Hating Empire Properly

The Two Indies and the Limits of Enlightenment Anticolonialism

Sunil M. Agnani

• Publisher: American Literatures Initiative
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780823252152
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

In Hating Empire Properly, Sunil Agnani produces a novel attempt to think the eighteenth-century imagination of
the West and East Indies together, arguing that this is how contemporary thinkers Edmund Burke and Denis
Diderot actually viewed them. This concern with multiple geographical spaces is revealed to be a largely
unacknowledged part of the matrix of Enlightenment thought in which eighteenth-century European and American self-conceptions evolved. By focusing on colonial spaces of the Enlightenment, especially India and Haiti, he demonstrates how Burke's fearful view of the French Revolution—the defining event of modernity— as shaped by prior reflection on these other domains. Exploring with sympathy the angry outbursts against injustice in the writings of Diderot, he nonetheless challenges recent understandings of him as a univocal critic of empire by showing the persistence of a fantasy of consensual colonialism in his thought. By looking at the impasses and limits in the thought of both radical and conservative writers, Agnani asks what it means to critique empire "properly." Drawing his method from Theodor Adorno's quip that "one must have tradition in oneself, in order to hate it properly, " he proposes a critical inhabiting of dominant forms of reason as a way forward for the critique of both empire and Enlightenment.Thus, this volume makes important contributions to political theory, history, literary studies, American studies, and postcolonial studies.

Part I: Denis Diderot: The Two Indies of the French Enlightenment

1. Doux Commerce, Douce Colonisation: Consensual Colonialism in Diderot’s Thought

Let us stop here and place ourselves back in the time when America and India were unknown. I address myself to the most cruel of Europeans, and I say to them: there exist many regions which will furnish you with rich metals, with appealing clothing, with delicious dishes. But read this history and see at what price this discovery is promised to you. Do you, or do you not want it to take place? Does one believe that there could be a creature so infernal as to say: I WANT THIS. Well! There will be no single moment in the future where my question would have the same force.

—Denis Diderot, “Reflections on the Good and Evil which the Discovery of the New World has Done to Europe” (1780)

What do these forts you have garrisoned all the beaches with attest to? Your terror and the profound hatred of those who surround you. You will no longer be fearful, when you are no longer hated. You will no longer be hated, when you are beneficent. The barbarian, just like the civilized man, wants to be happy.

—Denis Diderot, “Principles which the French Should Follow in India, If They Succeed There in Reestablishing their Esteem and Presence” (1780)

First the traveler, then the philosophe: this couplet is as important to the story of eighteenth-century intellectual history as is the revolutionary and the philosopher or the soldier and the statesman.¹ As a variation on this I would also add the administrator and the philosophe as another vital pair of complementarities and antagonisms. This chapter considers two texts by Diderot with a view to investigating the significance of some of these doubles. The first text is rather well known, although it has of late sparked or been reilluminated by scholarship with a greater degree of historical specificity.² I refer to Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, which is set in the South Pacific (though it is a South Pacific of the mind as much as of the seas, and this will be part of my consideration). What one finds when looking at the writings of the philosophes is in part a lucid demonstration of the now widely recognized but still debated thesis of Orientalism: the traveler and the administrator undertake to gather and collect information, and this in turn plays a vital role in informing the technologies of management and government.³ But this goes straight to the apparently menacing outcome of an initially rather innocent or pure act: I mean the desire, as Diderot remarked in the Encyclopédie, to note down and to “collect all the knowledge that now lies scattered over the face of the Earth.”⁴ It is here that we may locate many of the secondary reflections, as one could call them, on the initial reports from the field: the famous considerations of natural man by Rousseau in his Discourse on Inequality; the various footnotes throughout the work of Kant, even in his aesthetic works, to the Caribs, Africans, and others; and Diderot’s peculiar and parodic remarks on Tahiti in the Supplément.⁵ But all along there are interruptions in this smooth continuum that connects the traveler or administrator to the philosophe, disrupting the apparent imperatives for empire, land acquisition, or trade.

