Rethinking Colonial State Kathleen Wilson

Rethinking the Colonial State: Family, Gender, and Governmentality in Eighteenth-Century British Frontiers Author(s): Kathleen Wilson Reviewed
work(s): Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 116, No. 5 (December 2011), pp. 1294-1322 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the American Historical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/ahr.116.5.1294 . Accessed: 31/12/2011 02:21
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Rethinking the Colonial State: Family, Gender, and Governmentality in Eighteenth-Century British Frontiers
KATHLEEN WILSON
States, if the pun be forgiven, state . . . They dene, in great detail, acceptable forms and images of social activity and individual and collective identity . . . Indeed, in this sense, the State never stops talking.1
STUDIES OF THE COLONIAL STATE may seem to be characterized more by plenitude than by lack. Scholars have been assiduous in suggesting theories of its nature and its relationship to the legal and political structures of Western imperial modernity.2 However, the eighteenth-century British colonial state has received far less attention. Historians of Britain have recently been keen to examine the expansion of the Hanoverian state in a period of protracted war and intense international rivalries, but generally have limited their inquiries to the targets and reach of the amalgamated metropolitan British state. That this scal-military state, as John Brewer famously dubbed it, precociously forged some of the unique capacities of modern states is now taken as read, as is the role of these capacities in Britains domination
I would like to thank William Roger Louis for the productive misunderstanding in 2004 that led me to write and deliver a rst version of this article as a paper at the University of Texas Ransom Center. Subsequent versions were given to the Center for Historical Analysis, Rutgers University; the British Studies Seminar, Columbia University; the History Department, University of Glasgow; the Delaware Valley Seminar in British Studies; the Institute for Historical Studies, University of Texas; and the British Studies Seminar, University of Chicago. Thank you to all the participants for their constructive questions and comments. Special thanks also go to Nick Mirzoeff, Timothy Alborn, Jenise DePinto, Hannah Weiss Muller, Brooke Newman, Jennifer Pitts, and the anonymous reviewers for the American Historical Review for terric advice and engaged critique (in the French sense). Finally, thanks to the following institutions for funding the research for this project: the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Guggenheim Foundation; the Center for Historical Analysis, Rutgers University; and the College of Arts and Sciences, Stony Brook University.
1 Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 1985), 3. 2 E.g., Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1992); Said, Orientalism (New York, tienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene (London, 2002); Timothy Mitchell, The Limits of 1976); E the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics, American Political Science Review 85, no. 1 (March 1991): 7796; Akhil Gupta, Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State, American Ethnologist 22, no. 2 (May 1995): 375 402; David Scott, Colonial Governmentality, Social Text, no. 43 (Autumn 1995): 191220; David Lloyd and Paul Thomas, Culture and the State (London, 1998); John Comaroff, Reections on the Colonial State, in South Africa and Elsewhere: Factions, Fragments, Facts and Fictions, Social Identities 4, no. 3 (1998): 321 361; George Steinmetz, ed., State/Culture: State-Formation after the Imperial Turn (Ithaca, N.Y., 1999); Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta, eds., The Anthropology of the State: A Reader (Oxford, 2006). For colonial modernities, see Antoinette Burton, ed., Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities (London, 1999); Tani E. Barlow, ed., Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia (Durham, N.C., 1997); and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago, 2002).
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and ultimate victory in the century of war for trade and empire that ended at Waterloo.3 Perhaps as a result of the effectiveness of this institutional model, imperial historians of the period have been less interested in thinking about a colonial state as such, which has been conceptualized by default either as un etat manque of weak institutional forms and limited coercive powers, or as the unnished product of negotiation between metropolitan and colonial authorities that bestowed considerable autonomy on British domains from North America to the Indian Ocean.4 What remains striking is that the performative nature of state power, and the cultural intimations and practices of state-building, tend to escape sustained attention: the great arch of English state formation as cultural revolution, so masterfully described by Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer some years ago, remains curiously underconstructed within eighteenth-century British colonial history, while the studies of institutional forms of state power in turn tend to forget that the entity called the State is a ction.5 Examining the practices of governance in three frontiers of the British empire Fort Marlborough (Sumatra), St. Helena, and Jamaicacan help revivify a cultural perspective on the arts and strategies of colonial state-making in the long eighteenth century (16601820). It puts into play a different notion of state power, one that was performative rather than rigidly institutional and that focused on the organization of social life and national afliation among colonizers and colonized alike.6 In doing so, we can build on two strands of exciting work on European empires and colonization. The rst, executed largely by feminist scholars, has demonstrated the centrality of white male privilege, marital strategy, and concubinage to the establishment and legitimization of European authority in colonies and outposts across the globe
3 See John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 16881783 (New York, 1988); Lawrence Stone, An Imperial State at War: Britain from 16891715 (London, 1994); Patrick K. OBrien, The Political Economy of British Taxation, 16601815, Economic History Review 41, no. 1 (February 1988): 132; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 17071837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992). For the Continent, see Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 9901990 (Oxford, 1992); Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Princeton, N.J., 1994). 4 C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 17801830 (London, 1989); Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 17801914: Global Connections and Comparisons (London, 2004). Cf. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, N.J., 2000); Jack P. Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville, Va., 1994); Christopher L. Tomlins and Bruce H. Mann, The Many Legalities of Early America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001); Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 15001820 (London, 2002); John Smolenski and Thomas J. Humphrey, New World Orders: Violence, Sanction and Authority in the Colonial Americas (Philadelphia, 2005); Peter Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c. 17501783 (Oxford, 2004); Janice E. Thompson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, N.J., 1994). 5 Corrigan and Sayer, The Great Arch, 96. 6 That is, constituting through discourse or practice that which is alleged to be represented. In colonial environments, state power was necessarily performativecreating through day-to-day practices the outlines of authority that a state would or could possessand theatricalenacting hierarchies of authority, class, and caste into realms of the everyday that institutional forms of power did not usually encompass. For other examples of performative state-making, see Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2003), chap. 4; Carol Watts, The Cultural Work of Empire: The Seven Years War and the Imagining of the Shandean State (Edinburgh, 2007); Sudipta Sen, Uncertain Dominance: The Colonial State and Its Contradictions, Nepantla: Views from the South 3, no. 2 (2002): 392 406; James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn., 1999).
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and indeed, across the centuries.7 The second, undertaken mainly by scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century empires, has looked at the colonial governmentalitiesthe rationalities and techniques of governancethrough which hybrid forms of local authority were used to manage everyday social and intimate relationships, sometimes with a view to inducing their targets to monitor themselves.8 Through an examination of Fort Marlborough, St. Helena, and Jamaicafrontiers of British authority and identity in that they marked both borders of English dominion and limits of imperial knowledgethese lines of inquiry can be brought together in pursuit of a set of related issues. The rst is how problems of governance, discipline, and population permeated early modern forms of colonial rule almost a century before they are usually acknowledged to have done so. Fort Marlborough and St. Helena, although largely neglected by imperial historians, were East India Company (EIC) colonies of marginal economic and substantial strategic signicance, where the imperatives of trade, security, and social stability often violently contended. Jamaica, in contrast, a self-governing sugar colony and the jewel of the mideighteenth-century empire (and thus intensively studied), was as notorious for its social disorder and rebellion as it was famed for its prots. In each site, their different political structures notwithstanding, issues of population, sexual and family regulation, and national belonging loomed large in the dynamics of local governance, as ofcials attempted to mark national afliation and sexual and kinship relations as domains of organization and control. Secondly, the conjoined analysis of the arts of governance in these three Atlantic and Indian Ocean peripheries also raises some important questions about the longestablished historiographical division of the eighteenth-century British Empire into rst and second periodscharacterized by the mercantile empire of the seas
7 On the New World, see, e.g., Jennifer S. H. Brown, Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country (Vancouver, 1980); Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996); Ann Marie Plane, Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000); Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race and the Making of British Columbia, 18491871 (Toronto, 2001); Kirsten Fischer, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Ithaca, N.Y., 2002); Linda Colley, Captives (London, 2002); Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 18301867 (Chicago, 2002); Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia, 2004); Diana Paton, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 17801870 (Durham, N.C., 2004); Jennifer Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2009). On India and the East Indies, see Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia (Madison, Wis., 1983); Indrani Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India (New Delhi, 1999); Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (London, 2002); Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (Cambridge, 2008). For the Pacic, see Lenore Manderson and Margaret Jolly, eds., Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and the Pacic (Chicago, 1997); Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda, eds., Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (Charlottesville, Va., 1998); Harriet Guest, Empire, Barbarism, and Civilisation: Captain Cook, William Hodges, and the Return to the Pacic (Cambridge, 2008); Joy Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia (Cambridge, 1997); Wilson, The Island Race ; Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (London, 2003); Levine, ed., Gender and Empire (Oxford, 2004); Kathleen Wilson, ed., A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 16601840 (Cambridge, 2004). 8 Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucaults History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, N.C., 1995); Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, Calif., 2002); Sen, Uncertain Dominance; and fn. 2 above.
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Map by Christopher Sellers.
