Unhomely Empire

Whiteness and Belonging, c.1760-1830

Onni Gust

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350128538
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

This book examines the role of Scottish Enlightenment ideas of belonging in the construction and circulation of white supremacist thought that sought to justify British imperial rule. During the 18th century, European imperial expansion radically increased population mobility through the forging of new trade routes, war, disease, enslavement and displacement. In this book, Onni Gust argues that this mass movement intersected with philosophical debates over what it meant to belong to a nation, civilization, and even humanity itself. Unhomely Empire maps the consolidation of a Scottish Enlightenment discourse of 'home' and 'exile' through three inter-related case studies and debates; slavery and abolition in the Caribbean, Scottish Highland emigration to North America, and raising white girls in colonial India. Playing out over poetry, political pamphlets, travel writing, philosophy, letters and diaries, these debates offer a unique insight into the movement of ideas across a British imperial literary network. Using this rich cultural material, Gust argues that whiteness was central to 19th-century liberal imperialism's understanding of belonging, whilst emotional attachment and the perceived ability, or inability, to belong were key concepts in constructions of racial difference.

1

The racialization of belonging in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind, than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished.

Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith accused European colonists who owned African slaves in America and the Caribbean of ‘brutality and baseness’. Reversing the common, European stereotype of Africans as ‘barbaric’, Smith represented the enslavers themselves as ‘brutes’ and ‘barbarians’ who had reduced a ‘nation of heroes’ to the most vicious form of slavery.¹ Smith’s critique of the European enslavers’ brutality connected to his wider argument about the role of ‘sympathy’ in human society. ‘Sympathy’, which Smith defined as the ‘calling home to oneself’ the experience of another person, was what enabled society to function as a whole.² ‘Sympathy’ provided an explanation as to why humans cooperated with others, shared each others’ pleasure and pain, and engaged in acts of selflessness. Indeed, for Smith, no individual could survive without the fellow-feeling that enabled them to belong as part of society. Without ‘sympathy’ society would inevitably descend into the forms of ‘brutality’ and ‘baseness’ witnessed on the British-owned plantations in America and the Caribbean. The enslavers’ lack of sympathy for the sufferings of the enslaved was proof of the dangers of unchecked power to the progress of society and civilization. By approving of, and sharing, the enslaved Africans’ contempt for their captors, Smith extended his own sympathy to the sufferings of the enslaved and refused any identification with the slave-owners. His moral indignation against European enslavers thus took the form of rejection. Refusing them any place of belonging, whether in Europe, America or the Caribbean, Smith cast European enslavers out of society and into exile.

Smith’s condemnation of European enslavers played an important role in the emergent debates over the rights and wrongs of slavery and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In his two-volume History of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade (1808), Thomas Clarkson placed Adam Smith at the beginning of a long discussion of ‘men of great talents and learning’ who had ‘promoted the cause of the injured Africans’.³ Yet whilst Smith’s analysis of the unprofitability of slavery as a form of labour in his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) certainly provided a persuasive socio-economic critique of slavery, his representation of Africans as ‘savages’ to whose feelings and experiences he paid little attention raises questions about the extent and nature of his abolitionism.⁴ By expressing his own moral outrage, Smith was modelling the very ‘sympathy’ and mode of feeling that he argued represented a higher stage of civilization and virtue; a performance of sentiment that reinforced the superiority of white Europeans over the ‘injur’d African’.⁵ This chapter explores the relationship between sympathy, stadial theory and racial difference in Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and its implications for ideas of white masculinity and belonging in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The chapter begins by situating Smith in the context of imperial expansion, before turning to his definition of ‘sympathy’ and its relationship to stadial theory as a paradigm of progress and civilization. The next section looks at the ambivalence of Smith’s idea of ‘sympathy’ as a universal concept applicable to all humans and its role in constructing ideas of human difference. As feminist and postcolonial historians have long argued, Enlightenment philosophy posited a universal theory of human progress, which was based on the knowledge, worldview and experience of a very small minority of educated, metropolitan European men.⁶ The final section discusses Smith’s representation of women, and particularly non-European men, as the counter-points to his argument about ‘sympathy’, ‘virtue’ and ‘civilization’ and the impact that this had on ideas of belonging.