One of the primary flaws of the debate around orientalism, at least within the discipline of literary studies, may have been to lay too much emphasis solely on the question of representation. It is fair to say that for Said, orientalism was not merely about the question of representation; it was also a discursive field (an effect of power, a productive effect, etc.). “Indeed, my real argument is that Orientalism is—and does not simply represent—a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ world.”⁶ Nonetheless, constrained by the terms of this debate, I too will begin by commenting upon the question of representation in Diderot’s work. I hope, however, to attach these observations to a set of keywords in the political lexicon of the period that circulate among the writers of these works. I must first reiterate one link between the question of representation, in this case of the native or of native society, and political analysis which pertains, more specifically, to the concept of hegemony.⁷ In order to operate, hegemony requires constant repetition and reiteration; in one formulation it depends upon coercion and consent (and it is the presence and importance of consent that make it amenable to some forms of liberal political thought). I introduce this idea primarily to illustrate what one finds throughout Diderot’s later political writings: unwilling to accept the necessity of coercion as an element of colonization, he both attempts to imagine in many different formulations how this project could be undertaken by means of consent, participating in a set of representations that legitimize dominance of one kind, and frequently fractures this image. In the Supplément this is evident by his undermining of the truth claims of Antoine de Bougainville’s original text and in his use of an imagined Tahitian Other to flay the priest and cleric in France.⁸

Composed around 1772 (soon after the original publication of Bougainville’s work in 1771), Diderot’s Supplément au voyage de Bougainville was short and relatively coherent, not widely available in his lifetime, and circulated as an underground manuscript (perhaps because of its sexually scandalous nature).⁹ By contrast, the second text under consideration is much more scattered, was anonymous in its initial editions, and only in the mid-twentieth century was Diderot’s authorship conclusively verified. I refer to his contributions to the immense and fascinating work known as the Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes.¹⁰ The ten-volume work was edited by the abbé de Raynal and went through three editions (1770, 1774, and 1780). This much one can learn from reading the brief selection of material present in a modern English edition of Diderot’s Political Writings (1992).¹¹ But there are several other aspects of this massive work that are hardly visible from the excerpts presented there. Diderot’s involvement in the three editions increased with each publication, and he was said to have thoroughly rewritten the third edition by spending as much as fourteen hours a day at the task.¹² By many estimations, his contributions amount to approximately a third of the 1780 edition.¹³ It is clear that Diderot had some doubts whether his contributions, even if eloquent, would be of any worth. Raynal’s reply in a letter was admirably frank about the respective talents of each author: “Non, non . . . faites toujours ce que je vous demande. . . . Je connais un peu plus que vous le goût du public; ce sont vos lignes qui sauveront l’ennui de mes calculs éternels.”¹⁴ Although Raynal may have felt he could serve up a work to suit public taste, this does not lessen Diderot’s own commitment to the work, as illustrated by a dispute he had with Friedrich Melchior Grimm. Grimm had criticized Raynal for the third edition of the Histoire (1780), and this enraged Diderot. Arthur Wilson, Diderot’s biographer, cites a letter discovered in the twentieth century (probably unsent), in which Diderot rails against Grimm for becoming an “antiphilosophe” of the most dangerous variety. Grimm, Wilson argues, became more and more conservative, while Diderot increasingly lost faith in the possibility of political reform and became by contrast more revolutionary.¹⁵ In May 1781 the Parlement of Paris condemned the Histoire to be burned and the author to be imprisoned, while the abbé Raynal was prudently away.¹⁶

The subtitle to part 1 of my study emphasizes the notion of the “two Indies,” extending a thought implied by the structure of Raynal’s work, which moves at times from Occident to Orient, from North to South. Indeed the two are not identical images of each other, not exactly twin Indies, not les Indes jumelles.¹⁷ Yet the affinity suggested in such a work between les Indes occidentales and les Indes orientales, in conjunction with a shift between l’Amérique septentrionale and l’Amérique méridionale, brings out a quality that is quite striking to the contemporary reader: the link between the old colonies and the newer ones in this colonial encyclopedia, or—to put the matter in other terms—the relation established between the New World and the Old. One sees the same distinction at work in Burke’s writings on India, which are fundamentally shaped by events in the New World; by this I mean events both in North America and in the West Indies. In the writings of both Diderot and Burke there is ample evidence to sustain Anthony Pagden’s helpful distinction in this period between the “new” and the “old” colonies.¹⁸ The old or first colonies refer to those in North and South America, while the new or second colonies refer to the growing importance of Asia to European colonialism in the eighteenth century. We see this axis of comparison everywhere in the Histoire des deux Indes (beginning with the organization of the contents of the ten volumes), in travelogues from the period, in administrators’ memoirs, and in the movement of such military figures as Charles Cornwallis, leaving Yorktown in Virginia for Bengal. (Indeed this conjuncture of Virginia and “Hindostan” will recur in Burke’s thought.) In addition to this axis of comparison is a second between North and South America within the New World; one could attempt to enumerate the typologies of this discourse in order to understand their various functions.¹⁹

