Making the English Middle Class, ca. 1700-1850 || Racism, Imperialism, and the Traveler's Gaze in Eighteenth-Century England

Racism, Imperialism, and the Traveler's Gaze in Eighteenth-Century EnglandAuthor(s): Margaret HuntSource: Journal of British Studies, Vol. 32, No. 4, Making the English Middle Class, ca. 1700-1850 (Oct., 1993), pp. 333-357Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The North American Conference on BritishStudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/176028 .

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

Margaret Hunt

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

I had become convinced . . . that the most penetrating analysis would always be of forms, specifically literary forms, where changes of viewpoint, changes of known and knowable relationships, changes of possible and actual resolutions, could be directly demonstrated, as forms of literary organization, and then, just because they involved more than individual solutions, could be reasonably related to a real social history. [Raymond Williams]1

In the waning years of the seventeenth century Sir William Petty, F.R.S., a talented statistician, champion of trade and commerce, and "projector" of schemes for national betterment, drew up a plan to cope with what he, at least, saw as a major problem. Petty had observed that there were large numbers of English youth from respectable families who had not the leisure, money, nor opportunity to travel to foreign countries. He was concerned that these worthy young men would miss the chance to develop the expansive faculty of mind and commercial acumen that foreign travel provided and national progress demanded. The crux of his scheme was that these youths would repair

MARGARET HUNT is assistant professor of history at Amherst College. The author is grateful to the participants in the Amherst College Black Studies Works-in-Progress Seminar for their very constructive suggestions and criticisms. Special thanks as well to Rhonda Cobham, Barbara Corbett, Mitzi Goheen, Robert Gooding-Williams, John Halsted, Yukiko Hanawa, and Jan Thaddeus.

1 Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (Lon- don: Verso Books, 1980), pp. 25-26.

Journal of British Studies 32 (October 1993): 333-357 ? 1993 by The North American Conference on British Studies. All rights reserved. 0021-9371/93/3204-0003$01.00

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to London, where they would encounter businessmen around the Royal Exchange "who have fresh concerne & correspondance with all parts of the knowne world & with all the Commodityes growing or made within the same." The youths would have the opportunity to observe and emulate "[men] who have dominion and Interest in all the quarters of the world," and, finally, they would be able to observe "faire Collections of all natural & artificiall rarities, with com[m]ents upon them and the applications of them."2 It was a recipe for instilling in a new and less-than-genteel generation something of the quality of mind and breadth of vision that their betters were supposed to acquire on the grand tour-but at a fraction of the cost, and with a decidedly more commercial and extra-European emphasis than the grand tour typically had.

Petty himself had considerable experience with travel and the opportunities it could bring in its wake. Though his beginnings were humble he had spent lengthy periods of his own youth in France and the Netherlands. In the 1650s he went to Ireland with Cromwell's conquering army, and, having volunteered for the job of official sur- veyor of that shattered land, he took the opportunity to amass a mam- moth Irish estate of his own.3 But even as late as the 1680s, when Petty probably conceived his scheme, he was exceptional. The majority of literate people in the late seventeenth century had gone little farther than the closest provincial town with perhaps a few trips to London in a lifetime. Nor, apparently, were they working to overcome their desperate provincialism in their choice of reading matter. While the seventeenth century was the first century to see widespread literacy among urban middling groups, nonelite reading tastes in this period inclined strongly (if seldom exclusively) to devotional books. Nonelite book collections in this period, our main source, albeit an inadequate one, for what people were actually reading, tended to contain at mini- mum one-third and often one-half or more of religious books (including bibles and concordances, theological treatises, the lives and letters of prominent divines, sermons and devotional tracts) with the remainder divided between belles lettres, history, and politics, with a sprinkling

2 William Petty, The Petty Papers: Some Unpublished Writings of Sir William Petty, ed. Marquis of Lansdowne (London: Constable & Co., 1927), 1:40-42. It is not clear exactly when Petty wrote this plan, though it was probably late in his life (he died in 1687). Petty also called for the teaching of geography, map reading, and "analysis of the people," by which he presumably meant statistical demography and ethnography, in the schools: the first two did move strongly into school curricula in the eighteenth century. 3 Terence Hutchinson, Before Adam Smith: The Emergence of Political Economy, 1662-1776 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 27-28.

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of the occult, science, and travel and exploration.4 People were certainly reading travel books, but hardly with the kind of attention or in sufficient numbers to begin to remedy the gap that so worried Petty.

But in the long run Petty and turn-of-the-century propagandists for commerce and empire (and there were a number of these) need not have worried about interesting the respectable in travel, or at least in reading about travel.5 One of the most striking cultural trends of the ensuing half-century was the rapid rise in popularity of secular forms of writing, with travel books prominent among them. And it seems evident that, while a wide spectrum of the eighteenth-century literate public enjoyed books on travel, they were especially associated with, and increasingly addressed to, the interests of the trading, commercial, or "middling" classes.

What does it mean that in this formative phase of their history the commercial classes shifted their tastes so decisively (if not, of course, ever wholly), from books about religion to books about travel? Is this a case, as Raymond Williams would argue, of a community (or class) constructing itself, in some sense, around "fundamental choices of form"?6 And if so, what does the preference for travel books tell us about the rise of an English "middle-class" culture, unfolding as it did in the midst both of the first great age of British imperialism and of a formative stage in the development of theories of British (and white) racial superiority?

But before delving deeper into these questions it is useful to estab- lish the chronology of the change. In the first third of the eighteenth century, as Paul Kaufman has shown, there occurred a significant shift in reading habits. Private book ownership started to be supplemented, even at times replaced, by local circulating libraries and book clubs, institutions that catered primarily to the urban middling classes and a sprinkling of town gentry.7 The records from these organizations show a steady decline in interest in religious books and a rising interest in

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

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

6 Williams, p. 25. 7 Paul Kaufman, The Community Library: A Chapter in English Social History,

Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia: American Philosophi- cal Society, 1967), n.s., 57, pt. 7:30.