of trading posts and settler colonies and the sprawling territorial empire of rule over large numbers of non-British peoples, respectively.9 It suggests, instead, signicant continuities in techniques and targets of rule over the period, the rst stage in British expansion incorporating signicant numbers of alien peoples and quantities of authoritarian rule, and the second taking cues from the peripheries about the tenor and reach of reconstituted British authority. British overseas endeavors over the century, in other words, had produced a domain of contested sovereignties, of peoples, territories, and commodities, linked together by the reach of British power or ambition. Finally, a brief survey of the view of colonial governance from the outside in can point to rather different new departures than dominant narratives have led us to expect, which lay in the realms of state-making and racial marking, as the imposition of racialized and gendered categories of family, household, and national belonging became critical aspects of administration. Using governmentality as an optic, the case studies of Fort Marlborough, St. Helena, and Jamaica illustrate important moments of transition from early modern to modern forms of colonial governance, a transition marked by the movement between governmental modes of treating subjects like family and apprehending them as population.10
9 Territorial empire is generally taken to begin in 1763, after Britains acquisitions of the Seven Years War, or in 1783, at the end of the American Revolution, when in each case the imperial government sought to impose more rationalized and authoritarian modes of rule. See P. J. Marshall, A Free Though Conquering People: Eighteenth-Century Britain and Its Empire (London, 1994); Bayly, Imperial Meridian. 10 Thanks to Jennifer Pitts for encouraging me to frame the argument in this way. The movement back and forth between the familiar and more abstract demographic strategies of rule was evident in the colonies examined here from the late seventeenth to late eighteenth centuries. Cf. John Wilson, The
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ONE WAY TO WARM UP that coldest of cold monsters, as Michel Foucault called the state, is to examine it as a collection of practices and discourses that began to draw together, albeit unevenly and haltingly, the techniques of administration and processes of subjectication necessary for economic extraction and local social order. As his lectures from the 1970s and his History of Sexuality make clear, Foucault located the history of governmentality in the raison de tat and policing of early modern European monarchies, although the implications of his insights have rarely been developed in the historiography of the period.11 To be sure, Foucaults chronology of the practices and theories leading to governmental initiatives targeting population, security, and discipline and their interlinked goals of state- and subject-making are notoriously vague and sometimes contradictory.12 But his reections can still be illuminating in charting some of the key shifts in discourses and practices of governance, both within the English (and later British) metropole and in colonies and outposts themselves in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In this period, when government referred not only to political organization but also to problems of self-control, household management, and even spiritual guidance, juridical paradigms of sovereignty and law were being redirected by newer paradigms of virtue and manners that sought to render populations and things commensurate in the burgeoning global systems of commercial capitalism.13 Beginning in the 1660s, the problem of populationits manners, productivity, and healthwas twinned with the problem of order and thrust into the limelight by political arithmeticians such as Sir William Petty and John Graunt. As Graunt argued, Trade and government may be made more certain and Regular only through the knowledge of how many People there be of each Sex, State, Age, Religion, Trade, Rank or Degree, and these arts of government by demographic manipulation, as Ted McCormick has called them, were rst applied to the management of colonial populations.14 The censuses thereby producedsporadically at rst under Cromwell and Charles II, and then
Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in East India (Cambridge, 2008), which sees the transition from governance by familiars to the rule of strangers as marking the emergence of the modern colonial state in British Bengal between 1780 and 1835. 11 My use of governmentality as an optic is based on Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Colle `ge de France, 19771978, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke, 2007), esp. Lectures 25, 1215, quotation from 109; Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Colle `ge de France, 19751976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (Basingstoke, 2003), esp. 239263; Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Colle `ge de France, 1978 1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke, 2008); Foucault, Governmentality, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, 1991), 87104; Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1985); Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, eds., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst, Mass., 1988). 12 A point made by Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire. 13 See J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiey in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1982); Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge, 1999); Daniel OQuinn, Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 17701800 (Baltimore, 2006). 14 Sir William Petty, Several Essays in Political Arithmetick, 4th ed. (London, 1755); John Graunt, Natural and Political Observations Mentioned in a Following Index, and Made upon the Bills of Mortality (1662; repr., New York, 1975), 7879; Ted McCormick, William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (Oxford, 2009), 10. As McCormick notes, their strategies involved the transplantation and counter-transplantation of different populations and their intermixture through marriage and generation; Ireland and North America were crucial test sites.
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more regularly following the establishment of the Board of Trade and Plantations in 1696mobilized information on households, men, women, children, servants, and slaves that, along with gures on livestock, acreage, and natural resources, became a potential resource for king, privy council, and Parliament as well as colonial ofcials.15 This apprehension of population as an entity that needed to be managed not only made the governance of extended polities possible; it also produced political knowledge that could be integrated into techniques of rule, exerting pressure on the subjects of polities to organize their lives in specic ways.16 Crucially, according to Foucault, the recognition of population as an entity also had the effect of transforming the signicance of the family from a model or analogy of the state to an instrument of governance of use to that state or its surrogates, becoming the crucial segment through which population could be accessed, regulated, or reformed and sexuality managed.17 But what Foucault called the deployment of alliance, or the management of matrimonial relations, was in practice incorporated into early modern modes of British colonial governance as part of, rather than antecedent to, the deployment of sex (which he saw emerging in the late eighteenth century), as local ofcials sought to use cultural and religious codes not only to distinguish between lawful and illicit sexual practices, but also to extend political authority in alien domains.18 In other words, contrary to Foucaults schema, family remained a model for, even as it became an instrument of, authority through much of the eighteenth century; it also retained an irreducible political importance. The extension of the authority of the English crown into its peripheries was never simply a jurisdictional matter, Michael Braddick has reminded us, but was regarded as a broader programme to promote civility . . . [and] social and economic reform.19 In the context of the nation-making and nation-marking that were so central to claims to sovereignty and to colonial governance alike (and which, in the British case, involved welding multiple ethnicities together under the sign of English liberties), the modes of making families and the delineation of civil and domestic spheres were key to claims to national belonging in foreign environments, and to what was arguably the most crucial distinction in British colonial sites: who had access to the rights and privileges of Englishmen, and who did not.20 Even jurists and political
15 Robert V. Wells, The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776: A Survey of Census Data (Princeton, N.J., 1975). For England, which did not begin to count its citizens on a regular basis until 1801, see Andrea A. Rusnock, Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in EighteenthCentury England and France (Cambridge, 2002), 4; James C. Riley, Population Thought in the Age of the Demographic Revolution (Durham, N.C., 1985). 16 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population , 2932, 117. This triangulation between polity, population, and authority was clearly paradigmatic to empire, even one conceived of as a loose congeries of colonies and outposts. For the conduct of conduct, as Foucault called such techniques of governance, and their relationships to the counter-conducts of people and populations, see Foucault, Governmentality, 102103; and Foucault, About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth, trans. and ed. Mark Blasius, Political Theory 21, no. 2 (May 1993): 198227. 17 Foucault, Governmentality, 99100. 18 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population , 105; Foucault, Governmentality, 103; Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 106108. 19 Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 15501700 (Cambridge, 2000), 25. For the importance of governance to the early modern East India Company, see Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford, 2011). 20 For which see my Island Race, and Elizabeth Mancke, Negotiating an Empire: Britain and Its
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theorists acknowledged this fact. The ip side of English liberty, William Blackstone asserted, was a social discipline that found its instrumental form in family structure. By public police and economy, he argued,
I mean the due regulation and domestic order of the Kingdom, whereby the individuals of the state, like members of a well-governed family, are bound to conform their general behaviour to the rule of propriety, good neighbourhood and good manners; to be decent, industrious, and inoffensive in their respective stations.21
In other words, it was the regulation of individual and collective behavior that polity depended upon, rendering domestic order within and without the state possible. In colonies, such regulation was taken on by masters and mistresses as well as governors and councilors, upon whose ability to see like a state depended the reproduction of national manners, the organization of coercive labor regimes, the exertion of moral and intellectual suasion, and the imposition of social hierarchies among their various charges. Local examples from across the Indian Ocean and Atlantic worlds demonstrate how the arts of governance, moving continually between the familial and the demographic, embraced a rationality that linked a well-governed colony with well-governed families and self-governing individuals.22 Using governmentality as an optic, and so considering each site from the perspective of a general economy of power, will bring into focus similarities as much as differences in the practices of rule, beginning with these colonies shared status, from the metropolitan perspective, as marchlands of Britishness, where national social and cultural forms refused to take hold.23
Overseas Peripheries, c. 15501780, in Daniels and Kennedy, Negotiated Empires, 235266; Ken MacMillan, Sovereignty and Possession in the English New World: The Legal Foundations of Empire, 15761640 (Cambridge, 2006). For Continental examples, see Julia Adams, The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, N.Y., 2005); Peter Sahlins, Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After (Ithaca, N.Y., 2004); and Tamar Herzog, Early Modern Spanish Citizenship: Inclusion and Exclusion in the Old and the New World, in Smolenski and Humphrey, New World Orders, 205225. This essay follows the by now conventional distinction between English and British, the former applying to people hailing or descending from England, the hegemonic power within Great Britain, and the latter incorporating the Welsh, Scots, and Irish. But as Gargi Bhattacharyya wryly observes, British is the name imposed by the English on the non-English (quoted in Robert Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity [Malden, Mass., 2008], 5). In the eighteenthcentury empire, while subnational distinctions could be subsumed under the sign of British, who had access to the cultural capital of Englishness and who could claim the right to be called British remained contested political issues. 21 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England: In Four Books; with an Analysis of the Work, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1893), 2: 162. 22 This article is part of a larger study that will take in New South Wales and India as well as the sites briey discussed here. Throughout both projects, it is the targets of colonial strategies of administration that are of interest, rather than the assessment of their short- or long-term effectiveness. See Scott, Colonial Governmentality, 197, who aptly argues that scholars must ask in any historical instance, what does colonial power . . . take as the target upon which to work? 23 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 117. As Braddick has noted, it is often precisely in such margins that the contours of political and social order are thrown into sharpest relief; State Formation in Early Modern England, 340. See also Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 15801650 (Oxford, 2001), 551578.
