In this first picture, we can see the ship in which enslaved were transported in the eighteen century. In the eighteen century, this picture was used to represent the concern for the treatment of many enslaved which led Parliament to pass an 1788 act restricting the number of enslaved a ship could carry at one time. This stowage plan of the Brooks, showing the arrangement of enslaved in the hold of the ship. It was published by the London Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade as proof of the inhumane conditions that still existed even under the new regulations. This image became a powerful propaganda tool in both the British and American abolition movements.

In this second picture, we can see the inside of the ship. We can see how tight those enslaved were because there were not sufficient spaces between them. It was overcrowded inside. By the expression of some of them, it is well to assume that there is sadness among them since some of them are being separated from their family. Some of them could be children but the greed of those enslavers in those times did not let them see furthermore. It is also a sign of sadness because some of them will never see their families again and they have to work for others in order to survive and hoping to get their freedom someday.

I selected these two pictures because both of them remind me of Olaudah Equiano. In The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings by Olaudah Equiano, the theme of slavery is very highlighted. In chapter two of the same book, he explains how many times he was selling. He passes many circumstances onboard of many ships and the grief of being separate from his family and his beloved sister. After many times of being sold, he came to the sea. When he arrived, he saw a slave ship waiting for his cargo (55). Equiano expresses “These filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted into terror, which I am yet at loss to describe, nor the then feelings of my mind” (55). When he saw many black people chained together with expressions of profound sorrow on their faces, he realized what awaited him, and knew that he would never return to his native country (56). Equiano did not want to be there, and he suddenly wished to return to former slavery than to endure this new punishment. Equiano continues describing the sensation of being put under the decks and expresses, “…I received such a salutation in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life; so that with the loathsomeness of the stench, and crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste anything” (56). Equiano started feeling a little better when he found people of his own nation because he was convinced that the white men were evil spirits. Down in the hold, he was assaulted by hot air unfit to breathe because of its repugnant smells. Onboard, Equiano witnesses how many people grew sick and died, “thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers.” He listened to the screams and cries of anguish and terror on many enslaved what made the hold like a scene from Hell. However, since Equiano was a young boy, he was not put into chains and had more freedom to move about.

These two pictures are remarkable to demonstrate the way that enslaved were treated in the transatlantic slave trade. In chapter two from the book The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings by Olaudah Equiano the reader can appreciate and feel at the same time, the suffering that those poor people suffer because of the avarice of others. As I said before, those enslaved were treated without consideration, sometimes they did not eat, they were punished because of their ignorance but their enslavers did not teach them how to behave. It is sadder because they dreamed to be free and they did know when that would happen. Every time each of them was sold, there was a challenging experience as Equiano once said, “I remember in the vessel in which I was brought over… there were several brothers… were sold in different lots; and it was very moving on this occasion to see and hear their cries at parting” (61). There were cries because they knew what they are going to suffer and they. Also, they were full of pain because they did not know if some day, they could see their loved ones.

Works cited

Equiano, Olaudah, and Vincent Carretta. The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings. Penguin Books, 2003.

Getty Images “ Eighteenth-Century Collection Online” 1789

Slave Ship: Albanoz, 1846. Slavery & Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive.

As a New York City student, it is refreshing to read such works like Oroonoko. Not many literary works that I have read as a student portray slaves. Some parts of the history in Oroonoko can be related to the communities I can identify with. In the book Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave, by Aphra Behn, the main character starts off in his native land as a free man of royalty. He is tricked into slavery, and interestingly is treated different from other slaves. Oroonoko is described as someone who is extremely beautiful, which can be why is treated differently. There are many individuals who get treated differently because of the way they look in all communities. Some individuals are classified by just how they look and are treated unfairly because they may not have “beautiful features”. When it comes to people of color in my community, they may be treated differently because of how they look, but in the end, they still fall into one category that is considered lower than the masses.

The histories within the text can reflect issues within our communities. In low income areas, individuals can be seen as being enslaved by the system they live in. There is a form of oppression that is holding back certain individuals. For example, the prison system and be reflected to Oroonoko thinking, where he was stuck to be tortured or he can die. There did not seem to be anyway out, and opportunities were limited. It is unfortunate to think that in some way’s individuals do not see any way out of their problems and oppression other than death. Areas within the communities I live in offer housing for those who are in need of assistance, but it is made to keep individuals stagnant. There seems to be no way out of the areas they live in because the system is made to have a sense of control over people. Even though Oroonoko was treated differently and he even assisted with mistreatment of the other slaves, he did not move up in the scale. He always remained an enslaved person no matter what opportunity he was giving. Like many issues within this day, Oroonoko realized the suppression he was facing along with a group of other slaves. He began to fight the system and encourage other people to as well, but in the end, it did not work out the way he wanted. I see a lot of fighting for change and equality in my community and I have also been a part of this change as well. Sometimes I would admit that it may not work out the way it is expected to.

