the notations of a hand other than Cook’s.38 In the margins, written in pencil, is a breakdown of Cook’s subject matter into traditional natural history categories. Next to passages that describe Cook’s encounters with Tongatapu, there is this running list of topics: “Nautical Subject,” “Face of the Country,” “Produce,” “Animals,” “Fishing,” “Canoes,”“Houses and Furniture,” “Tools,” “What things they esteem most,” “Manufactory,” “Habits,” “Persons,” and “Customs” (ff. –v). The marginal notes seek to impose an order on Cook’s journal entries, for at this point in the writing process Cook’s eyewitness account was not yet proper natural history and had to be shaped to fit into natural history’s abstracted categories of information. Cook worked hard to transform his log-based journal into a piece of writing that would satisfy natural historians’ questions about the natural and cultural landscapes he encountered in the Pacific. Though Cook announced that he was not a natural historian, he did, indeed, try to emulate the learned discourses of the scientific gentlemen with whom he had extensive contact: Sir Joseph Banks, George and Johann Forster, and William Wales. One passage he reworked extensively reveals this striving to attain

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the proper tone of polite erudition. Initially Cook wrote in his journal (,) the following: “the Country is exceedingly Mountainous, not only about Dusky Bay but all the Southern part of this eastern Coast and exhibits to our view nothing but woods and barren craggy precipice’s, no meadows or Launs are to be seen nor plains or flatt land of any extent. ”39 Cook reworked this passage in MS ,, adding a place name and substituting “found” for “see,” among other minor stylistic changes, to produce: “the Country is exceedingly Mountainous, not only about Dusky Bay but through all the southern part of this western coast of Tavai poemnammoo and exhibits to our view little else but barren mountains with craggy precipices, no meadows and lawns are to be found nor plains or flatt land of any extent.”40 In further revisions Cook wrote but then crossed out the following passage: “The very Islands, which lay in the Bay and on the Sea Coast may each of them be called a mountain, and the whole Country a heap of steep, barren Mountains rising one above another till their lofty and craggy Summits are lost in the Clouds.”41 The final published version, which copies yet another revision, incorporates the very fashionable word “prospect” into the revision: “A prospect more rude and craggy is rarely to be met with; for inland appears nothing but the summits of mountains of a stupendous height, and consisting of rocks that are totally barren and naked, except where they are covered with snow” (Voyage, :). The word “prospect,” as Raymond Williams and John Barrell have argued, is a key concept, borrowed from nature poetry and landscape design, having to do with a landed gentleman’s “equal, wide survey,” his ability, based on standing above and outside the mercantile fray, to see comprehensively and dispassionately, possessing “the public virtue of disinterestedness.”42 With each succeeding revision, Cook struggled to bring his initial description of Dusky Bay into line with the polite discourse on gardens and landscape aesthetics, hammering at his words until they fit into the distancing prose of picturesque scenic tourism.

Eliding the Body This kind of stylistic revision, though at the micro level, had the cumulative effect of stultifying Cook’s brisk and direct prose and leveling his keen observations into flat statements of fact. To recover the “pure Cook” and his initial engagement with unfamiliar terrain, we must go to the journal entries of MS ,, for between the log’s codified language and the much revised manuscript, MS ,, which became the printed book, several

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significant journal entries narrate Cook’s encounter with this new place. What this manuscript (,) has that is so valuable is a record of Cook’s bodily response to his surroundings, not only what he saw, but what he heard, smelled, touched, tasted, and even vomited. Cook’s way of knowing was located in the tangible and the contingent. For instance, in a journal passage describing the plant and animal life of Dusky Bay, we see how facts emerge out of bodily experiences. I quote from Cook’s journal entries from his May  visit to Dusky Sound in what is now New Zealand:43 If the Inhabitants of Dusky Bay feel at any time the effects of cold they never can that of hunger, as every corner of the Bay abounds with fish, the Coal fish (as we call it) is here in vast plenty, is larger and better flavoured than I have any where tasted, nor are there any want of Craw and other shell fish, Seals are also here in Plenty, they chiefly inhabit the Rocks & small Isles which lie near the Sea, the flesh of many of them we found excellent eating, not a bit inferior to the finest Beef Stakes and the Harslets of them all are little inferior to a Hog. The Wild fowl are Ducks, Shaggs, Cormorrants, Oyster Catchers or Sea pies, Water or wood Hens, which are something like our English Rails, these inhabit the Skirts of the Woods and feed upon the Sea beach they are very like a Common Hen and eat very well in a Pye or Fricasee, they are so scarce in other parts of New Zealand that I never saw one but at this place, Albatroses, Gannets, Gulls, Penguins and other aquatick birds the Land fowl are Hawks, Parrots, Pigeons and such other birds as are Common to this Country.44

Natural history’s emphasis on enumerating types and species of animal life is found in this passage, but also we have a Cook who is eating animals and making pronouncements on their flavor. Cook’s tasting of these natural history specimens undermines the hierarchies of senses within natural history’s systematics. Sight and, to a much lesser extent, sound were the senses that were held in a higher regard in Enlightenment aesthetic and scientific discourses; the senses that require the body to interact with the environment through touching, smelling, and tasting bring the body into that process in a more tangible and immediate way, and as a result were considered more unstable, less disinterested, and less “objective” ways of knowing. (Sight, of course, happens within the body, but sight is experienced as something that is happening beyond the body—out there.) Disinterestedness, in science and aesthetics, is achieved by separating the “interests of the senses” from observation.45 In keeping with the dignified distancing of natural history prose, Cook removed his bodily pleasure from the printed account of the voyage. Suppressing the bodily encounter as a way of knowing, he deleted from the book the phrases “better flavoured than I have any where tasted” and “the flesh of many of them we found excellent eating.”46

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Chapter 

In addition to removing Cook’s robust gustatory engagement with natural history specimens, the book version provides an orderly listing of categories of plant and animal life encountered at Dusky Bay, while Cook’s journal is a hodgepodge of information. Cook’s journal combines in one paragraph flax plants, sand flies, continual rain, and the crew’s health with the sighting of an unknown quadruped. The journal conveys the experience of sensory overload and of being overwhelmed by the diversity of the newness of this natural landscape. The chaos of experience is regularized in the book so that this section becomes a coherent list of natural resources, beginning with the “Face of the Country,” its bays and mountains, moving on to trees and other plants, soil conditions, fish, ducks, and a description of several kinds of birds—a section that does not appear in either of the holograph versions of Cook’s journals. This section, a long list of bird species, is taken directly from William Wales’s journal.47 Not only is Cook’s eating body suppressed in the book’s version of the Dusky Bay segment; also gone is the framing passage with which Cook opens this natural history segment of his journal—“If the Inhabitants of Dusky Bay feel at any time the effects of cold they never can that of hunger”—and substituted in its place is “What Dusky Bay most abounds with is fish” (Voyage, :). The Maori inhabitants and their eating of wildlife in Dusky Bay are removed from the printed version, and instead the book gives us an emptied landscape that is abundant with fish and birds for ships’ crews. This emptied landscape recalls a similar rhetorical move made by Thomson in his Seasons, for whom the tropical regions of the Southern Hemisphere are vacant and await British penetration and exploitation. Implicit in Cook’s revised passages and the natural history focus is a figuring of Dusky Bay as an important way station for voyaging expeditions. Cook also added to his MS ,, written while he was collaborating with Douglas, the following passage that made its way into the book: “The trees are of various kinds, such as are common to other parts of this country, and are fit for the shipwright, house-carpenter, cabinet-maker, and many other uses” (, , f. ; Voyage, :). The bay’s shores, which are described as “thickly covered with Wood,” shift during revision from a naval officer’s concern with trees as a source of lumber for ship repairs and spruce for making beer into a statement that encourages settlement. The woods become potential stores for not only sailors but colonists, and the terrain becomes hospitable for settlement. In keeping with presenting Dusky Bay as possessing valuable natural resources crucial to building colonial settlements, complete with wood for domestic interiors, is the deletion of a passage that casts this place

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in a less than inviting manner: “From what we could see of the interior parts of the Country, it consists intirely of barren rocky mountains which are so crow[d]ed together as to leave room for no vallies of extent nor did we see a single acre of ground fit for a Plantation of any kind.”48 This statement would certainly have discouraged British colonization, and to delete it has the effect of making New Zealand less forbidding and more amenable to colonization. In deleting the statement about “from what we could see of the interior parts,” Cook not only changes the meaning of what he initially wrote while at Dusky Bay. In cutting this passage and many others like it, he removed a record of the way in which he apprehended the natural features of this environment. Suppressed in the book is his journal’s description of how he knew what he knew. Such passages as “from what we could see” instate the body as a source of information and introduce a note of instability into the text’s scientific description concerning the limits of eyewitnessing as a form of knowledge production. In MS ,, a collection of notes and passages generated during the editing process, we can see Cook writing and rewriting the Dusky Bay section, adding and then removing references to himself as observer. An example of the excision of himself and the process of knowing is this edited passage: “The only amphibious animals, I have seen either here or on any other part of this Coast are seals.”49 In deleting the words that are crossed out, Cook removed his body and mention of its limits and constraints as an epistemological tool to produce a line that reads as if it is reporting simply a fact. In another revised and then deleted passage, he had introduced the idea of the observer’s fallibility, though offered as a self-assured statement of sweeping authority, but thought better of it and canceled the following passage: “Indeed, I do not know, that either the sea of Land produceth any thing that is not to be found in other parts of the Country. Excepting Seals which I have no were seen on shore but in this bay, when they are found in great plenty/numbers on the small Isles and Rocks near the Sea.”50 This quality of contingency in Cook’s apprehension of the unknown is nearly gone in the book version of the voyage, whereas in his journal he often makes the provisional nature of knowledge explicit. One way he does this is by discussing how his observations may differ from other sources and previous voyages. In his journal, he writes of Easter Island: “This is undoubtededly the same island as seem by Roggewein in Sept  altho’ the description given of it by the author of that voyage does by no means correspond with it now; it may also be the same as is seen by Captain Davis in

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Chapter 

, but this is not altogether so certain.”51 This section is followed by a lengthy passage, which Cook crossed out, indicating perhaps that he was revising even while writing his journal on board. Three diagonal lines running from the top left to the bottom right and one diagonal line running from top right to bottom left cancel a lengthy discussion of whether the island he has named Easter Island had been sighted by others. This passage will illustrate how Cook put his thinking processes down on paper, only later to remove them, perhaps because he had changed his mind, or perhaps he wanted to sound surer of his observations. I shall mention some reasons both for and against it and leave the reader to judge for himself. In the first place we did not see the low Island said to lie to the East of it, and if any island had laid in that situation we must have seen it. Wagler [?] the author of Davis’s voyage, says the low Island likes in the latitude of .  S. in this situation its possible we might have pas’d it unseen; but then he says the highland laid to the westward of it, but, this might be W.N.N. or even N.W. It must be allowed that Easter Island seen from the Eastward corresponds very well with what Wagler [?] has had said on the subject, besides for some days before we made the land, we saw vast flocks of Birds which come in the Mornings from the West and returned back in the Evenings. and as we saw few birds about the Island, it seems probable that there is some uninhabited ile in the neighbourhood where they resort to.52

In addition to providing readers with a sense of the context in which he makes decisions, Cook qualifies much of what he sees by articulating the conditions of knowing. Rather than making blanket pronouncements about the landscape he was viewing, he frequently prefaces his description with phrases such as “as far as I could tell” or “from what I could see,” which has the effect of placing his body’s presence into the process of knowing and suggesting the limitations and even the instability of the conditions of knowing.53 An example of the contingency and bodily presence is the following from the journal: “As we advanced to SSW with a light breeze at ESE in expectation of geting round the end of the land, we raised by little and little more low Isles beyond the one already mentioned and at last we saw they were connected by Sand banks and reefs, which seem’d to extend home to the Main and shut up the Passage a long shore.”54 Cook’s use of the word “raised” recreates the experience of seeing land as it seems to rise to the ocean’s surface as one approaches it by ship. His use of “we raised” and “we saw” places the ship and its crew in the process of deciphering the landscape while the word “seem’d” qualifies these observations, localizing them to this moment and place. Compare this sense of process with the entirely rewritten version in MS ,, which presents the

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facts shorn of the experience of determining them: “About daybreak, the wind shifted to S.S.W with which we stretched to S.E. for the hill before mentioned, it belonged to an island which at noon extended from S.  E’ to S.  W’ distant  leagues.”55 Cook goes so far as to admit that his words are inadequate to the task of description, calling attention to the fallibility of natural history writing. In his journal he refers to Hodges’s drawing of Dusky Sound as “a very accurate view both of the North and South entrance as well as several other parts of the Bay and in them hath delineated the face of the Country with such judgement as will at once convey a better idea of it than can be express’d by words.” This passage does not appear in the book.56 As Cook prepared his manuscript for publication, the sense of bodily encounter with new environs was damped down to the point that the processes by which Cook made sense of the new are nearly elided, leaving only traces of the contingent nature of meaning making. Though this distancing strategy was in keeping with the dislocating techniques of Enlightenment experimental science, it produced a text that undermined its own authority, that of the eyewitness. By removing the sensing body and the questioning mind from the book, Cook’s narrative fails to capture the immediacy and vitality of being in the South Pacific, the experience of witnessing the exotic that the Morning Chronicle reviewer was hoping to find in this maritime book. Without these bodily references, the book dilutes Cook’s presence in the text as a man, and it is this very quality of Cook as a particular individual in a particular place that is crucial to the credibility of his observations. Whatever scientific value the book possesses is not derived from natural history’s dispassionate and distancing tones; rather it is Cook’s personal qualities, Boswell’s “plain, sensible man with an uncommon attention to veracity,” that make his account believable and authoritative. The language of A Voyage towards the South Pole, in mimicking natural history’s dislocated apprehension of natural knowledge, undercuts the authorizing presence of Cook, producing a text as ideologically riven as the man himself, whose working-class origins were at odds with his role as imperial agent and representative of the crown.

Chapter 

Domesticating the Tropics: Tropical Flowers, Botanical Books, and the Culture of Collecting

Who loves a garden loves a green-house too. —William Cowper, The Task1 What is decisive in collecting is that the object is detached from all its original functions in order to enter into the closest conceivable relation to things of the same kind. This relation is the diametric opposite of any utility. —Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project2 Thus any given object can have two functions: it can be utilized, or it can be possessed. The first function has to do with the subject’s project of asserting practical control within the real world, the second with an enterprise of abstract mastery whereby the subject seeks to assert himself as an autonomous totality outside the world. The two functions are mutually exclusive. Ultimately, the strictly utilitarian object has a social status. . . . Conversely, the object pure and simple, divested of its function, abstracted from any practical context, takes on a strictly subjective status. Now its destiny is to be collected. —Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting”3

In his long poem The Task, William Cowper celebrates gardening as an important part of country life, which he portrays as a remedy to the social, moral, and political ills produced by the luxury and corruption rife in the city. Country walks, reading, and gardening are, for him, activities that can contribute to one’s spiritual and moral improvement by giving one a “heart susceptible to pity” and “a mind cultur’d and capable of social thought” (“The Garden,” l. –). Among the gardening activities he

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describes is pruning trees, which, true to georgic form, he insists should not be relegated to “lubbard labour,” a gardener whose “robust tough sinews, bred to toil” would not suit the task as it requires the master’s knowledge and skill. Cowper advises: “no meaner hand may discipline the shoots/ None but his [the master’s] steel approach them” (ll. –). The same degree of knowledge and skill is also required in the tricky business of growing cucumbers in hot beds, which Cowper describes in nearly comic georgic detail. A master’s abilities are also necessary when it comes to choosing, arranging, and caring for plants for his greenhouse. His love of gardening extends from growing vegetables and fruit trees to having a greenhouse filled with exotics, plants from tropical and subtropical zones, which without the greenhouse’s shelter could not survive the frosts and freezes of the temperate zones’ winters: Unconscious of a less propitious clime, There blooms exotic beauty, warm and snug, While the winds whistle and the snows descend. . . . All plants, of ev’ry leaf, that can endure The Winter’s frown, if screen’d from his shrewd bite, Live there, and prosper. Those Ausonia claims, Levantine regions these; th’ Azores send Their jessamine, her jessamine remote Caffraia: foreigners from many lands, They form one social shade, as if conven’d By magic summons of th’ Orphean lyre.

Protected from winter, these plants, “all foreigners,” will thrive, like the garden, if the master oversees their care and exercises his superintending gaze, his skillful hand, and his “taste” (ll. ), bringing visual order to the array of greenhouse plants: Yet just arrangement, rarely brought to pass But by a master’s hand, disposing well The gay diversities of leaf and flow’r, Must lend its aid t’illustrate all their charms, And dress the regular yet various scene. (ll. –)4

These feminized plants, with their seductive charms, reward Cowper’s labors in the greenhouse: The sight is pleas’d, The scent regal’d, each odorif ’rous leaf, Each op’ning blossom, freely breathes abroad Its gratitude, and thanks him in their kind. (ll. –)

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Chapter 

The exotic plants, which appear in Cowper’s greenhouse, arrive there, not by magic, but as the products of dislocating dynamics akin to those at work in natural history discourse. These dynamics, which we have seen at work in Cook’s struggle to excise traces of his presence from the process by which he apprehended nature, presented exotic plants to the English imagination as discrete commodities, shorn of cultural and ecological ties, ready to be consumed as objects of little utility and much pleasure. Plants, which may have been used in their indigenous environments to make clothing, food, medicine, and shelter, once they entered the greenhouse and the “stove” (a heated structure that enabled tropical plants to weather the harshest cold), became ornamentals, occupying the categories of the “new, beautiful, or rare.” 5 Tropical plants, thus divested of the use-value, circulated as social signifiers within British society, most often appearing as collected objects—as live specimens on display in gardens and greenhouses, as dead specimens in herbariums, or as illustrations and descriptions collected in botanical books, such as floras and hortuses. These collections of tropical plant matter performed significant ideological work within narratives of self and nation. British identity was fueled by such collections. Benjamin suggests that once the collected object has been “detached from all its original functions,” it enters into a relation determined by the collector, and Baudrillard argues that once “abstracted from any practical context,” the collected object invites the collector’s “abstract mastery whereby the subject seeks to assert himself.” The exotic plants in Cowper’s greenhouse function as a collection, and, like all collections, are enlisted in the construction of their owner’s identity, which, in this case, is a particular British identity shaped by class, gender, and colonialist agendas. The identity of Cowper’s “master” is that of a gentleman, who lives a life of “labourious ease” in the English countryside, one that is distinct from and yet dependent on the labor of others, as well as marked by his mastery of nature in its most local and global guises. This chapter explores some of the processes by which tropical plants, though alien and exotic, were domesticated, recontextualized, and incorporated into British social practices and cultural systems. In late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century Britain, tropical plants appeared in a variety of social settings, ranging from the dinner party to the country house stove and the collector’s herbarium, and possessed an array of cultural meanings dependent on the discursive field in which they were placed. The incorporation of tropical plants into British life must be seen against the colonial context within which the discourse of natural history operated. As Mary

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Louise Pratt has argued, the discourse of natural history thrived on abstraction and decontextualization. “Natural history extracted specimens not only form their organic or ecological relations with each other, but also from their places in other peoples’ economies, histories, social and symbolic systems.”6 Nicholas Thomas also portrays natural history, particularly the kind that was employed on the Pacific voyages of discovery, as licensed by an “expansive curiosity, which sought to abstract, generalize and dehumanize particular and contingent forms of knowledge.”7 This thrust of natural history to decontextualize plant life is emblematized by the visual conventions of botanical illustration with its snipped twig, the white borders of an empty sheet of paper, and the focus on the flower to the exclusion of the whole plant and its cultural and ecological surroundings (Figure ). Radically severed from their places of origin, exotic plants circulated in British society divorced from the stories, recipes, and local knowledge that had used and produced these plants. As Harriet Guest has argued, exoticism arises out of this state of cultural illegibility, and it is precisely this absence of meaning, which heightened their exoticism, that imbued tropical plants, especially ornamentals, with special significance for British botanophiles. Inserted into the discourses of the cult of botany, tropical plants were reinvested with complex social meanings specific to British society. As markers of elite status, cultural capital, and scientific expertise, tropical plants within these various botanic and horticultural discourses were also suggestive of British mastery over the globe’s natural resources. To help illustrate how a tropical plant can perform as a signifier within a social system, I turn for an example to a novel. In Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (), Lady Delacour plans a lavish party that has as its central attraction the blooming of a rare and exotic plant. Placing this plant, an aloe, which is said to bloom once every hundred years, at the center of her elaborate arrangements, she hopes to astonish and impress her guests and mortify her rival, Mrs. Luttridge, thereby securing her own position in high society as the supreme orchestrator of stunning and sophisticated parties.8 Telling her protege, Belinda, how she plotted to spoil Mrs. Luttridge’s party by staging her own “magnificent entertainment” and using the aloe’s blooming as a ploy to draw away guests from Mrs. Luttridge’s party to her own, she describes her success: [I]n short, my dear, I gained my point—every body came from Mrs Luttridge’s to me, or to my aloe. She had a prodigiously fine supper, but scarcely a soul stayed with her; they all came to see, what could be seen but once in a hundred years. Now, the aloe, you know, is of a cumbersome height for a supper ornament. My saloon luckily

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Chapter 

has a dome, and under the dome we placed it. Round the huge china vase in which it was planted, we placed the most beautiful, or rather the most expensive, hot house plants we could procure. After all, the aloe was an ugly thing—but it answered my purpose—it made Mrs. Luttridge, as I am credibly informed, absolutely weep with vexation.9

For Lady Delacour, the flowering of the tropical plant at her soiree signaled not only her wealth and her role as arbitress of taste and fashion but also her eminence as a sophisticated and intelligent women of polite learning. The aloe, for Lady Delacour, was not an object of aesthetic delight or scientific interest or even of medicinal benefit; the aloe, because of its expense and the degree of difficulty in procuring it, was a way for her to solidify her social position and reaffirm her mastery of high society’s forms. As Edgeworth’s episode suggests, possessing tropical plants became socially recognized as a form of cultural capital, a way of signaling one’s sophistication and worldliness. Anthropologists Jack Goody and Sidney Mintz have argued that plants circulate in every society’s economy not only as sources of food, clothing, and shelter but also as signs in semiotic systems. In addition to their life-sustaining roles, plants are rich in cultural meanings and key elements in a wide range of social practices. In Food and Culture Mintz argues that a society’s cultural beliefs and social practices are revealed in the growing of food-bearing plants as well as the preparation and eating of these plant-based foods, activities, he insists, that are central to social systems and the construction of cultural identity. Borrowing anthropology’s focus on how cultural systems produce meaning, I would like to turn our attention to what one contemporary dubbed the “cult of botany,” an eighteenth-century British social and discursive formation that invested plants with social significance.

Botanical Discourses An important way in which plants circulated in the middling and upperclass social settings was their representation in botanical literature, specifically, the illustrated botanical book. Britain in the late eighteenth century, according to W. T. Stearn, produced “the finest illustrated” botanical books ever printed, a development he attributes to the rise in the popularity of botany with wealthy amateur botanists. Botanical books, many expensively and elaborately illustrated, included hortuses, which catalog the contents of individual botanical gardens, such as W. T. Aiton’s Hortus Kewensis ();

Figure . After an anonymous artist employed by the Calcutta Botanic Gardens, Caespalinia sappan. Plate  from William Roxburgh, Plants of the Coast of Coromandel, vol.  (London, ). Hamilton Library, University of Hawai‘i at Ma-noa.