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TO BEGIN AT YORK FORT in western Sumatra, Britains easternmost possession at the beginning of the eighteenth century, is to begin at the most unruly and tentative of commercial outposts, where contending sovereigntiesIndonesian, European, and Asianvied for power and prot.24 Founded by treaty with Indonesian rulers in 1685, after the Dutch had expelled them from Bantam, the fort quickly acquired a reputation as a pestilential death trap for its European residents and an eradicator of vaunted national characteristics. Its early governors were barbarous and brutish, William Dampier reported in 1690, ruthlessly pursuing private fortune regardless of local customs, and clamping Indonesian rajas in stocks for no other Reason but because they had not brought down to the Forts such a quantity of Pepper as the Governour had sent for.25 Not surprisingly, perhaps, Malay and Rejang chiefs were uninterested in extracting EIC quotas of pepper from their reluctant and restive subjects. The overseas Chinese of the China junk trade, who had been ofcially encouraged to trade and settle in Benkulen, were highly valued craftspeople, but their tea and arrack houses only increased residents penchant for various forms of intemperancegaming, women, and drinking. The struggle to obtain sufcient supplies of laborers, usually Coffrey or African, and especially Malagasy slaves, who provided the bulk of workers in the Companys service, and the inability of resident Topaz soldiers (Christians of Portuguese and Malay descent), Bugis mercenaries, and unseasoned British recruits to secure protection of the fort and outlange of peoples, alliances, and transstations caused additional anxiety.26 The me gressions led observers to comment that the settlement looked like a Batavian colonyperhaps the gravest of insults, for the Dutch colony was notorious for its mestizo culture and departures from European norms of civility in political and social life.27 Hence the essential goal of any effort to reform the government of the fort and its factories was to make the pepper trade protable and the inhabitants legible and accountable to administration and regulation. The EIC directors chose Joseph Collet, a London merchant, bankrupt and Baptist, for just this task in 1711. His position as deputy governor of York Fort quickly thrust him into new and unfamiliar roles as administrator, military captain, and politician, over a settlement and outstations numbering ve hundred inhabitants.28 Yet
After, that is, the Dutch had expelled the English East India Company from Bantam. William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World, with an introduction by Sir Albert Gray (London, 1937), 346; Dampier, Voyages and Discoveries, with an introduction and notes by Clennell Wilkinson (London, 1931), 125. 26 Robert J. Young, Slaves, Coolies and Bondsmen, in Klaus Friedland, ed., Maritime Aspects of Migration (Cologne, 1989), 391 402; thanks to Iona Man-cheong for this reference. Anthony Farrington, Bengkulu: An Anglo-Chinese Partnership, in H. V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby, eds., The Worlds of the East India Company (London, 2003), 111117; Alan Hareld, Bencoolen: A History of the Honourable East India Companys Garrison on the West Coast of Sumatra, 16851825 (Bartonon-Sea, 1995), 65. 27 John Bastin, The British in West Sumatra, 16851835 (Kuala Lumpur, 1965); Taylor, The Social World of Batavia. 28 See Bastin, The British in West Sumatra, xixxiii, 165; F. C. Danvers, The English Connection with Sumatra, Asiatic Quarterly Review 1 (1886): 410 431, here 420. For Collet, see British Library, Oriental and India Ofce Collections [hereafter IOR], European Manuscripts [hereafter MS EUR] D1153/15; Joseph Collet, The Private Letter Books of Joseph Collet, ed. H. H. Dodwell (London, 1933). Collets domain consisted of some three hundred miles, six or seven garrisons, the fort and its slave village, the Malay town of six or seven hundred houses, two outstations, and approximately 100 civilian Europeans, of whom 36 were in Company service and 189 were Company slaves. Estimates from IOR,
24 25
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Collet exceeded all expectations but his own in his ability to reform, enlarge, and improve British prospects in the archipelago. He quickly discerned that it was various forms of inefciency and immoralitytwinned signs in his mind of a failure of selfgovernment in both senses of the termthat were the source of local discontents. The native Malay and Rejang peoples had been injuriously treated by EIC servants and were consequently disinclined to improve their pepper plantations, while the English Council members, whom he described as profoundly ignorant, cross and obstinate, were lost in vice and petty conicts. So he promptly took administration out of their hands and focused on three things. First, to improve pepper production and better compete with the Dutch, he offered rewards to fractious rajas who improved the estates of their subjects, and he agreed to arbitrate their internecine disputes. Second, he made a plan to abandon cramped York Fort, built in swampland by the sea, and build a larger, stronger fort a few miles away on higher and healthier ground, with accommodations for all the Company employees, so that he could keep a closer eye on the conduct of his subordinates. This he named Fort Marlborough, after the great Whig general, a name which I endeavor to perpetuate in India because it seems to be forgot in England, thus establishing the irrefutably Whig and English credentials of his mission and, by proxy, those of his charges.29 Third, Collet vigorously campaigned to reform and regulate the sexual and gender as well as agricultural and political practices of local people, targeting men and women, Indonesian, European, and Eurasian, for improvement. Unlike his predecessors, or the Dutch at Batavia, Collet refused to condone the deployments of alliance of European men with Indonesian women, no matter how useful they were in ingratiating traders into local social and economic networks.30 Just as drinking and women caused EIC factors and writers to degenerate in the west coast littorals, so Malay men were addicted to Women, Collet asserted, and thus prevented from making progress toward civility and self-restraint. Yet he admitted to nding local women unlikely intoxicants. As he wrote to his sister-in-law in London, local women were both amorous and oppressed by their men; they were destitute of all those Charms wch attract the eye or engage the mind, their Complexions betwixt Copper and black; their features strong and Masculine and their ideas but one degree removd from their four leggd Sisters. Local white women, wives of the soldiers and councilors, had the education of your woodmans daughters in Oxfordshire.31 Collets display of connoisseurship of women and his apprehension of Malays as a population with distinctive manners were meant to signal a larger masculine competency in governance and authority extending from Sumatra to London. Living in a ramshackle British fort far across the world, Collet nonetheless managed the lives of his four teenage daughters back in England, prohibiting them from marrying idle aristocrats, Quality or Bigots, as he put it, and sending them black slaves (probably Malagasies) as presents. From among the young men in his charge in Benkulen,
G/35/7, February 28 and October 16, 1712; and G/35/8, fol. 116; A List of the Companys Civil Servants, at Their Settlements in the East-Indies, the Island St. Helena, and China (London, n.d., [1723]); and Hareld, Bencoolen, 5055. It does not include the Bugis but does include Topaz soldiers. 29 IOR, MS EUR D1153/2, fol. 130. 30 Taylor, The Social World of Batavia, 7172. 31 IOR, MS EUR D1153/2, fol. 170.
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Fort Marlborough. Detail from East India Isles, drawn and engraved by T. Clerk for John Thomson, A New General Atlas: Consisting of a Series of Geographical Designs, on Various Projections, Exhibiting the Form and Component Parts of the Globe (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1817). David Rumsey Map Collection.
factors and ofcers, he arranged an engagement for his eldest daughter (pledged by the exchange of miniature portraits and a chunk of the soon-to-be-deceaseds East Indian fortune), and legacies for the three remaining from similarly unlucky Company servants. His paternal management thus insinuated slavery into English structures of social advancement as it redened structures of kinship alliance to determine status and privilege across three oceans. From Fort Marlborough he involved himself in metropolitan theological disputes and local Christianizing efforts, conveyed his natural history ndings to the Royal Society, and sent Richard Steele of The Spectator a sketch he had written about a conversation between a Brahmin and an Eng-
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lishman.32 This man of Sense and Honour clearly had no intention of letting the grass grow under his feet, involving himself in projects that aimed to reform the conduct of everyone in his charge, from London to its putative suburb of southwestern Sumatra. Collet saw the task before him as one of establishing good governance, from which all other forms of order would spring. Because he was an East India Company servant, his idea of subjectship, whether natural or acquired, clearly derived from established English models that analogized the polity and the family, with the father as the primary authority. As he put it, in reviewing his success by 1714,
Their Kings and Princes obey my commands with as great readiness as if I were their Natural Sovereign, so that without assuming the title I am really an Absolute Prince with respect to the Malays. The Buggese [sic] and Chinese who live here are Properly subjects to the Company and consequently under my immediate Government. And as for the English we make up one great Family of which I am the head and common Father, to whom all pay the Reverence, Respect and Obedience of Children. All this together renders my Government very easy; the Publick Affairs prosper abundantly, and my private Affairs are also in a Flourishing condition.33
Hence his self-proclaimed status as natural sovereign was calibrated according to the sensibilities of his charges: he was an absolute prince to the Malays (an attribution that incorporated European fantasies of Oriental despotism); an imperial overlord to the proper subjects of the Bugis and Chinese, pseudo-feudal tenants toiling for the East India Company; and a paterfamilias to the English in Company service (which included European and Eurasian men and their kin), an ersatz national community among whom he administered peace and order. As the physical representative of the Crown and its surrogate, the East India Company, Collet proclaimed his local status as natural sovereign in more performative ways, via public spectacles and rituals that bespoke a particular moral order: his perambulations were attended by a horse guard and footmen with blunderbusses, the Union ag carried before him, and Bugis soldiers bringing up the rear.34 Such theater attempted to express and manage the relations between heterogeneous bodies, economies, and military power under the sign of British authority. Yet compared to previous and future governors, he lived modestly, with few servants and no personal guard. A careful merchant and accountant, he kept censuses of EIC civilian personnel, slaves, and private traders, as well as muster rolls for the military garrison, and quarterly bills of marriage, birth, and mortality, through which he carefully distinguished British and othersChinese, Bugis, Topaz, and Europeanliving in his jurisdiction.35 He also conspicuously remedied the egregiously exploitative trading practices of his predecessors, adhering to strict models of fair if energetic trading.
32 IOR, MS EUR D1153/3, fol. 11 (Convocation); 1153/2, fols. 98 (slaves), 106107 (legacies), 119 120 (Steele); The Private Letter Books of Joseph Collet, 1718, 126127 (Royal Society). 33 The Private Letter Books of Joseph Collet, 7879, Joseph Collet to Samuel Collet, March 1, 1713/14. 34 Bastin, The British in West Sumatra, 43 44. Such performances were central to British demonstrations of sovereignty and authority in East India Company domains from the earliest periods; see Aparna Balachandran, Of Corporations and Caste Heads: Urban Rule in Company Madras, 1640 1720, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 9, no. 2 (Fall 2008), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history/v009/9.2.balachandran.html; Stern, The Company-State, 2930, 9394. 35 IOR, G/35/7, February 2 and October 16, 1712; G/35/8 bills of mortality, 17131730, unfoliated;
