The Intimacies of Four Continents
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Published:May 2015
This chapter introduces the method of reading across canons, archives, and continents, which places the “archive of liberalism”—the literary, cultural, and political philosophical narratives of progress and individual freedom—alongside the colonial state archives from which such works have been separated. It argues the abstract promises of liberal freedom conveyed through abolition, emancipation, and the end of monopoly, often obscure their embeddedness within colonial conditions, and traces social differences, such as race, as enduring remainders of colonial processes through which “the human” is universalized and “freed” by liberal forms, while the peoples who created the conditions of possibility for that freedom are assimilated or forgotten. The chapter discusses colonial relations in the Americas that formed the conditions for political and economic freedom in Europe, through considerations of British Colonial Office, Foreign Office, and Parliamentary papers on settler colonialism, abolition of slavery, and introduction of Asian laborers to the West Indies. Examining an 1803 “Memorandum” that identified the Chinese as a “freely contracted” labor force that could replace slavery, the author analyzes the British imagination of the introduction the Chinese workers into the social order of white colonials and black slaves and argues that the British decisions to end slavery were equally pragmatic attempts to prevent Black revolution in the West Indies, and to resolve economic inefficiencies in the sugar industry resulting from the relative inflexibility of slave labor within colonial mercantilism
References
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
British Library, London
India Office Records (IOR)
Great Britain House of Commons Select Committee Reports (HCSC)
Great Britain House of Lords Select Committee Reports (HLSC)
China Mail (CM)
Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (CW)
Great Britain National Archives, Kew Gardens, London
Colonial Office (CO)
Foreign Office (FO)
Royal African Company (RAC)
House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (HCPP)
National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago, Port of Spain
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (NMM)
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Hamilton Library Special Collections (UHSC)
University of London
Senate House Library Special Collections (SHL)
University of West Indies at St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago
West Indiana and Special Collections
Victoria and Albert Museum, London (VA)
Westminster Review (WR)