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travel, geography, and history, accelerating throughout the century. Already by the early 1730s contemporaries were noting the change. A 1732 catalog of the Nottingham Public Library contrasts the preferences of clergymen versus "Gentlemen and Tradesmen," suggesting that the latter typically "supply themselves with such as their different Tastes lead them to, such as Lives, Characters, Voyages, Travels, and History in abundance." It would have been far harder to argue for such a cultural divide forty years before.8

As the century wore on this trend continued unabated. In 1768 in the Leeds Library belles lettres dominated, followed closely by travel and history. There was little theology. The Colne Book Society between 1793 and 1819 possessed seventy-one titles in divinity, morality, and metaphysics; seventy-one in astronomy, geography, voyages, and travels; and smaller collections of biography, history, and literature. The Bristol Library, as befitted a town whose well-being depended overwhelmingly on trade, had in 1782 in its collection 572 volumes of history and travel combined, 471 in belles lettres, and only 193 in theology and ecclesiastical history. Virtually all the eighteenth-century circulating libraries we know about included a significant minority of travel books in their collections.9

Just because a library possesses a particular book does not mean that it is widely read. But in the 1770s, because of the chance survival of library borrowing statistics from the town of Bristol for the years 1773-84, we can describe reading tastes with some precision.?1 Among middling Bristol readers, "History, Antiquities and Geography" (the bulk of the latter being travel) stood far ahead of any other category in popularity: 6,121 people borrowed 283 titles in this category during this eleven-year period. "Belles Lettres" was a distant second with 3,313 borrowings of 238 titles, and theology and ecclesiastical history a dismal fifth, with only 606 borrowings of 82 titles. Three out of the ten most borrowed books, including the most popular book of all, were travel or exploration books. The top book was John Hawkesworth's Account of the Voyages . . . for making discoveries in the southern hemisphere (1773), which 201 people borrowed.11

Also in the top ten were the Abbe Raynal's History of the Settle- ments and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies (1774),

8 Ibid., p. 38. 9 Ibid., pp. 26, 27. 10 Paul Kaufman, Borrowings from the Bristol Library, 1773-1784: A Unique Record

of Reading Vogues (Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Vir- ginia, 1960).

l Ibid., pp. 121-22.

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which 137 people borrowed (another 36 people read it in the original French); Patrick Brydone's Tour through Sicily and Malta (1773); and Oliver Goldsmith's History of the Earth and Animated Nature (1774), strictly speaking a work of natural history, but containing much travel- influenced content, including an early and influential argument for Eu-

ropean racial superiority.12 Bristol readers had a seemingly insatiable

appetite for books on travel, especially if they bore on British colonies or on parts of the world as yet "unclaimed" by Europeans. And while, as a port city, Bristol's interest in travel books surely exceeded the norm, there is no doubt that the preference was general among the literate middling classes of England well before the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

In the seventeenth century the "typical" English traveler abroad was assumed to be a member of the gentry or aristocracy in search of

polish and courtly connections. In the eighteenth century, by contrast, the "typical" traveler came increasingly to be a respectable private citizen with some sort of business interest in the country or peoples being described (Daniel Defoe captures the expectation precisely in the restlessly acquisitive figure of Robinson Crusoe). This "typical" person's normative status is reaffirmed by the fact that the central thematic of the form centers on the contrast between the traveler's "Englishness" and the "exotic," or at least "un-English," peoples and places he or she encounters. For purposes of the travel narrative, at any rate, to be "English" increasingly came to mean membership in that class of people who were respectable, private citizens (i.e., people who kept themselves apart-or were excluded by birth-from

politics or place) who also had interests in trade. The close identifica- tion between middling reader and middling protagonist was sustained by the fact that many travel narratives were written in the form of diaries or letters to family and friends at home, and this at a time when both diary keeping and letter writing, but particularly the former, had come very much into fashion among the trading classes.

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

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The form of the travel narrative in fact deliberately collapsed the difference between writer and reader (often in ways that paralleled the contemporary novel), and it did so during a period when roads were improving, canals and coach routes were increasing in number, and more and more English people were for the first time taking up real as opposed to vicarious traveling both for business and out of simple curiosity. It was, in fact, only a short step from reading travel books to writing one's own travel narrative, and many English people, including large numbers of middling people, did just that. It is misleading to think of the travel narrative only as a published form, the product of professional writers or journalists. In the eighteenth century it emerged as a true cottage genre, closely akin to the private diary, the commonplace book, and the autobiography. It became "the done thing" for perfectly ordinary travelers to keep travel journals or write up their journeys after the fact, and significant numbers of these humble efforts still lie, largely unread by historians, in eighteenth-century archives.l3

Cottage-Variety Racism Let us begin our inquiry into the larger significance of the middling

taste for travel writing by looking not at one of the published travel books but at an example of the cottage variety. This fragment is un- usual only in one sense, that it is written in verse. It is drawn from the unpublished papers of one John Kelsall (born 1683), a Quaker accountant with many years' experience in iron manufacture, mostly in the Midlands. In 1735 Kelsall did a brief stint in Cork, on the south coast of Ireland, as a teacher. One day, feeling at loose ends, he penned a piece of doggerel about that city and its inhabitants, one of whose main objects was to mark the place of the Irish "race" within the proliferating ranks of peoples subject to British rule:

The poor and naked begging Tribe The Indians, Black or Scotish Plotters Cannot outvie these vile Bog-Trotters ... Black-gaurds base [sic], and despicable

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

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Of Thieves and roguish Termagents Bred up in Sloth, and born in Wants ...