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Through such appropriate governance of self and others, Collet was soon able to discharge his debts and begin accumulating a fortune that, buoyed by the prots from his later preferment to the governorship of Fort St. George, at Madras (17161720), ultimately allowed him to retire to Hertfordshire in considerable style. Collet used his dominion as governor of the East India fort to perform statemaking functions that extended the rights and privileges of Englishmen beyond those he could claim, as a Baptist, within England. For example, as was customary in East India Company territories, he tolerated religious diversity as he embraced a public life from which he was excluded at home.36 His political domain was equally capacious; he treated with native chiefs, extended trade up the coast, and bestowed liberty upon especially meritorious Company slaves.37 His interest in regulating the sexual mores and manners of his various charges in Sumatra was intimately linked to these national and spiritual commitments. Collets zeal for good governance engaged not only with the larger civilizing impulses of early modern British imperialism, but also with metropolitan reform campaigns such as the Society for the Reformation of Manners, which targeted lechery, drunkenness, fornication, and Sabbath-breaking.38 Again, the imperative to regulate and reform worked symbiotically through self and other, reshaping individual and collective intimate practices and household organization. No less than three [Malay rulers] made separate Offers of Wives or Daughters to attend me, Collet wrote to his brother Samuel. I have always given a Serious reply that the Christian Religion does not allow such practices.39 Like the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, founded in 1701, which similarly strove to intertwine religious and social reform, and indeed like Protestant dissenters elsewhere in the empire, Collet enacted a version of patriarchy that made family constitution and sexual practice both models and instruments of political authority, social order, and indigenous reclamation.40 In contrast to his preG/35/8, Sumatra dispatches, 17111737n. unfoliated, February 27, 1712. Collet kept up a copious barrage of letters to the Court of Directors during his tenure. 36 See, e.g., his letters to fellow dissenter Rev. Nathaniel Hodges in London, who had been silenced from preaching by the Schism Act: The Private Letter Books of Joseph Collet, xxiii, 22, 37. For the religious motivation of much early colonizing in India, see Frank Penny, The Church in Madras: Being the History of the Ecclesiastical and Missionary Action of the East India Company in the Presidency of Madras in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1904), 292; Glenn J. Ames, The Role of Religion in the Transfer and Rise of Bombay, c. 16611687, Historical Journal 46, no. 2 (June 2003): 317340. 37 The Private Letter Books of Joseph Collet , 22, 37. Collets understanding and mediation of slavery as a temporary condition alleviated in the here (if deserving) and hereafter is discussed at length in my longer study. 38 The devotion to the duty of rebuking was held to be particularly important for masters and parents, as models and instruments of rule. Alan Hunt, Governing Morals: A Social History of Moral Regulation (Cambridge, 1999), 46; quotation from Rev. John Howe, A Sermon Preachd before the Societies for the Reformation of Manners at Salters Hall, Feb. 14, 1698 (London, 1698), 35. David Hayton, Moral Reform and Country Politics in the Late Seventeenth-Century House of Commons, Past and Present, no. 128 (August 1990): 4891; T. C. Curtis and W. A. Speck, The Societies for the Reformation of Manners: A Case Study in the Theory and Practice of Moral Reform, Literature and History 3 (1976): 4564; for sexual regulation, see Randolph Trumbach, Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (Chicago, 1998), 9194; for the empire-wide nature of such efforts, see Paul Hair, ed., Before the Bawdy Court: Selections from Church Court and Other Records Relating to the Correction of Moral Offences in England, Scotland and New England, 13001800 (London, 1972). 39 To avoid the implication of irregularity, he also required that his housekeeper return to her own quarters in the town. IOR, European Private MS D1153/5, vol. 2, fol. 127, August 23, 1714. 40 Such as Plymouth Colony, where well-ordered families and individual and collective morality were
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decessors, who had made the name of English odious to the Mallays, Collet claimed to have instilled faith in English fairness and equity, among indigenes and English alike. Tho I have the love of the Natives, I think am rather feard by the English . . . No man dares be profane, obscene or intemperate before me and for the rest I carry it with chearfullness and freedom.41 Collet, then, engaged in the project of nation-making and nation-marking through techniques of administration in which he made himself both subject and object. His state-making practices were presciently invested in both the intersection and the regulation of population, sexual relations, and commercial interests, moving between the familiar and the abstractedly collective in order to pursue appropriate kinds of exchanges. Sent to establish protability in an imperial margin, Collet spent a surprising amount of his public and private time counting and categorizing bodies, imposing familial protocols, and amending wider sets of relations (political and sexual) in order to secure the circulations that produced a satisfying social environment and greater agricultural yields of pepper, inventing familial alliances across space, and managing sexual and political alliances in everyday time. His perceptions and goals showed the stakes, in his case personal, political, and spiritual, involved in crafting a recognizable, if hybrid, English gender order that demarcated the boundaries of rule, maximized collective and individual forces, and made the various subjects under his purview legible to administration.42 His solution to ethnic heterogeneity and multiplicity, in other words, of space and placeand here Collet differed dramatically from EIC governors of the 1770s and 1780swas to hold everyone equally accountable to the protocols of English patriarchal governance, his primary tool of performative state-making and rule.43 That Collet had a notable lack of long-term success in reshaping local familial and authority structures should not obscure the energy he put in or the techniques he utilized to bring order to a distracted outpost, where he was celebrated as the most effective of Fort Marlborough governors until the Rafes administration of 1818 1824. Signicantly, his success in incorporating heterogeneous ethnicities into a hybridized English family secured by the authority of the Company and Crown encouraged later population experiments on the west coast of Sumatra, including a plan in 1770 to import German Protestant families to anchor sugar, arrack, and cotton plantations, and ensured their revision through the incorporation of newly racialized ideas of who could perform as proper British subjects.44 Nonetheless, during his
deemed paramount to good government. See John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2000); Carol Shammas, Anglo-American Household Government in Comparative Perspective, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 52 (January 1995): 104 144; Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs. For the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, see Frank Klingberg, British Humanitarianism at Codrington, Journal of Negro History 23, no. 4 (1938): 451 486. 41 IOR, E/3/98, fol. 119; The Private Letter Books of Joseph Collet, 31, 43. 42 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 24 25. 43 For the later period, see Clement Hawes, Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 17731833 (London, 1996); Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India. 44 After Collets departure, the return of the allegedly tyrannical and self-indulgent governance resulted in the 1719 revolt of local people, who red the fort and forced the British to take refuge in ships in the sea, not to return until 1723. See Hamilton, New Account, 2: 183. For German Protestants, see Bastin, The British in West Sumatra, 7379.
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lifetime, Collets zeal for the exercise of what Foucault has called pastoral power remained undaunted, and after his ve years spent as governor of Fort St. George, he returned to England to continue the project of generall reformation in his Hertfordshire villageand (by proxy) in the English factory at Smyrnathus completing one more entangled circuit in nation and empires synergistic travels.45
ST. HELENA AND FORT MARLBOROUGH WERE intimately linked, by sea routes, kinship ties, and EIC ambition. St. Helena sent vegetables, soldiers, planters, felons, and Malagasy slaves to Sumatra, and took, in return, West African and Mauritanian slaves, spices, and, in the 1810s, Chinese laborers. They also shared a mentality of governance.46 Held by royal charter granted to the EIC in 1659 (though claimed by the Company a decade earlier), the tiny African island bore the burden of an array of fantasies and hopes: of its earliest settlers, that it could be turned into an earthly paradise, a utopia of democracy and amity; and of the EIC directors, that it could become a South Atlantic Barbados, reaping high prots and relatively quiescent slaves from valley plantations of indigo, coffee, and sugar.47 Neither would come to pass. Instead, the island became a supply station and a hedonistic oasis for homeward-bound Company ships coming around the Cape of Good Hope, its slaves brought from Madagascar, Malabar, West Africa, and the Caribbean to raise yams (cocos in local parlance), plantains, bananas, and English cattle, sheep, and vegetables. The resultant rapid deforestation brought ecological devastation to the island, attracting the attention of nascent environmentalists such as Sir Joseph Banks.48 If the ora and fauna were a combination of indigenous, East and West Indian, African and English elements, St. Helenas white inhabitants were resolutely EnglishEnglish to a man, as Joseph Banks noted in 1771. All the people of the island speak English, dress after the English mode, and are generally of a tall slender shape, but somewhat tanned, another traveler explained, belying, no doubt, the racial crossings out of which such island societies were invariably made. Yet what is equally signicant is that the population identied as English. As the same observer put it, They always speak of England as their home, and most of them . . . expressed a strong inclination to see it.49 Most were in fact descendants of the colonists who
45 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 127130; The Private Letter Books of Joseph Collet, 196, 209; IOR, MS EUR D1153/3, fol. 56. 46 For the EIC project of governance, see Stern, The Company-State, 1960. 47 For St. Helena, see IOR, G/32/1155; T. H. Brooke, A History of the Island of St. Helena, from Its Discovery by the Portuguese to the Year 1806 (London, 1808); and British Library, Additional Manuscripts [hereafter Add. MSS] 2023920240. For early St. Helena, see Stephen Royle, The Companys Island: St. Helena, Company Colonies and the Colonial Endeavour (London, 2007). For the democratic propensities of early settlers, see IOR, E/3/90, fols. 272v274v, May 6, 1685; and E/3/96, fols. 195196, May 5, 1708. 48 See Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 16001860 (Cambridge, 1999), chap. 6. For a critique of Groves island environmentalism, see Gregory A. Barton, Empire, Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge, 2002). 49 J. C. Beaglehole, ed., The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 17681771, 2 vols. (London, 1962), 2: 264; Charles Frederick Noble, A Voyage to the East Indies in 1747 and 1748: Containing an Account of the Islands of St. Helena and Java, of the City of Batavia, of the Government and Political Conduct of
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St. Helena. Detail from Emanuel Bowen, Particular Draughts of Some of the Chief African Islands in the Mediterranean, as Also in the Atlantic and Ethiopic Oceans (London: William Innys et al., 1747). David Rumsey Map Collection.
had been sent from England since 1673, when the Company began concerted efforts to populate the island (after twice briey losing it to and retaking it from the Dutch). London placards and notices advertised St. Helena as an earthly paradise of free land and friendship for Protestant English men and women. As in Virginia, a vigilantly calibrated set of regulations bestowed property and privilege on male emigre s: every unmarried Englishman was to have ten acres of land and one cow, ten acres more and another cow if he married a planters daughter, or an English woman, and additional allotments for marrying planters widows and widows with children. Women functioned as both producers and commodities in this scheme, with their reproductive value incorporated along with crop yields, pasturage, and other improvements into the terms of freehold tenure. Here as elsewhere, the family, with the father as the head, was to be the main instrument of cultural and agricultural reclamation.50
