Reimagining the Transatlantic, 1780-1890

Joselyn M. Almeida

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317068587
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria para la literatura comparada

In her thought-provoking study of Britain's relationship with Latin America and the Caribbean during the Romantic and Victorian periods, Joselyn M. Almeida makes a compelling case for extending the critical boundaries of current transatlantic and circumatlantic scholarship. She proposes the pan-Atlantic as a critical model that encompasses Britain's relationship to the non-Anglophone Americas given their shared history of conquest and the slave trade, and underscores the importance of writings by Afro-British and Afro-Hispanophone authors in formulating Atlantic culture. In adopting the term pan-Atlantic, Almeida argues for the interrelationship of the discourses of discovery, conquest, enslavement, and liberation expressed in literary motifs such as the New World, Columbus, and Las Casas; the representation of Native Americans; the enslavement and liberation of Africans; and the emancipation of Spanish America. Her study draws on the works of William Robertson, Ottobah Cugoano, Francisco Clavijero, Francisco Miranda, José Blanco White, Richard Robert Madden, Juan Manzano, Charles Darwin, and W. H. Hudson, uncovering the shared cultural grammar of travel narratives, abolitionist poems, novels, and historiographies that crosses national and linguistic boundaries.

Chapter 1 From New World to Pan-Atlantic: Opening the History of America

DOI: 10.4324/9781315604589-2

As one of the most read books of its time, William Robertson’s History of America (1777) earned both praise and censure from his contemporaries. Edward Gibbon called him a “master artist” (qtd. in Humphreys, “William Robertson” 33), and Edmund Burke wrote privately to Robertson that “the Great Map of Mankind is unravelled at once; and there is no state or Gradation of barbarism, and no mode of refinement which we have not at the same instant under our view” (Burke, Works 1: 339).¹ A young Helen Maria Williams prefaced her poem Peru (1784) with a major, if implicit, compliment to Robertson, writing that “to describe [the conquest of Peru] with precision, and to display with just force the various causes which combined to produce it, would require all the energy of genius, and all the strong colouring of the most glowing imagination” (vii). In Spain, Ramón de Guevara y Vasconcelos, a member of the Real Academia de la Historia [Royal Academy of History], promoted the immediate translation of America and compared Robertson to Tacitus in his proposal. Robertson’s narrative impressed the academy “for not succumbing to Las Casas’s negative portrayals of the Spanish colonization of America” (Cañizares-Esguerra 171). Its director, Count Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes, wrote in a letter to Robertson that he had written America “como si estuviera entre nosotros, sin declinar en parcialidad” [as if you were among us, without recourse to bias]. Robertson wrote back in elegant Spanish, “El haberse dignado la Real Academia autorizar con su aprobación mis obras, me hace esperar que … habré incurrido en menos errores de los que recelaba” [That the Royal Academy has deigned to approve my work gives me the hope that I have made fewer errors than I feared] (“Two Original Letters” 354–5). Academies in Italy and Russia also honored him with memberships. While The History of the Reign of Charles V (1769) had made Robertson’s reputation in Europe, America extended it and solidified his position as Historiographer Royal in Scotland, which he held alongside the administratively demanding role of principal of the University of Edinburgh.

A smaller yet significant current of criticism pulled against the waves of encomia. An anonymous reviewer in the Real Academia charged Robertson with painting the Spanish in the worst light: “According to the reviewer the Portuguese appeared as friendly merchants, and the Spanish as slave raiders” (Cañizares-Esguerra 179). Anonymous though this reviewer was, he reflected a growing opposition to America. The book was soon deemed so controversial that Ramón de Guevara’s translation was prevented from going to press, and a royal decree banned Robertson in all Spanish American colonies, “the King having just reasons for not wanting that work to be introduced in Spain nor its Indies” (“Strict Orders”). Even in Britain, where the reception was overwhelmingly positive, criticism of the history materialized. The Gentleman’s Magazine published a series of reviews qua letters that attacked Robertson as “the professed advocate, and the Champion of Spain,” taking special issue with his portrayal of Las Casas. The author, a regular contributor who signed himself “L.L.,” admonished Robertson, “Reflect on the great distance between Las Casas, whom you have invidiously represented in the light of a disappointed projector, and yourself … Remember what Las Casas did … traversing the most distant and inhospitable regions, not from a thirst of gold, but an ardor to serve the interests of humanity” (L.L., “To the Reverend Dr. Robertson” [Jan. 1778] 14).² He was even more caustic when “praising” Robertson for “the delicacy you have observed in speaking of the hardships inflicted on the Indians by their Spanish taskmasters, who made them dig in the mines … I thought I had been reading … [Henry] Fielding’s tragedy of Tom Thumb the Great” (L.L., “To the Reverend Dr. Robertson” [Feb. 1778] 73).³