The Romans [i.e., Irish Catholics] are a factious Rabble Base desperate, and miserable Plotting to gain with head and hands Their banish'd gods, and forfeit Lands ...

Sad scene of Pride & Pov'rty ne'er was seen such foppish state & Gayety With Rustick clownish Slavery . .14

Kelsall's poor, naked, base, thievish, slothful, factious, vengeful, plotting, superstitious (polytheistic, actually), proud, foppish, slavish Irish could very easily have been Welsh, Scottish, Spanish, Portu- guese, Italian, Turkish, or African. Indeed, four decades later Edward Long, the archracist of the late eighteenth century, produced, as part of his influential apologia for slavery, an almost identical list of the "traits" of Africans, whom he charged with being "a brutish, ignorant, idle, crafty, treacherous, bloody, thievish, mistrustful, and superstitious people." 5 With a few changes in the litany of derogatory modifi- ers the objects of these slurs could have been the French (base, vengeful, superstitious, avaricious, slavish, luxurious, and promiscuous), Jews (base, vengeful, superstitious, proud, clannish, avaricious, promiscuous), or American Indians (base, vengeful, cruel, alcoholic, slothful, superstitious, foolish), or, for that matter, the English poor (base, factious, promiscuous, superstitious, indolent, alcoholic, dis- obedient, thievish, and grasping).

Like most travel accounts, both published and unpublished, Kel- sall's little piece is extremely derivative. As such it bears witness to an aspect of tourism every bit as central as visits to the same famous sites everyone else has seen, that is, the ceaseless need it seems to inspire in the traveler to reconfirm received stereotypes about the people he or she encounters. It is difficult to find an English person traveling to the Netherlands in the seventeenth or eighteenth century who did not remark upon the industry, the commercial mentality, and, inevitably, the narrowness and materialism of the Dutch. Travelers to France seldom failed to mention the luxurious tastes and sexual liber- tinism of the French. People visiting Ireland never neglected to point

14 Friends Library, London, MS vol. S 193/5, fols. 185-89. 15 Long, 2:353-54. Quoted in David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western

Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966), p. 462.

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out the alcoholism and superstition of the Irish. Travelers in Italy almost always noted the laziness and sodomitical tastes of Italians. Visitors to Africa inevitably remarked upon the nakedness and heathenish character of Africans, and no traveler to the Middle East failed to make reference to the licentiousness of its men and the degraded position of its women. In travel narratives racist and xenophobic "truths" work to confirm group values and knit individuals to their preferred community. They titillate authors and readers alike with people and customs just different enough to pleasurably decenter the "nor- mal." Yet the travel narrative also contains the means to reestablish order in an instant. The traveler almost always returns to England and "civilization"; the reader has merely to lift his or her eyes from the page to behold some reassuringly "English" scene.

"Race is the ultimate trope of difference," writes Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "because it is so very arbitrary in its application.""6 Gates is making two important points about what race "is." First, he wishes to underscore the point that "race" is a figure of speech, a trope rather than an indication of "real" or irreducible differences. Note that Gates is not saying that because "race" and "racism" are not "real" they need not be taken seriously. Rather, he asks us to look closely at the way "race" functions within particular belief systems and especially at the way that it is used metonymically to stand for and magnify the distance between slave and owner, the colonized and the colonizer, indigenous peoples and invaders, serfs and lords, poor and rich.

Second, Gates wishes to emphasize the slipperiness, the capri- ciousness of ideas about race and to suggest that it is precisely because the logic of "race" and "racism" is so muddled that it has been possible to apply it so widely. Discourses of "race," at least since the seventeenth century, first fix difference by appealing to (indeed literally by fixating on) some supposedly irreducible feature in "the other" such as skin color, physiognomy, nationality, or religion. They then proceed to collapse this "constant" with assertions about morality, intelligence, emotionalism, adaptability to particular climates or types of work, and the like. And finally they consecrate this illogical mixture by appeal either to Scripture or, increasingly from the eighteenth century on, to science. What is central here is that the more confused and arbitrary the metonymic moves are, the easier it is to develop more and more complex systems of racist thought, discourses that can be altered at will to fit a wide range of peoples, and to support all kinds

16 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., "Race," Writing, and Difference (Chicago and Lon- don: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 5.

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of cultural, political, nationalist, or entrepreneurial schemes.17 The strength and persistence of racism, one might say, actually thrives on incoherence.

Incoherence, derivativeness, and repetitious metonymy are all features of Kelsall's poem. And the opposing interests of colonizers and colonized are evident on every line. But there is something else there that bears looking at if we are to begin to gauge the relationship of travel literature, and the racism so frequently embedded within it, to the making of a community, a class, if you will, that was both "English" and associated closely with trade, industry, and imperial expansion.

What, we are bound to ask, was Kelsall really afraid of? It has become a commonplace to say that social groupings are created out of a process of negotiation. Theorists such as Pierre Bordieu and Ed- ward Said argue for a persistent corporate insecurity, insufficiency, or unreality about classes, genders, races, and nations. This deficiency, this ontological vacancy, must in turn be repaired, reconstructed, or formed in whole cloth using the medium of generally invidious compar- isons between "us" and "them."18 The history of European racist beliefs has been accorded a considerable amount of scholarly attention, yet the individual and collective insecurities of relatively obscure but "respectable" middling people like Kelsall, and the links between the fears these may be presumed to have engendered and racist beliefs, have hardly been examined at all.19

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

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

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

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One possible approach to what might be termed the "social history of popular racism" is to look more closely at the contemporary resonance of the epithets that recur with such tedious predictability within racist discourse. For purposes of brevity I will examine three terms from Kelsall's little piece, "thievish," "slavish," and "naked." The popularity of the term "thievish" reflects, on the one hand, the prevalent tendency in racist thought to fixate on those (alleged) traits of "the other" that impinge on "our" plans. It testifies perhaps more strongly to European solipsism than to any other single characteristic of either Europeans or anyone else. But in the eighteenth century it also highlighted, especially for middling people, the division between those English people who, as a survival strategy or as a last-ditch effort to sustain traditional ways of life, still stole and rioted as a matter of course and those whose place in the social hierarchy dictated more decorous forms of self-maintenance. Food and enclosure riots continued through the eighteenth century, and the high correlation between poverty and thievery, especially of edible or readily saleable items such as food and clothing, escaped no one. People who were no longer part of that culture of bare sufficiency and desperate communal acts tended to distance themselves rhetorically from-and constitute themselves in opposition to-those who were.