the Dutch, of the Empire of China, with a Particular Description of Canton, and of the Religious Ceremonies, Manners and Customs of the Inhabitants (London, 1762), 16, 36. 50 David R. Ransome, Wives For Virginia, 1621, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 48, no. 1 (1991): 318; Margaret E. Wilber, The East India Company and the British Empire in the Far East (Stanford, Calif., 1945), 196; Court of Committee, August 26, 1674, in Ethel Bruce Sainsbury, A Calendar of
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The Englishness of the island was also displayed in the ungovernable nature of its inhabitants. They were a Race of People who were of a leveling and ungrateful disposition, one ofcial reported back to his directors, evoking the islands Cromwellian origins and continuing democraticall sensibilities.51 From the mutiny of 1683 that resulted in the murder of the governor, to the sedition and riots of the next century, the islanders maintained a penchant for resistance and disorder, expressed in the pride, contention and division about their civil interests and rights that made them unwilling to submit to Company authority or, it seemed, to govern themselves.52 The EIC was convinced that its charter from the Crown gave it all the Power and Authority of Government in all cases relating to the island, that is, of a surrogate state: to constitute the Laws, to impose Pains, Punishments and Penaltys, and to Correct, Govern and Rule all and Every subject on the island through the establishment of courts administered by the resident governor and four councilmen.53 On more than one occasion, the directors in London had to remind local ofcials that they were Intrusted by His Majesty with the Exercise of the Sovereign Power . . . Legislative as Executive, and that their orders were to be regarded by all the Inhabitants of that Island . . . as good Laws as Magna Charta is to England.54 These strictures were visualized through the Companys traditional pageantry of power: the governor and council would parade to church, lodge, and castle, as the EICs seaside fortress was called, accompanied by uniformed soldiers and slaves blaring trumpets, pounding drums, and carrying ags emblazoned with the East India Company insignia. The Court of Directors attempts to enforce prohibitions and royal proclamations against vice and immorality were similarly public: swearing, Taking the Name of God in Vaine, Intemperance, Fornication and uncleanness, Sabbath-breaking, and Scandalous women who went aboard ships were punished
the Court Minutes, Etc., of the East India Company, 1674 1676 (Oxford, 1935), 272273; Jamestown, St. Helena Archives [hereafter SHA], EIC 1, fol. 61; IOR, E/3/89, fol. 123, March 24, 1680; IOR, G/32/165, Governor Robert Brookes Account of St. Helena. A number of Huguenot refugees from France were brought to St. Helena in 1689, one of whom, John Poirot, became governor. J. Ovington, Voyage to Surat in the Year 1689, ed. H. G. Rawlinson (Oxford, 1929), 57. Catholics were prohibited from emigrating to the island. 51 IOR, G/32/165, fol. 5, Brookes Account of St. Helena, 1792. See also SHA, EIC 3/7072, December 29, 1688, where one planter was prosecuted for having told another that neither you nor your popish King shall keep me in awe. Clearly the history of the revolutionary Atlantic needs to be extended to St. Helena. For the reputation of the English as ungovernable, see John Brewer and John Styles, eds., An Ungovernable People: The English and Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New Brunswick, N.J., 1983). 52 For the late-seventeenth-century disorders, see Royle, The Companys Island, 103126; quotation from Noble, A Voyage to the East Indies, 30. 53 IOR, E/32/1, fol. 3. Until 1754, governors came from London or were transferred from India and were usually military ofcers, although a few of the richest planters also fell into the job; councilors were appointed by the governor from a similar pool. Conversely, Company possession also created English subjects: all persons Borne upon the said Island were declared to be free Denizens and Naturall Subjects of England in the Charter of Charles II, a provision used in 1992 by Saints, as the island residents are now known, to sue the British government in the European Court of Human Rights over the provisions of the 1982 Immigration Act that denied them British citizenship. The court decided in the Saints favor. 54 This order was issued in 1687 after news of the 1684 planters sedition, but it was reissued in 1708 and 1717. IOR, G/32/1, fols. 12, 47 48, 7882; Add. MS 20240, fol. 1, August 3, 1687; fol. 3, May 5, 1708; fol. 5, March 21, 1717.
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with whippings and stocks in the square before the chapel.55 Here as elsewhere, obedience to legally constituted authority, self-governance, and properly ordered families were the targets of Company rule. Yet the regulations of a distant Court of Directors proved to be ineffective in reining in the intractable inhabitants. The pravity of their manners compares them with the rankest Soil, productive of nothing but noxious Herbs, untractable to all the Arts of Husbandry or Improvement, one visitor to the island presciently observed in 1683, linking the manners of the people and their environmental depredations.56 The local love of pleasure, which extended from music, dancing, and theater to drinking, whoring, and ghting, became famous among voyagers of all descriptions. One remarked on the abundance of young ladies looking for husbands, a surplus that resulted in girls ship[ing] themselves every year for India, to try a foreign market.57 Council and quarter sessions records are accordingly lled with the grievances of planters and traders, both men and women, whose liberties and properties were infringed upon by neighbors or whose dependents and slaves were debauched by other slaves, dissolute itinerants, or the sailors and soldiers who crowded into the punch houses of Jamestown. A signicant number of the court cases were concerned with morality and illicit sexuality of some sort: adultery, polygamy, incest, child rape, illegitimacy, prostitution, breach of promise, defamation of character, and sodomy; and the plaintiffs included planters, soldiers, merchants, widows, sisters, wives, and slaves. Neither were the EIC ofcials sent from England immune: a deputy governor was dismissed for immoral conduct in 1706, as were at least two clergymen in 1700 and 1748.58 Faced with such disorder and incontinence, the councilors twinned good governance with patriarchy. In their rulings, they supported the privileges and authority of male heads of household as they attempted to rein in female inuence: on an island with a signicant proportion of woman-headed households, the Council ordered widows and single women to be supervised or overseen by male relatives or councilmen.59 They made examples of other transgressors in public stocks or whipping posts, and forced repeat offenders off the island. They also established a pattern of paternal care for protection of children and servants as well as the poor, inrm, or orphaned, adjudicating lineage and inheritance, protecting minors from avaricious guardians, and even sending home aged slaves who asked to be returned to
55 For moral regulations, see IOR, G/32/1, fols. 610, 2326, 39 40; SHA, EIC 44/142144. For other examples of Protestant moralism in the empire in this period, see Arthur H. Williamson, An Empire to End Empire: The Dynamic of Early Modern British Expansion, Huntington Library Quarterly 68, no. 12 (March 2005): 227256. 56 Ovington, Voyage to Surat in the Year 1689, 63. 57 IOR, MS EUR D1085, Letters of Alexander Hall, March 26, 1751; see also Alfred Spencer, ed., Memoirs of William Hickey, 10th ed., 4 vols. (London, 1948), 1: 240. 58 The population in 1722 was 924, just under half of whom were slaves; by 1770 there were 978 whites and 1,738 blacks. For sexual transgressions, see SHA, EIC 1/6, fol. 239; IOR, G/32/120, unfoliated; G/32/10, fol. 211; G/32/18, fols. 225241v; G/32/17, fols. 323v324; G/32/128, fols. 27102712; G/32/118, November 24, 1724; Ovington, Voyage to Surat in the Year 1689, 57; EIC ofcials: IOR, G/32/3, March 12, 1706; clergymen: SHA, EIC 1/5, July 1700; Noble, A Voyage to the East Indies, 3233. 59 See, e.g., the case of Mrs. Coulson, who was made an example of for refusing to adhere to the Councils environmental directives. IOR, G/32/119, fol. 52. The disproportionate ratio of women to men was a source of ofcial and unofcial concern on the island.
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Madagascar or Malabar.60 The array of transgressions and legal and extra-legal remedies testied to the need for a continuous delineation of the boundaries of civil and domestic spheres and for vigilant enforcement of prescribed cultural norms. The condition of slaves provided another case in point. Their cruel treatment shocked observers, even those familiar with slavery elsewhere in the empire. An overseer brought over from the Codrington Plantation in Barbados had also imported the Barbadian slave code, and its police measures were intensied to prevent slaves from becoming formidable and Dangerous to the Inhabitants.61 Flogging, branding, amputation, castration, and execution were the escalating punishments for a range of offenses, from insolence to striking a white person and murder.62 Slaves retaliated with plots, poisonings, obeah, suicide, and, when possible, desertion onto visiting ships.63 But the planters, men and women, all too often exceeded even these harsh sanctions. The Court of Directors early order that all slaves be baptized and educated in the basic tenets of Christianity was studiously ignored, as was the corollary that after seven years such conversion would transform them into free planters, [who] injoy the privileges of other planters, both of land and cattle.64 [The] want of Education, a conned Situation, and the Misfortune of being connected with slavery renders it difcult for them [i.e., the white settlers] to become blessed with a liberality or humanity of Disposition, one writer diplomatically explained.65 What Banks described as their wanton cruelty prompted Governor Robert Brooke to produce an ameliorated slave code in 1786, ultimately endorsed by the Court of Directors in 1792, that among other improvements gave slaves the right to give evidence against whites, prohibited cohabitation without legal marriage, and abolished the slave trade to the island; signicantly, several of the codes articles were specically devoted to stamping out rape, forced prostitution, and other sexual abuse of enslaved women and children.66 As with the amelioration of slavery and the enforcement of civilized standards of behavior, it also fell to local colonial authorities to craft some agricultural and ecological order on the island. For example, with the prospect of sugar plantations dead by 1690, the Court of Directors ordered that the Great Woods be enclosed and preserved for Company use and that vineyards, indigo, and coffee farms be established on a commercial basis. The scarcity of wood and the English preferences of the planters resulted instead in the establishment of common lands and some scattered indigo and coffee farms.67 Local governors meanwhile turned their attention to shaping policies that could actually reverse deforestation and other blights. Governor John Roberts (17081712), decrying the ofcial blindness of the Court to soil
60 SHA, EIC 1/1/372385, and in each vol. subsequently; IOR, G/32/10, G/32/119, fol. 210; SHA, Minutes of the Widows and Orphans Fund, 17661837, vol. 1. 61 Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson A302, May 24, 1683. 62 IOR, E/32/1/3536, 49. 63 SHA, EIC 1/6669; EIC 3/139142; EIC 4/64 66, 236237. 64 IOR, E/3/88, fol. 44v, December 19, 1673. 65 IOR, G/32/165, fol. 17. 66 Banks, The Endeavour Journal, 2: 267. Brooke, A History of the Island of St. Helena, gives the old and new slave codes, 355363, 378 408. Because of resistance by planters, abolition was not achieved until 1816 (children) and 1831 (adults). See SHA, EIC 8/15, Committee of Subscribers for Encouraging Deserving Slaves, 18021816. 67 Grove, Green Imperialism, 106107; Hudson Ralph Janisch, ed., Extracts from the St. Helena Records (Jamestown, 1908), 17, 57, 42.