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floras, which describe the flowering plants of a particular region, such as William Curtis’s Flora Londinensis (); and gardeners’ manuals and reference books, such as Philip Miller’s The Gardener’s Dictionary (, ). Also published were educational books, such as Priscilla Wakefield’s An Introduction to Botany, in a Series of Familiar Letters () and Robert Thornton’s Juvenile Botany; An Easy Introduction to the Science of Botany (); these books, less expensive because smaller and less elaborately illustrated, popularized botany and offered instruction in the Linnean system of taxonomy.10 In short, plants appeared in a variety of illustrated books, ranging from gardeners’ guides, to scientific papers describing plants’ physical properties, to treatises detailing the economic benefits of particular plants, to lavishly illustrated, large-format editions full of plates and accompanied with text in the form of encyclopedialike entries. Placing the representation of tropical plants at the center of my investigation of the cult of botany illuminates the variety of discourses on plants as well as the tensions and contradictions within the study of botany as it was configured at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. At the core of these tensions lay key issues having to do with what constituted botanical knowledge, who had access to these systems of knowledge, and for what purpose this knowledge was used. In general, late eighteenth-century botanic knowledge was divided into economic botany, scientific botany, horticulture, and polite botany. Economic botany focused on practical uses of plants for medicinal and commercial purposes as well as taking note of horticultural techniques needed to grow economically profitable plants. The St. Vincent Botanic Garden, for instance, was instrumental in acclimatizing the breadfruit trees brought by Captain Bligh from Tahiti to the West Indies as a source of food for slaves.11 Scientific botany was dominated in Britain at the end of the century by a Linneaninspired preoccupation with taxonomy and classification, while chemical and structural analysis languished from inattention. Horticultural knowledge, information on how to grow particular plants, was generated primarily by professional gardeners, who worked in a variety of settings ranging from botanical gardens, to commercial nurseries, to the landscape gardens belonging to the great estates of the gentry and aristocracy. Professional gardeners and amateur botanists focused on exotic ornamentals as opposed to medicinal or commercial plants but approached them quite differently. While botanists were most eager to classify the “new” plants that flooded into England from all parts of the globe, gardeners concentrated on mastering the techniques necessary to raise tropical and subtropical plants in England’s

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cooler climate. Practitioners of polite botany ranged from the committed collector to the amateur botanical illustrator to the leisured naturalist and flower-lover who rambled through fields and gardens admiring and gathering plant specimens. Amateur botanists saw their hobby as much more than a form of recreation as they were convinced of the educational, emotional, and even spiritual benefits of botanizing. Of the many different kinds of books that featured tropical plants, I take as my focus Sir James E. Smith’s Exotic Botany (–) as these volumes mark a particular moment in the history of the study of plants, a time when botany was shaped by the concerns of a small group of wealthy plant collectors. Smith, the founder and president of the Linnean Society from its inception in  until his death in , had been trained as a medical doctor but devoted his life to studying, teaching, and writing about plants. The volumes of Exotic Botany provide us with an example of a way of thinking and writing about plants that was characteristic of several powerful men, including Smith’s friend and patron, Sir Joseph Banks, whose position as president of the Royal Society assured the ascendency of such thinking in scientific and polite circles. Exotic Botany’s importance as a historical and social document lies in what it reveals about the culture of connoisseurship, the construction of botanical knowledge, and the representation of tropical plant life. I must stress that in my focus on Smith’s text and the discourse of connoisseurship, I do not mean to suggest that this discourse was the only botanical discourse circulating at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. During this period, botany was a site of multiple discourses on plant life. For instance, tropical plants appeared in a variety of illustrated books. In addition to Smith’s Exotic Botany, images and descriptions of tropical plants could be found in Philip Miller’s Gardener’s Dictionary ( eighth edition), William Roxburgh’s Plants of the Coast of Coromandel (), and Robert John Thornton’s Temple of Flora (–). Though there is some overlap between the methods and materials of these four illustrated botanical books, they are informed by very different notions about the appeal, function, and significance of tropical plants in British life. Smith’s Exotic Botany was written as a guide for collectors of rare plants and botanical connoisseurs; Miller’s book aimed to provide the practical information needed to grow exotic plants; Roxburgh’s catalog of the plants in a particular region in India was designed for the use of the colonial official, prospective planter, and scientist interested in economic botany; and Thornton’s Temple of Flora, perhaps unique in its approach to plants, sought to inspire readers with a combination of intellectual

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Chapter 

curiosity, aesthetic delight, and spiritually charged admiration for God’s “vegetable kingdom.”12 To appreciate the variety of discourses on plants that circulated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we must forgo the temptation to plot a linear narrative of scientific progress that marches from one discovery to the next in a logical progression. We must be willing to linger in the cul-de-sacs and roundabouts that constituted the field of botany during this period. The botanists who figure prominently in this chapter do not appear in standard histories of botany, such as Morton’s History of Botanical Sciences, because their obsessions, mainly collection and classification, contributed little to the tenets of modern botany. Furthermore, Smith’s Exotic Botany, Roxburgh’s Plants of the Coast of Coromandel, and Thornton’s Temple of Flora were all financial failures, disappointing their compilers grievously. However unimportant these books may be in plotting the course of scientific progress, I would argue their significance lies in what they can tell us about British social practices surrounding plants, the cultural milieu that promoted an inordinate interest in foreign plants, and specifically the social function that tropical plants played in British society. More importantly, in keeping with this book’s central preoccupations, these botanical books can demonstrate the process of recontextualization, a process whereby a decontextualized object—in this case, a tropical plant—having been stripped of its cultural legibility, is then reinserted into another cultural context to take on meanings specific to that new cultural milieu.

The Cult of Botany By the late eighteenth century, the study and collection of plants was an activity that appealed to a great number of people. Both men and women, young and old, were fond of botanizing, which involved the study of the Linnean system of plant identification as well as field trips, countryside rambles, and botanic garden visits to test one’s knowledge of plant classification. In one of his lectures on the pleasures of botanizing, Smith described botany as “one of the most refined, improving, and unexceptionable pursuits, that can claim the notice or employ the leisure of persons of either sex, or of any age or condition.”13 Arguing for the spiritual benefits and physical well-being that accrued to botanizers, Robert Thornton, tireless promoter of botany and author of several books in addition to Flora, among them The Philosophy of Botany (), A Grammar of Botany (), and The

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Religious Use of Botany (), voiced his enthusiasm for botany in highflung prose. After extolling the pleasures of a morning walk, where “everything in Nature seemed combined to fill our minds with the sweetest and purest delights, and to lead our hearts towards God,” he celebrates the botanist’s close observation of nature: We come now to consider with more particular attention the appearance of plants, as they are seen by the eyes of the Botanist, who more minutely examines Nature; nor does the close inspection take away any thing from the delight which flowers impart: on the contrary, this is considerably increased by more minutely examining these fair and exquisite productions of Nature. For the more Nature is scrutinized into, the more she gains by a nearer acquaintance, and the more reason we have to admire her inimitable perfections. . . . What must be the enjoyment of that person who beholds these wonders of creative power through the medium of Science ! How much more will he rejoice who sees not these things collectively but can separate the component parts! . . . It is here that the  will find an unknown plant, which he probably observers for the first time, a new acquaintance, who will ever after wear the same smiling countenance. . . . [I]n this pursuit he never feels his spirits flag; his faculties become improved, his health thereby increased . . . , he feels an inward contentment such as no other pursuit can give him.14

Less hyperbolic in his praise of botany than Thornton, but just as committed to extolling its pleasures, Smith devoted his whole life to the study of plants and the promotion of botany. The pleasure of studying plants is captured in an exchange Smith had as a young man with a fellow enthusiast. While attending medical school in Edinburgh, he received a letter from one of his fellow Norwich botanizers, John Pitchford, who teased him about how his medical studies must now take precedence over his love of botany. “I am very sure you have but little time to botanize; and am far from being jealous, as an admirer of Flora, that you should neglect her for the more useful parts of science, which I make no doubt at this time have taken possession of your heart. This is as it should be. . . . Botany, to be sure, ought to be pursued as an amusement only.” Pitchford recognized that botany, particularly the art and science of classification, is outside the study of medicine but acknowledged Smith’s passion for botany with an invitation to indulge in their hobbies: “Let us, however, take a little ride together upon our favourite north and south British steeds, and communicate our discoveries to each other,” steeds being a reference to hobbyhorses. Pitchford then proceeded to tell Smith at length about his botanical specimens with great enthusiasm (Memoir, :–). While they were medical students, Smith and a few of his friends formed

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a society for the study of natural history. “I have great hopes that this will be a most respectable and useful institution, and am proud to be one of its first founders,” Smith wrote his father, telling of its prestigious members, among them two professors, two earls, and a son of an earl (Memoir, : –). Smith’s natural history society met every Friday from  to  o’clock to discuss two papers produced by members. “A few weeks ago I read a paper before the Natural History Society on collecting and preserving plants, which was debated on for three hours” (Memoir, :). Smith, writing to his father about his love of natural history, says: “I shall endeavour to get a general knowledge of every branch of literature as it falls in my way; but believe I shall find enough to employ me in the strict line of my profession, with the two first kingdoms of nature [fauna and flora] by way of relaxation; for I am fully persuaded that an intimate acquaintance with these is not only peculiarly ornamental, but highly necessary, to form an accomplished physician.” At this point in his education, he saw the study of natural history as a hobby that, in addition to being pleasurable, also enhanced his mastery of medicine. Moreover, his membership in this natural history society gave him the opportunity of writing, presenting, and discussing papers. It was this world of “literature,” as he called it, the world of natural history writing, that proved to be so important in shaping his career. Even at this early stage in his career, he recognized that “the benefit I have derived, . . . from the little knowledge of this kind which I am possessed of, is greater than could have been imagined, —I mean with respect to introducing me to the literary world; for if I had been without such an introduction, I might have drudged here perhaps a couple of years before I could have done anything to have signalized myself, or have been taken half the notice of which I now am” (Memoir, :). Such was the beginning of his life as a botanical writer and promoter of botany and the hobby that grew to occupy all his attention as author of more than twenty books on plants, on Linnean classification, and on the field of botany. In his prime Smith was regarded as one of Britain’s leading experts on botany, having mastered the intricacies of Linnean classification to the degree that he was consulted by professional and amateur botanists alike when they were confronted with botanic anomalies or other difficult-to-classify specimens.15 His good opinion was sought by professors of botany in England and in Europe, and he had a large network of foreign and domestic correspondents who consulted him on botanical issues. These biographical details underscore the complex state of botany as a field of knowledge and the ambiguous position of those who worked to

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produce botanical knowledge in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Not curiosi nor mere collectors, Smith and others like him were not “ignorant pretenders” but botanists, who, according to Pulteney in History and Biographical Sketches of the Progress of Botany (), possessed the ability “to investigate, to describe, and systematically arrange, any plant which comes under [their] cognizance” and who possessed “attainments which require a competent share of general learning, and not small degree of painful toil and patient industry, both in the fields and in the closet.”16 Amateur botanists, such as Banks, and more learned gentlemen, such as Smith, could trace their involvement with botany to the influence of Linnaeus, whose artificial system of plant classification was embraced in the s by British botanists for its simplicity and ease of application. No longer did botanists need to be extremely learned or to possess wide experience with plants in order to classify them. The Linnean system opened up botany to the amateur, to both the committed botanist and the occasional botanist who loved to ramble in the fields looking at flowers. In his Progress of Botany, Pulteney ascribes the popularity of botany in late eighteenthcentury Britain to the introduction of the Linnean system, “which in the rapidity of its extension, and the strength of its influence, had not perhaps been paralleled in the annals of Science” (:). According to Pulteney, Linnaeus’s “doctrines silently insinuated themselves” into the minds of British botanists because they were easily grasped: “The simplicity of the classical characters as the basis, the uniformity of the generical notes, confined wholly to the parts of fructification, and that precision which marked the specific distinctions, advantages of which all foregoing systems were destitute, soon commanded the assent of the unprejudiced; and after an interval of a few years, gave Linnaeus’s method a decided superiority with English botanists”(:–). The simplicity of the Linnean system not only appealed to professionals but also encouraged anyone with a little time to botanize. In Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science, Ann Shteir demonstrates how botany, as a form of polite learning, was open to women, who could not only partake of the pleasures of botanical walks and discussions but also become authors who wrote botanical books designed for the instruction of general readers. Shteir convincingly argues that the period from  to  was a time when women of the upper and middling classes were encouraged to participate in botany; it was considered a polite and refined activity that improved one’s character, mind, and health, and was especially appropriate for young women in preparation for their roles as mothers responsible for their children’s

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education.17 Though Smith himself encouraged young women to pursue botany, he also was acutely aware of hierarchies within the ranks of those who studied plants. In one of his lectures, he described four kinds of botanists: “the superficial gatherer of simples or flowers”; the “half-learned or half-experienced botanist”; the “practical botanist,” who knows plants from experience (he names Thunberg as an example) but fails to think abstractly about them; and “learned botanist,” who has mastered taxonomy and whose embrace of the Linnean artificial system is based on a desire to discover “Nature’s laws,” which reflect “that infinite wisdom which planned and perfected the whole.”18 Learning the Linnean system of classification could be acquired outside the university through individual application and the support of loosely organized communities of like-minded individuals. Amateurs, like Smith, could compete with professionals in the acquisition of such knowledge. Smith was not a professor of botany, like Professor John Hope, under whom he studied at the University of Edinburgh, nor was he a professional taxonomist, like his friend Jonas Dryander. A gentleman of taste and education, Smith, like Sir Joseph Banks, wielded enormous power in Britain’s scientific community. In his study of Enlightenment science in Britain, John Gascoigne argues that because the British government did not support science in any consistent or systematic way, the pursuit of scientific knowledge was left to amateurs, mostly members of the gentry, who had their own private incomes and, more importantly, connections with powerful aristocrats and statesmen, from whom they could wheedle funds on a piecemeal basis for individual projects.19 Unlike France’s centralized and well-funded Academy of Sciences or even the small but very productive scientific circles that flourished under the patronage of German princes, who vied with each other for eminence in the arts and sciences, England’s Royal Society received little state support.20 This lack of state funding and governmental interest in science created a vacuum that was filled by politically well-connected, upper-class patrons of the sciences. Amateur botanists, such as Banks, dominated British botany, to its detriment some would argue, diverting interest in plants into the activities of collecting and classifying, activities that were ultimately closely associated with a culture of connoisseurship that heavily influenced not only the sciences but the arts as well. With few scientists being supported to carry out research and writing, the direction of British science in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was shaped by talented and devoted amateurs, in short, by connoisseurs. I turn to the intersection of botany with aristocratic display and the practice of collecting

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to focus on the culture of botanical connoisseurship, a late eighteenthcentury social practice and discursive formation that invested tropical plants with cultural significance.

Connoisseurs and Collecting Exotics Though Sir James E. Smith was president of the Linnean Society, his passionate engagement in the study of exotic plants is not that far removed from Lady Delacour’s pursuit of the aloe plant for her dinner party. Both the fictional Lady Delacour and the botanist Smith used rare plants to influence powerful people, to fuel their ascendency within their own social circles, and to shore up their own elite status. In short, plants were a currency that bought prestige within aristocratic social circles. Smith’s lifelong devotion to the study of plants was his avenue into society’s highest ranks, for as his biographer asserts, “Botany clearly opened all doors to him—even ducal portals.”21 His purchase of Linnaeus’s library and his subsequent founding of the Linnean Society won him the friendship and patronage of Sir Joseph Banks, whose influence was not limited to his position as president of the Royal Society. Smith’s own background was rather ordinary; his father was a wealthy cloth merchant from Norwich. Though Smith was educated as a physician, his fascination with botany took precedence over medicine. Never practicing as a doctor, he was an author of several books on botany including The English Flora, as well as scholarly and scientific articles, and he served as a guest lecturer at a variety of academic and learned societies. Smith’s position as president of the Linnean Society gave him entry into the lives of aristocratic collectors, many of whom collected, in addition to rare plants, seashells, ancient coins, classical statuary, Italian paintings, and Chinese and Florentine porcelain, to name only a few of these connoisseurs’ passions. This culture of connoisseurship was a powerful force in the construction of botanical knowledge and in the representation of plant life in late eighteenth-century Britain. Key to connoisseurial botany was the collecting of plant life, with the aim of either cultivating rare specimens in one’s garden or greenhouse or collecting dried specimens for one’s herbarium. Smith’s Exotic Botany, as a compendium of current information about exotic plants, would have appealed to collectors and connoisseurs of tropical plants. However, beyond its usefulness as an aid to collectors of rare plants, Exotic Botany, I would argue, is itself a collection. Organized as a catalog, it provides readers with

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an image of each flower, a literature review, a scientific description of its appearance to aid identification, and a discussion of its geographic origin and the means by which it came to Britain (Figure ). Such cataloging efforts are a form of virtual collecting, where the possession of the object itself is not the goal, but rather the possession of information about the object is of the essence. Botanical books, such as Smith’s Exotic Botany and his English Flora, in their gathering, organizing, and displaying of information about plants, mimic those collecting practices of botanophiles who collected actual plant specimens. Floras and hortuses might be fruitfully conceived of as forms of collecting; just as in today’s world, we have collectors of objects and collectors of information, for example, comic book collectors, and those who organize and display information about comic books (on Web sites, for instance).22 This culture of collecting, with its anxiety over the status and legitimacy of connoisseurial knowledge, informs much of the botanizing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Figure . After James Sowerby, Hamellia patens, from Sir James Edward Smith, Exotic Botany (London,). Special Collections, University of Arizona Library.

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Connoisseurship within Britain has usually been identified with collectors of art, in particular, classical statuary and Old Master drawings and paintings. John Brewer’s discussion of the Society of Dilettanti, with its “impeccable aristocratic credentials,” focuses on the kind of knowledge that such men valued and the social circumstances under which it circulated. This “charmed circle of aristocrats” thought of “connoisseurship as their prerogative,” something that could be attained only “by those of general vision, men whose independent fortunes enabled them to take the larger, ‘liberal’ view.” Brewer points out that, in addition to a gentleman’s education, leisure, and means to pursue collecting, connoisseurship required a “highly detailed and particular sort of knowledge.”23 While collecting exotic plants might not have carried the cachet of collecting classical Roman statuary, plant collecting required a gentleman’s education, financial resources, leisure, a global network of correspondents and agents, and the mastery of the technical language of Linnean taxonomy. The culture of connoisseurship permeates Smith’s Exotic Botany, particularly in its form of address.24 The preface states that his aim in producing this book was not to describe “the plants actually blossoming in the English gardens” but rather to “introduce to the curious cultivator plants worthy of his acquisition from all parts of the globe, and to teach those who have correspondents abroad what to inquire for.” He adds that he will focus on “any new or rare plants,” taking as his object “anything worthy to gratify the botanical taste so now prevalent” (v–vi). The audience whom Smith is addressing in this preface is an elite one: those wealthy enough to possess greenhouses in which to grow these exotics and those who are already engaged in plant collection, having an international network of botanical correspondents. Though the implied audience for Smith’s book is wealthy botanical connoisseurs, this certainly does not prohibit others from enjoying the experience of imaginatively participating in the exclusive world of aristocratic desire and acquisition (though the book’s price no doubt was prohibitive to many). The chatty, almost intimate tone and the repetition of the names of his friends and fellow collectors create the illusion that the reader is a member of an exclusive group of botanophiles. While the audience might have actually included professional botanists and even perhaps nurserymen and gardeners employed by wealthy patrons, the implied reader of these volumes is the wealthy connoisseur whose passion is collecting rare and exotic plants. Exotic Botany is saturated with the language of desire and consumption. Smith’s goal is to arouse curiosity in his readers and to teach them to

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desire these plants, which he promises will gratify their taste for the new. His audience, he assumes, wants to be taught what to “inquire for,” as if these volumes, “illustrative of . . . the botanical riches daily flowing in upon us” from around the world, were to function as a shopping list for the acquisitive collector who is eager to possess, as the subtitle proclaims, “such new, beautiful, or rare plants as are worthy of cultivation in the Gardens of Britain.” Smith’s text stresses Exotic Botany’s access to extremely rare plants, such as in the following typical entries:  micrantha. The Marquis of Blandford has favoured us with this very curious and rare little orchideous plant, a native of Jamaica, which flowered in his lordship’s stove at White Knights in the latter part of last November. It accords exactly with a dried specimen sent by Dr. Swartz, its original discoverer, who after much consideration thought proper to constitute a new genus of this and the Epidendrum ophioglossiodes of Jacquin and Linnaeus. Their character indeed is peculiar, and justifies the determination. (:)  acaulis. For this most extradordinary plant, unique in its Natural Order, (as far as we know) in having neither stem nor flowerstock, we are indebted to the favour of Mr. Evans of Stepney, who received it from Trinidad, and in whose stove we had the pleasure of seeing this and many other very rare productions in June last. (:)  hyacinthinum. A native of the island of Trinidad, for which we are obliged to our liberal friend Thomas Evans, Esq., of the East India House, in whose choice collection it first flowered in the autumn of . It seems not yet to have been noticed by any author, not even in the ample enumeration of species in Dr. Swartz’s Treatise on the Orchideae, where this new species is first established. In natural affinity Cymbidium comes nearest to Dendrobium, see t. , , and , from which it differs essentially in the want of a pouch or spur in the base of the petals; a character perhaps rather artificial, but in so large and intricate a family any mark which is not variable becomes important. (:)

In addition to emphasizing the plants’ rarity and newness in English gardens, Smith’s descriptions often feature their visual and aromatic qualities. Of Humea elegans (incense plant), Smith writes: “The beauty of its widespreading drooping panicles, and innumerable shining rose-coloured flowers, which sometimes vary to white, render this plant a great acquisition to the Green-House, in which it succeeds without any peculiar attention. It is moreover desirable for its fragrance, which, though much too strong in the leave, partakes, in the panicle, of the odour of the Hautboy Strawberry, with some resemblance to the Red Cedarwood” (:). These sensory details,

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which delineate color, form, and aroma, enable the reader to visualize how these plants might function in their lives as objects of beauty, admiration, and desire. Another hothouse plant that he recommends for its fragrance is Asclepias carnosa (swallowwort): “We have not heard of it in any other collection. It is cultivated in the stove, and flowers from May to July, being very remarkable for its succulent habit, the elegance of its blossoms, and especially for their sweet and luscious fragrance, which have been compared to that of a rich plumcake. A combination of the smell of honey with the almond flavour of the Peruvian Heliotrope, perhaps gives the best idea of it” (:). Smith’s description of the aroma of these plants would have been useful to readers who, like the fictional Lady Delacour, might have wanted to display a rare plant with especially attractive qualities, such as a distinctive aroma, for social purposes or for personal satisfaction. Smith’s evocative and sensory language is something that he consciously cultivated. He gently chided his friend and fellow botanist William Roscoe on the plain style of his essay on “Monandrian plants,” an order which includes “Ginger, Turmeric, Zedory, and various sorts of Cardamoms.” (Memoir, :–). Your treatise is a plain, clear, unaffected discourse. Perhaps I was, at first reading it, disappointed that you had not made something more of it in the way of composition, with respect to ornament or episode, because I know that you are one of the few, who, with real science, could have done so. But this might have been “soaring above the path of true simplicity,” and the more I read your paper, the less I feel any want of such adventitious merits; —I only mention all that has occurred to my mind. The leading qualities of these plants, their beauty, their fragrance, their affinity or resemblance to Palms or Orchideae, whether real or supposed, the hot and moist climates which they prefer, —these things might have been alluded to. (Memoir, –)

Roscoe’s plain, and as we might say today “scientific,” style omits details about these “very attractive, curious, and rare” plants, details that Smith thought important, details that convey an authorial presence that appeals to the imagination and senses and provides information about how a plant might function socially and even decoratively in botanophiles’ lives.25 To enhance Exotic Botany’s attractiveness for his readers, Smith continually stresses the plants’ exotic qualities. The title page reinforces the theme of difference with a quote from Thomson’s Seasons: “Another Flora there, of bold hues,/ And richer sweets, beyond our garden pride.”26 However, the strangeness of exoticism, a quality that is fleeting and allusive, had to be cultivated, maintained, and shored up in this text as it is in danger of dissipating