The anxiety pervading the moment of publication of America partially accounts for this range of responses. As William Blake portrayed it in America: A Prophecy (1793), the Atlantic in the last decades of the eighteenth century was an ocean of blood and fire. In the 1760s, slave rebellions such as Tacky’s in Jamaica and Cuffee’s in Berbice presented formidable challenges to West Indian colonial society. The St. Vincent Carib Wars in 1772 continued the armed resistance of native peoples and Africans, and in Jamaica in 1776 the Hanover parish slave revolt broke out, parallel to the larger war looming with the future United States.⁴ Before the American Revolution, Robertson had intended to present the history of the entire hemisphere, including “the history of Portuguese America, and of the settlements made by the various nations of Europe in the West India Islands” (1: vi). The war precipitated Robertson’s publication and influenced his figuration of Spanish America as a metonymy for the hemisphere.⁵ As Historiographer Royal, Robertson recreated the gesta of European triumph in an America that might displace the far more unpleasant reality that the king and the British nation faced. On one level, America staged the redeployment of the discourses of discovery and conquest as compensatory narratives for the British loss of transatlantic colonies.⁶ But Robertson also aimed to redefine the New World as a hemispheric space to shift the coordinates of British Atlantic empire from north to south, and to offer Ibero-America as an alternative field for British enterprise.

What Robertson did not expect was that this vertical realignment would open the narrative to the interpellation of non-Europeans—the Mexican Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero and the Afro-Briton Ottobah Cugoano. This chapter analyzes the pan-Atlantic relationality between Robertson’s figuration of the New World in America and the corrective revisions of Clavijero’s Storia antica del Messico (1780) and Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments (1787).⁷ Clavijero and Cugoano retell the history of America from the Southern perspectives of Africa and Mexico even while living as transnational exiles in London and Bologna, and thereby decenter Robertson’s Eurocentric narrative. They resist Robertson’s universalizing epistemology and its narrative of inevitable European progress and reinscribe the continued agency of native peoples in the face of European expansion in the Atlantic. Clavijero and Cugoano may appear to some as unlikely candidates for comparison, since even in exile Clavijero was well protected institutionally and socially by virtue of being a Jesuit. Cugoano had to struggle to become literate, and after freeing himself from enslavement had to fend for a livelihood among London’s black population. Their critical response to Robertson’s narrative, which on some level justified the displacement of the Other in the name of progress, deserves joint attention because it embodies a Romantic cosmopolitanism that is not predicated on Europe as a point of reference. Their status as multilingual, diasporic subjects endowed them with plurilocal contexts from which they evaluated asymmetries of power in the relations between Europe, America, and Africa, while constructing alternative imaginaries that challenged the assumptions behind these relations.⁸ Clavijero and Cugoano set into motion a relationality of perspectives that reenacts the multiple layerings of language and translations in the pan-Atlantic. The etymology of translation suggests transportation, transference, and motion (OED); in the widest sense of the word, these writers translate the discourses of the pan-Atlantic—discovery, empire, enslavement, and resistance—to change the position of the signifying relationship between Europe, America, and Africa.

Cugoano and Clavijero speak from the epistemic space of the Other in order to reclaim history. As Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra contends, the Storia theorizes a “patriotic epistemology” that includes the work of Clavijero and other Jesuits exiled by Charles III in 1767, such as Juan Ignacio Molina and Juan de Velasco. Inasmuch as Clavijero represented this burgeoning nationalism, he was also an exponent of how pan-Atlantic relationality connected national histories to transnational and diasporic imaginaries. If Robertson’s history of the American hemisphere was also a history of European expansion in the Atlantic, Clavijero’s retelling questioned the assumed equivalence between the history of Europe in America and the past of America, specifically Mexico. Anticipating the later Romantic antiquarianism of Walter Scott, Clavijero sought to explain the history of Mexico and its peoples’ way of life before the incursion of Europeans and their continued survival after the conquest. Clavijero militates against the characterization of indigenous records as inaccurate, inferior, or otherwise lost, “pues hay tantas historias y memorias escritas por los mismos indios de que no tuvo noticia Robertson” [since there are so many histories and memoirs written by the Indians of which Robertson had no knowledge] (1: 27).⁹ Cugoano’s reading of America and his historical analysis of how enslavement becomes the engine of empire also draws from knowledge outside the frame of European reference. His interpretation of Robertson’s work crystallizes the idea that the “African slave trade … was an integral part of both European commercial expansion and New World colonization” (Davis, “Comparative” 60).

Turning to the South: Navigation, Commerce, Discovery

Robertson’s restaging of the conquest creates a global consciousness for Britain, one in which commerce and navigation lead to the progress of knowledge and, concomitantly, empire. In a recent assessment, Neil Hargraves argues that Robertson’s celebration of commerce and navigation in America is tempered by his careful analysis of adventurism, a transgressive agency that propels the brilliance of Columbus but can end in the civil strife that destroyed Pizarro. Hargraves concludes: “In suggesting that adventurism as a category of motivation needed to be reassessed … as an essential constituent of the modern world, [Robertson] challenges the notion of modern commerce as a self-contained system tending ultimately towards equilibrium” (52). Robertson’s disapproval of adventurism, however, is limited to the individual who is operating outside the bounds of the state and the authority of the king. As long as transgressive agency can be controlled by the state, it can be subsumed to the common good, and even the good of humanity. For instance, commerce and navigation are transformed by the order of John the Bastard, the Portuguese prince, to outfit

a few vessels … to sail along the western shore of Africa bounded by the Atlantic Ocean, and to discover unknown countries situated there. From this inconsiderable attempt, we may date the commencement of that spirit of discovery, which opened the barriers that had for so long shut out mankind from the knowledge of one half of the territorial globe. (1: 58)

Robertson’s belief in the development of European history as the uninterrupted evolution of progress ultimately outweighs any doubts about the ability of governments to reign in adventurism. The implementation of the interrelated systems of navigation, transoceanic administration, and the extraction of wealth from mines and plantations connects the narrative arc of empire in Europe from Roman times to the modern period.

As Anthony Pagden notes, the voyage to the Americas “constituted a turning point in the development of European civilization … [T]hese had enormously enhanced the scope of world trade” (European 100). In the discovery of the compass, which made it possible for Europeans to sail beyond the equator and set the stage for sailing to the Americas, Robertson even sees divine intervention: “At length the period arrived, when Providence decreed that men were to pass the limits within which they had been so long confined, and open to themselves a more ample field wherein to display their talents, their enterprise, and courage” (1: 55). This divinely predestined breakthrough of Europeans releases them from “confinement” into “a more ample field”—the world. “The compass may be said to have opened to man the dominion of the sea, and to have put him in full possession of the earth, by enabling him to visit every part of it” (1: 51). To demonstrate the gradual attainment of the “full possession of the earth,” Robertson gives a “succinct survey of discovery and navigation … from the earliest dawn of historical knowledge to the full establishment of the Roman dominion” to show that navigation, trade (commerce), and discovery or “enlarged ideas” fuel human progress (1: 30, 1: 13). This vision of global trade makes one thing clear for his readers: mastery of navigation will give a country dominion over commerce, and commerce can lead to great things, including the discovery of a new world.

A more significant reason why Robertson’s rejection of the commercial system is not entirely persuasive is the treatment of slavery in America as unheimlich or uncanny. Robertson constructs his panegyric on trade and navigation by largely suppressing the history of the slave trade and its connection to commerce. Such a glaring omission in the period indicates that, for Robertson, slavery was both familiar and frightening. As Freud defines it, the uncanny “is that species of the frightening that goes back to what was well known and had long been familiar … [T]he term uncanny (unheimlich) applies to everything that was intended to remain secret, hidden away, and has come into the open” (124, 132). Robertson’s suppression of slavery symbolically displaces the enslavement of Africans onto the enslavement of Americans, which becomes in Derrida’s formulation a “metonymic substitution” (Dissemination 89) that doubles what “was intended to remain secret.”¹⁰ Robertson furthermore creates a textual alibi through his controverted treatment of Las Casas, who, as Antonio Benítez Rojo argues, had himself treated the enslavement of Africans in Cuba and their revolt as uncanny.¹¹ This double concealment in Robertson’s text intensifies the relation between the enslavement of Africans and its link to that of Americans, and conveys the anxiety that Africans, like Amerindians, will resist enforced labor. The interreferentiality of discourses about America and Africa in Robertson’s History brings into relation the expansiveness of “discovery,” “commerce,” and “navigation” with the brutality of the Atlantic slave trade.