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erosion and deforestation, imposed a tree-planting program on landowners and tried to install a range of restorative measures, which included eradication of destructive goat herds and irrigation to reclaim wastelands. Clocking the links between environmental deterioration and the degradation of the populace, Roberts also issued a series of ordinances that aimed to reduce arrack drinking, control licentiousness, prevent clandestine marriages, raise the age of consent, and institute punishments of ducking and whipping upon all idle, gossiping women, [who] make it their business to go from house to house, about the island, inventing and spreading false and scandalous reports . . . to the utter extinguishing of all friendship, amity and good neighbourhood.68 Yet this respite from business as usual was brief: by 1715, the island had returned to a very bad and deplorable condition, and proposals were oated for moving the entire population to Mauritius. The same thing we have alleged for the decay of trees has in great measure contributed towards diseasing the body, the Council complained again in 1717. A pestilent sulphourous air comes down the valleys which divers have got sudden sicknesses . . . Ripon Wills and Mrs. Coles have each lost an eye.69 Clearly, as at York Fort, constructing an English society from the ground up was no easy task, even on a previously uninhabited island. The introduction of English common law in 1754, which restricted the power of the governor and the council and referred all disputes to juries or arbitration, encouraged greater cooperation from the residents, who nonetheless remained devoted to protecting their status and rights as British subjects under the Crown rather than as Company subjects.70 The environmental improvements on the island were similarly made in spite of rather than in accordance with London directives, including the St. Helena Forest Act of 1731, passed by Governor Pyke, an ordinance that stands as one of the earliest examples of colonial conservation legislation.71 St. Helena thus provides a crystalline example of the kind of social and cultural engineering and instrumentalization of family life that local governors were forced to incorporate into their techniques of administrationtechniques crafted on an island periphery and ultimately inuencing policy from the center.72 The population and familial strategies that governors were impelled to adopt suggest how the exigencies of rule in a distracted outpost could anticipate or reinforce the policing of sexuality in modern Europe.73 Disordered families, degraded forms of Englishness, agricultural mismanagement and ecological crisis, loose women and licentiousness,
68 For the articles and the inhabitants response, see Brooke, A History of the Island of St. Helena, 371378, 150176. As Brooke makes clear, riding the rails, ducking, and the pillory were common punishments for social infractions up to the 1780s. See also IOR, G/32/165, Governor Brookes History of St. Helena, fols. 1618. 69 Brooke, A History of the Island of St. Helena, 149; Janisch, Extracts from the St. Helena Records, 135136. Some future governors did follow Robertss lead in trying to regulate local activities that impacted the environment, including Capt. Robert Jenkins (17401742) of the War of Jenkinss Ear fame, who established a hospital in 1742. 70 The inhabitants also revealed a greater willingness to regulate themselves, as evidenced by various local associations targeting social improvement, among them the Planters Society (1780), the Widow and Orphans Society (1765), and the Society for Encouraging Deserving Slaves (18101816). See SHA, EIC 8/15 (Planters and Slaves), and SHA, Minutes of the Widows and Orphans Fund, vol. 1. 71 Grove, Green Imperialism, 120121. 72 Indeed, the Court of Directors took seventy-ve years, and additional evidence from Mauritius, St. Vincent, and India, before it endorsed conservation measures in St. Helena. 73 Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 42.
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and abused slaves: all earned St. Helena international notoriety. But they also galvanized colonists and colonial ofcials in a variety of capacities into action, stimulating the formulation of a range of regulations and experiments, demographic, commercial, and agricultural, designed to avert social and environmental catastrophe.74 This was a prescient moment of a locally mobilized biopower that sought simultaneously to discipline bodies and globally regulate social and ecological health. And as Banks would note later in the century, it eventually proved to have some success.
JAMAICA, A CROWN COLONY OPERATING with intermittent and casual oversight from the metropolitan government, offered a differently calibrated eld of population problems. Since Cromwell had rst wrested the island away from the Spanish in 1655, the colony had been known as a notorious marchland of Britishness, where the categories of national belonging remained unsettled. Its earliest white inhabitants hailed from Barbados, Surinam, and the Windward Islands as well as the British Isles, and even included some Romany-speaking gypsies. The native Taino had mostly vanished by 1700, and slaves, predominantly imported Africans, began their disproportionate climb to the point at which they outnumbered whites by at least ten to one at midcentury, and by as much as twenty-ve to one in some locales. Population, its categorization, increase, and management, was from the start a critical social and political issue, in tandem and sometimes in tension with the concomitant need to substantiate and protect social hierarchies of entitlement and abjection. Yet ofcial and unofcial efforts to conduct the conduct of local residents generated a range of competing counter-conducts that regulation failed to control. The demographic crisis of this Constant Mine, whence Britain draws prodigious riches, as Charles Leslie described Jamaica, has been well documented. The white population failed to grow between 1680 and 1756, undermined by tropical diseases, the shift to large-scale sugar monoculture, and the First Maroon War (17291739). The black enslaved population, the largest and most rebellious in the British West Indies, was also notorious for being unable to reproduce naturally. It is claimed that this demographic failure retarded the development of the kind of settler institutions and culture established in continental plantation colonies, and sealed the islands reputation as a vortex of social disorder and rebellion.75 But failure, like beauty, may lie largely in the eye of the beholder; rather than a failed settler society, it was possible to see Jamaica as a unique constellation of black culture and white domination that shared many sensibilities with the English metropole. White immigration to the island was impressive, with around 125,000 English and Europeans moving there before the American Revolution. Their minority status (they constituted 6.1 percent of the population in 1774) had the effect of intensifying both residents links to the mother country and their staunch insistence on the pro74 St. Helena thus provided an early model of the dynamics of island populations, extinction, and endemism; Grove, Green Imperialism, 342360. 75 Charles Leslie, A New History of Jamaica: From the Earliest Accounts, to the Taking of Porto Bello by Vice-Admiral Vernon (London, 1740), 12; Trevor Burnard, A Failed Settler Society: Marriage and Demographic Failure in Early Jamaica, Journal of Social History 28, no. 1 (Autumn 1994): 6382, quotation from 65.
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Jamaica. Detail from Henry Popple, A Map of the British Empire in America with the French and Spanish Settlements Adjacent Thereto (London: Willm. Henry Toms & R.W. Seale, 1733). David Rumsey Map Collection.
tection of their British liberties, properties, and independence against the imperial parliament, a contest that increased as residents became more vocal in claiming their right to dene their own identity as British subjects of the empire.76 The majority population of black Jamaicans meanwhile imposed their own syncretic lifeways on the island in a semi-autonomous existence, and thus carried the bulk of creole culture and consciousness, the self-proclaimed Britishness of which seems to elude most historians attention.77 White dominance on the island was uneasily maintained through theatrical performances of privilege and terror. The conspicuous consumption, grandiose hospitality, and notorious brutality of Jamaican planters, who included some of the richest inhabitants of British America, were integral to the performance of power that enacted the distinctions of rank, caste, and class on the island. The Master of Families in Jamaica, Planters and Merchants, live with as much Pomp and Pleasure as any Gentlemen in the world, John Oldmixon reported. They keep their Coaches and six Horses, have their Train of Servants in Liveries running before and behind them, and for Magnicance and Luxury they have always got the start of the other Colonies. The spectacular cruelty of slave punishments was the other side of the coin
76 Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the AngloJamaican World (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004), 16; Wells, The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776, 196. 77 See Kathleen Wilson, The Performance of Freedom: Maroons and the Colonial Order in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica and the Atlantic Sound, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 66, no. 1 (January 2009): 4586.
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of display: for relatively menial offenses, slaves could be hanged, burned, staked to the ground, or dismembered. These theaters of terror were supplemented and reinforced by a steadily increasing military presence, celebrated in militia reviews and military spectacles in Kingston, Spanish Town, and Montego Bay.78 All were integral to the performance of rank, nationality, and entitlement upon which the plantation system depended, as the paternalism of the masters performed through grandiose hospitality and consumption was reinforced by the retaliatory terror of the whip, the stake, and the gallows. Jamaican law attempted to codify these performative distinctions of class, race, and caste, marking inhabitants on the basis of a racialized nationality: white people could claim the protections of British rights and liberties, including trial by jury; black people existed beyond the bounds of this protection; and free people of color lay in between, some having special privileges granted by private acts of assembly, but most not possessing such privileges.79 The law of 1733 that provided that no one shall be deemed a Mulatto after the Third Generation . . . but shall have all the Privileges and Immunities of His Majestys white Subjects of this Island for a time gave descendants of black-white liaisons the right to be called English, and so shore up the white population to keep the other three castes under control.80 So, too, did the metropolitan Plantation Act of 1740, which bestowed natural-born British status on foreigners domiciled in an American colony for seven years.81 But in the aftermath of Tackeys Rebellion of 1760, the most serious and long-lasting slave uprising of the century in the British West Indies, the authorities attempted to clamp down on these previous whitening efforts, the assembly passing an act in 1761 that restricted the amount of property that a planter could leave to his mulatto children, since the inheritance of signicant estates tend[s] greatly to destroy the distinction requisite, and absolutely necessary . . . between white persons, Negroes and Mullatoes. Despite the protests from planters and merchants in Kingston and Spanish Town, the law was successfully defended to the Board of Trade by Jamaican agent Lovell Stanhope, who viewed it as vital to the very existence of that Colony. The 1761 law was the rst in the Caribbean to attempt to curtail the power of people of color, anticipating legislation in St. Kitts, Barbados, and St. Domingue as well as British Bengal.82 By the 1780s, legislators could condently describe the essential
78 John Oldmixon, The British Empire in America: Containing the History of the Discovery, Settlement, Progress, and State of the British Colonies on the Continent and Islands of America, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1741), 2: 412. For the theaters of power in eighteenth-century Jamaica, see Wilson, The Island Race, 146168; Wilson, The Performance of Freedom. 79 See The National Archives [hereafter TNA], Colonial Ofce Records [hereafter CO], 137/23, fol. 63, for an example of one such act, which bestowed the same rights and Privileges with English Subjects born of white parents on various mixed-race progeny of planters. 80 Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 15501812 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968), 176; Edward Long, The History of Jamaica; or, General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of That Island, 3 vols. (London, 1774), 2: 332. The law required the subjects to be brought up in the Christian religion. 81 The act created a subordinate category of British subjects liable to various civil restrictions if they went to England, a stipulation rst formulated in the Act of Settlement of 1700. See Great Britain, Parliament, The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, 36 vols. (London, 18061820), 20 (1810): 13271345. For examples of the lists of naturalized persons that were forwarded to the metropolitan government, see CO 137/23, June 17401741. The Jewish community responded by waging a campaign for civil rights on the island in the 1750s. Wilson, The Island Race, 149. 82 John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (London, 2006);