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through exposure.27 The OED’s definition of “exotic” reveals much about the instability of the category: “alien, introduced from abroad” and “a foreign plant not acclimatized.” An exotic is not exotic in its land of origin; it becomes an exotic only when it is brought to another country or climate. As Harriet Guest has argued in her discussion of the Pacific voyages of discovery, the exotic is constructed through decontextualization, through removal from site of origin, a process whereby the object “is stripped of context” and is displaced or dislocated “from any signs of the personal estate or cultural context that might produce legible or potent significance.”28 The dynamics of strangeness within the frame of familiarity construct the category of the exotic, and yet the exotic is always in danger of losing its alien quality as the exotic item becomes domesticated, or as in this case, a plant becomes acclimatized or culturally recontextualized. Smith’s project, in seeking to familiarize rarities and systematize the exotic, jeopardizes the very qualities of exoticism that he hoped would captivate his audience. One of the ways he deals with the instability of these plants’ exoticism is to stress their rarity in Europe and to refer constantly to the elite status of those who possess these plants in Britain. The rarified circles in which these plants circulated, as seeds, bulbs, and cuttings, ensure the plants’ status as rare and desirable. Within his descriptions of plants in Exotic Botany, Smith refers repeatedly to prominent members of what may be called a botanical elite. When a plant is described as belonging to Lady Amelia Hume, that plant takes on a luster by association. For some readers, such as William Roscoe, Smith’s friend and fellow amateur botanist, Lady Hume is a prominent member of their own group of botanical connoisseurs, but for other readers, who could only know of Lady Hume by reputation, references to such people intensify the feeling that this world of collectors is indeed very exclusive. Smith’s text is peppered with titles drawn from society’s upper ranks: “We have seen it [Melaleuca nodosa] in the green-house of the Dowager Lady De Clifford, flowering in June” (:); “the Marquis of Blandford has favoured us with this very curious and rare little orchideous plant” (:); “We received it from the garden of the Right Honourable Charles Long” (:); and “To Sir Joseph Banks we are obliged for a wild specimen” (:). Other names, not drawn from the landed upper classes, also circulate with regularity in Smith’s text. These names belong to prominent botanists and collectors such as Captain Thomas Hardwicke, Dr. William Roxburgh, Dr. Francis Buchanan, Dr. White, and Mr. Robert Brown, clerk and librarian of the Linnean Society, as well as wealthy professional men, mostly doctors and lawyers, and

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retired bureaucrats, such as “Thomas Evans, Esq. of the East India House” (:), many of whom had actually traveled abroad and collected specimens while overseas. The elite status of the botanophiles who people Smith’s volumes is ensured by a combination of their wealth, rank, botanical knowledge, and international network necessary to pursue what the book sees as a worthy goal—the collecting of rare plants. Smith’s name-dropping heightens the impact of the language of exclusion that suffuses this text. Though his descriptions of plants involve narratives about the generosity of collectors sharing their plants, the language in which these narratives are couched set up boundaries between the few initiated and the many uninitiated in the art of collecting exotic plants. In Smith’s text the words “we” and “us” are used repeatedly to refer to himself, the Linnean Society, and his fellow collectors of botanical specimens, suggesting that collecting rare plants occurs within a small, very exclusive community of friends and acquaintances who all share this passion. For example, he writes: “The Hon. Mrs. Barrington, to whom we have on many occasions been obliged for some of the rarest and finest plants that the British gardens can boast, favoured us with this Asclepias, brought to her from the straits of Sunda. We have not heard of it in any other collection” (:). In his use of “we” and “us” the exact referent is often obscure (who is the “we” which has been obliged to Mrs. Barrington?), and frequently, as in the passage above, the referent shifts, so that it is unclear if he is referring to himself (as in the royal “we”), to the Linnean Society, or to fellow botanists and collectors. When he writes “we had the pleasure of seeing this and many other very rare productions in June last” (:), the “we” seems to refer to himself, possibly in conjunction with his illustrator, James Sowerby. In other instances, Smith’s use of ‘we” collapses the boundaries between himself, his botanical friends, and the whole field of botany. When he writes “we are obliged to Captain Harwicke for the above description and a drawing, both made on the spot” (:), it is difficult to be certain whether the “we” means himself as the author of these illustrated volumes or all botanists who should be grateful to Captain Hardwicke for sharing his knowledge of exotics with them. Such usage of “we” implies that the collection of information about exotic plants—drawings made of them as well as the actual plants themselves—is coterminus with botany itself. Furthermore, the repetition of the names of a few collectors, such as Lady Hume, Lord Blandford, and Captain Hardwicke, who are mentioned with a gratitude and even fondness, creates the impression of insularity and exclusivity, with botanical specimens and

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information circulating within a tight orbit of a few collectors. These stylistic features of Smith’s prose underscore the intimacy and connectedness that this elite group shared in pursuit of their avocation.29 Though Smith’s text is sprinkled heavily with “we” and “us” and stories of his friends’ sharing of botanical specimens, the sense of community that such language builds is somewhat undercut by a hint of competition in the quest for the rare. Smith repeatedly announces the rarity of the plants he describes with phrases such as “It is unquestionably distinct from all hitherto described” (:); “We have not heard of it in any other collection” (:); “It . . . does not appear to be described by any writer” (:); “The genus is altogether new to our gardens” (:); and “they flowered last April, for the first time in Europe” (:). Implicit in the statement “not heard of in any other collection” is the pride in possessing the only specimen of its kind. Smith’s text captures the delicate balance between the collector’s desire to be the sole possessor of a particular rare plant and the reality of collecting, which is dependent on establishing a network of colleagues and a community of collectors who can facilitate the process of collecting, and even perhaps more importantly, validate it as an edifying exercise in polite learning. Smith mingles descriptions of rare plants with narratives of collectors sharing plant specimens, cuttings, seeds, and bulbs. Lady Hume, for instance, is praised for her generosity: “It [Humea elegans] is unquestionably distinct from all hitherto described. We have named it after the accomplished Lady to whom we are obliged for its introduction, and who, for her botanical taste and knowledge, as well as the number of new plants she has introduced into England, and which she is always in the most liberal manner disposed to communicate, well deserves such a compliment” (:). Smith repeatedly acknowledges with gratitude Captain Harwicke’s supply of information, drawings, and seeds, “which that gentleman has liberally distributed in England” and whose efforts “will enrich our collections”(:). Narratives like these about Lady Hume and Captain Hardwicke stress the collegiality of botanical connoisseurs while simultaneously proclaiming the rarity of the specimens that circulate among members of this elite group. Indeed, the tension between sharing a rare plant and keeping a plant rare that surfaces in these passages suggests the central contradiction that structures Smith’s Exotic Botany. As a guide to collecting rare plants, it endangers their very status as rare.30 What made these plants valuable was their scarcity in England, and yet a book that professes to “teach” readers “what to inquire for” would have, if successful in fulfilling this goal, ultimately led to diminishing the very rarity that it upholds as the highest form of value. However, even

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though Smith’s readers may have wished to expand their collections of exotics, the material conditions, namely the expense and leisure time necessary to form and maintain a collection, prohibited the large-scale circulation of most of these difficult-to-obtain plants. These remained securely in the hands of botanical connoisseurs until the mid-nineteenth century, when botanical gardens such as Kew received enough state support to carry out the study of exotic and rare plants.

The Curious Collector Smith’s reference in the preface to “the curious cultivator” signals that in addition to the Linnean system of classification, another natural history discourse is at work in his book, that of curio collecting. Exotic Botany mediates between two distinct discourses: the early modern discourse of collecting nature’s curiosities, with its goal of arousing a spectator’s sense of wonder, and the Enlightenment discourse of botany, which elides the traces of the observer from the process and object of observation. The discourse on the curious and wondrous in nature, which informed the seventeenthcentury cabinet of curios approach to natural history, featured, according to Katie Whitaker, “an attitude of mind involving a fascination and admiration for the rare, novel, surprising, and outstanding in all spheres of life.” The “curiosi,” educated men of the upper classes and those of the middling classes, who aspired to be considered accomplished gentlemen, collected natural and artificial objects that aroused “curious wonder” and excited their powers of explanation as well as reverence for “the true wonders of God’s works.” The Grand Tour, according to Whitaker, stimulated in English gentlemen a taste for the curious. “They returned to England as fullyfledged curiosi, bringing back rarities of nature and art which formed the basis of their collections of curiosities. They settled into the life-style characteristic of curiosi, travelling to seek out and view rarities, displaying rarities in the houses, gardens, and estates, and visiting each other to view and discuss these rarities.”31 As recent work in museum studies and the history of science has demonstrated, the culture of curiosi was responsible for the founding of the museum as a cultural institution, the curiosi amassing huge collections that became the core of many museums and herbariums. Curiosi’s collections, however, were not arranged systematically but in a manner that highlighted contrasts and artfully aroused wonder and admiration in viewers. Key to the curiosi’s experience of wondering admiration

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was the feeling of strangeness emanating from the collected object. This quality of strangeness was heightened, curiosi believed, by placing objects “in close juxtaposition of contrasting specimens,”32 something that could not happen in nature and was therefore most effectively achieved in a museumlike setting or in the pages of a book. This tension between celebrating a plant’s rarity and cataloging it makes for contradiction within Smith’s Exotic Botany. Smith’s reference to the curious collector of rare plants is quietly embedded in the dominant Linnean discourse of plant classification, a discourse that ensures his status as an botanical expert, not a curioso. Though the specter of curio hunting does haunt Smith’s text, he would have been horrified to have his work associated with the “primitive” thinking and curious collections of seventeenth-century natural historians. Smith would have regarded the curiosi’s passionate collecting of rarities and oddities as lacking in “the systematic arrangement of objects into kinds according to some method of classification.”33 The curiosi and their “preoccupation with rarity and uniqueness seemed indiscriminate and uncritical to those” who, like Smith, “viewed nature as a realm of laws, categories, and classes rather than one of rampant heterogeneity.”34 The distinction between curiosi and connoisseurs is an important one. Though both groups shared a passionate devotion to collecting, connoisseurs took pride in their “erudition,” their mastery of a technical vocabulary, and their belief in the utility of their studies. While botanical connoisseurs believed that they were contributing to the understanding of the laws by which the natural world operated, they saw the curiosi’s collecting as a form of entertainment, as an “amusement, tho’ seemingly rather matter of curiosity, than any useful knowledge that appears to be gain’d thereby.”35 This distinction between curiosi and connoisseur has a tendency to collapse in our modern terminology, “connoisseur” implying today an elitism combined with amateurism that is often dismissed as a trivial pursuit of specialized knowledge. For the late eighteenth century, however, the word “connoisseur” possessed connotations closer to today’s word “expert,” but with the exception that our notions of expertise imply professional training, which was not the case for most connoisseurs, whose knowledge was not usually acquired through institutional training or credentialized by professional organizations. Although Smith’s embrace of taxonomy distinguishes his love of plants from that of the “gatherer of simples” and the curiosi’s pursuit of wonder, there is a way in which the authorial presence in Exotic Botany, the speaking voice (the “we” that is used repeatedly), takes on a connoisseurial air,

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and at times partakes of the curiosi’s unabashed delight in collecting the rare and strange. Where the residual discourse of curio collecting is most evident within the learned taxonomic delineations of Exotic Botany is in those passages that hint at the collector’s pride and pleasure in his or her exclusive possession of valued objects. Behind Smith’s placid statements tracing out textual references to plants lies the collector’s enthusiasm. Whenever Smith mentions private gardens, country house greenhouses and hot houses, or private libraries and herbariums, he is referring to botanical collections amassed by individuals who were obsessed with plants and who had expended huge amounts of time and money on acquiring flowers, ultimately ephemeral possessions. Though Smith himself had a small garden, he was dependent on his network of friends and acquaintances for access to those rare plants he wanted to record in Exotic Botany. His passion was classification, but to indulge in this passion he had to maintain strong ties with serious and committed collectors, such as Lady Hume, the Marquis of Blandford, Alymer Lambert, and Hon. Mrs. Barrington. As president of the Linnean Society, Smith was positioned as someone who would be consulted when new and rare plants were acquired by collectors. His skills as a taxonomist as well as his firm grasp of the botanical literature would have been eagerly sought when a collector needed confirmation as to the uniqueness or value of his or her collection. Smith’s extensive correspondence is full of missives from collectors eager to share with him their new acquisitions. Lord Blandford wrote: “I have just had notice of , plants having left Jamaica for me from Dr. Damier [?]; a great many new genuses—I shall be happy to show them to you as soon as all my others when I am settled at White Knights.”36 By far the most expressive of his fellow enthusiasts was his friend Alymer Bourke Lambert, who frequently reported on shipments of plants, which he hoped to buy, or was in the process of buying, or had just purchased. Lambert writes to Smith with his usual enthusiasm: I have only just time to say there is now one of the finest collections of specimens of plants that ever came to this country, for sale on Tuesday next: from Surinam, I was there all day yesterday with Lord Blandford looking at them. Mr Rudge [and] myself intend buying the whole if possible; if you have a mind to join us we shall be glad as there are many Duplicates of each Species, you can have no idea of their Beauty. There are six large chests, several hundred in each [;] nothing can be in better preservation or better collected. . . . The Marquis of Blandford has been in town a week and we have done nothing else hardly but go from one garden to another.37

In another letter, Lambert tells how, while in Bristol, he had been invited by a Lord ——— forth on board a ship just arrived from the West Indies;

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Chapter 

Lambert was delighted to see “the whole Deck covered with living plants in twenty large Boxes containing according to the Gardener’s account about eight hundred & you might guess at my amazement and delight when he presented me with the whole collection !!!! of the plants !!!!! insisting that his Gardener on board should see them all safe to Boyton [Lambert’s stately home] & remain with me till they were are safe in my stoves. . . . You might suppose what a bustle I have been in.”38 Lambert also wrote to Smith reporting on other collectors’ botanic gardens. Of the Marquis of Blandford’s, he says, “more worth seeing than any private collection in this country. No one can be fonder of it & he spares no pains or expense although he has sixteen men constantly at work in the Botanic Garden he does more work than any two of them I believe.”39 Lambert also had access to Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey, as Lambert’s father lived in the neighborhood. While Beckford was abroad, Lambert paid several visits to his “Hothouses and Greenhouses which are some of the largest in Europe.” Lambert pronounced Fonthill to have “one of finest private collections I had ever seen,” and the reason for this was that Beckford had employed Milne, “who you no doubt know is one of the best if not the best Botanic Gardener in England.”40 Milne had apparently reported to Lambert that Beckford “desired if he ever saw you he wished he would tell you that you should see the Abbey and all the improvement. How highly you are favoured as you are the only person what has that permission, even the Duchess of Norfolk who went last year to see it was refused.”41 With such correspondents, Smith was at the center of the ebb and flow of botanical information. He was so well positioned that in addition to being invited to view private collections, he also could act as a broker of information about and access to collections. Sometimes his friends would ask him to use his influence to help them get plants they wanted for their gardens. For instance, in one of Mrs. Barrington’s letters, she begins by complimenting Smith on one of his botany lectures and by talking about how the study of natural history “fills the soul with wonder and gratitude to Providence for giving us such proofs of his universal power and wonderful works,” but after these niceties and platitudes, she gets down to business: “There is a flower which I should be delighted to be possess’d of and which is at the Physick Garden at Chelsea; that is the Strelitsia regina [Bird of Paradise]; but I don’t know if it is proper or possible to apply there for one of the Plants; will you have the goodness to tell me if you think I can, as by what means? I beg you to excuse the liberty I have taken.”42 Though connoisseurs had much at stake in maintaining the distinction between their serious, thoughtful, and informed knowledge about plants

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and the idiosyncratic and indiscriminate collecting of curios seekers, this distinction is inherently unstable. The distinction between collector and connoisseur has a tendency to collapse, as it does in Smith’s written text. His focus on rarities and his mention of the curious collector reveal that his project has more in common with the curiosi’s than he would have cared to admit. For seventeenth-century curio collectors as well as eighteenthcentury botanical collectors, curiosity drives the collector to possess objects, and with the possession of the desired object comes an illusion of mastery, a sense of possessing in microcosm the totality of the world.43 As Pomian argues in his study of different kinds of collecting in Europe, curiosity is the “desire to see, learn or possess rare, new, secret or remarkable things, in other words those things which have a special relationship with totality and consequently provide a means for attaining it.”44 Smith’s Exotic Botany, not a break with curio collecting but a reformulation and an extension of it, infuses the systematics of classification with curiosity and desire to master the strangeness of the exotic. Linnean taxonomy, as a universalist system, suppresses local meaning and local context and decontextualizes plant specimens, dislocating them from their cultural and ecological origin by inserting them into a universal system of ideal types. Smith’s focus on classification in Exotic Botany, what might be thought of as a virtual collection, removes foreign plants from their original cultural contexts as well as from the realm of utility, freeing them to circulate as possessions, readied for incorporation into subjective systems of meaning making. This discursive strategy lent fuel to the botanophiles’ avid collecting practices, and wealthy collectors, such as Lord Blandford, could use Smith’s flora as a catalog to guide his next purchases of plants from abroad.

Amateurs and Professionals Smith’s deployment of the connoisseurial tone in his annual volumes of Exotic Botany attempts to mask this tension between an expression of delight in what amounts to curio collecting and the rigors imposed by the exercise of classification. Despite his efforts to portray the world of botanophiles as united in their passionate fondness for plants, his text reveals an anxiety over what constitutes botanical knowledge and who deserves access to this exclusive realm of information. Smith’s portrayal of a botanophilic elite implies a coherent and collegial core of like-minded collectors, but what is less apparent in Smith’s volumes are the class divisions that

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Chapter 

threatened to fracture his audience. Though Smith’s repetition of titled names such as Dowager Lady de Clifford, Marquis of Blandford, and Right Hon. Charles Long heightens the elitism associated with botanical collecting, it also marks a divide in the text between aristocratic collectors and the experts, like Smith himself and Roxburgh, on whom these aristocrats relied for the procurement and elucidation of the plants they purchased. The tension between the collecting of plant life and the sharing of information about plants that structures these volumes mimics larger tensions within the scientific community between the aristocratic collector and the bourgeois expert. In addition to the class antagonism that appears in the competing discourses of curio collecting and botanical classification, subtle tensions stemming from competition between taxonomists and horticulturalists can be discerned in descriptions of North American and Caribbean flora. Smith must credit a group of horticulturalists, nurserymen, and estate gardeners and botanical curators, for he is dependent on them for specimens of plants, some of which, such as magnolias and phlox, had been growing in their gardens for some time but had not been properly classified. Of Uvularia sessilfolia Smith writes: “Drawn on the d of June  in the nursery of Messieurs Lee and Kennedy, who received it from North America. It is not mentioned in the Hortus Kewensis. Mr. Donn says it came into this country in . Linnaeus had his specimen from Kalm, and we find no further account of the species than what he has given, nor does it seem to be any where figured” (: ). In this passage Smith glides over the horticulturalists’ achievement in procuring and growing this plant and focuses the attention on questions of taxonomy, his area of expertise. Smith tended to regard nurserymen as socially and intellectually beneath him, especially in their limited ability to classify plants. In his letters, he praises, but in a condescending manner, the work of Mr. Shepherd, the head gardener of the Liverpool Botanic Garden. Calling Shepherd “this uneducated son of the art,”45 Smith mentions his surprise at Shepherd’s eagerness to learn the plants’ Latin names. In Exotic Botany, Smith portrays himself as the highest authority on classification and, in this way, secures for himself a position as expert on the plants’ value to the collector. Like the appraiser at an auction, Smith can tell his clients whether a plant is indeed the genuine article and as rare as the collector could wish. Ultimately, what is at stake in Smith’s volumes is an uneasy alliance between aristocratic means and bourgeois expertise, an alliance that Smith forged with much effort in Exotic Botany as well as in his role as president

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of the Linnean Society. Connoisseurship bridged class divisions, smoothing over competition for scientific authority between the kind of aristocratic privilege and access to resources represented by someone such as Sir Joseph Banks, and the kind of professionalized, university-trained, and credentialed expertise possessed by someone like John Lindley. Botanical connoisseurship emerged in the intersection of two discourses, the emergent discourse of professional expertise and the residual discourse of curio collecting. Connoisseurial authority can be seen as a transitional discourse fraught with tensions about aristocratic and elite access to knowledge. What was at stake in the subtle struggle between the collector and the expert was access to scientific authority and the privilege of managing information about the globe’s natural resources. By the s, professional and academic experts were eagerly relocating botany from the country houses’ stoves and the townhouses’ herbariums to the universities’ laboratories. Leading the attack on the botanophiles, John Lindley, in his inaugural lecture as the University of London’s professor of botany, condemned the dominance of Linnean botany in British science, as it had fostered, he said, a superficial knowledge of plants based on taxonomy and had discouraged “a more advanced state of science”: “The principles of Linnaean classification produced the mischief of rendering Botany a mere science of names, . . . nothing more useless can be well conceived.”46 Lindley was a proponent of the French natural system of classification, developed by Jussieu and others, that looked at plant anatomy and structure as well as chemical properties as a way to classify plant affinities. While Smith was aware of the importance of the Continental theories of natural classification, he defended the Linnean system to the end. In a lecture presented to the London Institution in , Smith insisted on the continuing importance of Linnean classification even to those who embraced the new natural system of classification. He rejected what he believed was a false opposition between an artificial and a natural system of classification, an opposition he believed was promoted by members of the French school, who, as supporters of Jussieu, “have been actuated by a truly contemptible national partiality, instead of a disinterested love of science and truth” (: ). He acknowledged the limitations of the Linnaean system: “the sexual system of Linnaeus lays no claim to the merit of being a natural arrangement. Its sole aim is to assist us in determining any described plant by analytical examination” (Memoir, : ). He urged that botanists use both systems as together they complement each other and compensate for inadequacies:

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Chapter 

The authors of most plans of botanical classification have . . . seldom considered the questions of natural and artificial arrangement, as opposed to each other. . . . Plants must be known before they can be compared, and the talent of discrimination must precede that of combination. . . . The knowledge of natural classification therefore, being the summit of botanical science, cannot be the first step towards the acquirement of that science. No person surely, who has published a natural system, without knowing all the plants in the world, will suppose that he has removed every present obstacle, much less anticipated every future obscurity, so that no insuperable difficulty can occur to the investigator of plants by such a system. Neither can any artificial system claim such perfection. But they may combine their powers, and cooperate in instruction. The one may trace an outline which the other may correct and fill up. The first may propose, and the second elucidate; the former may educate and improve the memory and observation, for the use of the latter. When they oppose each other, their several defects and weaknesses appear; by mutual assistance they strengthen themselves. (Memoir, :)

Rather than superseding the artificial system, the natural system, Smith contended, must build on Linnaeus’s “descriptions and definitions,” for these “afford the most instructive study, whatever mode of classification we may think most convenient”(Memoir, :). How else is “any student . . . to make out a single unknown plant?” (Memoir, :). Smith’s defense of Linnaeus was also a defense of botany as he knew it. He argued that botany’s popularity with amateurs had a profound and positive effect on the study of plants. “When science has been long and extensively cultivated, and is become an object of great popular attention, it assumes a very different character from the abstruse pursuits of the cloister or the schools, or the speculations of a few recluse and abstracted proficients. No study has undergone a more remarkable change in this respect than botany” (Memoir, :)47 What he feared was what indeed happened— botany became again the province of professional scientists, “the few recluse and abstracted proficients,” a shift that, as Shteir argues, excluded women from the scientific community. Women’s status as amateur scientists made them liable to the same attacks that gentleman botanists suffered when professional scientists, men mostly from the middle classes, tried to take back botany from the amateurs. In Lindley’s speech, as Shteir notes, he casts aspersions on botany as practiced by amateurs by portraying it as a trivial form of entertainment for women: “It has been very much the fashion of late years, in this country, to undervalue the importance of this science, and to consider it an amusement for ladies rather than an occupation for the serious thoughts of man.”48 Lindley’s attack on botany as practiced by Smith and his associates was his attempt to remove plants from the discursive

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realm of polite botany, marked as it was by aristocratic and feminine sensibilities, and to remake botany for bourgeois masculinity. Lindley’s move to discredit a botany that had been dominated by the upper classes and an Anglican clergy was in concert with the new discourse on middle-class expertise and professionalism.49 Lindley’s reformist ideas were a part of a larger movement, which, as Adrian Desmond argues, “repudiated the aristocratic ideal of polite knowledge as an embellishment to a gentleman’s education and sought to create a serious body of knowledge useful to the reformers in government and the professions.” For this “professional elite,”50 polite learning, including botany, was too closely associated with women’s pursuits and the leisured upper classes and stood in need of the academic rigor of formal training and discipline-based specialization. With the death of Sir Joseph Banks, who, as president of the Royal Society, had dictated the terms under which botany had been studied in Britain for nearly forty years, this shift toward professionalism was given full rein. By the mid-nineteenth century, botanical connoisseurship, as practiced by Banks, Smith, and others, was banished from the realm of science into that of collecting with all its fetishistic associations. The kind of botany that Smith and his fellow Linnean enthusiasts practiced stressed classification over other ways of mastering plant life, including horticulture’s emphasis on controlling nature’s reproductive powers and economic botany’s struggle to make plants economically productive. Linnean botany shares with the discourse on natural history this impulse to abstract, to remove all soiling trace of cultural specificity or region and locale, so that an object might circulate as a fact, free and unencumbered, like a commodity in the “free” market system. Connoisseurial botany was a key moment in the process by which plants became the province of facts, information divorced from context, transforming objects of use into objects for possession, shearing them of cultural legibility. However, connoisseurial botany, though it abstracted plants from their native cultural and agronomic contexts, reinserted plants into the British social scene and invested them with meanings that were just as local and provincial as South Asian, Caribbean, or Pacific horticultural practices and economic systems. Connoisseurial botany embedded plants within systems of prestige and acted to cement social ties within elites.51

Epilogue

Decolonizing Garden History

Not long ago, I received in the mail a catalog from Starbucks, the now notorious because ubiquitous coffee company that has sprung up on what seems like every street corner in North America and Europe, featuring their list of “rare and exotic coffees of far-away lands.” Since I love coffee and am a catalog “freak,” I read with guilty pleasure the attractive brochure that promised that if I mail-ordered coffee from Starbucks, I would “experience a world of rare coffees and exotic tastes,” and if I joined a special program I would receive coffee on a regular basis and a free mug with a globe pictured in relief on it, about which the advertising copy read: “The whole world is in your hands.” This Starbucks promotional literature, attractive, clever, and effective in arousing consumer desire, employs various discursive strategies that flourished in the eighteenth century, particularly in poems and paintings that depicted the products of tropical agriculture. The Starbucks brochure’s use of the catalog—its long list of coffees from Guatemala, New Guinea, Kenya, Sumatra, and so forth—its figuring of these places and products as exotic, as well as its promise to give readers the world to hold in their hands, are all strategies that poets, especially James Thomson, employed with great skill in their descriptions of the tropics, and, as I have argued, these strategies—then and now—are used to arouse the desire to consume the “exotic.” As we have seen, among the various discursive strategies used to describe the tropics, the catalog was employed in a variety of genres including Thomson’s georgic-inspired poem, but perhaps most prominently in natural histories and the hortuses and floras of latter half of the century. Though the catalog is essentially little more than a list, it is, like the survey and the inventory, not a politically neutral practice since catalogs, surveys, and inventories have a legacy closely associated with conquest and imperialism. William the Conqueror’s Doomsday Book, for instance, which lists and describes his newly conquered territories in the British Isles, functions as a tool with which to manage (and tax) this land and its people. By the

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seventeenth century and the rise of mercantile capitalism, the catalog, particularly in the Netherlands, came to be associated with ships’ lading and merchants’ inventories. The catalog, when it is employed in tandem with the concept of bounty, operates most effectively in creating the category of the exotic consumable ripe for global circulation. The catalog of exotic commodities, the contemporary version of which the Starbuck’s mail-order leaflet is an example, is a discursive strategy that performs important work around the figuring of a global system of extraction from the peripheries to benefit the core. With the examples of Starbucks’s and Thomson’s lists of exotic commodities, I want to emphasize the economic and political implications of the concept of bounty. When the tropics are represented as bountiful, nature gets the credit for abundance, not the local producer. Bounty is a poetic trope that belongs to the pastoral, which figures the golden age when man did not have to labor, for Nature with all her reproductive powers bestowed willingly and graciously her fruits on man. When the concept of bounty is deployed along with the list of tropical fruits and vegetables, the list does not merely work to decontextualize plant life by ignoring the local conditions of production. Also lost are the cultural meanings, narratives, and histories that are specific to a particular people’s relationships to nature. As a discursive strategy, the list alone does not necessarily shear off affective ties and cultural meanings, though it can be the first step in that direction. It is the use of bounty in conjunction with the list that elides the local context of production. The list, however, when placed within a narrative or framework that privileges local labor and honors localized knowledge, can function very differently from Thomson’s cataloging discursive practices. An example of a list of tropical plants that is not stripped of local meaning can be found in Michelle Cliff ’s novel Abeng (). Weaving together a coming-of-age narrative with a retelling of Jamaica’s colonial history, Abeng traces the development of an adolescent girl as she comes to grips with the contradictions of contemporary Jamaican society and its attitudes toward race, class, and gender. Apparent on every page is Cliff ’s acute sensitivity to old patterns of behavior and ways of thinking, to thoughts and practices that are African and Amerindian in origin or grew out of slavery or in resistance to slavery. For instance, the protagonist Clare, a city girl from a black middle-class family, goes to the country to spend her summers with her grandmother. Mrs. Freeman, as her grandmother is aptly named, is a figure of moral strength and stern religious conviction, and she has a garden in which she grows the same fruits and vegetables that her

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Epilogue

enslaved ancestors grew in their eighteenth-century provision grounds. “Mr. Freeman grew a few acres of sugar cane, and Mrs. Freeman kept a patch of yam, cassava, plantain, banana, okra, citrus; and there was wild ackee, guava, mango, tamarind, cashew, avocado.”1 Mr. and Mrs. Freeman practice a kind of agricultural cultivation that historians and anthropologists associate with a sturdy and independent peasant class. This form of agriculture, which is “devoted to satisfying local subsistence needs,” has its origins in the provision grounds of slaves who labored on sugar plantations.2 Mrs. Freeman’s garden and the produce that Cliff names possess a mythic quality in this text. Cliff has recaptured quite subtly in her descriptions of gardens and marketwomen the political importance of such agricultural systems to Afro-Caribbeans now and in the past, political in the sense that gardens were crucial to the survival of enslaved Africans who worked on West Indian sugar plantations. This list of garden produce can be read as a declaration of independence and a testimony to the power to resist terrible oppression. To suggest that gardening and gardens can be read as texts or more accurately as “cultural practice” and as “performance,” I borrow from Joseph Roach’s formulations concerning circum-Atlantic cultural production, in particular “restored behaviors of the past.”3 To plant a garden of cassava, edda, and plantain can be read as performing a collective act of memory. Performance genres, Roach tells us, include carnivals, slave auctions, and funeral processions, but might not they also include cultural practices that revolve around plants: narratives and rituals conveyed through recipes, horticultural techniques, medicinal preparations, and memories of previous gardens, their produce, and the consumption of that produce (parties, celebrations, and social events marked by special foods) as well as in the verbal displays attached to the exchange of plants and their produce in the form of the gestures, songs, and chants that street vendors use to sell their vegetable wares. The role of memory in gardening has been recently addressed by Jamaica Kincaid, who in trying to explain her garden’s importance in her life, writes: “I only marveled at the way the garden is for me an exercise in memory, a way of remembering my own immediate past, a way of getting to a past that is my own (the Caribbean Sea) and the past as it is indirectly related to me (the conquest of Mexico and its surroundings).”4 Mrs. Freeman’s garden with its list of tropical produce is, in Roach’s terms, a “critical genealogy” and in Kincaid’s terms “an exercise in meaning,” one that testifies to the ingenuity and resilience of Afro-Caribbean peoples. The spiritual and political power that emanates from Cliff ’s lists of yams, plantains, and

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cassava memorializes the past, linking current social practices with the preemancipation history of the West Indies. A passage in Cliff ’s novel describes a Jamaican marketwoman, the mother of Clare’s best friend, as she makes her weekly journey from the country into a small market town, carrying with her the produce of her small plot of land. Miss Ruthie made her living by going to the market at Black River ever Saturday and selling some of the crops she raised on the quarter-acre she borrowed from Miss Mattie, and the pink-edged coconut cakes and dark brown tamarind balls she made on Friday night. . . . Mostly, she sold callaloo, tomatoes, oranges, mangoes, yam, and cassava. She left Saturday at daybreak, traveling the distance on an old open-back truck which belonged to Mas Freddie. . . . Mas Freddie filled the back of his truck with fifteen or twenty marketwomen, each paying him a shilling, each loaded down with her basket, trying to protect her fruit and tomatoes from bruises as the truck bumped and banged along the country road and the women crowded each other on the long slatted seats. ()

With the list of the items Miss Ruthie grows, Cliff does much more than provide those material details that fill the narratives of contemporary novelists. She is reciting words—yam, cassava, callaloo—that belong to ancient practices and old stories, some African, some Amerindian, and some Creole. These words—yam, cassava, callaloo—can also be found in eighteenthcentury georgic poetry, natural histories, and traveler narratives that describe the agricultural abundance of the slaves’ gardens and provision grounds. As my chapter on slave gardens demonstrates, even in these colonialist and racist texts, the list of provisions resonates with Afro-Caribbean pride, defiance, and the will to survive. Compared with Thomson’s evacuated list of tropical commodities, Cliff ’s lists resonate with cultural significance and celebrate local labor as a form of resistance. Mrs. Freeman’s and Miss Ruthie’s gardens are not only “critical genealogies” but also “a little local politics,” to borrow Stuart Hall’s words, which he says “may be all we have, in bringing the politics of the local to bear against the global.”5

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Notes

Preface . The University of Hawai‘i at Ma-noa is situated on ceded lands, meaning Hawaiian lands confiscated by the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy by a band of American sugar planters with the aid of the U.S. marines. As Hawai‘i is a colony, the postcolonial era has yet to arrive.

Introduction . Michel Foucault, “The Discourse of Language,” The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, ), . . As Suvir Kaul convincingly argues, the poem declaims “the coming to global power of a puissant Britain, divinely ordained inheritor of the imperial and civilizational traditions of classical Europe.” Suvir Kaul, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, ), . . Thomson, “Rule, Britannia!” in The Complete Poetical Works of Jameson Thomson, ed. J. Logie Robertson (London: Oxford University Press, ), . . Kaul, Poems of Nation, . . James Boswell, Boswell: The Ominous Years, –, ed. C. Ryskamp and F. A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, ), . For Cook’s powers of observation, see Roy Porter, “The Exotic as Erotic: Captain Cook in Tahiti,” in Exoticism in the Enlightenment, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Manchester Universtiy Press, ), –. . William Dawson’s copy of Cook’s Resolution journal, entitled “Captn Cook’s Voyage from the year  to July  Given me by Himself, Bristol,” ff. –. Housed at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, this manuscript will be referred to as the Greenwich copy in the following citations. . My reading of the descriptions of tropical nature produced by naturalists and travelers was developed in conversation with William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, ). Very influential for me was his suggestion that fantasy played an important role in early colonists’ perception of Native Americans’ relation to the land. The New World had been represented as a place of “‘small labour but great pleasure,’” and, as Cronon argues, “the willingness of colonists to believe such arguments, and hazard

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Notes to Pages –

their lives upon them, was testimony to how little they understood both the New England environment and the ways Indians actually lived in it” (). Cronon’s analysis of the colonists’ perceptions of the New World reveals that pastoral tropes dominated their imaginations, and once they realized the environment was not a perpetual summer, they employed georgic tropes to dispossess Native Americans, who, in their eyes, did not labor, for the colonists did not see that the New England landscape and its productive powers had been managed and tended by Native Americans. “In short, Indians who hunted game animals were not just taking the ‘unplanted bounties of nature’; in an important sense, they were harvesting a foodstuff which they had consciously been instrumental in creating” (). This cognitive failure to recognize the effectiveness of agricultural practices that were different from Europe’s was, as I argue, prevalent in British descriptions of the tropics. . Greenwich copy, f. . . J. C. Beaglehole, ed., The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, –, vols.  and  (Sydney: Angus and Robertson and The Public Library of New South Wales, ), :–. . Beaglehole, ed., Endeavour Journal :. . In arguing that Cook saw that tropical bounty was produced by the labor and skill of Pacific Islanders, I am suggesting that Cook could, unlike Banks, acknowledge that Pacific Islanders possessed valuable horticultural techniques and botanical knowledge. However, Cook’s ability to recognize native knowledge traditions did not necessarily extend to other branches of local knowledge, such as navigation. For a complex analysis of why Cook failed to investigate the methods by which Pacific Islanders navigated, see David Turnbull’s essay “Cook and Tupaia, a Tale of Cartographic Meconnaissance ?” in Science and Exploration in the Pacific: European Voyages to the Southern Oceans in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Margarette Lincoln (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, ), –. Turnbull notes also that Banks valued Tupaia’s navigational skills more highly than Cook. . George Forster, A Voyage Round the World, ed. Nicholas Thomas and Oliver Berghof,  vols. (; Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, ), :. Subsequent references to this text will be placed in parentheses following the quotation. . See Forster’s discussion of the relation between agriculture and the progress of civilization, :–. George Forster was indebted to his father’s thinking on the relationship between climate and civilization; in fact, as Nicholas Thomas and Oliver Berghof contend, “this book was, to some extent, a co-authored work and . . . many broader perceptions expressed here are also enunciated in Forster senior’s diary and his Observations” (xlvii). For Johann Reinhold Forster’s ideas on the role of climate in shaping culture, see his Observations Made during a Voyage round the World, ed. Nicholas Thomas, Harriet Guest, and Michael Dettelbach (; Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, ), –. See also the introductory essays in this volume: Nicholas Thomas, “‘On the Variety of the Human Species’: Forster’s Comparative Ethnology,” xxiii–xl; Harriet Guest, “Looking at Women: Forster’s Observations in the South Pacific,” xli–xlv; Michael Dettelbach, “‘A Kind of Linnaean Being’: Forster and Eighteenth-Century Natural History,” lv–lxxiv. For J. R. Forster’s journal, upon which his son drew, see The Resolution Journal of Johann Reinhold Forster, –, ed. Michael E. Hoare,  vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, ).

Notes to Pages –



. Greenwich copy, ff. –. . For the Forsters’ and stagist (or stadial) theories of civilization, see Harriet Guest, “Cook in Tonga: Terms of Trade,” in Islands in History and Representation, ed. Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith (London: Routlege, ), –. See also Anne Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas (London: Allen Lane, ), chapter . . These reflections are shattered, however, when he encounters two islanders holding “their dead brethren in their arms” and discovers that the man had been killed by a musketball fired by the ship’s sentry. “Thus one dark and detestable action effaced all the hopes with which I had flattered myself ” (:). . Cook, Resolution logbook and journal, BL, Add. MS ,: f.  and f. . . BL, Add. MS ,: f. v.; Greenwich copy, f. . . For interpreting Cook’s motives for planting gardens in the Pacific, see J. C. Beaglehole, The Life of Captain James Cook (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ), and Dulcie Powell, “The Voyage of the Plant Nursery, HMS Providence, –,” Economic Botany  (): –. For the link between botany and empire in the Pacific, see Alan Frost, Sir Joseph Banks and the Transfer of Plants to and from the South Pacific – (Melbourne: Colony Press, ); John Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); David Miller and Peter Reill, eds., Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany and Representations of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). . Obeyesekere sees Cook’s planting as participating in the larger imperial project of bringing “progress” in the form of “improving” agriculture to the primitive Others of the Pacific. See The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). See Nigel Rigby’s thoughtful overview of the problems that attend totalizing historical narratives, such as Obeyesekere’s postcolonial approach, and more traditional imperial histories, such as Alan Frost’s essay “The Antipodean Exchange,” which offer interpretations of British imperial power as unified, rational, and organized. “Although botanical science’s important role in empire is being carefully examined, it is also, ironically, being made to seem more efficient, consensual and powerful than it actually was.” Rigby, “The Politics and Pragmatics of Seaborne Plant Transportation,” in Science and Exploration in the Pacific, ed. Margarette Lincoln (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, ), . . For a sensitive and persuasive account of Cook’s class position and how it affected shipboard dynamics, see Nicholas Thomas, The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain James Cook (New York: Walker, ). . For Banks’s plant transfers, see Ray Desmond, The European Discovery of the Indian Flora (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), chapters , ,, . Banks’s initial plan for Australia involved moving Pacific Islanders to Australia, primarily from Tahiti, since these islands were to his thinking overpopulated. Of course, with increased contact with Europe, the Pacific Islander population dramatically decreased with the introduction of deadly diseases, including smallpox, and starvation and dislocation due to the restructuring of property relations and agricultural practices. For the impact of European ideas on property and agriculture on Hawai‘i, see



Notes to Pages –

Lilikala- Kame‘eleihiwa, Native Lands and Foreign Desires: Pehea La- E Pono Ai? (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, ). . Recent work in the history of science, particularly Richard Drayton’s Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), and R. H. Grove’s Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), along with Lucille Brockway’s pioneering work, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Botanic Gardens (New York: Academic Press, ), are exceptions to the lack of interest among imperial historians in colonial agricultural practices. Drayton’s brilliant work on botanic gardens and the “intellectual history of botany” and his thesis that “sciences shaped the pattern of imperial expansion” (xv) are important contributions to rethinking imperial history. . Stuart Hall, “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities,” in Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, ed. Anthony King (Binghamton: Department of Art and Art History, State University of New York at Binghamton, ), . See also Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, ). . Exceptions to this general indifference to the intersection of nature and colonialism are Jill Casid’s recent work, “Inhuming Empire: Islands as Colonial Nurseries and Grave,” in The Global Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), –, and Mimi Sheller’s exciting new book, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (London: Routledge, ). . For colonial science and the tropics, see Grove, Green Imperialism; Donal McCracken, Gardens of Empire (London: Leicester University Press, ); Nancy Leys Stephen, Picturing Tropical Nature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ). . Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, ), . . Giambattista Vico, New Science: Principles of the New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations, trans. David Marsh (, ; New York: Penguin, ), . . Karen O’Brien, “Imperial Georgic, –,” in The Country and City Revisited, ed. Gerald Maclean, Donna Landry, and Joseph P. Ward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –, . . Lady Nugent’s Journal, ed. Philip Wright (Kingston, Jamaica: Institute of Jamaica, ), –. . Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, , ), –. . John Luffman, A Brief Account of the Island of Antigua (London, ), –. . Denis Diderot quoted in Richard Rand, Intimate Encounters: Love and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), . See also Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting, ed. Jane Iandola Watkins (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art), xiv, and Marianne Haraszti-Takacs, Spanish Genre Painting in the Seventeenth Century (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, ).

Notes to Pages –



. Gordon Bailey Washburn, Pictures of Everyday Life: Genre Painting in Europe, – (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Institute, ), unpaginated. . My reading of Brunias is influenced by Sean Shesgreen’s work on Laroon’s figures and a talk he gave at the Newberry Library in March . See also Shesgreen’s Criers and Hawkers of London (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ). . Milkmaids are not, of course, the producers of milk (cows are), but the metonymic slippage that hovers about the representation of milkmaids encourages fantasies of lactating milkmaids. . Bernard Smith, Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages (London: Yale University Press, ), . . Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), –. . Luffman, . . Sam Smiles, “Dressed to Till: Representational Strategies in the Depiction of Rural Labour,” in Prospects for a Nation: Recent Essays in British Landscape, –, ed. Michael Rosenthal, Christiana Payne, and Scott Wilcox (London: Yale University Press, ), . . Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (; New York: Hill and Wang, ), . . Barthes argues that bourgeois ideology “fixated this world into an object which can be forever possessed, catalogued its riches, embalmed it, and injected into reality some purifying essence which will stop its transformation, its flight towards other forms of resistance. And these riches, thus fixated and frozen, will at last become computable” (Mythologies, ). . Nicholas Thomas, “Licensed Curiosity: Cook’s Pacific Voyages,” in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), . . Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, ), . . Slavoj Êiêek, “How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?” in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Êiêek (London: Verso, ), . . William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer, “Introduction,” The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –, . . Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, ), . . David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers, eds., Geography and Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . See also Dorinda Outram, “The Enlightenment Our Contemporary,” in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, –. . Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, ), –. Subsequent references to this text will be placedin parentheses following the quotation. See also Foucault’s “What Is Enlightenment?,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, ), –. . The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, . . Geography and Enlightenment, –.

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Notes to Pages –

. See Bernard Smith, Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), chapters  and . . Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ), . . Beaglehole, ed., The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, :.

Chapter  . Knowledge that is “situated,” grounded in a specific locale and a specific set of relationships (cultural, economic, political), is what I mean by “local” knowledge. Somewhat akin to Clifford Geertz’s use of the phrase in his Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, ), my notion of local knowledge is similar to anthropology’s emic as opposed to etic , insiders’ views as opposed to outsiders’ views (see Geertz, –). However, Geertz’s famed “thick description” of a Balinese cockfight ultimately fails as a form of local knowledge since he constructs a typicalized and idealized cockfight which he then analyzes as if it were a text, and in doing so, he positions himself outside and above native knowledge. I would argue that in constructing an idealized, not a specific, cockfight, he participates in Enlightenment procedures much the same way that Linnaeus would collect plant specimens with an eye toward the typical and ideal rather than the specific and real. . For discussions of Banks’s activities as a naturalist and his control over the British botanical establishment, including Kew Gardens, see David Philip Miller, “Joseph Banks, Empire, and ‘Centers of Calculation’ in Late Hanoverian London,” and David Mackay, “Agents of Empire: The Banksian Collectors and Evaluation of New Lands,” both in Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature, ed. David Miller and Peter Reill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, ), – and –. See also my essay, “Imperial Designs: Botanical Illustration and the British Botanic Empire” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture  (): –. . Beaglehole, ed., The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, –, :. . See Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, –: A Study in the History of Art and Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). . Beaglehole, ed., Endeavour Journal of Banks, :. See Ingjerd Hoem’s essay “The Scientific Endeavor and the Natives” in Visions of Empire, –, for a discussion of these Western “visions of paradise” as they relate to Samoa. “The explorers seem to be visiting a tropical paradise where natural resources are abundant. Yet the natives live within a very complex system of rules and regulations governing their relations to the natural environment, a system that has grown out of the experience of living in a marginal atoll environment where most natural resources (apart from fish), if not treated with sufficient skill and care, are limited and in danger of depletion” (). . I would like to suggest that Captain Cook’s vision was less clouded by pastoral tropes, as he was a less well educated man than Banks. On his second voyage Cook notes how Tahitians cleverly irrigate their taro fields. See Chapter  for Cook’s plain style.