This second opposition between North and South America will become increasingly important as comparative reflections of the fate of societies and man in the various regions of the New World proceed in the nineteenth century. It is this comparison that is at work in some of Tocqueville’s reflections in Democracy in America when he wonders why “no nations upon the face of the earth are more miserable than those of South America” in spite of its enjoying an isolation from enemies and a geographical richness akin to North America.²⁰ Often this distinction between North and South America becomes a shorthand for several other oppositions having less to do with geography than with religion. One could mention here Voltaire’s positive evaluation of the behavior of the Quakers in North America for winning over and persuading the Indians by commerce, in contrast to the methods commonly used, in his view, by the Jesuits in South America.²¹

There will be two foci to my examination. The first concerns Diderot’s exploration of the possibility of a colonialism that is consensual; I refer to this as douce colonisation or “soft colonization.” (The phrase is my own, coined on analogy with doux commerce.)²² The second theme is related to this by the transposition of reciprocal consent to the intimate sphere, where it thereby pertains to métissage, or breeding. The two elements are also both related to issues of population and settlement. The discussion of procreation, and of population as a form of wealth in the Supplément, derive from the larger consideration of the settlement of colonies (part of douce colonisation). The Supplément supplies the occasion to introduce these topics, while the Histoire allows for their elaboration and contextualization.

Doux Commerce and Breeding

As a word on its own, breeding has many divergent valences, to which the title of this section refers (from manners to animal husbandry to biology).²³ One comes upon the notion frequently when examining the Histoire des deux Indes, which is caught in the whirl of discussions around the possibilities of commerce in the period. Yet tied in with this economic debate is an essential relationship to sexuality, and this occurs via a notion of wealth as it is yoked to the emerging idea of population in the period. To summarize: an empty continent, or empty island, to use the example given by the Tahitian native in Diderot’s Supplément, obviously needs someone to labor upon it. (So it was argued, following a logic stated in its clearest form in Locke’s Second Treatise of Government—the “agricultural argument,” as it is sometimes named.)²⁴ Wealth, both in the Histoire and in the Supplément, is often explicitly understood as population—an idea not surprising to scholars of the French eighteenth century, where one finds many writers concerned with the depopulation of one continent (North America) in a manner linked with the depopulation of another (Africa). On the one hand was the accidental ethnocide of disease alongside the intentional effects of conquest (as popularly reported, whether accurately or not, by de Las Casas in the sixteenth century); on the other hand was the concomitant forced migration of Africans as slave labor.²⁵ Two continents’ native populations, it was argued, were thereby jeopardized.²⁶

There are two or three different ways in which breeding operates in Diderot’s work, which may hold more generally in related late eighteenth-century French Enlightenment thought (keeping in mind that this forms a part of the plural Enlightenments discussed in the prologue—a more apt way of understanding this period). The questions I would like to consider are, schematically, the following: What role does breeding play in Diderot’s understanding of consensual colonialism? How does Diderot understand the figure of the Creole? What is the relation of wealth to population, and of these two terms to breeding? Finally, how does Diderot unders...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: Enlightenment, Colonialism, Modernity
• Introduction: Companies, Colonies, and Their Critics
• Part I. Denis Diderot: The Two Indies of the French Enlightenment
• 1. Doux Commerce, Douce Colonisation: Consensual Colonialism in Diderot’s Thought
• 2. On the Use and Abuse of Anger for Life: Ressentiment and Revenge in the Histoire des deux Indes
• Part II. Edmund Burke: Political Analogy and Enlightenment Critique
• 3. Between France and India in 1790: Custom and Arithmetic Reason in a Country of Conquest
• 4. Jacobinism in India, Indianism in English Parliament: Fearing the Enlightenment and Colonial Modernity
• 5. Atlantic Revolutions and Their Indian Echoes: The Place of America in Burke’s Asia Writings
• Epilogue. Hating Empire Properly: European Anticolonialism at Its Limit
• Notes
• Bibliography