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task of Jamaican law as, in contrast to English models, preserving a marked distinction between the white inhabitants and the people of colour and free blacks.83 Laws, however, could not eliminate the intimate practices that continually challenged and collapsed these distinctions. Although their letters home were virtually silent on the subject, almost every white man on the island had a black or mulatto mistress, and most had several illegitimate mixed-race children, practices that the colonial assembly hypocritically attempted to control through sumptuary regulations as well as the inheritance legislation. These vast households of mixed-blood families, surrogates of proper English kin, provide a model of family structure and crossblood alliance that is radically different from metropolitan models. Attorney Edward Long was fond of likening a Jamaican planter to an antient patriarch, conciliating affection by the mildness of [his] exertion, and claiming respect by the justice and propriety of [his] decisions and discipline, and indeed, in some ways, their households resembled Roman patriarchal models of a family as the collection of slaves and freed slaves attached to a married couple.84 Clearly, the exigencies of itinerancy, slavery, and colonization had forged a counter-conduct that generated distinctive social and familial forms. Not surprisingly, as Jamaica rose to imperial preeminence as a wealth-producer, and its planters proclaimed their status as full-blooded British subjects devoted to the native spirit of freedom, colonial and metropolitan observers began a rhetorical assault on their mode of making families as an ostentatious transgression of English standards of civility and rule. The exalted household position of the black or mulatto mistress; white womens use of enslaved wet nurses, whose blood may be corrupted from their own sexual freedoms; and the intimacy with which legitimate and illegitimate children of a family mixed, each attested to a miscegenated social formation that constituted a violation of all decency.85 Moreover, this local counter-conduct of white male privilege was blamed for having produced an enervated and degenerate version of Britishness and a restive population of free coloreds, who seemed poised to transform a British colony into a Spanish-style polity, dominated by a vicious, brutal and degenerate breed of mongrels. Long, like Stanhope, lamented British mens infatuated attachments to black women, advocating that instead of being gracd with a yellow offspring not their own, [they] perform the duty incumbent on every good citizen, by raising in honourable wedlock a race of unEdward Cox, Free Coloreds in the Slave Societies of St. Kitts and Grenada, 17631833 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1984); Hawes, Poor Relations. 83 Wilson, The Island Race, 148155; Acts of Assembly, Passed in the Island of Jamaica . . . 16811769, 2 vols. (Kingston, 1787), 2: 3639; CO 137/33, fol. 32, June 13, 1763; Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, vol. 12, November 25, 1830, quoting the earlier act. See also Brooke N. Newman, Gender, Sexuality and the Formation of Racial Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Caribbean World, Gender & History 22, no. 3 (November 2010): 585602. 84 Long, The History of Jamaica, 2: 271; Doris Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Durham, N.C., 2005), 127, quoting Suzanne Dixon, The Roman Family (Baltimore, 1992). The household average in St. Johns Parish in 1680 was already 20.6 persons, compared to 16.3 in Barbados in the same period, and the number continued to increase thereafter; Wells, The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776, 202, 299. 85 Long, The History of Jamaica, 2: 267; Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, 2nd ed., 4 vols. (London, 1794), 2: 22; John Singleton, A General Description of the West-Indian Islands, as Far as Relates to the British, Dutch, and Danish Governments, from Barbados to Saint Croix (Barbados, 1767), 12.
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adulterated beings.86 Here the fate of nation, colony, and empire was tied to individual sexual choice; the well-governed colony and the self-governing individual went hand in hand. As the ultimate sign of the colonists refusal to govern themselves, concubinage and mixed-race families were resoundingly condemned in the urry of recommendations, reports, and letters to the Board of Trade over the period, all of which were concerned to maximize national sensibilities, resources, and collective will on the island.87 Interestingly, the high rate of concubinage was also blamed on resident white womens insufcienciestheir vulgar manners, indolence, and early and habitual licentiousness brought on by the tropical climate and examples set by their slaves. They conspicuously failed, in other words, to perform that Englishness requisite for a socially successful colonial project.88 Marriage was considered the key technology to social reformation, but for this the men needed a pool of attractive partners. To allure men from these illicit connexions, Stanhope, Long, and estate bookkeeper J. B. Moreton each suggested techniques to render . . . women of their own complexion more agreeable companions, including better education, more modesty and economy, and segregation of white children from any of the black or tawny race. And as the famous Manning divorce case proved, white women were problematic not just as desired objects but also as desiring subjects, so that their everyday lives were monitored, surveyed, and reported on by their slaves, servants, and neighbors, as well as imperial authorities.89 The deployment of alliance and of sexuality here converged, as family formation was put to the task of managing sexuality. The enslaved were not exempted from such surveillance. Here family, real and ctive, forged through bonds of descent or experience on the slave ship, was considered a major obstacle to the creation of a tractable labor force, as Orlando Patterson pointed out some time ago.90 Natal alienation, or the reduction of complex
86 Long, The History of Jamaica, 1: 327, emphasis in the original. Stanhope referred to mixed-race people as a spurious and illegitimate breed of Mulattoes, whose very existence led to the Encouragement of fornication and Concubinage; CO 137/33, fol. 39r. See also J. B. Moreton, West India Customs and Manners: Containing Strictures on the Soil, Cultivation, Produce, Trade, Ofcers, and Inhabitants (London, 1793), 7879. 87 See, e.g., CO 137/23, fol. 99v; Add MS 22, 677, Letter of James Knight to the Duke of Newcastle, August 15, 1733; CO 137/33/34 35; Jamaica Archives, Spanish Town, Mesopotamia Conference Minute Book (Moravian), 1754, 17981812; James Grainger, An Essay on the More Common West-India Diseases: And the Remedies Which That Country Itself Produces (London, 1764); Collins, Practical Rules for the Management and Medical Treatment of Negro Slaves, in the Sugar Colonies (Edinburgh, 1783); Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, vols. 3334; Benjamin La Trobe, A Succinct View of the Missions Established among the Heathen by the Church of Brethren; or, Unitas Fratrum in a Letter to a Friend (London, 1771); Thomas Coke, A Journal of the Rev. Dr. Cokes Visit to Jamaica, and of His Third Tour on the Continent of America (London, 1789); Coke, An Account of the Rise, Progress, and Present State of the Methodist Missions (London, 1793). 88 Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, 2: 13. See also Singleton, A General Description of the West-Indian Islands. 89 Long, The History of Jamaica, 2: 330, 280; Moreton, West India Customs and Manners, 120; Trevor Burnard, A Matron in Rank, a Prostitute in Manners: The Manning Divorce of 1741 and Class, Gender, Race and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica, in Verene A. Shepherd, ed., Working Slavery, Pricing Freedom: Perspectives from the Caribbean, Africa and the African Diaspora (New York, 2006), 133152. Elizabeth Manning was accused, among other things, of having improper relations with a number of black men on her husbands estate. For the Privy Councils disallowance of the divorce, see CO 137/23, fols. 6061. 90 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 68; Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York, 2007).
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networks of social bonds to a single legal relationship over which the enslaved had no control, was not, however, easy to effect. Local ofcials tried to track the various nations of Africans who arrived on their shores, noting their several names of Akims, Fantins, Ashantees, Quamboos, etc. from the towns so called at whose markets they are bought in order to separate those with ties of kith and kin or a proclivity for rebellion.91 And despite the harsh treatment of slaves, the planters inability to control and manage them in quotidian affairs tormented authorities such as Governor Edward Trelawney. The English are the worst Managers of slaves of any people under the Sun, he complained to the Earl of Bedford. They will observe no Discipline . . . the very many wholesome Regulations enacted in this Island for the Government of Slaves, . . . as they are enforced only by due Course of Law, they are not and cannot be enforced at all, and every one in fact, does as he lists with his own Slaves.92 The result was that the enslaved had considerable freedom to engage in their forms of self-fashioning and family formation.93 The specters of anti-slavery and abolition raised the stakes on slaves intimate and ctive kin relations, making them objects of metropolitan scrutiny. English reformers who envisioned making an empire without slaves saw proper Christian marriage and the protection of its sacred duties and obligations as the rst step toward civilizing people of African descent into British subjects. Other proposals aimed at the rights of self-purchase, the establishment of rights to property and children, and the demarcation of a domestic space that slaveholders could not breach.94 Edmund Burkes Sketch of a Negro Code endorsed the enslaveds adoption of British cultural values, including the state of matrimony and the Government of Family, as the best means of tting them for the Ofces of a Freeman. Imperial oversight and virtuous exampleboth conspicuously lacking on Jamaican plantationswould allow the Crown, rather than colonial ofcials, to act as a marriage broker, providing women to enslaved men over the age of twenty-one and honoring those who fathered at least three legitimate children with a certicate attesting to their good manners, morals, and religion.95 Burkes was a robustly metropolitan perspective; in the colonies themselves, allowing slaves to make legitimate families was a concern only of reformers and missionaries.96 And pro-slavery planters had long argued that the enslaved were the
91 Long, The History of Jamaica, 2: 472; Wilson, The Performance of Freedom, 6667. The most signicant effect of such categorization was to provide enslaved and free blacks, such as the Maroons, with foundational ethnicities upon which they would build. 92 CO 137/48, fol. 196, Trelawney to the Earl of Bedford, April 14, 1750. 93 Michael Craton, Changing Patterns of Slave Families in the British West Indies, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 10, no. 1 (Summer 1979): 135; Morgan, Laboring Women; Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998). 94 Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006); Edmund Burke, Sketch of a Negro Code, in Paul Langford, ed., The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1981), 3: 577579; for similar proposals, see Essays, Commercial and Political: On the Real and Relative Interests of Imperial and Dependent States (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1777); and Barbados Museum and Historical Society, Instructions for the Management of a Plantation in Barbadoes and for the Treatment of Negroes (Barbados, 1786). 95 Brown, Moral Capital, 236237; Burke, Sketch of a Negro Code, 578, 580. 96 On St. Helena, for example, the Committee of the Subscribers for Encouraging Deserving Slaves did not include legal marriage as an avenue to self-improvement, and most planters in Jamaica resisted Christianization and legal marriage for slaves; SHA, EIC 8/15, vol. 1.
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Kings subjects in order to prove that slavery operated as a civilizing instrument that gave blacks access to the magistrate and the law, arguments that the enslaved themselves began to repeat as a remedy for mistreatment once the winds of abolitionism began to blow.97 But these currents also stimulated efforts to encourage a naturally reproducing population of slaves like those in North America. The 1770s saw the beginning of arguments for planters to adopt pronatalist policies that included reduced workloads for pregnant slaves and nancial payments for successful live births. In 1809, Jamaica and the Leewards passed legislation releasing female slaves with six children living from hard labor, and exempting their owners from having to pay taxes on them.98 Thus, a century before feminists and eugenicists advocated prenatal and maternalist policies in Europe, the contradictions of slavery had forged their invention at the colonial frontier.