Notes to Pages –



. James Thomson, Seasons, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon Press, , ), “Summer,” l. . For Thomson’s attitude toward gardens, see John Dixon Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening during the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, , ), chapter . For excellent discussions of the nationalist and imperialist agendas of Thomson and other georgic poets, such as Dyer and Grainger, see Markman Ellis, “‘The Cane-Land Isles’: Commerce and Empire in Eighteenth-Century Georgic and Pastoral Poetry,” in Islands in History and Representation, ed. Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith (London: Routledge, ); Tim Fulford, Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); John Goodridge, Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); and Suvir Kaul, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, ). . Virgil, Works, trans. H. Ruston Fairclough,  vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), Georgics :–. I use the Fairclough translation here because I like his use of the verb “conquer,” as it implies the link of conquest and colonization implicit in the word “colonus,” who becomes the peasant proprietor in the poem (a colonus was a soldier rewarded for performing his military duty with a plot from the conquered lands). For the rest of my citations to the Georgics, I use the Wilkinson translation. . Anthony Low, The Georgic Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), . . Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, ), ; Donna Landry, The Muses of Resistance: Labouring-Class Women’s Poetry in Britain, – (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), . This chapter, indeed the whole book, is deeply indebted to Williams’s formulations on labor and leisure in the rural economy in The Country and the City. For a discussion of the differences between the pastoral and the georgic, see John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ) and his “Georgic and Pastoral: Laws of Genre in the Seventeenth Century,” in Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England: Writing and the Land, ed. Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor (Leicester: Leicester University Press, ); and Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valery (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). For the history of the georgic and its impact in Britain, see Anthony Low, The Georgic Revolution; John Chalker, The English Georgic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ); Douglas Chambers, The Planters of the English Garden: Botany, Trees, and the Georgics (New Haven: Yale University Press, ); Ralph Cohen, “Innovation and Variation: Literary Change and Georgic Poetry,” in Ralph Cohen and Murray Kreiger, eds., Literature and History: Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, March ,  (Los Angeles: UCLA, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, ), –; Richard Feingold, Nature and Society: Later EighteenthCentury Uses of the Pastoral and Georgic (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, ) . For poetry and rural life, see Tim Fulford, Landscape, Liberty, and Authority;

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Notes to Pages –

John Goodridge, Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry; and Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). . See Low’s The Georgic Revolution; Frans de Bruyn’s The Literary Genres of Edmund Burke: The Political Uses of Literary Form (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ); and Richard Braverman, Plots and Counterplots: Sexual Politics and the Body Politic in English Literature, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ) for a discussion of how georgic poetry and other forms of agricultural writing made the labor of reading and thinking about agriculture and husbandry attractive to the landed elite through the tropes of improvement, aristocratic stewardship, civic virtue, and nation building. . Virgil, The Georgics, trans. L. P. Wilkinson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), :. Subsequent references to this text will be placed in parentheses after the quotation. (The numeral before the colon refers to which book of the Georgics and the numerals after refer to the line numbers.) . L. P. Wilkinson, The Georgics of Virgil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ) , , . Clearly, the word colony is derived from colonus, Roman soldiers rewarded for performing martial duties with land from the conquered regions. In the word colonus, agriculture and imperialism come together in a way that is clearly present in the eighteenth century but much less obvious. . Landry, ; Pope, “Windsor-Forest,” in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London: Methuea, ), –, l. . For Pope on landscape as garden design, see John Dixon Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape, chapter . . For a discussion of these issues surrounding sport and virtue as represented in visual art, see Stephen Deuchar, Sporting Art in Eighteenth-Century England, A Social and Political History (New Haven: Yale University Press, ). . John Gay, “Rural Sports,” in John Gay: Poetry and Prose,  vols., ed. Vinton A. Dearing with the assistance of Charles E. Beckwith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), :–. . For Thomson’s celebration of natural philosophy as a form of “disciplinary control” and his figuring of “mastery as the power to make nature yield” (), see Braverman on Thomson in Plots and Counterplots, chapter . . Mary Collier, “The Woman’s Labour: An Epistle to Mr. Stephen Duck” (ll.–), quoted in Landry, . . For a discussion of Grainger’s views on the abolition of slavery, see Eve W. Stoddard, “A Serious Proposal for Slavery Reform: Sarah Scott’s Sir George Ellison,” Eighteenth-Century Studies  (): –. See Thomas Krise’s introduction to Caribbeana: An Anthology of English Literature of the West Indies, – (Chicago: University of Chicago Press); this collection contains the full-length version of Grainger’s poem. See also John Gilmore, The Poetics of Empire: A Study of James Grainger’s The Sugar Cane (; London: Althone, ). . John Barrell suggests that this might be the case because eighteenthcentury middle and upper classes preferred to think of the rural laboring classes as happy workers, not as happy idlers. See The Dark Side of the Landscape. . James Grainger, The Sugarcane, in The Poems of Grainger and Boyse, vol.  of The British Poets,  vols. (Chiswick: College House, ), –; , . See also

Notes to Pages –



this edition’s introductory essay by R. A. Davenport, “The Life of James Grainger,” –. Subsequent references to the introduction and poem will be placed in parentheses following the quotation and will refer to this edition’s page numbers. . See Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power, for the suggestion that the Caribbean sugar plantation was first capitalized industry, and that management techniques learned on the sugar plantation were exported back to the mother country, England, where a mechanized labor force was introduced in the latter part of the eighteenth century. . And passages like these undoubtedly earned Dr. Johnson’s disapprobation. Johnson’s dismissal of Grainger’s effort was accompanied by making fun of writing a georgic about parsley or cabbage cultivation: “‘You know there is already The HopGarden, a Poem: and, I think, one could say a great deal about cabbage’.” (James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (London: Oxford University Press, ), –. . Roderick McDonald, The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, ), . . Walvin, Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery (London: Fontana, ), –. . Indeed, this problematic reveals itself in the contast between the elevated and allusive language and the poem’s mundane and lowly subject matter. . Ralph Cohen argues that within the hierarchies of privilege established in Thomson’s Seasons, the poet possesses even more power than the aristocrat because of his comprehensive view based on his mobility and “class anonymity”: “Socially, the speaker observes the rural workers, the squires and the lords of the manor; moving freely among the different groups, he himself becomes a model of mobility from one class to another. The observer of the poor reapers is also the friend of Lyttleton, so that he is both a defender of class distinctions and a successful social climber.” The Unfolding of The Seasons (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), . . See Mary Louise Pratt’s discussion of the “anti-conquest” narrative of natural history. Unlike the brute power exercised by slavers and planters, the kind of power exercised by naturalists is epistemological and discursive, for the goals of natural history were to describe and to organize natural phenomenon, and as such, natural history was portrayed by its proponents as benign and innocent (Pratt, Imperial Eyes, chapters , , and ; ). See also my article, “Imperial Designs: Botanical Illustration and the British Botanic Empire,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture  (): –. . Describing how Thomson figures nature in “Autumn” as an entity to be “read through the empirical laws inscribed on her body,” Braverman notes that the passage beginning with “Oh Nature! All sufficient! over all!/ Enrich me with the knowledge of thy works!” is “not so much a description as an abstraction, and on that account it is a trope of power: not the coercive variety but power measured as the disciplinary control owing to the knowledge of principles that are at once empirical and universal” (). For georgic poetry’s powers of abstraction, see also Kurt Heinzleman, “Roman Georgic in the Georgian Age: A Theory of Romantic Genre,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature  (): –, and Anne D. Wallace,



Notes to Pages –

“Farming on Foot: Tracking Georgic in Clare and Wordsworth,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature  (): –. . Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, ), –.

Chapter  . Communists Like Us: New Spaces of Liberty, New Lines of Alliance, trans. Michael Ryan (Semiotexte, ), –. . See essays by Karen O’Brien, Elizabeth H. Cook, and Elizabeth Bolhs in The Country and City Revisited, ed. Maclean, Landry, and Ward. . One has only to glance at the subject guide to the volumes of the Royal Empire Society to see the vast numbers of publications on the West Indies. For a useful compendium of extracts from such publications, see Roger D. Abrahams and John F. Szwed, eds., After Africa: Extracts from British Travel Accounts and Journals of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries Concerning the Slaves, their Manners, and Customs in the British West Indies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ). . See Johannes Fabian’s letter to American Association of Anthropology’s newsletter: “Must practices of producing knowledge be disembodied, gender-less, time-less, and place-less to count as objective? Is it ‘tougher’ to represent anthropological knowledge as a set of structural models or as low-level statistical correlations based on counting items of doubtful quantifiability than to formulate what is known about other cultures in complex narratives and intricate interpretations?” (Anthropology News , no.  [April ] : ) Mary Louise Pratt writes of the travel narrative: “This discursive figuration, which centers on landscape, separated people from place, and effaces the speaking self ” (), presenting the author as “collective moving eye.” See “Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen,” in Race, Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates (Chicago: University of Chicago ), . . John Luffman, A Brief Account of the Island of Antigua, –. . See Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World That Slaves Made (New York: Random House, ), ; Roderick McDonald, The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves, ; and Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies,  vols. (; New York: AMS Press, ), : –. . These figures, of course, are approximate; they fluctuate according to the writer, and whether they correspond to any reality can’t be known. Gordon Turnbull writes: “seven or eight salt herrings, (if small, a dozen) or two pounds of pork, or three pounds of beef, or the same weight of salt cod-fish, which is commonly left to their own choice. Of wheat, flour, or rice, the allowance is a pint per diem, or double that quantity of Indian corn, flour, split beans, pease, etc.” (An Apology for Negro Slavery: or the West-India Planters Vindicated [], .) Turnbull’s numbers are high, perhaps for the obvious reason implied by his title, that his goal is to portray slavery as a humane institution. . Charles Bolton, quoted in Hilary Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History

Notes to Pages –

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of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, ), . . Richard B. Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves: A Medical and Demographic History of Slavery in the British West Indies, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . . B.W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, – (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), . . See Mintz on the Amerindian and African origin of these plants as well as agricultural techniques: “From Plantations to Peasantries in the Caribbean,” in Caribbean Contours, ed. Sidney Mintz and Sally Price (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), –, and his Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past (Boston: Beacon Press, ). See also David Watts, Man’s Influence on the Vegetation of Barbados, – (University of Hull: Occasional Papers in Geography No. , ). For “the continuation of African dietary practices,” see Douglas V. Armstrong, The Old Village and the Great House: An Archaeological and Historical Examination of Drax Hall Plantation, St. Ann’s Bay Jamaica (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ), . For a discussion of a plantation that had “too few slaves . . . to work even the sugar lands” so that with “such a labour shortage” it was “highly unlikely that the management would divert vital labour to the task of growing food,” see Michael Craton and James Walvin, A Jamaican Plantation: The History of Worthy Park, – (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), ; chapter . Briefly, corn, cassava, sweet potatoes, and pigeon peas are Amerindian while eddoe, okra, ackee, bananas, plantains, millet, and watermelon are African foods. . Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), . See chapter  for a discussion of North America’s economic relationship to the West Indies and the argument that much of the wealth produced in the New England was derived from selling foodstuffs and timber to West Indian planters. . See History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave () in The Classic Slave Narratives, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Penguin, ), –. . Sir William Young, “ A Tour through the Several Islands of Barbadoes, St. Vincent, Antigua, Tobago, and Grenada in the Years  and ,” in Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies, : –, . References to this text will be placed in parentheses following the quotations. . Edward Long, The History of Jamaica,  vols. (London, ; rpt. ), :, quoted in Craton and Walvin, A Jamaican Plantation, . For a description of plantation society, see Craton and Walvin’s A Jamaican Plantation, and for an overview of British slavery, see Michael Craton, Sinews of Empire: A Short History of British Slavery (New York: Doubleday, ), and Walvin, Black Ivory. . Ashton Warner, quoted in Virginia Heyer Young, Becoming West Indian: Culture, Self, and Nation in St. Vincent (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, ), . . See Sidney Mintz’s and Douglas Hall’s seminal study, “The Origins of the Jamaican Internal Marketing System,” Yale University Publications in Anthropology  (): –. See also Woodville K. Marshall, “Provision Ground and Plantation

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Notes to Pages –

Labor in Four Windward Islands: Competition for Resources during Slavery,” in Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, ed. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, ), –. . Mintz, “Peasantries,” . . Long, History of Jamaica, :. See McDonald’s discussion of slaves’ access to coinage and his discussion of Long’s analysis (–). . According to Hilary Beckles, slaves regarded taking things from the master as a matter of survival and an exercise in ingenuity rather than theft. Apparently, stolen goods amounted to a significant portion of the internal economy of slaves in Barbados since slaves did not have provision grounds on that island. See Beckles, Natural Rebels, chapter . . McDonald, . . Dale W. Tomich, “The Other Face of Slave Labor: Provision Grounds and Internal Marketing in Martinique,” in Caribbean Slave Society and Economy, ed. Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, ), –, . . Mintz, “Peasantries,” , . For a discussion of Creole culture, a product of this protopeasantry within the slavery plantation system, see Roger D. Abrahams, “Questions of Criolian Contagion,” Journal of American Folkfore  (): –. . Grainger provides footnotes that explain the African and Amerindian plants he describes in his poem. Angola (pigeon pea) and bonavist are legumes; eddoe is a root but also produces a green leaf much like spinach; and callaloo is green-leafed vegetable. Manioc or cassava (or cassada as Grainger and Carmichael spell it) is a poisonous root from which is made a very popular meal-like starch used in breads, puddings, and crackers. See Rosamund Grant, Caribbean and African Cooking (New York: Interlink Books, ), for definitions and recipes. According to Sidney Mintz, the origin of many of these plants is obscure. Plantains and cocoyams (taro), while brought to the Caribbean from Africa, are most likely Oceanic in origin. Yams, it seems, are African, while potatoes, sweet or otherwise, are from South America (Mintz, Tasting, ). . On provision grounds, see Edward Bancroft, An Essay on the Natural History of Guiana in South America (London, ); William Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica (London, ); Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies,  vols. (London, , ); Charles Leslie, A New and Exact Account of Jamaica (Edinburgh, ); Matthew Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor: Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica (; New York: Negro Universities Press, ) Edward Long, The History of Jamaica; John Luffman, A Brief Account of the Island of Antigua; J. B. Moreton, West India Customs and Manners (London, ); George Pinckard, Notes on the West Indies (London, ); Albert Baron von Sack, A Narrative of a Voyage to Surinam (London, ); Janet Schaw, Journal of a Lady of Quality: Being the Narrative of a Journey from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina, and Portuagal, in the years  to , ed. Evangeline Walker Andrews (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ); John Singleton, A General Description of the West-Indian Islands . . . Attempted in Blank Verse (London, ); Gordon Turnbull, An Apology for Negro Slavery; Aston

Notes to Pages –



Warner, Negro Slavery described by a Negro; Being the Narrative of Aston Warner, by S. Strickland (London, ); [Sir William Young], Considerations which may tend to promote the Settlement of our new West-India Colonies (London, ); Sir William Young, West-India Common-place Book (London, ). . James Grainger, The Sugarcane, –, . References to this text will be placed in parentheses following the quotation. . Philip Curtin, qtd. in Richard B. Sheridan, “Mortality and the Medical Treatment of Slaves in the British West Indies,” reprinted in Caribbean Slave Society and Economy, ed. Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd, –, ; Richard S. Dunn, “‘Dreadful Idlers’ in the Cane Fields: The Slave Labor Pattern on a Jamaican Sugar Estate, –,” in British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams, ed. Barbara L. Solow and Stanley L. Engerman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), ; Sheridan, . . Richard S. Dunn, , , . . He was the son of Sir William Young who, as a commissioner of St. Vincent and one of the largest landowners, was deeply implicated in the first revolt of the Black Caribs, the native inhabitants of the island. For an account of these events, see Virginia Heyer Young, Becoming West Indian, chapter ; Peter Hulme and Neil L. Whitehead, eds., Wild Majesty: Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), –; Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, – (London: Methuen, ), chapter . Virginia Young suggests that Sir William Young’s estate, Calliaqua, was located on what had been Black Carib land, and that the Caribs continued to use this land to camp on as they made their way from the interior to Kingstown. “Clearly the Caribs treated the Calliaqua estate as Carib territory” (). . For a discussion of this “aristocratic” attitude adopted by West Indian planters, see Michael Craton, “Reluctant Creoles: The Planters’ World in the British West Indies,” in Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), –. . I can only estimate how many slaves Young had at his St. Vincent estate of Calliaqua. Mrs. Carmichael, writing of St. Vincent in the s, says that a small estate would have around  slaves, and since the Youngs were the principal landowners on that island, one can assume that he owned at least , perhaps  slaves. . Warner, quoted in Virginia Heyer Young, Becoming West Indian, , , . . Virginia Heyer Young, . . Matthew Gregory Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor. References to this text will be placed in parentheses following the quotation. This book was published in , printed from Lewis’s manuscript, which is the journal of two residences in Jamaica in – and in . Lewis died on shipboard in  on the return voyage from the West Indies. . So successful in establishing a tone of authority, Carmichael’s account has been regarded by historians and anthropologists as reliable. More skeptical of Carmichael’s narrative, anthropologist Virginia Heyer Young contrasts Ashton Warner’s narrative with Carmichael’s, both of which record life on St. Vincent in the s,



Notes to Pages –

and urges scholars to be cautious in using Carmichael as an authority and “to pick out neutral and unprejudiced data from Carmichael’s account” (). . A. C. Carmichael, Domestic Manners and Social Condition of the White, Coloured, and Negro Population of the West Indies,  vols. (; rpt. New York: Negro Universities Press, ), :–. References to these volumes appear in parentheses following the quotation. . Young, Tour, . See also Luffman, –. . Walvin, Black Ivory, –.

Chapter  . BL, Hastings, Add. MS ,, f. . . Ronald Paulson, Emblem and Expression: Meaning in English Art of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), . . For a discussion of conversation pieces as a genre, see Paulson’s Emblem and Expression, chapter ; Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Yale University Press, ); Ellen G. D’Oench, The Conversation Piece: Arthur Devis and His Contemporaries (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, ). Also, for Devis’s career, see Sydney H. Paviere, The Devis Family of Painters (Leigh-on-Sea: F. Lewis Publishers, ), and Polite Society by Arthur Devis, –: Portraits of the English Country Gentleman and his Family (Preston, England: Harris Museum and Art Gallery, ). . See D’Oench for Devis’s appeal: “Devis recalled those qualities of ‘fragility, restraint, and amateurishness’ at their most notable in early miniatures, which have been aptly characterized as the elements of an ‘English’ style. This aspect of provinciality in Devis’s work may have captured for him a circle of patrons, who, in selecting Devis, were making a deliberately conservative choice of portraitists. Most of his commissions came from members of a Tory landed gentry who could not have been ignorant of prevailing fashion for the Rococo” (). . Paulson, . . D’Oench, , , , , . . Of the garden conversation piece, Paulson writes: “man now controls and imposes his order on nature” (). See Nigel Everett on the kind of landscape “Capability” Brown made fashionable “as an expensive confirmation of the triumph of the private interest over the public” (The Tory View of Landscape [London: Yale University Press, ], ); Ann Bermingham on despotic sweeps of lawn in Brownian gardens (Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, – ([Berkeley: University of California Press, ], ); and Denis E. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ). Discussing Blenheim’s Brownian vistas, Cosgrove writes: “Entering it even today one is overwhelmed by the arrogant assertion of total control in the vulgar classicism of the house and the subjection of the valley floor to a lord’s parkland” (). . John Harris, The Artist and the Country House: A History of Country House and Garden View Painting (London: Sotheby’s, ), , . See also Mary Spivy,

Notes to Pages –



Ellen D’Oench, and Joy Breslauer, Country Houses in Great Britain (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, ). . Shearer West argues that conversation pieces are “carefully constructed images” about “family lineage” () and “became a form of family tree” () that was especially important to families whose line of descent was threatened by no direct male heir: “A close study of the subjects of conversation pieces reveals that many of them represent families who had to grapple with the problems of primogeniture; such strategies of continuity frequently lay behind the ostensibly harmonious family groups represented” (). See Shearer West, “The Public Nature of Private Life: The Conversation Piece and the Fragmented Family,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies  (): –. The literature on the politics of the representation of landholding is vast and includes the following classic texts: Raymond Williams, The Country and the City; John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), and The Dark Side of the Landscape; Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House (London: Yale University Press, ); Michael Rosenthal, British Landscape Painting (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ); Denis E. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Landscape; Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology; Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, eds. The Iconography of Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Cambridge: Polity Press, ); Simon Pugh, ed. Reading Landscape: Country—City—Capital (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ); and Nigel Everett, The Tory View of Landscape. . E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present  (): –. . Bermingham, . . Cosgrove contrasts productive value of land, what he calls the natural economy, with the capitalist exchange value of land: “In the natural economy the relationship between human beings and land is dominantly that of the insider, an unalienated relationship based on use values and interpreted analogically. In a capitalist economy, it is a relationship between owner and commodity, an alienated relationship wherein man stands as outsider and interprets nature causally. Culturally, a degree of alienation is achieved by compositional techniques—particularly linear perspective, the formal structure of the pastoral in poetry and drama and the conventional language of landscape appreciation” (). . Howard Newby, Country Life: A Social History of Rural England (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, ), –. For the political dynamics of landowning in the rural economy, see G. E. Mingay, English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ); R. S. Neale, Writing Marxist History: British Society, Economy, and Culture since  (Oxford: Blackwell, ); Howard Newby, “Deferential Dialectic,” Comparative Studies in Society and History  (): –; E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.” . Newby, Country Life, .

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Notes to Pages –

. Susan Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property in England, – (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), . . William Marshall, On the Management of Landed Estates (London, ). For a fuller discussion of these issues, see my essay “Arthur Young, Agriculture, and the Construction of the New Economic Man,” History, Gender and EighteenthCentury Literature, ed. Beth Fowkes Tobin (Athens: University of Georgia Press, ), –. . As Cosgrove argues, “ The origin of the landscape idea in the West and its artistic expressions have served in part to promote ideologically an acceptance of the property relationship while sustaining the image of an unalienated one, of land as use” (). This ambivalence toward land as at once a commodity and a lived relation is also apparent in the country house poem, a genre closely related to country house portraiture and garden views. See Hugh Jenkins, Feigned Commonwealths: The CountryHouse Poem and the Fashioning of the Ideal Community (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, ). Jenkins writes: “The country-house poem itself is a form of legitimacy myth, one that exalts the aristocratic virtues of ‘manners, armes, and arts’ while at the same time seeking to incorporate or contain emerging bourgeois notions of domesticity and privacy and the capitalist use of the land” (). See also Virginia C. Kenny, The Country-House Ethos in English Literature, – (New York: St. Martin’s Press, ). . For a fuller discussion of these issues, see Everett, chapter . See in particular his readings of several country house portraits, in which he argues that “the mansion and the public domain coexist in a way that is complex and uncertain, but at least open to the suggestion that the mansion is contributing to the improvement of the entire landscape” (). See also Thomas Gisborne, Duties of Men in Higher and Middle Classes of Society (), who felt that the landowner’s indifference to the welfare of those who occupied his land constituted a breach in ties that bound the landlord to his tenants in a system of obligation and gratitude. Gisborne insists that the landowner’s duties are conferred upon him by virtue of “the actual power which the landlord enjoys over his estates, and the tenants who occupy them; and partly from the influence which the possession of those estates gives to him in their neighbourhood even over persons who are not his immediate dependents” (). . Bermingham identifies these Brownian landscapes with their expansive prospects as referring to a pre-enclosed landscape, one which was, in fact, fast disappearing. While this may be true, it is important to realize that enclosure did not always mean literally to enclose with a hedge or a wall. The enclosure acts were a means of legally denying peasants access to land to which they had varying kinds and degrees of customary claims ranging from occasional and seasonal use (gathering of birds’ eggs and berries) to regular use (from grazing cows or letting pigs roam to cultivating small strips of common land). Though enclosure meant hedgerows in the south of England, it meant very different things in the north. Enclosure could mean draining marshy land and transforming it into productive agricultural land, growing turnips, a source of animal feed, for instance. Land that had supported various wildlife that local laboring poor partook of were transformed into fields of clover for the gentry’s horses. In many cases engrossment was the most devastating to the small leasehold farmer—ten farms of forty acres each were collapsed into one

Notes to Pages –



large farm, reducing the number of small farmers drastically. Arthur Young celebrates the enormous farms in Norfolk of , acres, something that Nathaniel Kent laments as destructive of rural economy. See my Superintending the Poor: Charitable Ladies and Paternal Landlords in British Fiction, – (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ) for a discussion of the discourse on scientific agriculture. . Everett, . . Too much blame has perhaps been heaped on Brown, for he merely systematized landscaping practices established earlier with places such as Chatsworth, where the village was moved a mile away from the house. For a sympathetic treatment of Brown’s aesthetics and his career as a landscape designer, see Roger Turner, Capability Brown and the Eighteenth-Century English Landscape (New York: Rizzoli, ). For an interesting discussion of spacial dynamics and gardens, see Rachel Crawford, Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). . Everett, . . Bermingham, , . . Paulson, . . See Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), chapter . . For an excellent study of the ideological agenda of sporting art, see Stephen Deucher, Sporting Art in Eighteenth-Century England. . For an overview of British artists and their work in India, see Mildred Archer, India and British Portraiture, – (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, ). . Hastings, the son of a curate, longed to reclaim his family’s lost landed legacy. He used a huge part of his Indian fortune to buy back Daylesford, the estate and house his grandfather had sold in . For a discussion of Hastings’s expenses in improving the estate and rebuilding the house, see P. J. Marshall, “The Personal Fortune of Warren Hastings: Hastings in Retirement,” in Trade and Conquest: Studies on the Rise of British Dominance in India (Aldershot, England: Variorum [Ashgate], ). . Summing up Burke’s position on returning company employees, Everett writes: “Law and liberty would not survive at home . . . if new money, founded on the desolation of India, was able to return unpunished and unashamed to England, buy respectability through public acts of benevolence or by marriage into the mortgaged nobility, and enter into Parliament or the local administration of justice” (). For a less biased interpretation of returning company employees, see P. J. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). “The assumption that a former Governor of Bengal should be one of the richest commoners in England was widely shared. Lord North thought that it would be not unreasonable for Warren Hastings to aim at a fortune of , [pounds]” (Marshall, ). For the discourse on nabobs, see Percival Spear, The Nabobs: A Study of the Social Life of the English in Eighteenth-Century India (; London: Oxford University Press, ); Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India, – (Delhi: Oxford University Press, ), chapter ; and Amal Chatterjee, Representations of India, –: The Creation of India in the Colonial Imagination (New York: St. Martin’s Press, ), part .

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Notes to Pages –

. See Teltscher, –. . See P. J. Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead: Eastern India –, vol.  of The New Cambridge History of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), chapter . “Burke was convinced by Francis and gave his ideas much publicity” (). . Marshall, Bengal, . . Edmund Burke, “Articles of Impeachment,” in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. , India: The Launching of the Hastings Impeachment, –, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), . Subsequent references in parentheses will follow quotations. . David Musselwhite, “The Trial of Warren Hastings,” in Literature, Politics and Theory, ed. Francis Barker et al. (London: Methuen, ), –, . . Marshall, Bengal, . . Ranajit Guha, The Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Paris: Mouton, ), –. . Guha, Rule, . Francis argued that even when his ideas were instituted in Bengal, they were not implemented in the proper way, hence “the Landed property of Bengal changes hands every day from the families of the old Proprietors to a new set of men, who may be called the moneyed interest of Calcutta, such as Shroffs, Banyans and other Natives employed in the collection of the Revenue or in Stations of great personal Favour” (quoted in Guha, Rule, ). . Musselwhite, . . On ideological implications of trees, see Stephen Daniels, “The Political Iconography of Woodland in later Georgian England,” in The Iconography of Landscape, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, –. . Drummond, who had been a banker, bought an estate and, along with it, introduction into country society. Zoffany’s family portrait very skillfully erases Drummond’s money-market origins with the venerable oak and the adoring spaniel, a dog used for shooting, the sport of the landed, and a dog famed for its devotion to its master, underscoring and enforcing hierarchical relations in this rural economy. See my paper “The Deferential Gaze: Portraits of Gentlemen and Their Dogs.” . Paulson, –. . Describing jackfruit as “huge deformities,” Lansdown Guilding wrote in An Account of the Botanic Garden in the Island of St. Vincent (Glasgow, ): “You behold . . . the Jack of India (A. integrifolia) bearing its ponderous fruit the weight of  to  pounds on the trunk and arms” (). The elephant approaching the house in the far distance also heightens the exoticism of the scene. . Of Brownian lawns, Everett writes: “everything appears to be owned and controlled, clearly under the eye and authority of the proprietor” (). . See Bermingham’s discussion of the Andrews portrait, –. See also John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, ). . Archer, . . See P. J. Marshall, “The Private Fortune of Marian Hastings” and “The Personal Fortune of Warren Hastings” in Trade and Conquest. . In The Wealth of Nations (New York: Penguin, ) Adam Smith writes: “The capital . . . that is acquired to any country by commerce and manufacturers, is

Notes to Pages –

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all a very precarious and uncertain possession till some part of it has been secured and realized in the circulation and improvement of its lands” (). See also David Hume, “On Public Credit,” in David Hume, Writings on Economics, ed. Eugene Rotwein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ). . David McNally, Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism: A Reinterpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), . . Thomas Gisborne, Enquiry into the Duties of Men in the Higher and Middle Classes, . . Hastings, The Present State of the East Indies (London, ), quoted by Everett, . . Hogarth’s “Progresses” contains images of white and black domestic servants. In the “Marriage à la Mode” series, the third plate has the figure of a steward with a sheaf of bills, the fourth contains two black servants, and the last has a foolish-looking servant who has bought the poison with which the Duchess commits suicide. Hogarth’s “Progresses” are not conversation pieces, however. . See Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head, –. . For the connection between women and the consumption of exotic commodities, see Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early EighteenthCentury English Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ); Suvir Kaul, “Why Selima Drowns: Thomas Gray and the Domestication of the Imperial Ideal,” PMLA  (): –; and Beth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, ). For the association of black servants with exotic commodities, see David Dabydeen, Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Black in Eighteenth Century Art (Athens: University of Georgia Press, ), and my chapter “Bringing the Empire Home: The Black Servant in Domestic Portraiture,” in Picturing Imperial Power (Durham: Duke University Press, ). . Richard Leppert, “Music, Domestic Life, and Cultural Chauvinism: Images of British Subjects at Home in India,” in Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception, ed. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), , , . See also Teltscher on British anxieties about servants, –. . Archer, . . Everett, . Not only are white household servants invisible in country house and garden view paintings but they were made invisible in real life with underground tunnels that hid their presence in gardens and on lawns. Such underground passages can still be seen today at the country house Strokestown, built in Ireland in the s. Robert Clive’s Claremont, his estate with its Palladian villa, also had tunnels between the servants’ quarters and the great house so that the great Lord Clive’s Brownian views would not be cluttered with the busy bodies of his servants. See Douglas Chambers, Reinvention of the World: English Writing, – (London: Arnold, ), chapters  and , which discuss the discrepancy between Pope’s celebration of the country house ethos in his poetry and Burlington’s, Cobham’s, and Bathurst’s relations with their local communities, relations which were shaped by the removal of villages and the engrossment of land for aesthetic purposes. . An exception to this lack of subjectivity in black servants is to be found in

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Notes to Pages –

a painting of Claud and Boyd Alexander by Arthur William Devis. The two brothers, both company employees, are turned toward each other, engaged in discussing a letter that Claud holds. Meanwhile, a servant holding one of their hats has his head turned and looks out of the picture. His gaze is directed at the viewer, and his slumped shoulders express an emotion that seems somewhat despondent or exhausted or even slightly critical of the excited brothers. For this image, see Archer, . . See Archer for these images, – and –. . “Defense of Mr. Hastings, by himself,” part IV, –, of The History of the Trial of Warren Hastings (London, ), . . For this “contradictory pursuit of revenue and order” (), see Nicholas B. Dirks, “From Little King to Landlord: Colonial Discourse and Colonial Rule,” in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,), –. . Marshall, Bengal, . . Bermingham, . . A.P. Benthall, The Trees of Calcutta and its Neighbourhood (; Dehra Dun, India: Bishen Singh Mahendra Pal Singh, ), xxviii, . . I owe this interpretation to Monica Ghosh, South Asia Librarian at the University of Hawai‘i.

Chapter  . W. T. J. Mitchell, “Holy Landscape: Israel, Palestine, and the American Wilderness,” Critical Inquiry  (): –, . See also Mitchell, ed. Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). . See Mildred Archer, India and British Portraiture, –. For an assessment of Hodges’s career, see Geoff Quilley’s essay “William Hodges, Artist of Empire” in the catalog for the National Maritime Museum’s exhibition, William Hodges, –: The Art of Exploration, ed. Geoff Quilley and John Bonehill, – (London: Yale University Press, , in press). Hereafter this text is referred to as the Hodges’s catalog. . For Hodges’s training and career, see Isabel Combs Stuebe, The Life and Works of William Hodges (New York: Garland, ). See also Bernard Smith on Hodges’s plein-air technique and Richard Wilson’s influence on Hodges, stemming from his apprenticeship under Wilson, Imagining the Pacific, as well as Rudiger Joppien and Bernard Smith, The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages, vol. , The Voyage of the Resolution and Adventure, – (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ). . For Sir Joshua Reynolds’s and the Academy’s hierarchy of genres, which disqualified landscape painting from being considered a liberal art, see John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting From Reynolds to Hazlitt (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ). See also my essay “The Artist’s ‘I’ in Hodges’s Travels in India” in the Hodges catalog, –. . For the “ruin sentiment,” see Richard Feingold, Nature and Society. For the politics and aesthetics of ruins as figured in poetry, see Suvir Kaul, Poems of Nation, and Anne Janowitz, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape

Notes to Pages –

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(London: Blackwell, ). Closely related to the trope of ruins is that of luxury; for a history of the concept of luxury in Britain, see John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). . I have not regularized Hodges’s spelling of Indian place names. . Hodges’s competitors in the market for topographical illustrations, Thomas and William Daniells, an uncle and nephew team of artists, complained that Hodges had altered his subject matter to enhance its picturesque qualities. See G.H. R.Tillotson’s essay “A Fair Picture: Hodges and the Daniells at Rajmahal,” Marg  (): –. He argues that Hodges’s use of the picturesque is in keeping with the artistic fashions of the day, and that “there is no justification for regarding it as particularly connected with colonial rule.” While I agree with the first part of the argument, it is my goal to show how Hodges’s use of the picturesque mode to represent India had a political impact that supported the colonial project. See also Tillotson’s The Artificial Empire: The Indian Landscape of William Hodges (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, ). . On the picturesque, see the now-classic formulations of Elizabeth Wheeler Manwaring, Italian Landscape in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study Chiefly of the Influence of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa on English Taste, – (New York: Oxford University Press, ); Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View (London: Frank Cass, ); and W.J. Hipple, The Beautiful, Sublime, and the Picturesque (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, ). See also Malcolm Andrews’s seminal book, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, – (Aldershot, England: Scolar Press, ), and John Dixon Hunt’s impressive body of work on the picturesque and garden history, Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, , ). Political readings of the picturesque include John Barrell, “Visualizing the Division of Labor: William Pyne’s Microcosm,” The Birth of Pandora and Other Essays (London: Macmillan, ); Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology; Stephen Copley, “Gilpin on the Wye: Tourists, Tintern Abbey, and the Picturesque,” in Prospects for the Nation: Recent Essays in British Landscape, –, ed. Michael Rosenthal, Christiana Payne, and Scott Wilson (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ), –; and Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ). See also Kim Ian Michasiw, “Nine Revisionist Theses on the Picturesque,” Representations  (): –, and Robert Mayhew, “William Gilpin and the Latitudinarian Picturesque,” Eighteenth-Century Studies  (): –. . For Gaspard Dughet’s popularity in Britain, see Katharine Baetjer, “Catalogue,” Glorious Nature: British Landscape Painting, – (New York: Hudson Hills Press, ), . . Calcutta is a little beneath the  degree latitude line, and Benares a bit above. . See Natasha Eaton’s essay, “Hodges’s Visual Genealogy For Colonial India, –,” in the Hodges’s catalog, –. . Hodges’s images of India evoke the productive potential and the ruination of wasteful expenditure that is the subject of Oliver Goldsmith’s “Deserted Village.” . William Hodges, Travels in India (London, ), . Subsequent citations to this text will be placed in parentheses after the quotation.

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Notes to Pages –

. For the poetic tradition of linking luxury with the downfall of empires, see Laurence Goldstein, Ruins and Empire: The Evolution of a Theme in Augustan and Romantic Literature (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, ); and Suvir Kaul, Poems of Nation. Dyer’s “Ruins of Rome” is an especially good example of this motif. . Joseph Addison, The Spectator no.  (June , ). . Susan Stewart’s analysis of the desires that antiques and souvenirs arouse in us can shed light on Hodges’s melancholic nostalgia. “Nostalgia is a sadness without an object. A sadness which creates a longing that of necessity is inauthentic because it does not take part in lived experience.” For these reasons, “the nostalgic is enamored of distance, not of the referent itself. Nostalgia cannot be sustained without loss.” Stewart, On Longing, , . . Anne Janowitz, England’s Ruins, , . . See Sara Suleri, “The Feminine Picturesque,” chapter  of The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . Though Suleri writes about nineteenth-century women amateur painters, her insights into the workings of the picturesque also apply to Hodges’s illustrations and scenic touring: “The picturesque becomes synonymous with a desire to transfix a dynamic cultural confrontation into a still life, converting a pictorial imperative into a gesture of selfprotection that allows the colonial gaze a license to convert its ability not to see into studiously visual representations” (). . Stewart, , and Janowitz, . . Richard Payne Knight, Landscape: A Didactic Poem quoted in Hunt and Willis, eds., The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden, – (London: Elck, ), –, and John Dyer, quoted in Andrews, Search for Picturesque, . . Hodges’s drawings from his India sojourn, including Mosque at Mounheer, are at the Yale Center for British Art, B ..–. volumes, “Original Drawings for Choix de Vies de L’Inde and others.” . See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, ), and Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, ). . Homi Bhabha, “Sly Civility,” The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, ), . India’s present is Britain’s past, or as the Daniells wrote in their A Picturesque Voyage to India (): “the present inhabitants . . . present the image of a remote and almost obsolete antiquity” (i). . See Harriet Guest, “Cook in Tonga: Terms of Trade,” in Islands in History and Representation, ed. Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith (London: Routlege, ), –. See also Geoff Quilley’s introduction to the Hodges’s catalog. . See Roxann Wheeler’s The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ). . See Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ), . . Quoted in Cohn, . . Cohn, . . Of course, as Homi Bhabha points out, this love of liberty comes into

Notes to Pages –



direct contradiction with colonialism, which is not based on the consent of the subject peoples. “The doubleness of colonial discourse is not simply the violence of one powerful nation writing out the history of another. . . . For it reveals . . . the incompatibility of empire and nation; it puts on trial the very discourse of civility within which representative government claims its liberty and empire its ethics” (Locations of Culture, –). . Teltscher, India Inscribed, . This notion of repressed colonial anxiety has been discussed by John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas de Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,); Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, ); Homi Bhabha, Location of Culture; and Ranajit Guha, “Not at Home in Empire,” Critical Inquiry  (): –. . I have not corrected Hodges’s misspellings of names. . These British forces consisted of sepoys as well as European soldiers. See Dean Mahomet, a sepoy himself, for a more complex treatment of Chait Singh’s and Hastings’s conflict, The Travels of Dean Mahomet: An Eighteenth-Century Journey through India (Berkeley: University of California Press, ). . P. J. Marshall, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. , India: The Launching of the Hastings Impeachment, – (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), , . Subsequent references to this volume will be placed in parentheses following the quotation. . Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ), –. . Teltscher, . . Ibid. . Sigmund Freud, “The Ego and the Super-Ego (Ego-Ideal),” The Ego and the Id (; New York: Norton, ), ; quoted in Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, ), . . Butler, . I borrow Butler’s formulation about the other and the modality and object of desire, which she applies to the construction of homosexual identity, to illuminate colonial identity. . See Slavoj Êiêek, “Mourning, Melancholy, and the Act,” Critical Inquiry  (): –. . For a late twentieth-century analysis of Hastings’s career that makes use of this defense with no shred of irony, see Michael Edwardes, Warren Hastings: King of the Nabobs (London: Hart-Davies, MacGibbon, ). “Hastings’s attitude to Chait Singh was Indian rather than British. In fact, in thirty years of immersion in India he had absorbed the country’s political morality. The justification was clear. The Company’s dominion in India was not that of a European state either actual or ideal. The Company was an Indian power for all its European overtones. Indian rulers considered it as such and expected it to act as if it was. Hastings might be condemned for behaving like the worst of Indian rulers, but his reasons were absolutely valid in Indian terms” (). . As Sara Suleri suggests in her nuanced reading of Burke’s language, at the

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Notes to Pages –

center of Burke’s critique of Hastings’s Orientalism and Hastings’s reliance on the concept of Oriental despotism () is a desire to blame Hastings for what Burke saw as the perversion and abuses of a colonial system that in and of itself was not, in Burke’s eyes, necessarily prone to such excesses. This way Hastings becomes the scapegoat for the ills of empire, and “Hastings, who, by functioning as a repository of ill-doing, could simultaneously protect the colonial project from being indicted for the larger ill of which Hastings was simply a herald” (). Burke portrays Hastings as a monstrous aberration in the colonial record while, in fact, he was the product of the exigencies of the company’s role in India. As Suleri argues: “the transgressions of which Hastings was guilty conform perfectly to the extortionism upon which the East India Company was based” (). Suleri suggests that Burke’s “sensationalism” () and “rhetorical exaggeration” () reveal in their very excess “an uncanny understanding . . . of the nature of colonialism’s relation to arbitrary power” (). See also Nicholas B. Dirks on “the contradictory pursuits of revenue and order” () in “From Little King to Landlord: Colonial Discourse and Colonial Rule,” in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), –. . The trial was marked by an anxiety over the possible influence of Oriental despotism on British conduct in India. This anxiety has been traced in colonial discourse by Said, Barrell, Leask, Teltscher, and other cultural historians as a fear of contagion, a fear that an inevitable degeneration sets in to corrupt and vitiate the conquerors’ superior culture, so that over time, exposure to climate, and proximity to indigenous peoples, the conquerors become as morally decayed and politically ineffectual as the previous order they had replaced. The idea was that Akbar and his Mughal system of government, while once militarily brilliant and culturally sophisticated, could not withstand the debilitating effects of India just as his monuments and architectural triumphs decayed in the subtropical climate of the subcontinent. Cornwallis’s prohibitions and restrictions (forbidding the company from employing at the managerial level mixed-race employees; forbidding mixed-race marriages and the taking of native women as common-law wives; forbidding acceptance of gifts from local leaders, etc.) were designed to maintain boundaries and prevent such “moral decay.” . Teltscher, . . For, as Homi Bhabha has argued in his discussion of Frantz Fanon, the instability of colonial identity stems from a blurring of boundaries: “not Self and Other but the otherness of the Self inscribed in the perverse palimpsest of colonial identity” (). Though speaking about the identity of the colonized, Bhabha’s analysis gets at the colonizer’s split identification: “It is not the colonialist Self or the colonized Other, but the disturbing distance in-between that constitutes the figure of colonial otherness” (). . Barrell, Pandora, . . For these quotes I am indebted to John Bonehill’s archival skills. See his essay “‘This hapless adventurer’: William Hodges and the London Art World,” in the Hodges exhibition catalog, . For antiquarianism, see Tracing Architecture: The Aesthetics of Antiquarianism, a special issue of Art History  (), especially Stephen Bending on polite antiquities.

Notes to Pages –

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Chapter  . BL Add. MS ,: f. v. . Public Record Office Adm. /, f. ; quoted in Joppien and Smith, The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages, :. . See Joppien and Smith, :–. See also Bernard Smith, Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ), –. . George Forster, A Voyage round the World, :. . For a discussion of the political implications of Reynolds’s aesthetics, see John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting From Reynolds to Hazlitt (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ), and Elizabeth Bohls, “Disinterestedness and Denial of the Particular: Locke, Adam Smith, and the Subject of Aesthetics,” in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Art, ed. Paul Mattick Jr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. . Joppien and Smith, :. See Smith on the “Italianate domination of English taste” and how “the elaborate late-baroque classicism of the Cipriani/Bartolozzi circle persisted in the engravings associated with the second voyage” (Imagining the Pacific, –). . See Geoff Quilley’s note in his essay on colonial landscapes: “It might be comparable, in this sense, to William Hodges’ paintings completed for the Admiralty on his return from Cook’s second voyage to the Pacific, produced after work completed on the spot, but which were meant to offer retrospective poetic reflections upon, and syntheses of, his experiences on the voyage.” (“Pastoral Plantations: The Slave Trade and the Representation of British Colonial Landscape in the late Eighteenth Century,” in An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the Atlantic World, –, ed. Geoff Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), –. . I am referring to the book’s illustrations only, and not the vastly complex and very beautiful paintings, which Hodges produced in the Pacific and later in Britain. . Add. MS , f. . . June , ; Egerton , f. . . Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” Critical Inquiry  (): –. . The vertical lines on the left are ruled in red ink, which Cook also used when making corrections in another journal. . J. C. Beaglehole, “The Textual Introduction to the Journal,” The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, Vol. : The Voyage of the Endeavour – (Cambridge: Published for Hakluyt Society at the University Press, – ), cxvi. . Ibid., cxciii. . BL, Add. MS. , f. . . Bruno Latour, Science in Action, , . . J. C. Beaglehole, The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, Vol. : The Voyage of the Resolution and Adventure, – (Cambridge:

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Notes to Pages –

Published for the Hakluyt Society at the University Press, ),. Hereafter cited as Beaglehole, ed., II. See p. cxvi on the process of further abstracting from the log to produce the left-hand side of the log-portions of , . . Beaglehole, “Textual Introduction,” Beaglehole, ed., II, cxvi. . Morning Chronicle January , , . This review suggests that Cook’s Voyage is less well written than French maritime literature for two reasons, which, I might add, contradict each other: the first, that Cook was not up to task of recording the events of the voyage, and the other that the narrative he produced would have been better without editorial interference. The implication of both propositions is that A Voyage towards the South Pole might have been a better book if Cook had been a different man, someone who had received a gentleman’s education. The editors, to whom the Morning Chronicle reviewer is referring, are Benjamin Robbins, John Hawkesworth, and John Douglas. The British maritime books are respectively: A Voyage round the World, in the years MDCCXL,I,II, II, IV, by George Anson. Compiled from the Papers and other Materials of the Right Honourable George Lord Anson and published under his direction by Richard Walter [and Benjamin Robins] (London, ); An Account of the Voyages undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty, for making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, And successively performed by Commodore Byron, Captain Wallis, Captain Carteret and Captain Cook, in the Dolphin, the Swallow, and the Endeavour. Drawn up from the Journals which were kept by the several Commanders and from the Papers of Joseph Banks Esq. by John Hawkesworth, LL.D.,  vols. (London, ); A Voyage towards the South Pole, and Round the World. Performed in His Majesty’s Ships the Resolution and Adventure, In the Years , , , and . Written by James Cook, Commander of the Resolution,  vols. (London, ); A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean. Undertaken by the command of His Majesty, for making Discoveries in the Northern Hemisphere, to determine the position and extent of the west side of North America; its distance from Asia; and the practicability of a northern passage to Europe. Performed under the direction of Captains Cook, Clerke, and Gore, in His Majesty’s ships the Resolution and Discovery, in the years , , , , and . Vol. I and II written by Captain James Cook. Vol. III by Captain James King (London, ). Though I argue that John Douglas did not revise Cook’s manuscript of his second voyage as intensively as this viewer implies, Douglas did oversee the final stages of book production. The introduction to A Voyage towards the South Pole contains the following statement from Cook: “And now it may be necessary to say, that, as I am on the point of sailing on a third expedition, I leave this account of my last voyage in the hands of some friends, who in my absence have kindly accepted the office of correcting the press for me; who are pleased to think, that what I have here to relate is better to be given in my own words, than in the words of another person; especially as it is a work designed for information, and not merely for amusement; in which, it is there opinion, that candour and fidelity will counterbalance the want of ornament” (xxxvi). References to A Voyage towards the South Pole (Voyage) will be placed in parentheses following the quotation. . January , ; BL, Egerton , f. . I have not regularized Cook’s punctuation or spelling.

Notes to Pages –

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. January ,  [sic: ?]; BL, Egerton , f. . . January , ; BL Egerton , f. . . March , ; BL, Egerton , f. . . January ,  [sic: ?]; BL, Egerton , f. . . Beaglehole, ed., II, cxlv. . Ian MacLaren, “Exploration/Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Author,” International Journal of Canadian Studies  (): –. . BL, Egerton , f. . . BL, Egerton , f. . . BL, Add. MS. , ff. –. . Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, ed. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), . . Dorinda Outram, “On Being Perseus: New Knowledge, Dislocation, and Enlightenment Exploration,” in Geography and Enlightenment, ed. David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –; . . James Boswell, Boswell: The Ominous Years, –, . . Beaglehole, ed., II, cxli. . Carol E. Percy, “To Study Nature Rather than Books”: Captain James Cook as Naturalist, Observer and Literary Author,” Pacific Studies  (): –. . Beaglehole, ed., II cxvi , cxxii. . See Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), and The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, ed. William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). . Outram, . . The handwriting does not look like Cook’s fluid penmanship as the writing is in pencil and is choppy, more up and down and less slanted than Cook’s, although it is possible that the cramped style was due to writing in the margins. It is, however, clearly an eighteenth-century hand given the prose style. . BL, Add. MS ,, f. . . BL, Add. MS ,, f. . . BL, Add. MS ,  f. . See Beaglehole, ed., II, –, note . . John Barrell, English Literature in History, –: An Equal, Wide Survey (London: Hutchinson, ), –. . Dusky Sound is not in the tropics, but since it was the first warm place after voyaging in the Antarctic that the Resolution stayed for any length of time, Cook and his men responded to Dusky Sound’s plentiful natural resources as if they were in an arcadia. “The arrival at Dusky Bay after three months of the intense Antarctic cold must have been welcomed by all” (Joppien and Smith, ). George Forster wrote of Dusky Bay: “so apt is mankind, after a long absence from land, to be prejudiced in favour of the wildest shore, that we looked upon the country at that time, as one of the most beautiful which nature unassisted by art could produce” (Voyage :). . BL, Add. MS ,, f. v (May , Tuesday, ). . Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, quoted in Bourdieu, .