But the problem came even closer to home, for middling people were also deeply fearful about acts perpetrated by their "own people," acts that could, had people been of a mind to do so, easily have been fitted under the rubric of "thievish." Middling people were obsessed with the problem of individuals who did not pay their debts, who failed to honor contracts, or who lived beyond their means. Kelsall's diaries and letters (and here he is entirely typical of his class) are full of bankruptcies (including a spectacular one suffered by his former master, the ironmaster Charles Lloyd in 1727), and threatened bankruptcies, people who kept criminally haphazard accounts, and wastrels who ran up bills they could not pay, often thereby bankrupting others.20 One of the central preoccupations of the eighteenth-century business classes was to try to impose a uniform moral code on the tangled morass of personal and business transactions that made up the early modern marketplace.

One strategy for achieving this aim was, it is true, to try to con- vince the trading classes that their crimes were morally indistinguish-

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

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able from the petty larcenies of their social inferiors. But somehow this tactic never really took off. White-collar crime, though it was sometimes savagely punished (certainly more savagely than today), was of a different order than a poor Englishman or woman stealing a coat, an Irishman failing to pay his rent, or an African woman pock- eting the money from the sale of some of the crops she had grown rather than handing it over to her master.21 Apparently it was more efficacious and less troubling to assert one's Englishness and respectability against imagined "others" than to dwell on discomfiting com- parisons between one's own ethics and those of one's inferiors. At any rate, the word "thievish" never stuck as a term for anyone except non-Engish people, servants, and the poor.22

The English, and perhaps the middling classes even more than other people, made an easy association between the term "slavish" and a wide range of groups, from actual slaves or serfs to the inhabitants of virtually any country that was not Protestant, that possessed a strong monarchy, that allotted a different set of special privileges to its aristocracy than Britain did, or that demanded heavy tax or labor exactions of its peasantry. This included the French, Italians, Irish, Spanish, Portuguese, Russians, and Turks, among others. Slavishness literally denoted individuals (often entire populations) with an acquired or inherited slave mentality, groups with no autonomy of spirit or intellect and little or no desire or capacity to change their state for something better. Its indiscriminate and well-nigh ubiquitous use by literate English people in the eighteenth century is surely related to the anomalous position so many of them were in themselves.

They were "free" in the sense that they owed few formal duties to their social superiors, lived in a country without an established police force or compulsory religious conformity, were ruled by a combination of king and parliament, and could order around, hire, or fire their workers or servants with a relative (and increasing) freedom from customary restraints. They were "unfree," distant from the ideal of

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

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

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independent citizenship, in that most of them were unable to vote or hold significant office; social, cultural, and political supremacy was still firmly in the hands of a hereditary ruling elite; and the power of the central government was notoriously maintained through a combination of blatant graft and corruption and, at various times during the eighteenth century, overt repression. Small wonder that they worried about their own slavishness, about the creeping corruption of despotic forms, even as some of them seized the opportunity to argue that their own slaves were so dependent, so morally and spiritually slavish, that it would be criminal to emancipate them.

"Naked" is another epithet that turns up repeatedly in eighteenth- century racist (and class-interested) discourse. One of the major ways the middling classes measured their difference from people they deemed to be their inferiors, whether foreigners or not, was by their clothes, or lack of them. "The poor and naked begging Tribe" that opens Kelsall's poem is not a tribe of foreigners but the English poor, whose characteristic features (nakedness, reliance on begging) mark them as fundamentally distinct from Kelsall and his kind and closer in nature and spirit to the racial "others" with whom the poem immedi- ately goes on to compare them.

Most poor people in eighteenth-century Britain owned one set of clothes only. When their clothes had to be washed (and the poor washed their clothes often so as to keep down vermin) they went literally naked.23 And items of clothing were one of their main forms of currency. In poorer communities in the eighteenth century and probably well into the nineteenth, pawnbrokers' pledges seem overwhelmingly to have been in the form of clothes; it was not uncommon for individuals, desperate for food or rent money, literally to hock the clothes off their backs.24 The poor tended to keep their children largely naked up to the time they began to work for a living (often around the age of six or seven or even younger) because almost every scrap of clothing there was had to go to those family members who were actually earning. Before nakedness came to be a general term associated with Native-Americans, East Indians, Africans, and the Irish, it was already heavily identified with the English poor. But even more important, it was coded as "One of Those Things 'We' Are Not," a bound-

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

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

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ary marker between middling respectability (often sustained by its own more furtive trips to the pawnbroker) and something less.

To focus too single-mindedly on the symbolic benefits of racism to the groups that construct themselves through it-in this case eighteenth-century English middling people-is to run certain risks. One of these is the risk of losing sight of some of the more immediate aims of racism. Racist assumptions about the Irish were and are linked historically to the desire of the English to appropriate their land, crush their belief system, minimize the military threat they represented to English and Protestant interests, and limit their commercial competi- tiveness. Racist beliefs about Africans advanced alongside the plundering of West Africa for ivory, gold, and slaves in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and reached new heights of sophistication in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a way to justify first the continuation of slavery in the face of abolitionist challenges and then the scramble for African colonies. Racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples in the Americas were and are ineradicably connected to European seizures of their lands and have helped justify centuries of genocidal policies as well as much disingenuous rewriting of history.