As I begin reading certain texts, I always think back to my history. I consider myself to be an individual with a Caribbean background. Most text that I read, like Oroonoko, encourages me to divulge into other histories. I must remember to think back on the history of America as a student and grasp and understanding for the time period the work is written in. This forms an understanding to what the text is supposed to be about. During the time this text was written the history within the location can also be compared to the history in New York. The New York area had been a Dutch Colony and the Suriname also became colonized by the Dutch. Both places were also known to have a slave trade area which gives them both similarities. Oroonoko can be compared to modern day New York and within the past. I enjoyed reading the book and will be excited to see what comes next.

The class thus far focuses our attentions on British (L)iterature; years 1660 to 1815. Due to this “border”, we are set upon reading texts that waver around a very select couple of themes. If you’re judging by the years and the country you can probably put two and two together and figure out what those things are: Colonialism (yes, the colonized and the colonizer). The two go hand in hand. Yes, there is probably more to this time period but how effective would that be when it comes to teaching you what the time was really about.

Despite the historical works, we have gotten through our first full-length text: Oroonoko: The Royal Slave. The title’s quite ironic isn’t it. It is as it sounds, and that is a completely fictional narrative of a royal African man tricked into slavery and his life thereafter.

Now the question is posed. What does a student from NYC reading this feel from the matter? Better yet how do the “histories” from the text connect to the communities that I currently identify with and see throughout my time in NYC?

The historical facts behind these works are tales of slaves and slave master.

As for what I see as the truth… well, it is that the last wave of colonialism is one of the major reasons and causes for the displacement of millions of hue-mans, especially those of Afrikan descent. Plainly saying, this new regularity of the randomization of birthplace versus birth location by phenotype is due to the effects of Britain’s hand in colonialism. Colonialism forced the path of “evolution” and for that we have the world in which we exist today.

A New York City is the exemplar set for the world of what a successful melting pot in a Utopian-esque land could look like. NYC has had influx of people from everywhere on this planet. It is one of the most famous places in the world and the populace of immigrants show. To me, NYC shows what it could’ve looked like if people were given the natural choice to go across seas and leave their homes for the purpose of work instead of the brutish ways of the past during England’s (and friends) golden hour. Whilst Oroonoko’s tale and the other texts are portraits of the time period, it is unrealistic to expect any such thing from the blood thirsty but in a city with an account for everyone on the planet, it really brings to mind what the possibilities could have been had things been approached differently.

To continue our in-class discussions, it is difficult but crucially important to reflect on the language we use to talk about literary texts embedded in histories of enslavement and imperialism. While we all have good intentions in critiquing such language and representations, we must also be careful about whether in our critiques we unintentionally reproduce racialized terminologies and ideologies. Writing as a white scholar of postcolonial studies and African diaspora studies, I want to be as transparent as possible that I include myself in this “we.” I can’t claim innocence here, nor can I claim “mastery” over the “correct” languages with which to talk about texts that reflect and represent histories of human bondage and racism. I can only claim sincere engagement with anti-racist and anti-imperialist works and scholars and a commitment to doing this continual work of listening and self-criticism.

To this end, I wanted to share with you a resource that I have found quite clarifying for understanding, in broad strokes, some of the suggestions scholars of color have offered for writing about histories of enslavement. This resource, titled “Writing About ‘Slavery’? This Might Help,” comes courtesy of Professor P. Gabrielle Forman and includes a number of suggestions for preferred terms and terms to avoid when writing about histories of enslavement. Let’s go over some of these together. Then, a few questions for you: what stands out to you in this resources suggestions for usage and avoidance? How will these suggestions prompt you to revise the language you use in your own writing?

