Circuits

This chapter reads the dynamics of gender and racial violence in Leonora Sansay’s 1808 novel Secret History in transoceanic context. Even as the French Atlantic triangle generated enormous wealth through enormous exploitation, encounters and events in the transnational Pacific were laying bare the unequal terms and coercive relations that underpinned such triangles and the circuits that spun around them. Set in Saint Domingue during the Haitian Revolution, the novel situates the violence of both marital and plantation intimacies within the turning global circuits of sexual-economic drive and their production of disproportion and inequality. By presenting French European and French creole desire in terms of a sexualized colonialism and a pornographic capitalism, Secret History exposes the rotations of capitalist drive as a violent obscenity, and revolution as its violent offspring.

Cycles

This chapter situates William Earle’s 1800 novel Obi within a network of texts—including histories, natural histories, poems, and travel narratives—that surface the novel’s engagement with the profitable business of botanical transplantation which, at the turn into the nineteenth century, depended on connections between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Earle aligns human bodies with plants in order to represent the slave trade as a destructive form of transplantation and amputation. Drawing from Erasmus Darwin’s poem Botanic Garden, the novel Obi advances a “vegetable economy” in which revolution is a natural, botanical response to the violent transplantation project of the Atlantic slave trade. The surprisingly transoceanic and political life of plants during this period therefore forms the backdrop for the novel’s anti-slavery argument, which aligns human bodies with the bodies of plants and understands plantation slavery in terms of botanical transplantation.

Coils

This chapter reads Charles Brockden Brown’s 1799 novel Ormond in the context of Philadelphia’s newly intimate commercial relationship with the East Indies during the final decades of the eighteenth century. The novel draws from accounts of the Pacific and Siberia by such figures as Maurice Benyowsky, August von Kotzebue, and John Ledyard. Ormond embodies many of the features of the new merchant millionaires whose Philadelphia fortunes derived from transoceanic speculations in the East India trade. Such a transoceanic context aligns Ormond’s revolutionary politics with the logic and temporality of global finance capital rather than the Illuminati conspiracy with which he is often associated. Similarly, the narrative pace of Ormond mimics the expectant temporalities of financial investment and revolutionary discourse to show how seductive spectacles of the future distract us from the present acts of violence necessary to arrive at them.

Numbers

This chapter focuses on American mathematical schoolbooks from the age of revolutions, as well as associated genres such as manuals on bookkeeping, navigation, and insurance. Knowledge of these fields was crucial for the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century voyages of commerce and discovery that connected the Atlantic and Pacific, and these books introduced a wide variety of readers, including women, to the world of global trade. In their attention to the interrelated practices of calculation and speculation, these genres—in dialogue with literature on the lottery—taught readers the narrative dynamics of suspense that also informed the emerging genre of the novel. Like transoceanic travel narratives, novels were the textual companions to capitalism, offering readers regular practice in accommodating the sensations of expectation central to a world increasingly penetrated by global trade and its mechanisms of risk-taking and risk assessment. Novels emerged, in other words, as numberless representations of an increasingly number-driven world.

Narrative

This chapter reviews the publication history of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century genre of Pacific travel narratives, and examines its narrative features. During this period, ships moved with increasing regularity on incredibly risky voyages between the world’s oceans. At the same time, novels came to dominate the literary world of fiction. These developments are related by their shared narrative dynamics, especially in the relationship between narrative suspense and numerical speculation, between words and numbers. The short-term risks and losses that attended these voyages were offset by their long-term profits, as the pleasure of accumulation concealed but also depended on the horrors of violence.

Circles

This chapter recovers and analyzes a forgotten 1778 novel set in New Zealand and the wider Pacific world. The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman implicitly links North America’s Atlantic Revolution against England with indigenous anti-colonial Pacific uprisings against Europeans. It does so by transforming European stadial theory—then in vogue as a framework for understanding the long conjectural history of human development—from a linear into a cyclical narrative. Written and published in a historical moment when debates about British empire were considerably more complex and unresolved than they would be a decade later, the novel brings cannibalism and consumption together in a critique of transoceanic capitalism. Hildebrand Bowman positions Britain as a cannibal empire that feeds on the bodies of others. The novel moreover sexualizes this relation in ways that draw from European explorers’ depictions of the Pacific, as the bodies of women expose imperialist consumption as its own form of cannibalism.

Politics

This chapter argues for a revolutionary Pacific that should be seen as a transoceanic counterpart to the revolutionary Atlantic. The Pacific has been left out of early American studies because the region’s events and actors cannot be accommodated by the central story of the American Revolution, a linear story plotted around the nation that took shape in its aftermath. Yet maritime travel writing from the period routinely describes constant uprisings, rebellions, and acts of resistance throughout the Pacific by reference precisely to the major revolutions of the Atlantic. An attention to empire rather than nation, and to cyclicality rather than linearity, is needed to bring the Pacific and Atlantic worlds into greater dialogue within American literary and cultural history during the age of revolution. Moreover, by paying attention to the embodied experiences of indigenous women in the Pacific, we can recover the violence concealed by triumphant narratives of political revolution.

Introduction

The Introduction develops a transoceanic framework for the study of American literature and the emergence of the novel. It establishes that American literature and culture have always been integrated within complex and wide-ranging commercial, political, and textual networks that connected the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. By locating the presence of the Pacific in the Atlantic, and of the Atlantic in the Pacific, this volume establishes a global materiality to narrative in the transoceanic age of revolutions. Long-distance maritime travel depended on capitalist strategies of calculation that also concealed practices of violence against women and indigenous peoples. The resultant narrative of expectation or suspense drives the discourses of commerce, revolution, and the novel.

Epilogue

The Epilogue proposes new methods and approaches for developing a transoceanic American literary history. These include the practices of transoceanic drifting and archival diving to identify forgotten or distant texts, including traditions of reprint and translation. A transoceanic American literary studies does not claim that there is anything particularly or uniquely American about the texts it studies, regardless of where they were published or what language they were written in; but it does claim that this larger archive and context must be taken into account in any attempt to rewrite American literary history in relation to the globe. A global American literary history asks us to imagine America as at once central to and yet profoundly decentered from the globe and its connections, part of both Atlantic and Pacific oceans that are in turn linked to the rest of the planet’s waterworlds.