The Geography of Freedom in the Age of Revolutions

This chapter explores a contradiction at the heart of the mainstream abolitionist movement: colonialism in India was promoted as a solution to the problem of slavery. It focuses on forms of unfreedom that trouble the geographical divide drawn in abolitionist discourse between slavery and freedom within the British empire. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of Marianna Starke's pro-imperialism/antislavery drama (set in India), The Sword of Peace (1788). It then turns to Maria Edgeworth's anti-Jacobin short-story collection Popular Tales (1804), which features nearly identical scenes of slavery set in Jamaica and India. Edgeworth's fiction might seem worlds away from actual colonial policy; but by contextualizing her writing amid debates about the slave trade and proposals for the cultivation of sugar in Bengal, the chapter shows that her stories were important and highly regarded thought experiments in colonial governance. Finally, the chapter discusses an important historical instantiation of the Indies mentality that falls outside the time frame of this study: the transportation of Indian indentured laborers to the Caribbean in the 1830s.

Coda

This coda studies the Indies mentality's demise. When the organization of global space shifted once more under the leadership of a new geopolitical world order, the two Indies ceased to be a compelling framework for organizing knowledge of the world. The chapter locates the swansong of the Indies mentality in the 1870s, the onset of the US systemic cycle. To be sure, the Indies mentality was residual by this time; but it was also still powerful. American desires for geopolitical dominance took shape during Britain's systemic cycle, and they bear the cultural imprint of British hegemony. One of the events that sealed the United States's rise to hegemonic status was the completion of the first transcontinental railroad to the Pacific, which was widely hailed as an American “Passage to India.” The chapter then makes the case for the portability of this book's method, especially in the context of postcolonial studies, where it can be used to reconstruct and reinhabit non-European epistemologies.

A Trip to Vauxhall

This chapter details the major cultural fallout of the Seven Years' War. In addition to radically disrupting the nation's socioeconomic status quo and altering the texture of metropolitan sociability, the war inaugurated a new way of seeing the empire: the Indies mentality. The chapter looks at Vauxhall Gardens to illustrate how the Indies mentality manifested in Georgian London. From the time it opened to the public in the mid-seventeenth century, Vauxhall was in the vanguard of what can now be called the entertainment industry. A multimedia entertainment experience that combined artistic consumption with sociability, Vauxhall represented a perfect epitome of late Georgian culture.

Diagnosing the (American) Crisis in Foote’s The Cozeners and Burney’s Evelina

This chapter contributes to the ongoing scholarly reassessment of the so called American Crisis, which was actually experienced — and in many ways is still best understood — as a global crisis in imperial affairs. It discusses Edmund Burke's speech “On American Taxation,” delivered on April 19, 1774, and Frances Burney's debut novel Evelina (1778). However, the primary case study is Samuel Foote's neglected comic masterpiece The Cozeners (1774). One of the goals of the chapter is to show how the theater afforded playwrights especially complex representational practices with which to render the far-flung coordinates of Britain's globally stretched imperial social formation visible. At the theater, Londoners learned how to view the empire from the perspective of the Indies mentality; and they sought to make sense of current events within this global analytic framework.

Political Slavery and Oriental Despotism from Haiti to Bengal

This chapter builds on the critique of the Atlantic world paradigm initiated in the previous chapters. It begins in Haiti, where revolutionary leaders like Jean-Jacques Dessalines opposed not only chattel slavery but also “political slavery,” or subjection to the absolute rule of a foreign conqueror — namely, colonialism. From classical antiquity through the Age of Revolutions, political slavery was associated with Asia and Oriental despotism. This helps explain why eighteenth-century writers ubiquitously associated slavery with India even while they denied that actual chattel slavery was practiced there. The chapter traces the circuit of political slavery and Oriental despotism's global travels, around the world and in the “world” of metropolitan print.