For the next few weeks, we will be discussing two Black writers who experienced enslavement and how their literary work resisted their captivity. Since so much of our focus so far has been on how white British writers represented and reflected the transatlantic slave trade and imperialism, it’s important to remember that there were always resistant voices that spoke back to these representations. We will see how they employed sophisticated artistic and rhetorical strategies to defiantly proclaim their humanity in the face of brutal racism and enslavement. Phyllis Wheatley (c. 1753 – 1784) is often cited as the first “African American” writer. She was a young enslaved women when she crafted the poems that would make up her 1773 Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Her poems displayed an expert understanding of classical verse and used it to both address and resist her unfree condition. Indeed, her work was so learned that the text was accompanied by an “attestation” by the “most respectable characters in Boston” as proof that Wheatley indeed wrote her poems, inaugurating a racist history white people “validating” the veracity of Black artistic productions that would continue far beyond Wheatley’s case. While her writing fame led to her emancipation, she died in poverty at the age of 31. 

Olaudah Eqiuano’s Interesting Narrative (1745-1797) carries a similar attestation. Equiano, a former enslaved African who was through ingenuity able to buy his freedom, published his famous autobiography in the midst of heated debates in Britain on abolishing the slave trade. Equiano, by this time one of the 10,000-20,000 Black people living in Britain, was active in the Abolitionist movement. Though slavery in Britain itself had been struck down in 1772, the slave trade persisted until 1810 and slavery would continue in British colonies until 1831. His narrative adapted the genre of the “spiritual autobiography” (most famously represented by Augustine’s Confessions), which describes an arc of sin, conversion and rebirth, to one of the “fall” into enslavement and the “rebirth” as a free person. The Interesting Narrative was published in 1789, the same year as the French Revolution, and thus was part of the broader Enlightenment movement and its ambivalent political thinking about emancipation and freedom. So much of Equiano’s narrative concerns the difficulty of being free in a world marked by enslavement. In this sense, Equiano reverses the notion of European colonialism bringing “civilization” and “Enlightenment” to non-Western lands. Together, we will need to consider in more depth the strategies by which Equiano represents the experience of enslavement in order to further its abolition.

In approaching the question of what it is like being a student in New York City studying and reading material concerning 18^th century British colonialism, I can’t help but speak about privilege, both in the sense of being a white male, and of being a native New Yorker. For many years I thought I understood the privilege I possessed in terms of race, but it is only in the last ten years or so that I realize how many layers of privilege I was unaware of, despite being exposed to diversity at an early age and lucky enough to befriend people who were outspoken about the inequities that existed in the world. Though I considered myself enlightened, and non-biased, the more I looked the more I realized how many subtle layers of institutional racism still lay within me. Once I had discovered it, I had to try to use that privilege to make a difference. 

I think that, even in the fast-paced, outwardly brusque and uncaring atmosphere of New York, where racism certainly exists and even thrives in some areas, we are still as a citizenry fairly sheltered from what the rest of the country—that is not the east or west coasts—look like. We are packed together, and on top of one another and perhaps because we have so much contact with so many people who look differently, and have cultures and beliefs that are not our own, we are by default more tolerant. Such is not the case in other parts of the country.  As a childhood friend of mine, a woman of color, recently said to me, “we were spoiled growing up in the Bronx, where everybody hung out with everyone and color and religion was never a problem. I found that out when I was wandering around the country. I found myself in places where my color was not appropriate.”  Those were her exact words.  “My color was not appropriate.”

So, I come to texts like Ooronoko, and Captain Singleton with that phrase ringing in my ears as I read about how color and class and circumstance decide who and who isn’t “appropriate” in this new “great empire” that is being birthed through slavery and oppression and conquest. I think about the political climate in our country right now, and I think about the discussions we will have about the texts we read in class, and I anticipate that we will all more or less be on the same page in condemning the inequities and seeing through the excuses and apologies given for why the colonizers thought their cause just. Then I think about this class being taught in the Rust Belt, or in Idaho, or Arizona, where just a few miles away from the university there are children locked in cages, and people in the classroom making excuses and apologies for why that is so. How do they see these texts?  Who are the heroes and the villains of these stories for them?

I don’t mean to stereotype. I am certain that every state and place I mentioned above has intelligent, compassionate people in them as well. I am only reacting to the rhetoric I hear when I enter political discussions about how this country should proceed, and how our society should be structured. The same attitudes of racism and imperialism seem to be pervasive in a certain section of our society. I think it is important to learn about these texts and, it is an English literature course after all, not a history or political science course, but I think we should be aware of the atmosphere in which we study, and to understand that the things we are reading about in this class are happening in today’s world as we speak, with only the specifics changed, and there are fellow citizens that are applauding those things as right and just.  

