The Inner Life of Empires

An Eighteenth-Century History

Emma Rothschild

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781400838165
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

The birth of the modern world as told through the remarkable story of one eighteenth-century family They were abolitionists, speculators, slave owners, government officials, and occasional politicians. They were observers of the anxieties and dramas of empire. And they were from one family. The Inner Life of Empires tells the intimate history of the Johnstones--four sisters and seven brothers who lived in Scotland and around the globe in the fast-changing eighteenth century. Piecing together their voyages, marriages, debts, and lawsuits, and examining their ideas, sentiments, and values, renowned historian Emma Rothschild illuminates a tumultuous period that created the modern economy, the British Empire, and the philosophical Enlightenment.One of the sisters joined a rebel army, was imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle, and escaped in disguise in 1746. Her younger brother was a close friend of Adam Smith and David Hume. Another brother was fluent in Persian and Bengali, and married to a celebrated poet. He was the owner of a slave known only as "Bell or Belinda, " who journeyed from Calcutta to Virginia, was accused in Scotland of infanticide, and was the last person judged to be a slave by a court in the British isles. In Grenada, India, Jamaica, and Florida, the Johnstones embodied the connections between European, American, and Asian empires. Their family history offers insights into a time when distinctions between the public and private, home and overseas, and slavery and servitude were in constant flux.Based on multiple archives, documents, and letters, The Inner Life of Empires looks at one family's complex story to describe the origins of the modern political, economic, and intellectual world.

• CHAPTER ONE •

SETTING OUT

The Johnstone sisters and brothers were born in Scotland in the 1720s and 1730s and grew up in Dumfriesshire, in the Scottish-English borders. Over their long lifetimes, from Barbara’s birth in 1723 to the death of Betty, the last surviving child, in 1813, they were participants in a vast transformation of the conditions of existence. They lived in a time of economic and commercial revolution; of expansion in long-distance commerce and empire; of political revolution in India, North America, France, and Saint-Domingue; and of the changes in ways of thinking about individual lives, political rights, freedom of commerce, and European dominion overseas that have been associated, since the Johnstones’ own times, with the birth of the modern world.¹

The valley of the Esk, where the Johnstones’ family home of Westerhall is hidden among bare, rounded hills, was at the edge of this new world of enlightenment. It was a place of sheepgrazing, smuggling, and disputes over inheritance.² “It’s but a coarse moorish Country,” in the description of a travel guide of 1729, and Daniel Defoe, in his Journey through Scotland, found only one impressive sight in the entire vicinity, “standing in a wild and mountainous Country, where nothing but what was desolate and dismal could be expected.”³ Scotland, with its own legal system and established religion, had been united with England under a single parliament by the Act of Union of 1707.⁴ But it was still, for several generations, a “small and poor country.”⁵ The west of Scotland, in particular, was in the early part of the eighteenth century a “country without Trade, without Cultivation, or money,” in the description of a contemporary of the Johnstones, Elizabeth Mure, in which “some part of the old feudle system still remained.”⁶ Scotland was also traversed, in the Johnstones’ childhood, by conflicts over religion and by the struggles over political succession—the Jacobite rebellions, and eventually the conflict of 1745–46—which were at one and the same time wars within families and scenes in the long, intermittent, and occasionally global competition between England and France.⁷

The economic and commercial expansion of the eighteenth century—an “economic revolution,” especially in Holland, England and France, an increase in long-distance commerce in the Atlantic and the Indian oceans, and an “industrious revolution” in the consumption of textiles and household goods—came relatively late to the west of Scotland.⁸ But in the 1740s, in Elizabeth Mure’s account, almost everything began to change: “About the 40 riches began to incress considerably. Many returnd from the East and West Indias with good fortune who had gone abroad after the Union.” The ideas of individuals changed, too. “It was then that the slavery of the mind began to be spocken off; freedom was in every bodys mouth.” Even children were to be freed from superstition; “for their Girls the outmost care was taken that fear of no kind should inslave the mind; nurses was turned off who would tell the young of Witches and Ghosts.”⁹

The expansion of long-distance commerce—or the early globalization of the eighteenth century—was most spectacular, in the Johnstones’ lifetimes, with respect to the Atlantic commerce with North and South America, the Caribbean, and the West African slaving ports, and the Indian Ocean commerce with eastern and southern India.¹⁰ The ocean had become “the great high road of communication to the different nations of the earth,” as Adam Smith wrote in 1759, and the “industry of mankind” had “entirely changed the whole face of the globe.”¹¹ The Atlantic slave trade, in which the British acquired the right to supply slaves to the “South Seas,” or the Spanish colonies in America, became a flourishing commerce, connected in turn to the markets for Indian textiles in coastal and interior Africa. The European empires transported some forty-one thousand slaves per year from Africa to the Americas in the 1700s, and eighty-seven thousand per year in the 1790s; British traders accounted for almost half the expansion. By the 1790s some thirty-two thousand slaves were exported each year to the British West Indies alone.¹²

The European commerce with India was transformed over the same period by the successes of the French and English East India companies. The East India companies, private associations of merchants with trading privileges granted by Indian and European sovereigns, were the intermediaries in the expansion in sales of Indian manufactured goods, textiles, and spices, and of Chinese tea, to European, African, and American markets.¹³ They were also in a position to extend their privileges, in the interstices of continuing conflicts between the Mughal empire and its Indian enemies, into territorial dominion.¹⁴ The “great monied companies,” in Edmund Burke’s description of 1769, constituted “a new world of commerce,” a system that was “wholly new in the world.”¹⁵

