Race, Gender, and Empire in Oroonoko

We began an important conversation last week dealing with how to approach a text like Oroonoko with “modern” eyes, but also one that touches on how in historical context Oronooko resists some “linear” assumptions we might have about the novel as “proto-abolitionist.” While Oronooko is clearly critical of transatlantic slavery, it doesn’t ultimately reject imperialism. In fact, the narrator of Oroonoko appears to criticize transatlantic slavery not simply because of its brutality and barbarism, but, she implies, for its failure to actually carry out the so-called “civilizing mission” of English imperialism (which the text never criticizes) and for its economic inefficiency. By depicting Oroonoko as a “royal slave,” Behn doesn’t even really condemn transatlantic slavery in its totality, but rather condemns its indiscriminate reduction of such a “high born” figure as Oroonoko to an enslaved status. This links to the text’s ultimate upholding of the colonial “civilizing” mission, as the duplicity Oroonoko faces in his capture and enslavement leads him to reject Christianity.

In terms of the economics of colonialism, Behn compares the plantation system to an idealized (and inaccurate) description of English trade with the Indigenous peoples of Surinam, which is described as a existing in a state of “perfect amity” and “friendly affection” (1-2). This description not only rewrites violent settler colonialism as a “free” and “equal” relationship, but appears to criticize transatlantic slavery mainly in order to strengthen colonial domination. We will see this seeming contradiction again and again throughout our readings, in particular in the more formally abolitionist writings to come, as British advocates for ending the slave trade and/or enslavement were often, like Behn, not explicitly anti-racist or anti-imperialist. As Philippa Levine argues in the excerpts we read previously: “Many abolitionists saw their role as creating an environment in which Africans could be raised to civilization, a state they believed fully lacking in their life of enslavement and realizable through the redemption of Christianity” (22). Additionally, British abolitionism toward the end of the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century actually coincided with the expansion of the British empire, especially in India and the Indian Ocean—a context we will consider in relation to our readings from Daniel Defoe’s Captain Singleton.

Another aspect of the colonial politics of Oroonoko that we began discussing, but could discuss further, concerns the white female narrator of the text. The narrator of Oroonoko is quite clearly implicated in the plantation system she depicts: she is not a mere observer but an active participant. How does this complicity affect our reading of the gender politics of the text? In other words, how does Behn’s ability to break from the stereotypical gender roles assigned to (white) women depend on participating in the colonial subjugation of racialized Others?

The Novel Form

As also mentioned last week, Oroonoko is a fairly early example of an English novel, a form on the rise during throughout the long eighteenth century. In simplistic terms, the term “novel” can refer to any extended narrative prose fiction, but there is a bit more to it than that. Scholars of the novel have noted that the form is defined by its “omnivorousness”—in other words, its capacity to incorporate and absorb many different forms and genres. Though the novel in some ways grew out of the high epic tradition, it became associated with popular forms and “low” literary style. The “popular” appeal of the novel relates to the emergence of a “middle class” reading public in the eighteenth century—an emergence made possible by the links between the rise of capitalist industry and the transatlantic colonialism Oroonoko itself depicts. Also, despite its links to the Romance tradition, the novel is associated with a new aesthetic of literary realism: in other words, early novels often tied their fictional narratives to the backdrop of real history. In fact, many eighteenth century novels didn’t refer to themselves as novels at all, but instead as “histories.” Oroonoko is an example of this convention, as the full title reads: Oroonoko: Or, the Royal Slave. A True History.

Mercantilism in Daniel Defoe’s Captain Singleton (1720)

Captain Singleton is one of Defoe’s more obscure novels. In fact, the novel was the follow-up to his most famous work, Robinson Crusoe (1719), which depicts a trader’s colonial cultivation of a desert island after being shipwrecked. While Robinson Crusoe is generally read as an apologia for the colonial project, Captain Singleton is much more ambivalent.

Captain Singleton follows an English pirate in the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea. As Lehman’s own Professor Siraj Ahmed argues in his book The Stillbirth of Capital (2013), the novel blurs the line between “illegitimate” and “legitimate” commerce and, thus, comments on the mercantile system of the day. So, we should define mercantilism in order to make what Defoe is doing in Captain Singleton more clear. Mercantilism contrasts with later economic systems in which the state is primarily concerned with creating the conditions for “free” trade (ie., liberalism). Mercantilism worked quite differently. Instead, mercantilist policies attempted to establish a positive balance of trade and aimed to accumulate monetary reserves at the state level. (Put a little more simply, mercantilists really thought of “national wealth” in terms of monetary reserves, usually silver, being accumulated by the state. Contemporary “liberal” monetary policy no longer thinks this way: for example, a nation’s Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, does not refer to amount of money sitting in a vault somewhere, but rather the speed in which money changes hands in the economy.) Mercantilists, therefore, supported the establishment of monopolies over trade in certain products and regions. The East India Company, chartered in 1600 to establish British trade in the Indian Ocean region, is an example of just such a monopoly. East India Company trade also links to the transatlantic histories we considered in relation to Oroonoko, as Indian Ocean trade literally financed the British state throughout the eighteenth century, which was constantly needing money to keep up the perpetual wars that also established British dominance over the Atlantic and the trade in enslaved Africans.

Ahmed argues that the blurred lines between “piracy” and “legitimate commerce” in Captain Singleton traces “both the illicit origins of the wealth that invests the state’s legitimate property and the precise networks in which it was converted from the one to the other along the way” (53). In other words, the novel demonstrates how Britain’s amassed wealth and power in the Indian Ocean (and the world) was based, quite literally, on straight up theft. As is clear in Captain Singleton, the Indian Ocean is anything but a “blank space,” but a multi-ethnic and multicultural space where circuits of trade flourished long before the European colonial presence. While European discourse tends to portray colonialism as a “globalizing” process (that creates links and establishes trade between hitherto unconnected places), this couldn’t be more false. Instead, Captain Singleton demonstrates how Indian Ocean colonialism involved the appropriation (legalized or not) of preexisting Indian Ocean trade between Indian, Arab, Turkish, and Chinese merchants. Ahmed also argues that the narrator’s Christian conversion (depicted toward the end of our selection) acts as a metaphor for the conversion of pirated goods into “legitimate” money, a process that represents the basis of the colonial British state’s wealth.