         New York City! Who hasn’t heard of it? Its one of the most major known cities in the world, and so many different people come and go and live in it. Whilst reading the novel Oroonoko by Aphra Behn, and Captain Singleton by Daniel Defoe, one can only make connections to their world around them. As a student in NYC I was able to do just that! First and foremostly, I live in Washington Heights. Oroonoko is set in Suriname in the West Indies, a colony owned by the British and Dutch for resources such as sugar. Suriname is in some ways very similar to the Caribbean islands many of the Hispanic and Caribbean communities in Washington Heights have connections to. Many families have backgrounds and family histories leading back to the same kind of slave treatments or native islander stories they share and can relate to, their homelands being exploited by the white man for its resources with very little compensation. And while in this area, NYC, is different because there are no slaves, however in some ways colonization is still relevant today!

         The increasing gentrification of the area could be considered a domestic colonization of the area. There are multiple family owned businesses going out of business because commercial rent is increasing and increasing the more the while colonizers continue to spread and take homes in the area. My own building was just sold and what used to be 90% Hispanic residence is now more like 30%.

         Captain Singleton is a great example of someone who can be/was colonized but could also be the potential colonizer, his connections to NYC lay within his characterization. He would be connecting to those in the lower income areas or ‘hood’ with his go-getter hustler pirate attitude. Alongside his economic status he also encountered many different people and places, such is the case with New York City. NYC is a huge range of different diversities and races and ethnicities and people are from everywhere, such as Captain Singleton had visited so many different areas.

         In Oroonoko, colonization is viewed as cultural more than physical. An example of this is the idea to Christianize the American Indians, that this idea that by teaching them the word of the lord, they somehow become less savage and more humane. It’s cultural influences, such as teaching the bible and changing names, “I ought to tell you that the Christians never buy any slaves but they give ’em some name of their own, their native ones being likely very barbarous, and hard to pronounce; so that Mr. Trefry gave Oroonoko that of Caesar,” Behn wrote. In some ways this colonization or treatment of Oroonoko as an almost-slave-almost-native where they give him the freedom and the status and the name and find his wife is all fine and dandy, however at the end of the day he is still considered the slave and is expected to act as such. This could be compared to the issues many people from low economic statuses face, such as the new policy for jumping the train and getting a $100 ticket or arrested, or the idea of cash bail that was just abolished in NYC.

Being a student of New York city and reading and responding to eighteenth century works, it could result a little bit challenging. I live in Little Italy in the Bronx. In the Little Italy there are multiple restaurants and bars. There are a lot of noise each day and more over the weekends. Near my house, it is found the emergency room of Saint Barnabas hospital and one firefighting station. Sometimes I have tried to change the time when I read. As I work full time, the best time for me to read and concentrate is at nights. However, since the Little Italy is a noisy place at night, it is difficult for me to fully understand my assignments. Then, I decided to change my habits of reading. For example, couple weeks ago I started reading in the morning to be more concentrated and understand the reading that my professors assign me. But it is difficult to read in the morning when there are cars at double parking. There is too much noise between the cars, and it is annoying. Additionally, I rent a room in a house and sometimes my roommates are very noisy. In this house there are more people living and it is hard to concentrate because I cannot demand them to be noiseless.

Last week, I was reading the book Oroonoko by Aphra Behn. I have to say that I started reading the book with the best interest because when I realize that the reading is about a story instead of facts, I pay the most attention needed. I started reading it Sunday morning since I was free from work. It was very interesting reading the first couple of pages, but at the same time I was disoriented because of the noise around me. In the moment that I was most concentrated, there was an ambulance or firefighting truck passing by. So, I have to go back and start reading the page again in order to understand what the author was saying. One vivid example of that is when Oroonoko was captured and sold as a slave. Being honest, I was very confused of what was happening. I was deconcentrated by the outside noise of my neighborhood and the inside noise of my roommates. So, I have to re-read the page one more time in order for me to get the idea and understand the real situation within the text. When I read it twice, I realized that Oroonoko was betrayed by his best friend, the Captain, who captured him and sold Oroonoko to Trefry. At the moment when I understood this, I was astonished because I would not think that Oroonoko could be sold as slave because he was an outstanding warrior, respectful and prince of his land.