To point out that the content of racist thought tended to represent the obverse of English fears about themselves also does not really get at the question of why some kinds of racism have such striking longev- ity and have had such appalling effects, while others have been con- signed to oblivion or to cartoons about the English on holiday. It also helps little when one is trying to explore how such ideas manifested themselves in everyday practice. In the eighteenth century racist attitudes on the part of the English toward the French sometimes led to French travelers, and especially French servants in the employ of Brit- ish masters, getting beaten up by mobs of English people.25 And they were a staple of jingoistic propaganda, especially in wartime. The ef- feminate, luxury-loving, slavish Frenchman with overrefined eating habits who populates so many anti-French diatribes, particularly during the wars with Louis XIV, provided a crucial counterpoint to the plain-speaking, manly, freedom-loving Englishman, whose staple food was unadorned roast beef. And yet racist ideas directed against the French were not accompanied by centuries of military occupation and land expropriation as they were in Ireland, India, the Middle East, North and South America, and other parts of the world (not, of course,

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

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for want of trying). French men and women were not forcibly captured and removed across the Atlantic in the millions the way that Africans were. It is for this reason that Francophobic sentiments (and their equivalent across the channel) seem quaint, even humorous today, unless one happens to live in, say, Belgium or the Canadian province of Quebec. Racism is historically contingent at its very heart.

Given the ubiquity of racist ideas in eighteenth-century Britain, it needs to be asked whether travel narratives really contributed anything new. After all, anti-Semitism was endemic throughout both literate and nonliterate cultures in the eighteenth century, and had been for centuries before that, even when there were no Jews living in England. During this period the most malign slurs against Africans are known to have circulated in ballad form in the streets of London.26 Better-off whites saw nothing peculiar about importing black children into En- gland as "pets" (and that was the word they used) for their own children. Puppet shows featuring the "Cruel Turk" were performed on the streets of London, and the Irish, both in England, whence many of them moved in desperate search of work, and in Ireland were almost universally regarded by English people as little better than animals. The English did not "learn" their racism from travel narratives. What the narratives did was to compile and collect such beliefs in an easily accessible place, present them in such a way that they could readily cross-fertilize one another (Kelsall's instinctive comparison between the English poor, the Irish and "Indians, Black or Scotish Plotters" is entirely typical of the genre) and supply a powerful confirmation of received wisdom via eyewitness "evidence" from "typical" and therefore highly credible English travelers. They helped change racism from a rather unsystematic, if nonetheless widely held, medley of popular beliefs into an elaborately worked out taxonomy that embraced the entire globe; made claims to be scientific; and situated Europeans, and especially the English, at the pinnacle of the racial hierarchy.

The Commercial Gaze

Williams reminds us in another of his prescient statements about literary form that part of what "makes" a form is its relationship to,

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

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as he puts it, "changes of viewpoint, changes of known and knowable relationships, changes of possible and actual resolutions." Literary forms have epistemologies, political economies and teleologies, and these, to play out Williams's logic, are both constitutive of and consti- tuted by particular communities. Racism is a powerful element in much of the travel writing of the period, but it is not the only one. Nor, in terms of changes of viewpoint, or shifts in political economy, is it even necessarily the most characteristic.

One of the main aims of any travel narrative is to instruct readers on how to go about apprehending an unfamiliar place and population, to supply a mental framework and a set of practical directions for confronting the unknown and unfamiliar. Its didactic intent can be seen especially clearly in a subgenre within the larger body of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travel literature, one that was ex- plicitly aimed at formulating general principles for how to travel, or really how to observe, wherever one went, in England or abroad. The earliest examples of this type of writing derive not from travel books intended for the middling classes but from the tradition of the aristocratic grand tour. James Howell's Instructions for Forreine Travell (1642) is clearly directed toward the English gentleman abroad. He assumes that his traveler will have attended Oxford or Cambridge and that he has available to him several years within which to do nothing but learn foreign languages; hone his dancing, fencing, and social skills; and gather miscellaneous knowledge about court politics and social mores in the various countries in which he resides. It is not that the traveler should avoid the topic of trade entirely-Howell does suggest to his readers in one passage that they take a little time to find out the major commodities of a particular area-but this is the only serious mention of economic matters in the entire book. Similarly, Howell recommends the company of English merchants when abroad, but only because they are a good source for political news.27 Howell's tract reflects the preoccupations of an aristocratic or at least gentle- manly class that, while it was fast giving up martial exploits for diplo- macy, statecraft, and the more prestigious professions, still tended to disdain trade and saw travel primarily in terms of the polish, so-

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

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phistication, contacts, and facility with foreign, particularly courtly, tongues that it was likely to bestow.28

Such attitudes were not necessarily in decline: the gentry and aristocracy notoriously hung on to power for an extremely long time in England, and they never lost their passion for travel. But in the seventeenth century, and even more in the eighteenth, old-style gentil- ity competed for space and readership with an increasingly commercial and expansionist ethos, a caste of mind that was pervading English society, but which could be found in its most concentrated form among the middling folk who actually captained the ships; distributed the wares; oversaw the manufactures; and, in many cases, owned the sugar, tobacco, or indigo plantations. The origins of this second strand run farther back, of course, to the "age of discovery" writings of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Here, gentleman adventur- ers like Richard Hakluyt, Samuel Purchas, William Lithgow, and Sir Walter Raleigh popularized, for a generation or more of enthralled readers, the notion that "exotic" lands existed so that Englishmen could win personal glory and immense wealth by conquering and plundering them.29

Between the late sixteenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries, travel and ideas about travel were significantly democratized and ex- panded. Gentlemen and aristocrats continued to go on the grand tour, but the balance tipped heavily toward travelers involved in trade. These men (and a few women), often newly literate and always ambi- tious for profits, came to view land and people, both at home and abroad, in terms of fairly long-term investment opportunities, commercial competition, and labor utilization rather than primarily in terms of personal glory and plunder or, more lately, courtly contacts and a cosmopolitan sensibility. One of the most characteristic as well as the most influential forms of written expression of the age was, in fact, less a pure ethnography than an amalgam of the travel narrative and the economic treatise. It was a form in which the things one observed and the ways one apprehended them took on cardinal importance.