Notes to Pages –

. BL, Add. MS ,, f. v. . Whether Cook authorized this, I do not know. . BL, Add. MS ,, f. . . BL, Add. MS ,, f. v. . BL, Add. MS ,, ff. –. . BL, Add. MS ,, f. v. . BL, Add. MS , f. v. . An example of a deleted passage from the famous scene where trees were mistaken for stone Pillars by the Forsters is Cook’s statement “I must susspend my judgement upon them for the present.” . BL, Add. MS ,, f. . . BL, Add. MS ,, f. . . BL, Add. MS ,, f. . One reason for cutting this mention of Hodges’s drawing of Dusky Bay might have to do with the selection process by which images were chosen to be made into illustrations for the book.

Chapter  . William Cowper, The Task, Book III, “The Garden,” Cowper’s Poems, ed. Hugh I’Anson Fausset ( London: Dent, ,) , l. . . Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ), . . Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ), –, . . Cowper, The Task, Book III, “The Garden,” . . The subtitle of Sir James Edward Smith’s Exotic Botany (London, –). Smith had hoped that Exotic Botany would be an annual publication, but he discontinued the series after only two volumes had been published, one in  and the other in . Citations to these two volumes will be placed in parentheses after the quotation. . Pratt, . . Thomas, –. . Perhaps Edgeworth confused the Aloe with the Agave americana, the century plant, which does indeed bloom once in its lifetime and is “not necessarily attractive,” according to Mary Rose Duffield and Warren Jones, Plants for Dry Climates (Tucson, Arizona: Fisher Books, ), . . Maria Edgeworth, Belinda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . . See Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, – (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), chapter , especially –. . See An Account of the Botanic Garden in the Island of St. Vincent (Glasgow, ). . This chapter does not offer an overview of botanical print culture. See Blanche Henrey, British Botanical and Horticultural Literature before ,  vols.

Notes to Pages –



(London: Oxford University Press, ), and Wilfred Blunt and William T. Stearn, The Art of Botanical Illustration (; Kew: The Royal Botanic Gardens, ). . Memoir and Correspondence of the late Sir James Edward Smith,  vols., ed. Lady Smith (London: Longman, ), :. Hereafter these volumes of letters will be referred to as Memoir and the citation placed in parentheses following the quotation. . Robert John Thornton, The Religious Use of Botany (London, ), , –. . Smith writes of his successful lectures at Liverpool in : “My lectures are numerously and brilliantly attended, and seem to stir up a great taste and ardour for botany.” (To Dawson Turner, July , ) in Memoir, :. . Richard Pulteney, The Progress of Botany,  vols. (London, ), :ix. Subsequent citations are placed in parentheses following the quotation. . Smith himself was called upon by Queen Caroline to teach her daughters botany. . Memoir, :–, , . . As in Banks’s ability to get funds from Lord Sandwich for Cook’s first voyage. . John Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). . Margot Walker, Sir James Edward Smith (London: Linnean Society of London), . . In Japan the term for a collector of information, is otaku. Often associated with the amassing of information about a particular popular cultural item (television shows, cartoons, toys), the otaku has his forebears in the systematic collecting and classification that naturalists have been engaged with for over two hundred year. . John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –. . The British Library possesses a three-volume folio edition with the illustrations collected in the third volume, which bears the date  on its binding. Dumbarton Oaks possesses the smaller version of Smith’s Exotic Botany, which combines the two volumes of text into one and includes the illustrations, which are placed before the textual description of them. On the title page written in pencil is “publication not continued,” which means that Smith had envisioned publishing more volumes, perhaps one each year, to make a series. Volume  is dated  and volume  is dated , and presumably he had hoped to publish a third volume the following year. But sales did not merit further publication. . Smith, Memoir, :. Shteir traces the shift in style of botanical books from the narrative and dialogue-based treatments of botany (many of which were written by women), representative of the Enlightenment ideal of polite science, open to the educated person, to the straightforward, unadorned style of the new scientific discourse, which eventually became the language of specialists. . The definition of the word “exotic” implies national boundaries. An exotic plant is an alien or foreign plant, not necessarily a tropical plant, for plants from the arctic regions are considered to be exotics, but there are a far larger number of tropical plants than arctic, and Smith’s Exotic Botany is almost exclusively focused on tropical and subtropical species.



Notes to Pages –

. See K. Dian Kriz’s article on exoticism in natural history, “Curiosities, Commodities, and Transplanted Bodies in Hans Sloane’s Natural History of Jamaica,” WMQ  (): –. . Harriet Guest, “Curiously Marked: Tatooing, Masculinity, and Nationality in Eighteenth-Century British Perceptions of the South Pacific,” in Painting and the Politics of Culture: New Essays on British Art, ed. John Barrell, –. Oxford: Oxford University Press, . . For a discussion of collecting and motives for it, including establishing communities, see Susan M. Pearce, Museums, Objects, and Collections (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, ). . In her path-breaking article on Sloane’s natural history illustrations, K. Dian Kriz suggests that the contradiction between presentation of the typical and the rare (or odd) renders the book’s images incoherent. She makes the brilliant observation that natural history’s goal is to render “flora and fauna . . . into fully comprehensible objects,” though the presentation of rarities depends on “the fears and the desires aroused by strangeness of a new world.” The natural history part of Sloane’s visual and written text transforms the unfamiliar into the familiar through systematic use of the catalog of the typical while the cabinet of curios part wishes to retain the strangeness of the unfamiliar. “The problem of both retaining and containing their difference persists. If the curiosities represented become too throughly pacified in the process of visual and verbal representation, their capacity for arousing the wonder and desire of the reader will be diminished sharply. Too little pacification threatens to expose an Otherness that cannot be known and, even more worrying, cannot be physically contained.” Kriz argues that to appeal to a wide audience, natural history “depended on the description and illustration of the unusual or curious rather than the typical”; however, as illustrated natural history books circulated in polite society, curiosities could through overexposure “lose their status as rarities” (–). Any book that makes the exotic its topic runs the risk of undoing that very exoticism it seeks to explore, especially if it is a natural history or botanical book with its impulse to regularize and codify. . Katie Whitaker, “The Culture of Curiosity,” in Cultures of Natural History, ed. N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –, , , . . Ibid., . . Ibid. . Brewer, . See Smith’s lecture on the Linnean artificial system as based on “Nature’s laws” (Memoir, :). His discussion of the field of botany reveals a hierarchy of those who study plants; the lowest rung in this hierarchy is the flower gatherer, then the half-learned botanist, followed by the practical botanist, who is topped by the taxonomist botanist, who Smith sees as discovering nature’s laws, “that infinite wisdom which planned and perfected the whole” (:). . Quoted in Brewer, . . Linnean Society, Smith’s Correspondence, MS, George Spencer Churchill, Marquis of Blandford, to Smith,  August . . Linnean Society, Smith’s Correspondence, MS, Lambert to Smith,  December .

Notes to Pages –



. Linnean Society, Smith’s Correspondence, MS, Lambert to Smith,  October  (emphasis his). . Linnean Society, Smith’s Correspondence, MS, Lambert to Smith,  September . . Linnean Society, Smith’s Correspondence, MS, Lambert to Smith,  August . . Linnean Society, Smith’s Correspondence, MS, Lambert to Smith,  August . . Linnean Society, Smith’s Correspondence, MS, Barrington to Smith,  July . . In his study of the Hapsburg encyclopedic collections, Thomas Kaufmann argues that the specimens, both artificial and natural, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ Kunstkammer “represented the world in toto” and “reflected the contents of the universe in all its variety.” Kaufmann suggests that Emperor Rudolf II’s “possession of a universal collection could symbolically represent his Imperial majesty, his control over a microcosm, that reflected his claims to mastery of the macrocosm of the greater world, and over the body politic of which he was sovereign.” Thomas Dacosta Kaufmann, “From Treasury to Museum: The Collections of the Austrian Hapsburgs,” in Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), , . . K. Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. . Linnean Society, Smith’s Correspondence, MS, Smith to Roscoe,  August . . Quoted in Shteir, . . Appendix to Memoir, :–. Introductory Lecture, Read at the London Institution, May , . . Lindley’s speech, quoted in Shteir, . . Professionalization also occurred within agriculture. See my essay on agricultural experts, “Arthur Young, Agriculture, and the Construction of the New Economic Man.” In History, Gender, and Literature, ed. Beth Fowkes Tobin (Athens: University of Georgia Press, ), –. . Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –. See also Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaelogists in Victorian England, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). . See chapter , “The Art Auction: Sign Exchange and Sumptuary Value,” in Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis, Mo.: Telos Press, ).

Epilogue . Michelle Cliff, Abeng (; New York: Penguin, ), . . Mintz, “From Plantations to Peasantries in the Caribbean,” .

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Notes to Pages –

. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, ). . Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden (Book) (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, ), . . Stuart Hall, “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities,” .

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Boswell, James. Boswell: The Ominous Years, –. Ed. C. Ryskamp and F. A. Pottle. London, . ———. Life of Johnson. Ed. R. W. Chapman. ; London: Oxford University Press, . Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Ed. Richard Nice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, . Braverman, Richard. Plots and Counterplots: Sexual Politics and the Body Politic in English Literature, –. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Brewer, John. The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . Brockway, Lucille. Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Botanic Gardens. New York: Academic Press, . Brown, Laura. Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, . de Bruyn, Frans. The Literary Genres of Edmund Burke: The Political Uses of Literary Form. Oxford: Clarendon Press, . Burke, Edmund. “Articles of Impeachment.” The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke. Vol. . India: The Launching of the Hastings Impeachment, –. Ed. P. J. Marshall. Oxford: Clarendon Press, . Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, . Carmichael, A.C. Domestic Manners and Social Condition of the White, Coloured, and Negro Population of the West Indies.  vols. ; New York: Negro Universities Press, . Casid, Jill. “Inhuming Empire: Islands as Colonial Nurseries and Grave.” In The Global Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum, –. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, . Chalker, John. The English Georgic. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, . Chambers, Douglas. The Planters of the English Garden: Botany, Trees, and the Georgics. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, . ———. Reinvention of the World: English Writing, –. London: Arnold, . Chatterjee, Amal. Representations of India, –: The Creation of India in the Colonial Imagination. New York: St. Martin’s Press, . Clark, William, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer. “Introduction.” The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, –. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . Cliff, Michelle. Abeng. ; New York: Penguin, . Cohen, Ralph. “Innovation and Variation: Literary Change and Georgic Poetry.” In Literature and History: Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, March , , ed. Ralph Cohen and Murray Krieger, –. Los Angeles: UCLA, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, . ———. The Unfolding of The Seasons. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, . Cohn, Bernard S. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, . Cook, James. A Voyage towards the South Pole, and Round the World.  vols. London, .

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Copley, Stephen. “Gilpin on the Wye: Tourists, Tintern Abbey, and the Picturesque.” In Prospects for the Nation: Recent Essays in British Landscape, –, ed. Michael Rosenthal, Christiana Payne, and Scott Wilson, –. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, . Cosgrove, Denis E. Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. ; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, . Cosgrove, Denis, and Stephen Daniels, eds. The Iconography of Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  Cowper, William. The Task. In Cowper’s Poems, ed. Hugh I’Anson Fausset. London: Dent, . Craton, Michael. “Reluctant Creoles: The Planters’ World in the British West Indies.” In Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, –. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, . Michael Craton, and James Walvin. A Jamaican Plantation: The History of Worthy Park, –. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, . Crawford, Rachel. Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape, –. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, . Dabydeen, David. Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Black in Eighteenth Century Art. Athens: University of Georgia Press, . Daniels, Stephen. Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States. Cambridge: Polity Press, . Desmond, Adrian. The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . Desmond, Ray. The European Discovery of the Indian Flora. Oxford: Oxford University Press, . Deuchar, Stephen. Sporting Art in Eighteenth-Century England: A Social and Political History. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, . Dirks, Nicholas B.“From Little King to Landlord: Colonial Discourse and Colonial Rule.” In Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks, –. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, . D’Oench, Ellen G. The Conversation Piece: Arthur Devis and His Contemporaries. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Center for British Art, . Drayton, Richard. Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, . Duffield, Mary Rose, and Warren Jones. Plants for Dry Climates. Tucson, Arizona.: Fisher Books, . Dunn, Richard S. “‘Dreadful Idlers’ in the Cane Fields: The Slave Labor Pattern on a Jamaican Sugar Estate, –.” In British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams, ed. Barbara L. Solow and Stanley L. Engerman, –. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Eaton, Natasha. “Hodges’s Visual Genealogy for Colonial India, –.” In William Hodges, –: The Art of Exploration, ed. Geoff Quilley and John Bonehill, –. London: Yale University Press, .

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Edgeworth, Maria. Belinda. ; Oxford: Oxford University Press, . Edwards, Bryan. The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies.  vols. ; New York: AMS Press, . ———. The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies.  vols. London, , . Edwardes, Michael. Warren Hastings: King of the Nabobs. London: Hart-Davies, MacGibbon, . Ellis, Markman. “‘The Cane-Land Isles’: Commerce and Empire in EighteenthCentury Georgic and Pastoral Poetry.” In Islands in History and Representation, ed. Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith, –. London: Routledge, . ———. “Tails of Wonder: Constructions of the Kangaroo in Late EighteenthCentury Scientific Discourse.” In Science and Exploration in the Pacific: European Voyages to the Southern Oceans in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Margarette Lincoln, –. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer in association with the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, . Elsner, John, and Roger Cardinal, eds. The Cultures of Collecting. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, . Everett, Nigel. The Tory View of Landscape. London: Yale University Press, . Fabian, Johannes. Anthropology News , no.  (April ): . Feingold, Richard. Nature and Society: Later Eighteenth-Century Uses of the Pastoral and Georgic. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, . Fisher, Michael H, ed. The Travels of Dean Mahomet: An Eighteenth-Century Journey through India. Berkeley: University of California Press, . Flett, Arthur. “Ruins: The Development of a Theme in Eighteenth Century British Landscape Painting c. –.” Dissertation, Indiana University, . Forster, George. A Voyage round the World. Ed. Nicholas Thomas and Oliver Berghof.  vols. . Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, . Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, . ———. “The Discourse of Language.” The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, . ———. “What Is Enlightenment?” In The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, –. New York: Pantheon, . Fowler, Alastair. “Georgic and Pastoral: Laws of Genre in the Seventeenth Century.” In Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England: Writing and the Land, ed. Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor. Leicester: Leicester University Press, . ———. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, . Frost, Alan. Sir Joseph Banks and the Transfer of Plants to and from the South Pacific. Melbourne: Colony Press, . Fulford, Tim. Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Gascoigne, John. Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, .

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Gay, John. “Rural Sports. A Georgic: Inscribed to Mr. Pope.” In John Gay: Poetry and Prose.  vols. Ed. Vinton A. Dearing with the assistance of Charles E. Beckwith, :–. Oxford: Clarendon Press, . Geertz, Clifford. Local Knowledge. New York: Basic Books, . Genovese, Eugene. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World that Slaves Made. New York: Random House, . Gilmore, John. The Poetics of Empire: A Study of James Grainger’s The Sugar Cane. ; London: Althone, . Gilpin, William. Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and On Sketching Landscape. London, . Girouard, Mark. Life in the English Country House. London: Yale University Press, . Gisborne, Thomas. Duties of Men in Higher and Middle Classes of Society. London, . Goldsmith, Oliver. “The Deserted Village.” Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith.  vols. Ed. Arthur Friedman. London: Oxford University Press, . Goldstein, Laurence. Ruins and Empire: The Evolution of a Theme in Augustan and Romantic Literature. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, . Golinski, Jan. Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Goodridge, John. Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Grainger, James. The Sugarcane. A Poem. In Four Books. In The Poems of Grainger and Boyse. Vol. . The British Poets.  vols. Chiswick: College House, . Grant, Rosamund. Caribbean and African Cooking. New York: Interlink Books, . Greig, Charles. “Hodges and Attribution.” In William Hodges, –: The Art of Exploration, ed. Geoff Quilley and John Bonehill, –. London: Yale University Press, . Grove, R. H. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, –. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Guattari, Felix, and Toni Negri. Communists Like Us: New Spaces of Liberty, New Lines of Alliance. Trans. Michael Ryan. Semiotexte, . Guest, Harriet. “Cook in Tonga: Terms of Trade.” In Islands in History and Representation, ed. Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith, –. London: Routlege, . ———. “Curiously Marked: Tatooing, Masculinity, and Nationality in EighteenthCentury British Perceptions of the South Pacific.” In Painting and the Politics of Culture: New Essays on British Art, –, ed. John Barrell, –. Oxford: Oxford University Press, . ———. “The Great Distinction: The Figures of the Exotic in the Work of William Hodges.” Oxford Art Journal  (): –. Guilding, Lansdown. An Account of the Botanic Garden in the Island of St. Vincent. Glasgow, . Guha, Ranajit. “Not at Home in Empire.” Critical Inquiry  (): –. ———. The Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement. Paris: Mouton, . Hall, Stuart. “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities.” In Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation

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of Identity, ed. Anthony King. Binghamton: Department of Art and Art History, State University of New York at Binghamton, . Haraszti-Takacs, Marianne. Spanish Genre Painting in the Seventeenth Century. Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, . Harris, John. The Artist and the Country House: A History of Country House and Garden View Painting. London: Sotheby, . Heinzleman, Kurt. “Roman Georgic in the Georgian Age: A Theory of Romantic Genre.” Texas Studies in Language and Literature  (): –. Henrey, Blanche. British Botanical and Horticultural Literature before .  vols. London: Oxford University Press, . Higman, B. W. Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, –. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, . Hipple, W. J. The Beautiful, Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, . The History of the Trial of Warren Hastings. London, . Hoare, Michael, ed. The Resolution Journal of Johann Reinhold Forster, –.  vols. London: Hakluyt Society, . Hodges, William. Travels in India, During the Years , , , and . London, , . Hoem, Ingjerd.”The Scientific Endeavor and the Natives.” In Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature, ed. David Miller and Peter Reill, –. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, . Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum Publishing Company, . Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, –. London: Methuen, . Hulme, Peter, and Neil L. Whitehead, eds. Wild Majesty: Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day. Oxford: Clarendon Press, . Hume, David. “On Public Credit.” In David Hume, Writings on Economics, ed. Eugene Rotwein. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, . Hunt, John Dixon. The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening during the Eighteenth Century. ; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, . ———. Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture. ; Cambridge: MIT Press, . ———. The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden, –. London: Elek, . Hussey, Christopher. The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View. London: Frank Cass, . Janowitz, Anne. England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape. London: Blackwell, . Jenkins, Hugh. Feigned Commonwealths: The Country-House Poem and the Fashioning of the Ideal Community. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, . Joppien, Rudiger, and Bernard Smith. The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages.  vols. Vol.

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. The Voyage of the Resolution and Adventure, –. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, . Kame‘eleihiwa, Likikala-. Native Lands and Foreign Desires: Pehea La- E Pono Ai? Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, . Kaomea, Julie Thirugnanam. “The Hawaiians of Old: Representations of Native Hawaiians in the Elementary Curriculum.” Ph.D. diss., University of Hawai‘i, . Kaufmann, Thomas Dacosta. “From Treasury to Museum: The Collections of the Austrian Hapsburgs.” In Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, –. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, . Kaul, Suvir. Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, . ———. “Why Selima Drowns: Thomas Gray and the Domestication of the Imperial Ideal.” PMLA  (): –. Kenny, Virginia C. The Country-House Ethos in English Literature, –. New York: St. Martin’s Press, . Kincaid, Jamaica. My Garden (Book). New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, . Knight, Richard Payne. Landscape: A Didactic Poem. In The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden, –, ed. John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis. New York, . Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth. Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, . Krise, Thomas. “Introduction.” Caribbeana: An Anthology of English Literature of the West Indies, –. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . Kriz, Kay Dian.“Curiosities, Commodities, and Transplanted Bodies in Hans Sloane’s Natural History of Jamaica.” WMQ  (): –. ———. “Marketing Mulatresses in the Paintings and Prints of Agostino Brunias.” In The Global Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum, –. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, . Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. ; London: Verso, . Landry, Donna. The Muses of Resistance: Labouring-Class Women’s Poetry in Britain, –. New York: Cambridge University Press, . Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, . Leask, Nigel. British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire. New York: Cambridge University Press, . Leppert, Richard. “Music, Domestic Life, and Cultural Chauvinism: Images of British Subjects at Home in India.” In Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception, ed. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary, –. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Leslie, Charles. A New and Exact Account of Jamaica. Edinburgh, . Levine, Philippa. The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaelogists in Victorian England, –. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Lewis, Matthew. Journal of a West India Proprietor: Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica. ; New York: Negro Universities Press, .

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Liu, Alan. Wordsworth: The Sense of History. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, . Livingstone, David N., and Charles W. J. Withers, eds. Geography and Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . Long, Edward. The History of Jamaica.  vols. ; New York: AMS Press, . Low, Anthony. The Georgic Revolution. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, . Luffman, John. A Brief Account of the Island of Antigua. London, . Mackay, David. “Agents of Empire: The Banksian Collectors and Evaluation of New Lands.” In Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature, ed. David Miller and Peter Reill, –. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, . MacLaren, Ian. “Exploration/Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Author.” International Journal of Canadian Studies  (): –. Manwaring, Elizabeth Wheeler. Italian Landscape in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study Chiefly of the Influence of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa on English Taste, –. New York: Oxford University Press, . Marshall, P. J. Bengal: The British Bridgehead: Eastern India, –. Vol.  of The New Cambridge History of India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . ———. East Indian Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, . ———. “The Personal Fortune of Warren Hastings: Hastings in Retirement.” In Trade and Conquest: Studies on the Rise of British Dominance in India, Aldershot, England: Variorum (Ashgate), . ———. “The Private Fortune of Marian Hastings.” In Trade and Conquest: Studies on the Rise of British Dominance in India. Aldershot, England: Variorum (Ashgate), . ———. The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke. Vol. , India: The Launching of the Hastings Impeachment, –. Oxford: Clarendon Press, . Marshall, William. On the Management of Landed Estates. London, . Marshall, Woodville K. “Provision Ground and Plantation Labor in Four Windward Islands: Competition for Resources During Slavery.” In Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, ed. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, –. Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press of Virginia, . Mayhew, Robert. “William Gilpin and the Latitudinarian Picturesque.” EighteenthCentury Studies  (): –. McCracken, Donal. Gardens of Empire: Botanical Institutions of the Victorian British Empire. London: Leicester University Press, . McDonald, Roderick. The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, . McNally, David. Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism: A Reinterpretation. Berkeley: University of California Press, .