The eighteenth-century epoch of globalization was a period of almost uninterrupted war, over very large distances. The half century from the outbreak of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1740 to the end of the War of American Independence in 1783—the Johnstones’ own age of empire—was thought of at the time as a single conflict, with its interwar periods and its postwar periods and its periods of false or imagined or expected war.¹⁶ The French and British navies fought over prizes and islands from Madras to northern Canada, and from the Cape of Good Hope to the Antilles; the Jacobite armies fought with French support in Scotland, and the armies of the British and French East India Companies fought in changing alliances with the princes of the Mughal and Maratha empires. It was a time, as David Hume wrote to a French friend in 1767, in which the “most frivolous Causes” were liable to “spread the Flame from one End of the Globe to the other.”¹⁷

The age of revolutions, from the overthrow of Mughal power in Bengal in 1757–65 and the American Revolution of 1776 to the French Revolution of 1789 and the revolution of 1793 in Saint-Domingue, the modern Haiti, was the last scene of the Johnstones’ lives, and of the lives of their extended households.¹⁸ Five of the brothers lived for a time in the British colonies in North America, or were landowners in the territories that became the new United States. Bell or Belinda, who had been the “slave or servant” of John Johnstone, arrived in Virginia in 1772, as the revolutionary crisis began to unfold. William Johnstone’s daughter was involved, as will be seen, in the family disputes of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic empire. Betty Johnstone was involved, with two of her nieces, in the politics of inheritance in the new American republic.¹⁹ This was the Johnstones’ own new world.

THE FOUR SISTERS AND SEVEN BROTHERS

The Johnstones were the children of a young couple from the unprosperous professional classes of lowlands Scotland: Barbara Murray and James Johnstone. The young couple made a “clandestine & unorderly” (or unannounced) marriage in 1719, in the judgement of the Edinburgh justices of the peace.²⁰ The older James Johnstone, the children’s father, was a law student, whom an acquaintance urged, some years later, to “try to disencumber yourself of that intolerable shyness which plagues you.”²¹ He was from a family of provincial lawyers and factors—or commissioners for the estates of rich landowners—who was the heir to the newly acquired title of baronet of Nova Scotia and to the heavily indebted family home of Westerhall.²² Barbara Murray, the children’s mother, was from a legal and professional family of the uneminent nobility, the granddaughter of an Edinburgh surgeon and great-granddaughter of an archbishop of Glasgow.²³ She was described, in a sermon preached after her death, as endowed with an “admirable power of elocution,” although “her temper was ardent, & consequently liable to excess”; “she did not abound for instance in the virtue of Prudence . . . nor had any talent at making a secret of every thing.”²⁴

The families were diverse, like so many others in eighteenth-century Scotland, with respect to religion and politics. The Johnstones of Westerhall were members of the Church of Scotland and supporters of the union with England; the Murrays of Elibank were for the most part, in this period of fluctuating religious associations, members of the Church of England or of the Episcopal Church in Scotland. One of Barbara Johnstone’s brothers, the children’s “Uncle Sandy,” was a prominent Jacobite, and another was a British army chaplain and prebendary in the Church of England.

Barbara and James Johnstone had fourteen children over the nineteen-year period from 1720 to 1739, of whom eleven survived infancy.²⁵ This is a large population of relations to keep in mind, and it is quite difficult, in a world of much smaller families, to imagine what it would be like to have intimate, or potentially intimate relationships with one’s ten brothers and sisters (and ten or more sisters-in-law, or brothers-in-law, or other companions). There were misunderstandings from time to time, even within the family; James had to assure William at one point in 1757 that “the Ungrateful & Extravagant Brother G. mentions is Gidion.”²⁶ I have provided in an appendix some straightforward, or fairly straightforward biographical information about the brothers’ and sisters’ baptisms, marriages, and deaths. These are their stories, in brief.

Barbara (Johnstone) Kinnaird (1723–65), the oldest of the surviving children, lived in Scotland throughout her life. She married a man from a Perthshire family, Charles Kinnaird, who inherited the title and estate of his cousin under the complicated circumstances that were so familiar in eighteenth-century inheritance disputes (his cousin’s wife had been accused of attempting to fabricate a pregnancy, and the birth of two male heirs, by walking around with pillows under her dress).²⁷ Charles Kinnaird came from a Jacobite family and was arrested in 1745, with a servant of Sir James Johnstone called Walter Scot, for “treasonable correspondence”; he was later described in family stories as “eating his commission in prison.”²⁸ Barbara had five children and a shortlived period of prosperity, during which she was able to buy “Tea-cups & Saucers” and even a carriage with her husband’s “name Copper’d and a Coronet.”²⁹ But she and her husband separated soon afterwards.³⁰ She then lived on her own in Edinburgh and died at the age of forty-one.³¹

Margaret (Johnstone) Ogilvy (1724–57), the second child, was the first of the Johnstones to become well known, or notorious, in public life. She was a Jacobite, a supporter of the “pretender” to the thrones of England and Scotland, and she and her husband, David Ogilvy, spent much of 1745–46 traversing Scotland with the rebel armies of “Bonnie Prince Charlie.”³² She was of enthusiastic “political notions,” in the contemporary description of a pamphlet, The Female Rebels, “with black Eyes and black Hair, and her Person well sized, and an easy though not very slend...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction Ideas and Sentiments
• Chapter One Setting Out
• Chapter Two Coming Home
• Chapter Three Ending and Loss
• Chapter Four Economic Lives
• Chapter Five Experiences of Empire
• Chapter Six What Is Enlightenment?
• Chapter Seven Histories of Sentiments
• Chapter Eight Other People
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Maps
• Index