John Houghton's Collection for Improvement of Husbandry and Trade came out in serial form between 1692 and 1703. It was repeatedly reprinted throughout the eighteenth century and was to influence all

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

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

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subsequent British forays into economic theory, including those of Adam Smith. Houghton was a London apothecary, general dealer in tea and other goods, and agricultural projector. It is likely, in fact, that he knew Petty, whose interest in commercial improvement and passion for "projects" Houghton shared. Houghton's Collection is an encyclopedic celebration of trade and commerce in all its infinite variety: "The whole kingdom made as one trading city, is the design of these my papers." It draws from a range of sources, including reports on scientific experiments issuing from the Royal Society, ephemeral printed or manuscript lists of commodity prices and exchange rates of the sort that commonly circulated around the London coffeehouses in this period, and, of course, travel writing.30 Houghton uses travel narratives both as models and as sources, and he makes it plain that his primary aim is to teach businessmen travelers a new way of looking that will redound both to their own individual benefit and that of the nation.

With staggering consistency Houghton responds to unfamiliar people and places by trying to gauge their profit potential. For instance, he supplies his readers with the mileage from port to port on all the navigable rivers of England, coupled with information on those that bear merchandise and how much. His discussion of the town of Derby, drawn from travelers' observations, focuses on coal mines and ore deposits, water transport, the price of hops, and the alleged high life expectancy of its poorer classes and the resulting low cost of labor.31 His ethnography of the Dutch, again heavily reliant on travelers' accounts, attempts, in the most conventional of terms, to explain the Dutch "miracle" by a combination of national character and sound economic policy; he uses this to outline how English merchants can learn to compete.

Houghton enthusiastically promotes West Indian plantations as a model of the efficient utilization of soil and people for productive purposes. Slaves are "the usefullest merchandize [that] can be carried thither," he informs his readers, helpfully supplying them with a de-

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

31 Houghton, pp. 104-21.

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scription of the mechanics of slave trading drawn from contemporary travelers' accounts of West Africa and the West Indies.32 He also gives directions to the would-be planter for organizing slave labor on a plantation. Whether surveying a West Indian slave plantation or an English provincial town, this travelogue cum how-to manual deals centrally with demographics. Houghton includes a thorough discussion of how to keep up "stocks" of slaves, touching, among other things, on the high suicide rate of African captives ("they will hang themselves no creature knows why"), which he finds deplorable primarily because it infringes on the property rights of their owners.33

Houghton provides a revealing look at the everyday practice of commercial gazing, but a pamphlet of 1758 by Josiah Tucker, actually entitled Instructions for Travellers, supplies the principles on which this new way of seeing is based. Tucker was an Anglican clergyman (later bishop) and writer on economics who is today considered one of the most important British writers on economics before Adam Smith. A more sympathetic character than Houghton, Tucker was to go on record in later life as a critic of slavery, though admittedly at a time when it had become almost fashionable to do so.34 But while Tucker's Instructions for Travellers advances a less brutal vision than Houghton's, it resembles it in a number of respects. The traveler, says Tucker, should observe the soil, taxation systems, climate, public spirit, and tenor of the constitution of every country he visits. He should take account of "the peculiar Genius [talents] and singular In- ventions of the inhabitants, as well as of the fruitfulness of [their] married women." He should learn to ask himself questions like the following: "What improvements might be made [here] in water car- riage?" "What new markets are opened for vending?" "Do Journey- men and Journey-women work by the Day, or by the Great [i.e., by the piece]? And what Checks are invented to guard against Impositions of bad Work or embezzling the Materials, or idling away Time?"

32 Ibid., p. 457. 33 Ibid., pp. 307-28. 34 Tucker's main attack on slavery is to be found in his A Letter to Edmund Burke,

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

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"What Machines are used to abridge the process of a Manufacture, so that one Person can do the work of many? And what is the Conse- quence of this Abridgement both regarding Price and the Numbers of Persons employed?"35

Mary Louise Pratt has pointed out that early nineteenth-century travel narratives tend to "focus on the Other's amenability to domination and potential as a labor pool."36 She shows too that travelers reserve their greatest enthusiasm for "the consideration of the commercial and geographical importance" of the prospect before them.37 Hers is an extremely valuable account, but, as this essay shows, the roots of these features of the travel narrative go back at least to the late seventeenth century. The encounter with foreign peoples and climes that is the stuff of travel writing merged seamlessly at a very early stage in Britain's imperial history with a discourse of profitability, labor efficiency, and national prosperity.38

If Houghton epitomized the unembarrassed rapaciousness and instinctive resort to coercive violence of mid- to late seventeenth- century capitalism, Tucker stood at the brink of the age of factories and of the new, apparently more benign persuasions of the clock, the machine, and the dismissal notice. Though the most naked form of coercion, slavery, was to survive in the British colonies and former colonies for almost one hundred years more, Tucker was already un- comfortable with it on economic as well as humanitarian grounds. Over the course of his life Tucker also grew increasingly critical of the colonial system. For instance, he condemned in strong if patronizing terms "the ill-gotten, and ill-spent Wealth . . . obtained by robbing, plundering, and starving the poor defenceless Natives of the East In- dies."39 But a closer look reveals that Tucker's main complaint lay with the fact that the mother country was having to foot the bill for

35 Ibid., pp. 19, 27, 29-30. 36 Mary Louise Pratt, "Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow

Saw in the Land of the Bushmen," in Gates, ed. (n. 16 above), p. 139. For a lengthier discussion of these and other topics, see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).

37 Ibid., p. 144. 38 Seventeenth-century economists and "projectors" had already produced an im-

portant body of writing devoted to efficiently utilizing the labor of their own less fortu- nate countrymen and women. An excellent overview of this material can be found in Appleby (n. 5 above), pp. 129-57.

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

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the ongoing defense of the colonies, not with European expansion per se. His primary aim was to ensure the prosperity of Britain, and while colonies might not be the optimum means to this end, independent settlements by British peoples in foreign lands assuredly were.

The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, is the crowning achievement of eighteenth-century British economic thought. It is deeply indebted in form and content to travel narratives, and Adam Smith is every bit as didactic in his intent as Houghton and Tucker. Smith had in his personal library almost every major piece of published travel writing by a French or English writer of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and he cited more than twenty of these by name in his most famous work, using numerous others without attribution.40 The characteristic modes of viewing of commercial travel cast their influence over virtually every chapter of The Wealth of Nations. Smith discusses demography and the price and conditions of labor, transport of goods, labor-saving devices, the quality and availability of land, the changing price of commodities, the influence of geography and historical context, inheritance and marriage customs, religious practices, and political governance in Scotland, Ireland, England, Holland, France, the East Indies, the Cape Colony, West Africa, China, Java, Mexico, Brazil, the West Indies, the North American colonies, Japan, Imperial Rome, and Republican Athens. Smith's great synthesis is breathtak- ingly comprehensive, as well as truly global in scope.

Smith's attitude toward imperial expansion is notoriously ambiva- lent. Like Tucker he viewed colonies as a financial drain on the mother country and would have preferred either to tax them for the difference or to make them independent. On the one hand, he was thoroughly hostile to trading companies, especially the East India Company, and acutely aware of the ways the British government, in particular, milked the "golden dream" of empire for purposes of propaganda.41 On the other hand, he saw little problem with Europeans appropriating large portions of the world's resources for their own use. If nothing else, a European diaspora would stimulate a global trade, from which trading nations such as Britain would inevitably enjoy the lion's share of the

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

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

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benefits. Smith admired the "active and enterprising spirit" of the men who were leading the forces of European world domination and, while he usually explained "large" movements of peoples or nations in terms of manifest historical destiny, he seemed at times to see Europeans' expansionist caste of mind, their internationalist zeal, their omnivo- rous gaze, as part of a sort of inexorable tribal mission. For Smith the appropriative gaze of the traveler, the businessman, the settler, was part of the natural order of things. It was pointless to try to apply morality to economic expansion, and the "dreadful misfortunes" that had befallen the indigenous peoples of, say, the East and West Indies (which he was perfectly willing to acknowledge) were, in the final analysis, simply an inescapable side effect of progress.42

It is true that Smith believed slavery to be an inferior method of labor organization when compared to free labor, and it is also the case that Smith's arguments on this score (as well as the prestige of his name) were to be used to good account by several generations of abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic. But Smith himself made it fairly clear that he believed it virtually impossible to effect a general abolition of slavery. As with so much that is brutal or distasteful in Adam Smith's often rather bleak worldview, chattel slavery was grounded in human nature, in that "love of domination and authority over others, which I am afraid is naturall to mankind."43 In the end it was as futile and counterproductive to try to obstruct the buying and selling of human beings as it was to hinder the buying and selling of tea, wool, or wheat. Indeed, and here was the final irony, it was precisely free countries, those whose government and trade were not caught in the grip of tyrants or despotic controls, that were the least likely to eliminate slavery.44

Conclusion

Racist thought sustains its adherents' belief that acts of appropria- tion and coercion are all for the best by concocting for them a fictitious intellectual, moral, and generally physical superiority over specified groups of people. Writers of travel literature certainly contributed to this project. But one of their other aims, and a far more consciously explicated one, was to introduce their readers to a new epistemology,

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

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

44 Ibid., p. 186.

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what I have called the "commercial gaze." The central feature of this new epistemology was a special kind of omniscience, one that reflected the concerns of that narrator who was also, in eighteenth-century par- lance, a "man of business." Houghton and Tucker hoped to train their readers to adopt a wide-angled view of the world, one that could ab- sorb and process all kinds of quantitative and qualitative data about people, soil, transport, the weather, commodities, crops, life expectancy, and "racial" character.

Even Adam Smith, despite his oft-expressed suspicions about men of business, fully adopted his predecessor's broad focus, adding to it one of the most sweeping statements ever made about the impervi- ousness of economic processes to moral intervention. The Wealth of Nations is, it could be argued, the philosophical culmination of the commercial gaze. Encyclopedic in scope (its only real competitor in the eighteenth century was the great, but far less coherent, Encyclo- pedie of Denis Diderot, published between 1751 and 1780), The Wealth of Nations is ostensibly involved with every part of the known world and every part of apprehended reality. But as with almost all works of its type there is a fundamental gap in the picture when it comes to the subjectivity of the peoples who were enslaved, robbed of their lands or customs; utilized as cheap, mobile labor; or dragged willy-nilly into someone else's trade nexus.45

And that, finally, is where racism and the commercial gaze meet up again in the middle. To his credit, Smith was in many respects a remarkably egalitarian thinker. Among other things, he routinely replaced racist justifications for the exploitation of non-Western peoples (and class-interested justifications for exploiting European ones) with contextual explanations based on market forces, on abuse of power, or on corrupt mercantile survivals such as the East India Company. On the one hand, there is a refreshing unwillingness, most of the time, at any rate, to resort to arguments about innate inferiority or essential difference in Smith's system (the same could not be said for many of his successors).46 On the other hand, the difference, in functional terms, between seeing other groups of people as inferior beings and seeing them as commodities is sometimes hard to discern. Both "view- points" work to undermine or erase the subjectivity and humanity of

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

46 But see Smith, Wealth of Nations, p. 535, where he remarks that, "in spite of the cruel destruction of the natives which followed the Conquest, these two great em-

pires [Mexico and Peru] are, probably, more populous now than they ever were before: and the people are surely very different; for we must acknowledge, I apprehend, that the Spanish creoles are in many respects superior to the ancient Indians."