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McRae, Andrew, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, –. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Michasiw, Kim Ian. “Nine Revisionist Theses on the Picturesque.” Representations  (): –. Miller, David, and Peter Reill, eds. Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany and Representations of Nature. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, . Miller, David Philip. “Joseph Banks, Empire, and ‘Centers of Calculation’ in late Hanoverian London.” In Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature, ed. David Miller and Peter Reill, –. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, . Mingay, G. E. English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, . Mintz, Sidney W. “From Plantations to Peasantries in the Caribbean.” In Caribbean Contours, ed. Sidney W. Mintz and Sally Price, –. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, . ———. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin, . ———. Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past. Boston: Beacon Press, . Mintz, Sidney, and Douglas Hall. “The Origins of the Jamaican Internal Marketing System.” Yale University Publications in Anthropology  (): –. Mitchell, W. T. J. “Holy Landscape: Israel, Palestine, and the American Wilderness.” Critical Inquiry  (): –. Mitchell, W. T. J., ed. Landscape and Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . Moreton, J. B. West India Customs and Manners. London, . Morning Chronicle, January , . Musselwhite, David. “The Trial of Warren Hastings.” In Literature, Politics, and Theory, ed. Francis Barker et al., –. London: Methuen, . Neale, R. S. Writing Marxist History: British Society, Economy, and Culture since . Oxford: Blackwell, . Newby, Howard. Country Life: A Social History of Rural England. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, . ———. “Deferential Dialectic.” Comparative Studies in Society and History  (): –. Lady Nugent’s Journal. Ed. Philip Wright. Kingston, Jamaica: Institute of Jamaica, . Nussbaum, Felicity, ed. The Global Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, . Obeyesekere, Gananath. The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, . O’Brien, Karen. “Imperial Georgic, –.” In The Country and City Revisited,

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ed. Gerald Maclean, Donna Landry, and Joseph P. Ward, –. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Outram, Dorinda. “On Being Perseus: New Knowledge, Dislocation, and Enlightenment Exploration.” In Geography and Enlightenment, ed. David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers, –. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . ———. “The Enlightenment Our Contemporary.” In The Sciences of Enlightened Europe, ed. William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer, –. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . Patterson, Annabel. Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valery. Oxford: Clarendon Press, . Paulson, Ronald. Emblem and Expression: Meaning in English Art of the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, . Paviere, Sydney H. The Devis Family of Painters. Leigh-on-Sea: F. Lewis Publishers, . Pearce, Susan M. Museums, Objects, and Collections. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, . Percy, Carol E. “To Study Nature Rather than Books”: Captain James Cook as Naturalist, Observer and Literary Author.” Pacific Studies  (): –. Pinckard, George. Notes on the West Indies. London, . Pointon, Marcia. Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in EighteenthCentury England. London: Yale University Press, . Polite Society by Arthur Devis, –: Portraits of the English Country Gentleman and His Family. Preston, England: Harris Museum and Art Gallery, . Pomian, Krzysztof. Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, –. Trans. Elizabeth Wiles-Portier. Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, . Pope, Alexander. “Windsor-Forest.” In The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, –. London: Methuen, . Powell, Dulcie.“The Voyage of the Plant Nursery, HMS Providence, –.” Economic Botany  (): –. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, . ———.“Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen.” In Race, Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, –. Chicago: University of Chicago . Price, Uvedale. Essay on the Picturesque. London, . Prince, Mary. History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave (). In The Classic Slave Narratives, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. New York: Penguin, . Pugh, Simon, ed. Reading Landscape: Country—City—Capital. Manchester: Manchester University Press, . Pulteney, Robert. The Progress of Botany.  vols. London, . Quilley, Geoff. “Pastoral Plantations: The Slave Trade and the Representation of British Colonial Landscape in the Late Eighteenth Century.” In An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the Atlantic World, –, ed. Geoff Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz, –. Manchester: Manchester University Press, . ———. “William Hodges, Artist of Empire.” In William Hodges, –: The Art of Exploration, ed. Geoff Quilley and John Bonehill, –. London: Yale University Press, .



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Rand, Richard. Intimate Encounters: Love and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century France. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, . Reynolds, Sir Joshua. Discourses on Art. Ed. Robert R. Wark. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, . Rigby, Nigel. “The Politics and Pragmatics of Seaborne Plant Transportation.” In Science and Exploration in the Pacific: European Voyages to the Southern Oceans in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Margarette Lincoln, –. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer in association with the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, . Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, . Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, . Rosenthal, Michael. British Landscape Painting. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, . von Sack, Baron Albert. A Narrative of a Voyage to Surinam. London, . Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, . ———. Orientalism. New York: Random House, . Salmond, Anne. The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas. London: Allen Lane, . Schaw, Janet. Journal of a Lady of Quality: Being the Narrative of a Journey from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina, and Portugal, in the years  to . Ed. Evangeline Walker Andrews and C. M. Andrews. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, . Sekora, John. Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, . Sheridan, Richard B. Doctors and Slaves: A Medical and Demographic History of Slavery in the British West Indies, –. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . ———. “Morality and Medical Treatment of Slaves in the British West Indies.” In Caribbean Slave Society and Economy: A Student Reader, ed. Hilary Beckles and Vereue Shepherd, –. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, . Shteir, Ann B. Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, –. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, . Singleton, John. A General Description of the West-Indian Islands . . . Attempted in Blank Verse. London, . Smiles, Sam. “Dressed to Till: Representational Strategies in the Depiction of Rural Labour.” In Prospects for a Nation: Recent Essays in British Landscape, –, ed. Michael Rosenthal, Christiana Payne, and Scott Wilcox. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, . Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. New York: Penguin, . Smith, Bernard. European Vision and the South Pacific, –: A Study in the History of Art and Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, . ———. Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, . Smith, Sir James Edward. Exotic Botany. London, –.

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———. Memoir and Correspondence of the late Sir James Edward Smith.  vols. Ed. Lady Smith. London: Longman, . Sohn-Rethel, Alfred. Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, . Spear, Percival. The Nabobs: A Study of the Social Life of the English in EighteenthCentury India. ; London: Oxford University Press, . Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?”In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, –. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, . Spivy, Mary, Ellen D’Oench, and Joy Breslauer. Country Houses in Great Britain. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Center for British Art, . Staves, Susan. Married Women’s Separate Property in England, –. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, . Stephen, Nancy Leys. Picturing Tropical Nature. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, . Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, . Stoddard, Eve W. “A Serious Proposal for Slavery Reform: Sarah Scott’s Sir George Ellison.” Eighteenth-Century Studies  (): –. Stuebe, Isabel Combs. The Life and Works of William Hodges. New York: Garland, . ———. “William Hodges and Warren Hastings: A Study in th-Century Patronage.” Burlington Magazine (): –. Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . Teltscher, Kate. India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India, –. Delhi: Oxford University Press, . Thomas, Nicholas. The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain James Cook. New York: Walker, . ———. “Licensed Curiosity: Cook’s Pacific Voyages.” In The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, . Thompson, E. P. “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.” Past and Present  (): –. Thomson, James. The Seasons. Ed. James Sambrook. Oxford: Clarendon Press, . ———. The Complete Poetical Works of James Thomson. Ed. J. Logie Robertson. London: Oxford University Press, . Thornton, Robert John. The Religious Use of Botany. London, . Tillotson, Giles. The Artificial Empire: The Indian Landscapes of William Hodges. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, . ———. “A Fair Picture: Hodges and the Daniells at Rajmahal,” Marg  (): –. ———. “The Indian Picturesque: Images of India in British Landscape Painting, –.” In The Raj: India and the British, –, ed. C. A. Bayly. London: National Portrait Gallery, .



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———. “William Hodges and Indian Architecture.” In William Hodges, –: The Art of Exploration, ed. Geoff Quilley and John Bonehill, –. London: Yale University Press, . Tobin, Beth Fowkes. “Arthur Young, Agriculture, and the Construction of the New Economic Man” In History, Gender and Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Beth Fowkes Tobin, –. Athens: University of Georgia Press, . ———. “The Artist’s ‘I’ in Hodges’s Travels in India.” In William Hodges, –: The Art of Exploration, ed. Geoff Quilley and John Bonehill, –. London: Yale University Press, . ———. “The Deferential Gaze: Portraits of Gentlemen and Their Dogs.” Unpublished paper. ———. “Imperial Designs: Botanical Illustration and the British Botanic Empire.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture  (): –. ———. Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, . ———. Superintending the Poor: Charitable Ladies and Paternal Landlords in British Fiction, –. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, . Tomich, Dale W. “The Other Face of Slave Labor: Provision Grounds and Internal Marketing in Martinique.” In Caribbean Slave Society and Economy, ed. Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd, –. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, . Trask, Haunani-Kay. From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai‘i. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, . Turnbull, David. “Cook and Tupaia, a Tale of Cartographic Meconnaissance? ” In Science and Exploration in the Pacific: European Voyages to the Southern Oceans in the th Century, ed. Margarette Lincoln, –. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, . Turnbull, Gordon. An Apology for Negro Slavery: or, the West India Planters Vindicated from the Charge of Inhumanity. London, . Turner, Roger. Capability Brown and the Eighteenth-Century English Landscape. New York: Rizzoli, . Vico, Giambattista. New Science: Principles of the New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations. Trans. David Marsh. ; New York: Penguin, . Virgil. The Georgics. Trans. L. P. Wilkinson. Harmondsworth: Penguin, . Virgil. Works. Trans. H. Ruston Fairclough.  vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, . Walker, Margot. Sir James Edward Smith. London: Linnean Society of London. Wallace, Anne D. “Farming on Foot: Tracking Georgic in Clare and Wordsworth.” Texas Studies in Language and Literature  (): –. Walvin, James. Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery. London: Fontana Press, . Warner, Aston. Negro Slavery described by a Negro; Being the Narrative of Aston Warner. By S. Strickland. London, . Washburn, Gordon Bailey. Pictures of Everyday Life: Genre Painting in Europe, –. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Institute, . Watkins, Jane Iandola, ed. Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, .

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Watts, David. Man’s Influence on the Vegetation of Barbados, –. Occasional Papers in Geography No. . Hull: University of Hull, . West, Shearer. “The Public Nature of Private Life: The Conversation Piece and the Fragmented Family.” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies  (): –. Wheeler, Roxann. The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in EighteenthCentury British Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, . Whitaker, Katie.“The Culture of Curiosity.” In Cultures of Natural History, ed. N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary, –. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . White, Hayden. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” Critical Inquiry  (): –. Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, . Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, . [Young, Sir William]. Considerations which may tend to promote the Settlement of our new West-India Colonies. London, . Young, Sir William nd. A Tour through the Several Islands of Barbadoes, St. Vincent, Antigua, Tobago, and Grenada in the Years  and . In Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies.  vols. , ; New York: AMS Press, , : –. ———. West-India Common-Place Book. London, . Young, Virginia Heyer. Becoming West Indian: Culture, Self, and Nation in St. Vincent Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, . Êiêek, Slavoj. “How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?” In Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Êiêek. London: Verso, . ———. “Mourning, Melancholy, and the Act.” Critical Inquiry  (): –.

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Index

Adorno, Theodor,  Africans, , , , , , , , , , ; as agricultural experts, –, –, ; as marketers, –, , , – Afro-Caribbeans, , , , –, –; depictions of, , , –, – Agra, , , , –,  agriculture, –, , , , , , , –, –,  n.; and abundance, , , –, –, –, –; and imperialism, ,  n.; and local producer, , , , , , – Aiton, W. T.,  Akbar, , , –,  aloe, –,  n. Antigua, , , – Appadurai, Arjun,  arcadia, , , , , ,  Archer, Mildred, , ,  n.,  n.,  nn. , – avocado, xv, ,  Banks, Sir Joseph, , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , ,  n.,  n. Barbados, , ,  Barrell, John, xi, , , ,  n.,  n.,  n. ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n. Barthes, Roland, –,  nn.– Baudrillard, Jean, , ,  n.,  n. Beaglehole, J. C., , –, ,  n.,  n.,  nn. , ,  nn.–,  n.,  nn. , ,  Benjamin, Walter, , ,  n. Bermingham, Ann, , ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n. Bhabha, Homi, xv, ,  nn. , ,  n.,  n.

Bohls, Elizabeth, ,  n. botanizing, ,  botany, ; amateur, –; cult of, , , –; Linnean, , –; polite, –, ; and women, –, . See also classification Boswell, James, , , , ,  n.,  n. Bourdieu, Pierre, , ,  nn. ,  breadfruit, –, , , ,  Brewer, John, ,  n.,  n. Brown, Capability, xi, –, ,  n.,  n. Brunias, Agostino, –, , ; Linen Market, Dominica, –, ; A West Indian Flower Girl, – Burke, Edmund, –, –, , ,  n.,  nn. , ,  n. Butler, Judith, ,  nn.– capitalism, , –,  Cardinal, Roger,  Carmichael, Mrs. A. C., , –,  nn. , ,  n. cassava, , , , , , , , – catalog, , –, , , – Chait Singh, –,  n. Cipriani, Giovanni Battista,  Clark, William, ,  n. classification, , ; Linnean, , –, , –, – Claude Lorrain, –,  Cliff, Michelle, – coconut, –, ,  coffee, , , ,  Cohn, Bernard, ,  n. collecting, , –,  n.; botanical, , , –; curiosities, – Collier, Mary, ,  n. commodities, xvi, , , , , , , ,



Index

; agricultural, , , , –; land as, –,  connoisseurs, , , , , , , , –; botanical, –, –,  connoisseurship, , –, ,  Cook, James, –, , , , , , , , , ,  n.,  nn. , , ,  n.; and gardens, –; and maritime books, –, –; as a natural history writer, –, –; and ship’s log, – country house portrait, , , , , –, , , , ,  n. Cowper, William, , –,  nn. ,  Craton, Michael, ,  n.,  n.,  n. curiosity, , ,  Curtin, Philip, ,  n. Curtis, William,  Davenport, R. A., ,  n. Desmond, Adrian, ,  n. Devis, Arthur, –; Leak Okeover, , ; Mr and Miss Bonner, , ; Robert and Elizabeth Gwillym, , ; Sir John Shaw and His Family, ; Thomas Lister and His Family, , , , ,  Devis, Arthur William, , , , –,  nn.–,  n.; The Auriol and Dashwood Families, , ; Louisa Dent, –; William Dent with his Brother, , –; William Monson and his Wife, –, – D’Oench, Ellen, ,  nn. –, ,  Dominica, – Douglas, John, , , –,  n. Drayton, Richard, ,  n. Dughet, Gaspard, –, ,  n. Dunn, Richard S., ,  n. Dusky Bay (Sound), –, ,  n.,  n. Dyer, Richard, ,  East India Company, , , –, –, , –, , –, ,  n. Edgeworth, Maria, –,  nn.– Edwards, Bryan, ,  n. Elsner, John,  enclosure, –,  n. Enlightenment, xv, –, , ,  n.; science, –, –, , ; Scottish, –

estate portrait, , –,  Everett, Nigel, , ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  nn. , ,  n.,  n. fertility, – food, , –, –,  n.,  n. Forster, George, –, , ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n. Forster, Johann Reinhold, , , –, ,  n.,  n.,  n. Foucault, Michel, xi, , –,  n.,  n. Francis, Philip, –,  n. Frankfurt School, – Freud, Sigmund, ,  n. Gainsborough, Thomas, John Pamplin, ; Mr and Mrs Andrews, , , ; The Morning Walk,  gardens: Afro-Caribbean, , –, –; Anglo-Indian, , –, –, , , –; in Cowper’s The Task, –; English, , –, –, –, ; and memory, –; Mughal, , , ; Pacific, – garden view, , , , , , , ,  Gay, John, , , , , , , ; “Rural Sports,” –, ,  n. georgic, –, , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  nn. , ,  nn. , ,  nn. , ; antigeorgic, –, ; imperial, , ; traditional English, , , –, ; West Indian, , ,  Gilpin, William, – Gisborne, Thomas, ,  n.,  n. global, xvi, , , – Goldsmith, Oliver, , ,  n. Golinski, Jan, ,  n. Grainger, James, xiv, , , , , , –, , ; Sugarcane, –, , –,  n.,  nn. , ,  n.,  n. greenhouse, , , , – Guattari, Felix, ,  n. Guest, Harriet, , ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n. Guha, Ranajit, –,  nn.– Hall, Stuart, , ,  n.,  n. Harris, John, ,  n. Hastings, Marian, , ,  n.

Index Hastings, Warren, , –, –, , , –, , –, , ,  n.,  nn.–,  n.,  n.,  nn.– Hawkesworth, John, , , ,  n. Higman, B. W., ,  n. Hindu: architecture, , ; culture, –; government,  Hodges, William, xiv, , –, –, –, ; on the artist’s role, , –; and Hastings, –, , –, –; The Landing at Mallicolo, ; The Landing at Middleburg, ; Pass of Sicri Gully, , , ; and the picturesque, , –, , , , ; A View of Agra, ; A View of Bidjegur, , ; A View of the Fort of Gwalior, , ; A View of the Palace in Lucknow, ; as a writer, , –, – Horkheimer, Max,  Hulme, Peter,  jackfruit tree, xv, , ,  n. Jamaica, , , , , , , – Janowitz, Anne, ,  nn. ,  Johnson, Samuel, ,  n. Kame ‘eleihiwa, Lilikala¯, ,  n. Kaomea, Julie,  Kaul, Suvir, ,  nn. , ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n. Kent, Nathaniel, ,  n. Kincaid, Jamaica, –,  n. Kriz, K. Dian,  nn. ,  Laclau, Ernesto, ,  n. landholding practices: English, –,  n.,  nn.–; Mughal, –, ,  n. Landry, Donna, , , ,  n.,  n.,  n. Laroon, Marcellus, – Latour, Bruno, , , , ,  n.,  n. Leppert, Richard, ,  n. Lewis, Matthew, , –,  n. Lindley, John, – Linnaeus, , –,  n. Linnean Society, , , –,  Livingstone, David, ,  n. Long, Edward, ,  n.,  n. Low, Anthony, ,  nn.–,  n.



Luffman, John, –, –,  n.,  n.,  n. luxury, –, ,  n.,  n. MacLaren, Ian,  markets, –, , , ; Sunday, , , , –, – Marshall, P. J., , , ,  nn.–,  nn. –, ,  n. Marshall, William, ,  n. Marx, Karl,  McDonald, Roderick, ,  n.,  n.,  n. Meyer, Manu,  Miller, Philip, , – Mintz, Sidney, , , ,  n.,  nn. , ,  nn. ,  Mitchell, W. J. T., ,  n. Mouffe, Chantal, ,  n. Mughal: architecture, , , –, , , ; empire, , , , –, –; government, –, –, –; society, – Musselwhite, David, ,  nn. ,  nabob, ,  natural history, , , , –, , , , , , , . See also botany; Cook, James; Linnaeus; Smith, Sir James Edward natural philosophy, , ,  Neale, R. S.,  neem tree, – Negri, Toni, ,  n. Newby, Howard, , ,  nn. – New Caledonia, , – Obeyesekere, Gananath, ,  n. O’Brien, Karen, ,  n.,  n. Outram, Dorinda, , ,  n.,  nn. ,  paradise, , ,  pastoral, , , , , , , ,  nn. ,  Paulson, Ronald, , , ,  nn. –, ,  n. Pearce, Susan,  Percy, Carol, ,  n. picturesque, –, , , –, , –, , , ,  pineapple, , , , , 



Index

pipal tree, – plantains, xv, , , , , , , , , ,  planters, , –, , , ; absentee, ,  Pope, Alexander, xi, xvi, , , , , , , , , ; “Windsor Forest,” , , ,  Pratt, Mary Louise, , , ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n. provision grounds, –, –, –,  n. Putleney, Richard, ,  n. Reill, Peter Hanns,  Reynolds, Sir Joshua, , , ,  Roach, Joseph, ,  n. Roscoe, William,  Rosenthal, Michael, ,  n. Roxburgh, William, , –, ,  Royal Academy, ,  Royal Society, , , , ,  Said, Edward, xv, ,  n. Sandby, Paul, ; Hackwood Park, – Schaffer, Simon, ,  n. Schaw, Janet,  science, Enlightenment, polite,  Sheridan, Richard B., ,  n.,  n. Shteir, Ann, , ,  n.,  n. Siberechts, Jan, Bifrons Park, , ,  slavery, , , , , –; defense of, , , , ,  slaves, –; and diet, , –, –,  n.; and gardens, , –, –; and health, –, , –; and horticultural expertise, , , –, –, –, . See also provision grounds Smith, Adam, ,  Smith, Bernard, , –, –,  n.,  n.,  n.,  nn. –,  Smith, Sir James Edward, –, –,  nn. , , , ,  n.; and collecting, –; and Exotic Botany, –,  nn. , ,  n.; and Linnean classification, , –; and natural history,  Sohn-Rethel, Alfred, ,  n. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, xv,  sporting art, , ,  n. Staves, Susan, ,  n. Stearn, W. T., 

Stewart, Susan, ,  nn. ,  St. Vincent, , , , –, , ,  sugar (cane), , , –, , , ; cultivation of, , , , , , –, ; as industry, ; plantations, , , , , , , , , –, ,  Suleri, Sara, , ,  n.,  n. Tahiti, , , , , , ,  taro, ,  Teltscher, Kate, –, , , , ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  nn. , , ,  nn.– Thomas, Nicholas, , , ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n. Thomson, James, xiv, xvi, –, , , , –, –, –, , , –, ,  n.; The Seasons, –, , –, –, – nn. , , ,  Thornton, Robert, –,  n. Tomich, Dale, ,  n. Tonga, , , , ,  travel narratives, , , –, –, –, –,  Trask, Haunani,  Trinidad,  Vanuatu, –, – Vico, Giambattista, , ,  n. Virgil, , , ; Georgics, , , –, , , , – nn. , ,  Wakefield, Priscilla,  Wales, William, , , , ,  Walvin, ,  n.,  nn. , ,  n. Warner, Ashton, ,  n.,  nn. ,  Weber, Max,  Wheatley, Francis,  Whitaker, Katie, ,  nn.– White, Hayden, ,  n. Wilkinson, L. P., ,  Williams, Eric, ,  n. Williams, Raymond, xi, , , , ,  n.,  n. Wilson, Richard,  Withers, Charles, ,  n. yams, , , , , , , , –, – Young, Arthur, , ,  n.,  n.

Index Young, Virginia Heyer, ,  n.,  nn. –,  Young, Sir William, nd Baronet, , , , –, , , ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n. zamindari, –,  Êiêek, Slavoj, , ,  n.,  n.



Zoffany, Johann, xiv, , , , ; Colonel Blair with Family, , ; The Drummond Family, –,  n.; The Impey Family, –; Mr and Mrs Warren Hastings, –, –, ; Sir William Young and Family, , 

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank those who have read and commented on versions of this manuscript: Tim Berringer, Mita Choudhury (who thought of this book’s title), Julie Codell, Richard Drayton, Monica Ghosh, Jan Golinski, Betty Joseph, Luciana Martins, Felicity Nussbaum, Geoff Quilley, Nigel Rigby, and Glyn Williams; special thanks go to Dian Kriz and to my writing group of Andrea Feeser, Cindy Franklin, and Laura Lyons. Versions of some of the chapters were presented at conferences, and I am grateful to the organizers for inviting me to present my work and for providing such wonderful opportunities for intellectual cross-fertilization: Felicity Nussbaum for “The Global Eighteenth Century,” Kathleen Wilson for “The New Imperial History,” Tim Berringer and Geoff Quilley for “Art and the British Empire,” Laura Rigal, Fredrika J. Teute, and Joyce Elizabeth Chaplin for “Bacon to Bartram: Early American Inquiries into the Natural World,” Felix Driver and Luciana Martins for “Tropical Views and Visions,” and Nigel Rigby and Jonathan Lamb for “The Maritime Book Conference.” I also wish to thank the University of Hawai‘i for supporting travel to Britain with two Faculty Research Grants, the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich for granting me a Caird Short-Term Fellowship, and the National Endowment for the Humanities for giving me a Senior Fellowship, which permitted a year of writing unencumbered by academic duties. Portions of Chapter  appeared in Laura J. Rosenthal and Mita Choudhury, Monstrous Dreams of Reason: Body, Self, and Other in the Enlightenment (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, ), and portions of Chapter  appeared in an article, “Let There Raise Yams: Slaves’ Gardens in the Writings of West Indian Plantocrats,” in The Cultural Topography of Food, a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life  (): –, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Sections of Chapter  appeared in Felicity A. Nussbaum, ed., The Global Eighteenth Century, pp. – and are reprinted with permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press. Finally, I wish to thank Julian, Alison, and Sam, whose hospitality and generosity made my yearly and sometimes biyearly forays into Britain’s libraries and museums not only possible but downright pleasant.