IN THREE FRONTIERS OF British identity and authoritythe trading factory of Fort Marlborough, the supply station of St. Helena, and the sugar colony of Jamaica itinerant, settler, and hybrid populations engaged in everyday life at great distances from the imperial state. Despite differences in economic purpose and political structure, they shared in an economy of power that took as its object the organization of family and sexual relations as markers of national afliation and colonial authority, as rulers and governors perceived the necessity of managing quotidian practices to demarcate social, national, and racial boundaries. The examples of Sumatra, St. Helena, and Jamaica also changed over time toward more racialized ideas about nationmaking and nation-marking, as the movement back and forth between family as model and instrument of rule and population as an entity to be managed came to produce increasingly exclusionary notions of national belonging and rights. Finally, the need to rule an array of alien peoples, the interpenetration of commercial and territorial peripheries, and the mutual impact of chartered company and Crown colony governmental initiatives were evident throughout the eighteenth century, ensuring that the British Empire continued to be maritime and commercial as well as territorial and conquering into the next century. In Fort Marlborough, Joseph Collets performative and exceptionally zealous state-making, simultaneously quixotic and pragmatic and vacillating between the familial and the demographic, was able to effect signicant, if temporary, changes in how the locals did business in both the economic and social senses. St. Helena makes it clear that Collet was no anomaly; he participated in a broadly shared set of principles common to other EIC governors regarding political obligation, obedience to constituted authority, and the protocols of good governance. But St. Helenas governors were less interested than Collet in creating a hybridized English
97 Long, The History of Jamaica, 2: 246n; Granville Sharp, A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery . . . (London, 1769), 72n. 98 Barbara Bush, Hard Labor: Women, Childbirth, and Resistance in British Caribbean Slave Societies, in David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds., More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington, Ind., 1996), 198199. For a pronatalist argument, see Rev. Beilby Porteus, A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts: At their Anniversary Meeting in the Parish Church of St. Mary-le-Bow, on Friday, February 21, 1783 (London, 1783).
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family and keener to try to reduce their self-proclaimed English subjects to subordination to the Company. Faced with recalcitrant settlers determined to resist and to abuse both their slaves and the environment, the authorities of St. Helena had to exceed metropolitan directives by trying to craft a local social order that worked up from the level of family structure and sexual alliance. As regulative authority was woven into the fabric of everyday life, colonists and colonial ofcials alike were galvanized into enacting forms of biopower designed to avert social and environmental catastrophe. These two examples suggest that the East India Company was a particularly prescient actor in formulating governmental initiatives that targeted population and privileged the family as the instrument through which to regulate and rule, and through which local strategies could come to shape global designs.99 All three sites revealed the tensions of empire that invariably resulted from the clash between the ambitions of metropolitan authorities and the interests and abilities of colonial ofcials, who had to deal with counter-conducts of people, British and non-British, enslaved and free, that were aimed at a (frequently resistant) selfgovernance.100 In Jamaica, a self-governing sugar colony, a planter class very aware of the demographic stakes posed by plantation monoculture and slavery sustained their authority, in part, through concubinage and the maintenance of mixed-race families. The local economy of sex, in other words, was managed according to a broad geopolitical set of priorities (the plantation complex of the Atlantic world) in which useful, if non-marital, alliances facilitated control of mixed-race and enslaved people.101 However, in the face of a dangerous slave uprising, global war, and the islands rise to dominance as a wealth-producer, planters and merchants, in conjunction with metropolitan overseers, came to see racial mixing as a danger to polity, and championed white self-governance and properly constituted families as the best means to sustain and expand prosperity and power. Always at the forefront in engineering techniques of racialized nation-making and -marking, Jamaican planters created new racial criteria for demarcating who had the rights and privileges of Englishmen and who did not, supplemented the brutal forms of discipline they used on the enslaved with subtler biopolitical regimes, and initiated, before any other Caribbean or East Indian colony, measures designed to limit the property and power of mixed-race peoples. How applicable are these insights to other, more successful or differently congured colonial spaces? From a methodological point of view, analyzing colonial power from the outside in, to gauge its place in the general economy of power and to examine the targets on which this power chose to work, brings into view arts of governance that are elided in analyses focused solely on institutions. Demonstrating a pervasive instrumental concern with regulating family and household order, gender privilege, and sexual alliance, the governmental initiatives undertaken in each site underline the political stakes lodged in governing racially diverse and increasingly
99 Stern, The Company-State ; Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India; E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c. 18001947 (Cambridge, 2001). For EIC innovations in inoculation, environment, and health in British India, see Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India, 16001850 (Oxford, 2003). 100 Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (New Haven, Conn., 1987). 101 For the locus classicus of this discussion, see Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 5256.
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racialized colonial polities, and conjoin the political theories, ambitions, and assumptions of metropolitan states with the more tentative and specic requirements of colonies. Managing the often contradictory imperatives of population, security, and discipline also required a great deal of invention on the ground, a performative state-making focused on creating a viable body politic that made various forms of circulation, security, discipline, and prot possible. The deployment of familial and sexual alliance converging in these sites may encourage historians to look anew at the eighteenth century in tracking the relations between the emergence of biopolitics at home, in European societies, and those abroad, in their empires. A non-institutional approach to state-building has much to reveal about strategies of national or cultural reproduction in colonial environments. Governmental techniques of administration, both internal and external to the state and enacted through operations of rulediscursive, practical, and localbring into focus the multiform ways in which authority was expressed, exercised, and contested, illuminating how the colonial state was ultimately called into being, through the practices of governance, of self and other, necessary for economic extraction and colonization.102 British settlement in North America, Bengal, and New South Wales reveals remarkably similar patterns of biological and cultural miscegenation, colonial and imperial anxiety about it, and attempts to manage and ultimately eradicate both.103 Given that, in contrast to the French and Spanish colonies, family formation and national and racial marking had little institutional support and minimal metropolitan oversight, British colonies may have frequently expanded the importance of the family and the authority of the household head at the expense of civil government.104 In any event, the geographies of regulation, their meanings and their targets, can be established only through careful and contextualized study.105 The consolidation and extension of British authority, uneven and ineffective as it may have been, required gendered technologies of power that sought to intervene directly in the domestic organization and the sexual practices of its subjects. How these strategies were developed and changed in other colonies, how they operated in different European empires, and how they may modify current models of biopower and governmentality in the nineteenth century await further investigation. But it seems clear that the exigencies of Britains early modern empire had forged a version of biopolitics that bequeathed to metropolitan modernity critical issues of colonial governance and ethics. Through eighteenth-century colonial governmentality, the
102 This is also true on the frontiers of the European nations themselves: see Nicholas P. Canny, The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 30, no. 4 (October 1973): 577582; David Dickson, No Scythians Here: Women and Marriage in Seventeenth-Century Ireland, in Margaret MacCurtain and Mary ODowd, eds., Women in Early Modern Ireland (Edinburgh, 1991), 224 230; R. A. Houston, Women in the Economy and Society of Scotland 15001800, in R. A. Houston and I. D. Whyte, eds., Scottish Society, 15001800 (Cambridge, 1991), 118147; Sahlins, Unnaturally French; and Herzog, Early Modern Spanish Citizenship. 103 See especially Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India; Kathleen Wilson, Empire, Gender, and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century, in Levine, Gender and Empire, 14 45; Wilson, Re-thinking the Colonial State (manuscript in progress). 104 Shammas, Anglo-American Household Government in Comparative Perspective, 127128. 105 E.g., Richard Phillips, Heterogeneous Imperialism and the Regulation of Sexuality in British West Africa, Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, no. 3 (July 2005): 291315; Jennifer M. Spear, Colonial Intimacies: Legislating Sex in French Louisiana, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 60, no. 1 (2003): 7598.
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Kathleen Wilson
performance of state and the performance of bodies were twinned, each central to shaping a stable order on which to build and prot.
Kathleen Wilson is Professor of History and Cultural Analysis and Theory at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She writes on culture, politics, and empire in eighteenth-century Britain and its domains. She is author of the prize-winning book The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 17151785 (Cambridge University Press, 1995) and of The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (Routledge, 2003), and editor of A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 16601840 (Cambridge University Press, 2004). She is currently nishing Strolling Players of Empire: Theatre, Culture and Modernity in the English Provinces (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), which explores the politics of theatrical and social performance and colonial rule in sites that range across the Atlantic and Pacic worlds. This article is part of a larger study on state-making practices in global frontiers of the British empire.
DECEMBER 2011

Rethinking Colonial State Kathleen Wilson

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Rethinking the Colonial State: Family, Gender, and Governmentality in Eighteenth-Century British Frontiers Author(s): Kathleen Wilson Reviewed

Rethinking the Colonial State

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Rethinking the Colonial State

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Rethinking the Colonial State

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Rethinking the Colonial State

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Rethinking the Colonial State

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Rethinking the Colonial State

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

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Rethinking the Colonial State

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Rethinking the Colonial State

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Rethinking the Colonial State

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Rethinking the Colonial State

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Rethinking the Colonial State

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Rethinking the Colonial State

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Rethinking the Colonial State

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Rethinking the Colonial State

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