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whole peoples, and both serve to justify the exploitation of others. And, finally, both racism and "commercial gazing" react powerfully back upon the groups that employ them, in the one case helping to create a self-defined superior race convinced of its right to rule and in the other creating a self-defined superior technocrat with a vision and a mandate to turn peoples and lands to his will.

The argument of this essay has followed a well-trodden analytic route: writers write books or pen private journals that confirm and systematize some old beliefs at the same time that they suggest some new techniques. Readers respond with a will, take the writers' reassur- ances and their instructions to heart, and go on to do things that they might well have ended up doing anyway, but they do them more efficiently, with a clearer conscience, and, as this essay suggests, with a more powerful and purposeful sense of who they "are." The picture seems satisfyingly complete.

But is history ever so simple? The eighteenth-century city of Bris- tol was, one would think, an excellent vantage point from which to pore over one's library books, gaze out over the world, and dream imperial dreams. It was also one of the most important slave depots of Europe, a town where, literally, people's bread and butter depended on the Africa trade. What then are we to make of the runaway popularity of a book like the Abbe Raynal's History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, one of the most impassioned anti-imperialist and antislavery tracts of the eighteenth century?

As commentators have pointed out, Raynal and his cocontributors (the book was actually a collective project) were not immune to the conventions of travel literature, including its rampant racism and its tendency, even at its most liberal, to infantilize the oppressed. But even taking these things into account, Raynal's book still challenges powerfully some of the most fundamental articles of faith of British imperialism. Among other things he launches a frontal attack on the convenient belief that people nurtured in nations known for their political liberty (here he means England and France) naturally bring that heritage to bear in their dealings with peoples in other climes. He mounts a sweeping critique of the persistent myth that British, Dutch, and French imperialism(s) were more humane than those of Spain and Portugal (the "Black Legend").47 And he does not hesitate to describe European-and British-atrocities in the most graphic of terms.

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

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In the eighteenth century, travel and travel reportage were not uniformly reassuring, nor did they universally confirm received teach- ings. It would not, perhaps, be wise to put much stock in the liberatory potential of travel literature and certainly not of the mergers of economics and travel that have been the subject of the second half of this essay. Nonetheless, the popularity of a writer like Raynal does raise the question of whether the traveler's gaze, or, to put it in less overde- termined language, any traveler's curiosity about the variations in human experience to be found in the world, is intrinsically exploitative. It is certainly the case that, while the English middle classes regarded the imperial project with notorious complacency and not a little pride of proprietorship in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they also felt, at least intermittently, quite guilty about it. One would not want to overestimate the importance of this sort of sentimentalism, especially given the lightning speed with which it could and did con- vert into the most offensive kind of paternalism. One feels too that Adam Smith may have been right in thinking that guilt does not have the same capacity to turn the world upside down that self-interest does. Nevertheless, guilt is probably a force that historians of the British middle class should pay more attention to, for it has its own place in the contradictory makeup of that most revolutionary class.

Edward Said's justly famous book Orientalism describes a Euro- pean discursive tradition devoted consciously or unconsciously to trying to obliterate the subjectivity of "the other." Said's study is concerned centrally with the intersections between Orientalism, as a linguistic, theological/philosophical, and ethnographic discipline as well as a particular touristic sensibility, and what he calls "the realm of political will, political management, political definition."48 The merchant and the manufacturer, profit, labor utilization, and trade routes, that expansive gaze that is acquisitive and commercial rather than primarily managerial, play a much less prominent role in his account.

The roots of Orientalism in Said's sense certainly lie in the eighteenth century, and even earlier. In the case of Britain, evidence of this can be found in the escalating eighteenth-century passion for car- rying off other nations' antiquities, the quickening of interest in ancient languages, the mid-century fad among the respectable classes for the sayings of Confucius, and the burgeoning concern to systematize East Indian colonial administration. There was also already in place a vast, if unsystematic, accumulation of racial prejudice. But the fact remains that eighteenth-century travel writing reflected the ethos of the capital-

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

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ist more than it did either the Orientalist scholar or the colonial bu- reaucrat.

To study early modern travel literature is to be confronted by the delusions and self-referentiality of a nation and a class in the making. But it is also to come face-to-face with the very real global conse- quences of these peoples' grandiose musings. Racist thought tends to be banal and repetitive, yet the circuitous routes by which racist ideas seize on the cultural imagination of whole peoples, the intersections between their reductionist formulas and the irreducible complexity of historical events, and the way they imprint themselves on other social, political, and intellectual trends present the most complicated of ana- lytical problems. By the same token, to look at people and land almost solely in terms of their profit potential is a narrow and spiritless way to go about apprehending the world, yet the fact that we can date with some precision the beginnings of this approach in England, and actually see people engaged in trying to teach others how to do it "prop- erly," gives us pause to wonder (pace Adam Smith) how "natural" it really is. Travel literature bore a heavy freight in the eighteenth century. We owe it and its originators, for better or for worse, a great deal.

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Documents

Making the English Middle Class, ca. 1700-1850 || Racism, Imperialism, and the Traveler's Gaze in Eighteenth-Century England