Adam Smith, moral philosophy and imperial expansion

Adam Smith’s name and his most substantial work The Wealth of Nations (1776) are synonymous with the Scottish Enlightenment. His most recent biographer, Nicholas Phillipson, described him as ‘the most celebrated of Scotland’s enlightened literati, a man to be visited by cultural tourists on pilgrimage to Edinburgh, a man whose table-talk and eccentricities were to be cherished by locals’.⁷ Today, his name lends respectability to neoliberal organizations intent on restoring the ‘great nineteenth-century era of free trade and economic expansion’.⁸ The influence of The Wealth of Nations on thinkers across the world, including on the Bengali philosopher, political and religious thinker, Raja Rammohan Roy, has been well documented.⁹ In contrast to the wide geographical reach and impact of his works and ideas, Smith himself barely travelled beyond the British Isles, and never beyond Western Europe. Between 1764 and 1766, he accompanied the Duke of Buccleugh, heir to vast estates in England and Scotland, on a tour of France and Switzerland.¹⁰ Beyond that year acting as tutor to the young heir, and a year spent studying in Oxford, Smith spent most of his life in Glasgow and Edinburgh. He grew up in, and in later life returned to, his family home in Kirkcaldy, where he lived with his mother, Margaret (née Douglas) until they both moved to Edinburgh in 1778, and a cousin, Janet Douglas who acted as their house keeper.¹¹ Smith’s social world was dominated by his attendance at male-only social and debating societies primarily in Edinburgh and Glasgow, including the Edinburgh Select Society, the Oyster Club, the Poker Club, as well as small gatherings in the homes of colleagues and fellow scholars, including that of Lord Kames.¹²

If Smith’s life was relatively parochial, his friendship with David Hume , Adam Ferguson and Lord Kames, as well as his subsequent position at the Board of Trade, would have introduced him to imperial administrators and colonists, including Benjamin Franklin.¹³ His reading of the reports of colonial travel writers from the Americas, the Pacific and coastal West Africa also informed his thinking. Listed in the catalogue of his library were at least forty-five books of travel writings, including Francois Bernier’s Voyages (1699) and Anthony Benezet’s Some Historical Account of Guinea (1771). He also possessed the Quran, translated into French, and Sir William Jones’s translations of Persian and Sanskrit poetry.¹⁴ Smith’s library, as well as his own published works, is a testimony to the growing awareness of non-European peoples and the emerging hegemony of British imperial rule during the second half of the eighteenth century. The early books on travel writing largely written by French travellers and colonists had, by the 1770s, been eclipsed by the names of British-imperial travel writers, including Cook’s voyages to the Pacific and part of Australia. There is a noticeable transition, too, in the knowledge that Smith had of non-European peoples between the 1750s, when he was writing The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and The Wealth of Nations, which was published in 1776. As Mary Louise Pratt has argued, their representations of non-European peoples played a fundamental role in shaping Enlightenment ideas of the human and non-human world.¹⁵

Despite Smith’s increasing awareness of non-European societies as they were represented through the words of European-imperial male travellers, and his use of them for his theories of development, his own intellectual and social world remained narrowly focused on men from the elite and middling ranks of society. His lecture theatres at the University of Edinburgh, where he taught Rhetoric and Jurisprudence, and at the University of Glasgow where he held the Chair of Logic and was subsequently Professor of Moral Philosophy, were barred to women. So, too, were the clubs and societies where he discussed and developed his ideas. In his writing, Smith excluded women from his imagined audience, referring to women as ‘them’, and men as ‘us’ or, in one instance, ‘us males’. He also embedded this gendered separation of social and intellectual spheres into his The Theory of Moral Sentiments, stating that ‘to talk to a woman as we should to a man is improper: it is expected that their company should inspire us with more gaiety, more pleasantry, and more attention’.¹⁶ As feminist historians have long argued, although the discourse of sympathy and sentiment nominally elevated women’s status by purporting to honour women’s ‘natural’ sensibility and their ‘civilizing’ influence upon men, in practice it placed further restrictions on their agency beyond the home.¹⁷ Indeed, Lucinda Cole has argued that Smith’s particular definition of sympathy dismissed ‘feminine’ sensibility as ‘weak’ and denied women any ability to access a higher, more rational form of sympathy that he associated with virtue.¹⁸ Smith routinely ignored or belittled women’s labour, dismissing, for example, the significance of Native American women’s agriculture in order to represent the society as belonging to the stage of ‘hunters’.¹⁹ Smith was more extreme in his misogyny than either Hutcheson or Hume, but his exclusion of women from his imagined audience was common to all branches of European philosophy. In his lectures, Smith’s teacher, Francis Hutcheson, made the gender of his readership explicit when he stated that the aim of Moral Philosophy was to ‘direct men to that course of action which tends most effectually to promote their greatest happiness and perfection’.²⁰