The discourse on navigation begins as a disarmingly simple and logical lesson in supply and demand, in which navigation is personified. Navigation can balance surpluses and deficits:

It is to navigation that men are indebted for the power of transporting the superfluous stock of one part of the earth, to supply the wants of another. The luxuries and blessings of a particular climate are no longer confined to itself alone, but the enjoyment of them is communicated to the most distant regions. (1: 3–4)

Besides positing a harmonic redress of “want,” Robertson conceives of supply in terms of “luxuries and blessings of a particular climate.” By conferring the status of “luxury” and “blessing” to “superfluous stock,” Robertson gives a morally acceptable tenor to the commerce taking place. The commodity traded is not essential to the traders, and consumers purchasing the “stock” are not disturbing trade’s harmonic balance by demanding or taking necessities.¹² The resulting “enjoyment” rewards this exchange between equals, where no abuses of power have been committed.

If commerce is implicit at the beginning of Robertson’s narrative, he soon pairs it with navigation. Together they neutralize “the ambition of conquest, or the necessity of procuring new settlements” for Phoenicians and Carthaginians (Robertson, America 1: 5), while for Greeks and Romans, they consolidate military control, government, and the acquisition of wealth. In the first instance, trade becomes “a new source of discovery”—“it opened unknown seas, it penetrated into new regions, and contributed more than any cause, to bring men acquainted with the situation, the nature, and the commodities of different parts of the globe” (1: 5). The Phoenicians stand out as “a people of merchants who aimed at the empire of the sea, and actually possessed it” (1: 7), and the Carthaginians, who succeeded them, also benefit from business. “Commerce … awakened curiosity, enlarged the ideas and desires of men, and incited them to bold enterprises. Voyages were undertaken, the sole object of which was to discover new countries, and to explore unknown seas” (1: 13). Discovery, the “enlargement” of ideas, accompanies the expansion of trade, and both are made possible by “the empire of the sea.” Robertson next turns to “the progress of navigation and discovery among the Greeks and Romans, which, although less splendid, is better ascertained” (1: 16). Under the Greeks and Romans, the forces of navigation and commerce, which for the Phoenicians and Carthaginians are vehicles of discovery, give way before empire. “The expedition of Alexander the Great into the east, considerably enlarged the sphere of navigation … The revolution in commerce, brought about by the force of his genius, is hardly inferior to that revolution in empire, occasioned by the success of his arms” (1: 20). Under Alexander, an overarching structure of government unifies trade for the first time, a consolidation the Romans replicate. Although the Romans realize that “in order to acquire the universal dominion after which they aspired, it was necessary to render themselves masters of the sea” (1: 25), their administration is what gives them power. Robertson observes with admiration that “the union among nations was never so entire, nor the intercourse so perfect, as within the bounds of this vast empire … One superintending power moved and regulated the industry of mankind, and enjoyed the fruits of their joint efforts” (1: 26–7). The power between trader and consumer that seems so equitably shared at the beginning of Robertson’s analysis becomes, through the figurative alchemy of navigation and commerce, the agency of “one superintending power” that oversees not only the “transportation” of goods,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Table Of Contents
• Reimagining the Transatlantic, 1780–1890
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Pan-Atlantic
• 1 From New World to Pan-Atlantic: Opening the History of America
• 2 Francisco de Miranda, Toussaint Louverture, and the Pan-Atlantic Sphere of Liberation
• 3 Pan-Atlantic Exports and Imports: Translation, Freedom, and the Circulation of Cultural Capital
• 4 Positioning South America from HMS Beagle: The Navigator, the Discoverer, and the Ocean of Free Trade
• 5 Pan-Atlantic Migrations: Capital, Culture, Revolution
• Epilogue
• Works Cited
• Index