After that, I kept reading because I was intrigued to know how Oroonoko’s life was going to be since he was not a prince anymore but slave. So, I continued reading and, in the trajectory, I was distracted once again, therefore I had to re-read multiple times. Another example of that was when Oroonoko encounter Imoinda, married and pregnant her. Because of that Oroonoko wanted to be free before the child’s birth, and many people including Trefry started making promise and distracting Oroonoko to prevent him of starting a rebellion against the slaveowners. When I was into those pages, I had to take a breath in order for me to process this information because I was not understanding what was happening at once. I had to re-read it once again until the end to make sure that I really understood the context.

As I said before, living in a noisy neighborhood, it is very difficult to concentrate while reading especially eighteenth-century materials. Sometimes the language is different because it is old English and because of that we need more concentration. But when the place ones live do not help and it is not quiet, it is still more difficult to get engaged with the reading.

Oroonoko is an interesting tale that was created by Aphra Behn. This book while created in 1688 has certain topics and themes that can still be relatable to present-day life here in New York. Aphra Behn is a cultural icon. Not just because she is a female play write but also because she wrote one of the first stories that depict the tale of a Slave Prince who in the tale Aphra Behn acts as a narrator. The narrator Behn does not just know the character but she states that she had also witnessed some of the moments the main character has experienced or has heard first hand from the Prince. This is made clear in the beginning especially when Aphra Behn states, “The scene of the last part of his adventures lies in a colony in America, called Surinam, in the West Indies.” This is important because it gives us a perspective of where the story is being told to us from. 

Oroonoko’s name is not mentioned until about thirteen pages into the book but so much about his past is revealed to us and its relativity to modern life is very clear as well. Aphra Behn states, “he had only left him for his successor one grandchild, son to one of these dead victors, who, as soon as he could bear a bow in his hand, and a quiver at his back, was sent into the field to be trained up by one of the oldest generals to war; where, from his natural inclination to arms, and the occasions given him, with the good conduct of the old general, he became, at the age of seventeen, one of the most expert captains and bravest soldiers that ever saw the field of Mars: so that he was adored as the wonder of all that world, and the darling of the soldiers.” It is relatable that Oroonoko is depicted in such a way because most people nowadays don’t see that level of ability within our youth the way his grandfather did and like his grandfather anytime people do see potential in their kids often time it’s for their own benefit. Here in New York, you have students who at the age of thirteen are not valued within school systems or even at home so they go out into the world to find this very same level of attention and discipline through gangs. Not to mention that many New York kids can understand what it’s like to have their lives controlled just like Oroonoko because in the story his own grandfather deprives him of his wife. In the tale, it states, “After a thousand assurances of his lasting flame, and her eternal empire over him, she condescended to receive him for her husband; or rather, received him as the greatest honor the gods could do her.” What Behn is trying to do here is not necessarily state that they were married because the culture that this takes place in didn’t necessarily believe in the same marital beliefs that we do in Christian based societies but still to give off that marriage kind of vibe meaning they are officially a couple. Unfortunately, Behn states, “he had intelligence brought him that Imoinda was most certainly mistress to the Prince Oroonoko. This gave him some chagrin: however, it gave him also an opportunity…” This means that the Grandfather found information on Oroonoko like any modern-day parent goes snooping through your personal life or text messages to find out about you without actually talking to you face to face. In turn of finding out about Oroonoko and his new wife Imoinda the Behn states,” He was therefore no sooner got to his apartment but he sent the royal veil to Imoinda; that is the ceremony of invitation: he sends the lady he has a mind to honor with his bed, a veil, with which she is covered, and secured for the king’s use; and ‘tis death to disobey; besides, held a most impious disobedience.” Basically, as the king, the grandfather uses his absolute power to take away what matters most to Oroonoko. In a fit of rage Oroonoko plots to take revenge or rebel against the king when he states, “And he would often cry, “O, my friends! were she in walled cities, or confined from me in fortifications of the greatest strength; did enchantments or monsters detain her from me; I would venture through any hazard to free her”. This is relatable because teenagers rebel against their parents all the time. Shakespeare wrote about it in Romeo and Juliet and it is a common occurrence to this day. It is important to respect the agency of young adults because their emotions could truly get the best of them and have them end up on a slave ship to South America in search of their love like Oroonoko himself. The link on the bottom leads to a video that acts as a visual modern representation of how Ooronoko must feel to have his life controlled by his own family.

Citations:

Behn, Aphra, 1640-1689. Oroonoko, Or, The Royal Slave. Boston :Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000.

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.