Moral Philosophy was directed explicitly and exclusively at men, and was centred and narrowly circumscribed around a Europe that was imagined as white. Although there were certainly Black and Asian people living and working in Scotland during Smith’s lifetime, the first recorded Black student, William Ferguson, did not matriculate from Edinburgh until 1809.²¹ Whether Smith encountered and engaged with any non-white people is a matter of conjecture; he may have met Samuel Johnson’s black servant, Frank Barber, when they visited Edinburgh in the 1770s.²² In his published work, however, Smith’s reference to black people was restricted to enslaved Africans in the Caribbean. Smith’s assumption that his audience was located in, or originated from, Europe is evident from his representation of China as a distant civilization, with which only European merchants would have an interest.²³ He wrote of different European nations with a sense of familiarity, proximity and equivalency that is lacking in his discussion of peoples in Asia, Africa or North America, who he tended to refer to homogenously as ‘savage nations’. David Hume, to whom Smith was both intellectually and socially close, did acknowledge the existence of people of African descent in Europe, but only to place a complete separation between Africans and white Europeans, and to identify himself and his audience explicitly with white, elite, Europeans. This is most evident in his infamous footnote in his essay, ‘Of National Character’, in which he claimed that ‘there are Negroe [sic] slaves dispersed over Europe, of whom none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity though low people, without education, will start up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession.’²⁴

Despite these prejudices, and their exclusion from lecture theatres, it is clear that women and non-white men did engage with Scottish Enlightenment thought. As Laurent DuBois has shown, ideas and books circulated on the ships bound for colonial ports, informing the thinking of the enslaved and colonized.²⁵ Both Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano were familiar with, and employed, Enlightenment thought in their published work against the slave trade.²⁶ As subsequent chapters show, relatively high-status women, including Elizabeth Hamilton, Maria Edgeworth and Maria Graham, had access to the published works of Scottish Enlightenment in the libraries of their families and friends. They also gained insights into the debates that took place in the lecture theatres and men-only societies through dinner-table conversation and discussions in parlours.²⁷ Yet regardless of this partial and mediated access, women and non-European people of all genders remained the Others against which Smith formulated his ideas of ‘civilization’ and societal advance. As the rest of this chapter argues, Smith’s idea of ‘sympathy’, and its relationship to ‘progress’ and ‘civilization’ not only excluded those who did not fit his vision of the white, elite and male bodied subject, but it actively employed gendered and racialized tropes in order to illustrate what ‘virtue’ and ‘civilization’ was not. In this respect, Smith’s idea of ‘sympathy’ as a form of emotional engagement intersected with his more materialist understanding of societal development that is encapsulated in stadial theory.

Sympathy and stadial theory

Adam Smith began his academic life at the University of Edinburgh in 1748, before moving to the University of Glasgow in 1751. In addition to his lectures on Logic and Metaphysics, he lectured on Natural Jurisprudence and Moral Philosophy, and was appointed Professor of Moral Philosophy in 1752. Only parts of his lectures on Jurisprudence survive from notes taken by his students during the academic sessions of 1762–3 and 1763–4, his own lecture notes were destroyed at his request on his death.²⁸ However, those few surviving lecture notes, published in 1896 as Lectures on Jurisprudence, provide the most comprehensive account of the four-stage theory of societal development, known as ‘stadial theory’, which would play a fundamental role in shaping and justifying British imperial thought and practice. Stadial theory mapped the progress of human societies according to their modes of acquiring and using property.²⁹ Smith identified four stages – hunting, pasturage, agricultural and commercial – according to which all human societies could be classified, and through which some societies would pass, or in the case of Europe had passed, sequentially. In the first stage, in which humans subsisted on hunting wild animals and eating wild fruits, the ownership of property was confined to what an individual could physically, and thereby momentarily, lay claim to. Beyond that, there was no sense of long-term ownership and therefore no need for laws of property. In the second stage, as numbers grew, human societies developed the ability to tame animals and to lay claim to those animals that they had reared. Smith identified all ‘savage nations’, including the ‘Tartars’ and ‘Arabs’ who ‘subsist by flocks have no notion of cultivating the ground’, as living in this stage of ‘pasturage’. The cultivation of land in order to grow food, and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Map
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The racialization of belonging in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments
• 2 Dugald Stewart and the colour of progress
• 3 The role of ‘home’ in Edgeworth and Graham’s critiques of slavery
• 4 Belonging and exile in the debate over Scottish Highland emigration
• 5 Colonial knowledge and the making of white masculinity in Bombay
• 6 ‘A hothouse of weeds’: reproducing white womanhood in colonial India
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint