English Language Notes
54.1 SPRING / SUMMER 2016
SECURE SITES: EMPIRE AND THE EMERGENCE OF SECURITY
SPECIAL ISSUE EDITORS: JEFFREY N. COX JILLIAN HEYDT-STEVENSON PAUL YOUNGQUIST
Department of English 226 UCB UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO, BOULDER BOULDER, COLORADO, USA 80309-0226 ENGLISH.COLORADO.EDU/ELN English Language Notes © Copyright 2016, Regents of the University of Colorado. All rights reserved.
English Language Notes, under the sponsorship of the University of Colorado, is published twice per year, in Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter. Institutional subscriptions are $70.00 for the United States and Canada, $80.00 for all other countries. Personal subscriptions are $45.00 for the United States and Canada, $55.00 for all other countries. Back numbers of ELN beginning with Vol. XX, Number 1 are available for $24.00 each from English Language Notes, Hellems 101, University of Colorado Boulder, 226 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0226. Periodicals postage is paid at Boulder, CO. Claims for undelivered subscription numbers will be honored if received within one year of the publication date. No refunds offered for cancellations.
POSTMASTER: Send address changes to English Language Notes, University of Colorado Boulder, 226 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0226.
ISSN 00138282 USPS 176-720
English Language Notes is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography.
Contact Information: English Language Notes Department of English University of Colorado Boulder 226 UCB Boulder, CO 80309-0226 [email protected] http://english.colorado.edu/eln/
Cover design: Karen Jacobs Printed on recycled paper
Cover Art © Heirs of Aaron Douglas/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Credit: The Walter O. Evans Collection at Savannah College of Art and Design. English Language Notes
Senior Editor Advisory Board Laura Winkiel Elizabeth Abel, University of California, Berkeley Adélékè Adéèkó, . . Ohio State University Managing Editor Matthew Anderson, University of New England Jenny Cookson Jan Baetens, University of Leuven (Belgium) Sara Blair, University of Michigan Business Manager Rob Breton, Nipissing University (Canada) Grace Rexroth Anna Brickhouse, University of Virginia Steven Bruhm, University of Western Ontario (Canada) Editorial Board Lennard Davis, University of Illinois, Chicago Katherine Eggert Madelyn Detloff, Miami University, Ohio Jane Garrity Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University Nan Goodman Laura Doan, University of Manchester (UK) Kelly Hurley Dino Felluga, Purdue University Karen Jacobs Cathrine Frank, University of New England William Kuskin Esther Gabara, Duke University Laura Green, Northeastern University Jennifer Green-Lewis, The George Washington University Elena Gualtieri, University of Groningen (Netherlands) Steffen Hantke, Sogang University (South Korea) Richard Hornsey, University of Nottingham (UK) David Kurnick, Rutgers University Doran Larson, Hamilton College Tirza Latimer, California College of the Arts Caroline Levine, University of Wisconsin-Madison Jill Matus, University of Toronto (Canada) David McWhirter, Texas A&M University, College Station Richard Menke, University of Georgia Kent Puckett, University of California, Berkeley David Palumbo-Liu, Stanford University Table of Contents
Introduction Here and There, Now and Then 1 Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, University of Colorado Boulder [email protected] Paul Youngquist, University of Colorado Boulder [email protected] Jeffrey N. Cox, University of Colorado Boulder [email protected]
Queer Green Sex Toys 13 Timothy Morton, Rice University [email protected]
DeLancey’s Tour: 25 Military Barracks and the Endo-Colonization of Englend in the 1790s Neil Ramsey, University of New South Wales [email protected]
How Wordsworth Tells: Numeration, Valuation, and Dwelling in “We are Seven” 39 Miranda Burgess, The University of British Columbia [email protected]
Chthonic Michael: Smithson, Levi-Strauss, Freud, Wordsworth 53 Orin C. Wang, University of Maryland [email protected]
Lalla Rookh and the Afterlife of Allegory 71 Padma Rangarajan, University of Colorado [email protected]
The Last Ruins of Palmyra 87 Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, University of Colorado Boulder [email protected]
Optative Places 107: The Periodical as Site Christine Marie Woody, University of Pennsylvania [email protected]
The “Police Report” Debates: 111: A Burgeoning Fantasy of the Modern Security State Grace Rexroth, University of Colorado Boulder [email protected]
Refracted Artifacts: 115 The Honours of Scotland’s Illusion of Security Conny Cassity, University of Colorado Boulder [email protected]
Print Circuit Security and the Writers’ Buildings 117 in Early Nineteenth-Century Calcutta Chris Kelleher, University of Toronto [email protected]
Antinomian Spaces and Godwin’s Thieves 121 Eric Pencek, Boston College [email protected]
Citing and Siting in the Nineteenth-Century British Census 123 Sophia Hsu, Rice University [email protected]
Securing the Romantic Body: 125: The Politics of Vaccination Travis Chi Wing Lau, University of Pennsylvania [email protected]
Contagious Revolution and Colonial Securitization 129 Lenora Hanson, University of Wisconsin-Madison [email protected]
Contributors 133
De Lancey’s Tour: Military Barracks and the Endo-Colonization of England in the 1790s1
Neil Ramsey
n Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald describes a walking tour across modern day Suffolk that reveals a region haunted by its militaristic past. Seemingly devoid of inhabitants, the region Iis filled instead with innumerable vestiges of Britain’s violent history of military power, war and colonialism. At one point, the unnamed narrator locates relics of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815), observing that while the coast between Orford and Felixstowe had been defended for centuries by Orford Castle, the wars saw a series of Martello towers built along the coast in response to the threat of French invasion.2 Built to withstand naval bombardment with brick walls up to thirteen feet thick, Martello towers were austere and simple round forts that uncannily resembled the pillboxes and bunkers of two world wars.3 Historians of eighteenth-century Britain have had little to say about such military geographies or the ways that they foreshadowed modern military architecture. As a commercial and comparatively liberal nation with deep suspicions of its standing army, Britain has been seen to stand in stark contrast to its autocratic European neighbours. A growing body of research has, however, revealed the full extent of British military power in the eighteenth century, albeit a power linked to finance, taxation, and naval technology as much as to an extensive army.4 Sebald’s tour helps reveal how militarism does not simply manifest in overt displays of martial grandeur, but can function through austerity, secrecy, and familiarity, that it also has a presence just beneath the surface of everyday life.
The Martello towers were not the only military buildings constructed in England at the end of the eighteenth century. The 1790s also saw the widespread establishment of military barracks across the country. While barracks had long been used in Europe, they were not common in England prior to this time. Antagonism toward the standing army was firmly established with the revolution of 1688, and it was commonly believed throughout the eighteenth century that in order to resist monarchical tyranny, English soldiers must not be separated from the people in barracks. At the start of the 1790s, an estimated twenty thousand soldiers were stationed in barracks across Great Britain, almost wholly in the Highlands and the southeast coast of England around naval ports (although barracks were used much more extensively in Ireland). Soldiers were normally billeted at inns or private properties. However, by the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, well over one hundred and fifty thousand soldiers were stationed in almost two hundred barracks.5 This is a development that historians largely ascribe to the increasing size 26 | English Language Notes 54.1 Spring / Summer 2016
and professionalism of the British army, viewing barracks as a military necessity for Britain as it faced the growing military power of France.6
This article revisits the development of barracks in England by examining an earlier tour than Sebald’s, one undertaken by Britain’s Deputy Adjutant General, Colonel Oliver De Lancey, in the summer of 1792 that was instrumental in the British government’s decision to commence construction of barracks across the country later that year. In part, the widespread use of barracks at the end of the eighteenth century can be seen in relation to Michel Foucault’s work on the dawning of a disciplinary society. As innumerable studies have reiterated, barracks represent the prototype of the disciplinary institutions of supervision that proliferated in the nineteenth century such as factories, hospitals, prisons and schools. By examining De Lancey’s tour and the underlying rationale for constructing barracks, this article reveals that they were, however, more than simply sites of discipline. By drawing on Paul Virilio’s conceptualization of military mobilization and the ways in which he argues for the significance of speed, space, and logistical developments in a militarized society, this article proposes that barracks help reveal a thoroughgoing militarization of Britain in the 1790s. The construction of barracks played a significant role in the overall counter-revolutionary politics of the decade because they were fundamentally related to questions of security and biopolitics in the government of the nation’s industrializing towns. In constructing barracks, the nation undertook what Virilio terms an endo- colonization that in effect put the nation into a state of siege as a traditional politics of rights was overawed by military speed.
De Lancey’s Tour De Lancey was appointed Deputy Adjutant General of the armed forces in 1790.7 Although born in America in 1749 to the British General Oliver De Lancey, he was educated in Britain and had a career in the British army, serving in the 14th and subsequently the 17th Dragoons. During the American Revolutionary War, he served as aide-de-camp to Lord Cornwallis and also as Adjutant General to the army at New York (succeeding Major Andre in this role). His position meant that on his return to England he was appointed to head a commission to settle all military claims of the American loyalists and to settle the army accounts connected with the war. With an extensive history of military administration and with close connections to the government, De Lancey was an ideal candidate for the sensitive task of building barracks.8
The government began to construct barracks in response to De Lancey’s report on the loyalty of regiments stationed close to what he termed “manufacturing towns.”9 At the start of 1792, De Lancey was charged with making a tour “for the purpose of discovering the real state, disposition of the Troops, & how far they were to be depended upon in in case of any emergency.”10 He thus travelled from Manchester to Liverpool, Sheffield, Nottingham, Leicester, and finally Birmingham where he concluded his tour in June 1792. It was a tour he attempted to make in secret because of the political sensitivities involved. He was almost found out in Sheffield and forced to retire to nearby Chesterfield while he corresponded with the government. De Lancey submitted a report in relation to the state of the troops, particularly drawing attention to his concerns about “a spirit of combination, and discontent” amongst the 2nd Dragoons stationed at Manchester.11 He also observed attempts by locals at Sheffield to Ramsey | 27
distribute revolutionary pamphlets amongst the 6th Dragoons and 7th Light Dragoons. Although unsuccessful, these attempts left De Lancey with some uncertainty as to the reliability of the soldiers’ loyalty.
Alongside concerns with the loyalty of military forces, however, he also reflected at length on the political feelings and general temperament of the townspeople. E.P. Thompson views De Lancey’s tour as strong evidence of the government’s concerns with the spread of ideas from Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791) amongst the general populace.12 It is worth noting, however, that while De Lancey identified a number of different grievances and disturbances in the towns he visited, he was only seriously concerned by what he encountered at Sheffield. Here he discerned the effects of Painite literature, reporting that “they read the most violent publications, and comment on them, as well as on their correspondence not only with the dependant societies in the Towns & Villages in the vicinity, but with those established in other parts of the kingdom.”13 Rioting had occurred in Sheffield the previous year in response to enclosures, but the only present disturbance that De Lancey could identify was colliers’ demand for increased wages, while he also observed that any problems at Sheffield were exacerbated by an absent and ineffective magistrate.14 So too, although he had observed disturbances at several locations, including Manchester, Liverpool, and Nottingham, in each case he felt that the grievances had nothing to do with republican values. His observations on the townspeople of Norwich, for example, were that they were “not at all disaffected toward the present government.”15
Returning to London, De Lancey met with Henry Dundas (Secretary of State for the Home Department), William Pitt, William Fawcett (Adjutant General), and others at Dundas’s house in June 1792. Although De Lancey reported that in the overwhelming majority of cases the population was loyal and did not represent a threat to the government’s soldiers, Pitt and Dundas nonetheless decided to establish barracks close to the major manufacturing towns that De Lancey had visited, drawing on the direct authority of the crown to do so and thus avoiding any discussion of the measure in parliament.16 De Lancey departed again for the towns immediately following the meeting to arrange sites and contractors for the construction of barracks.17 By the end of July 1792, grounds had been cleared for the first barracks at Sheffield and within the next two months De Lancey had acquired locations for barracks at Nottingham, Birmingham, and Coventry.18 Payments were made from extraordinary regimental expenditure accounts rather than going through the more established route of the Ordinance Board, meaning that payments did not appear in the annual parliamentary army estimates.19 Unlike his first tour, however, this one was far from secret and his movements were widely reported in the papers. One newspaper reported that it appeared barracks would soon be erected in the vicinity of “every great town in this kingdom.”20 In the following years, a number of additional barracks were built or planned, primarily along the southeast English coast but also close to other inland towns such as York and Bristol.21 Many towns even began to request their own barracks.22 A King’s warrant was issued in 1793 to regularize the ongoing development of barracks, while the same year saw De Lancey appointed Superintendent General of Barracks and in turn as Barrack Master General to supervise their ongoing construction and maintenance.23 28 | English Language Notes 54.1 Spring / Summer 2016
The 1790s thus saw a massive expansion of barracks across England. With large sums being spent on their construction it is perhaps unsurprising that the expenditures were eventually called into question, and a military inquiry in 1804 was set up to investigate the suspicion of fraud. De Lancey himself was exonerated but resigned as Barrack Master General.24 What was surprising, however, was that the construction of barracks only received serious attention because of financial issues and not because of fundamental concerns with their constitutional legitimacy. Barracks had long been derided in Britain as the starkest symbol of monarchical tyranny, a point explained in detail by William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69) that was central to British constitutional law.25 Yet for all that De Lancey was doing to overturn long-standing beliefs, his efforts to construct barracks received very little parliamentary attention. In January 1793, the St. James’s Chronicle voiced a common sentiment when it spoke of barracks as a welcome necessity for the nation:
The barracks, now building for the relief of inn-keepers, and for preserving the morals of the soldiery, are to supply Opposition with another topic; and they even talk in their way, of a grand debate upon it. That many thousand of our fellow subjects should be relieved from an inconvenience, which the party have always been foremost to exaggerate, and that soldiers should be no longer, of necessity, exposed to the temptations and the loose company to be found in ale-houses, are no benefits in the view of Opposition.26
Barracks were discussed in Parliament in February 1793 but far from resulting in a grand debate, opposition arguments, which drew on Blackstone, were largely ignored. Pitt swayed parliament by emphasising De Lancey’s concerns that Painite literature represented a new and dangerous spirit in the country.27 As De Lancey had written in his private correspondence with Dundas:
From my observations in the course of my journey on the general state of the country, it appears to me that the People at large are disposed to exert themselves in support of the present constitution, but there is a spirit abroad very full of mischief, & which should be checked before it has made any greater progress.28
The barracks were, in other words, principally viewed as a preventive measure and were linked to a markedly amorphous notion of a mischievous spirit that was threatening to infiltrate and contaminate Britain. Republican supporters David Stewart Erskine and John Thelwall both went on to publish material questioning the legality of the barracks, but they did not publish until well after the barracks had been constructed.29 Debate only emerged after the barracks were already established, while long respected constitutional arguments against barracks were now associated with a revolutionary radicalism.
Military Mobilization and the History of Speed As the archetypal disciplinary institution, it makes sense that barracks should have expanded so rapidly in Britain at the dawning of industrialization and the generalization of the disciplinary society. Like other disciplinary institutions, barracks enabled an intensification of disciplinary practices, allowing a constant supervision of soldiers and hence a daily regulation of their time, conduct and habits.30 So too, while military buildings represented a prominent development in late eighteenth-century architecture, they shared a marked convergence in style with domestic Ramsey | 29
buildings more generally.31 Although barracks were typically much larger than civilian buildings, often also being surrounded by walls, they nonetheless resembled the basic architecture of other disciplinary institutions. They were typically sited within existing urban areas or even built upon existing buildings.32 In 1797, the Gentleman’s Magazine featured a print of two barracks sent in by a correspondent, Miles Emeritus, who hoped the illustrations would show the utility of barracks, observing that the “[t]he temporary prejudice which prevailed against the introduction of Barracks [had] been entirely removed, by the unequivocal experience of their comfort and utility.” Featured in the magazine as exemplary of order and functionality, barracks appear as a nondescript or naturalized part of the British landscape, in which long-standing hostility to the institution was reframed as a “temporary prejudice.”33 The form taken by military barracks suggest that military buildings and infrastructure were coming to insert themselves within, rather than forcibly upon, the domestic or civilian British landscape.
Several features are, however, particularly distinctive about the barracks that were constructed at the start of the 1790s. Firstly, they were built as relatively small cavalry barracks that housed from 60 to 200 troopers.34 Prior to this time, the only barracks to have been constructed in England were large infantry barracks, which had typically being sited close to naval ports. If the St. James Chronicle had presented a common argument in support of the barracks, that they took the onus off innkeepers to maintain soldiers, it is worth noting that only a very small number of soldiers were to be housed in the new barracks constructed in the 1790s. James Douet also observes that they were for the most part built with separate accommodation for officers and soldiers, a new development and one that facilitated officers’ surveillance of their soldiers.35 A further distinctive feature is that these new form of cavalry barracks were erected both inland and subsequently along the southeast coast. They were deemed equally effective at providing defense against disaffection within English towns as they were at defending against French invasion; they were a response to both internal and external threats to the nation.
The early 1790s are generally associated with the dawning of total war through the levée en masse of revolutionary France, which allowed the nation to massively increase the size of its armed forces.36 Britain was forced to respond with similar measures as war began to require total mobilization of the nation’s resources. The country not only witnessed a massive increase in the size of its army, but also a huge expansion of volunteering for service. Nearly one in six men of military age were under arms by the end of the 1790s.37 The mass mobilization required by the war effort has been mooted as the primary reason for the overall expansion of barracks in Britain during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. But while it’s likely that the growth of the armed forces was crucial to the overall expansion of barracks at this time, much of the army was stationed overseas and the greatly expanded volunteer and militia forces were not principally housed in barracks.38 That the construction of barracks commenced with buildings designed for small cavalry formations and in response to a highly amorphous and yet threatening “spirit,” also suggests that military mobilization is a more complex phenomenon, one linked by the philosopher Paul Virilio to the much more expansive and diverse effects of military logistics and speed. 30 | English Language Notes 54.1 Spring / Summer 2016
Expanding upon the concept of military mobilization, Virilio argues that military speed is central to the logistical arrangements required for waging total war.39 Turning away from traditional political economy, he insists upon the significance of the politics of what he terms dromocracy, the Greek term for race or racing.40 Virilio argues that the development of the modern world has been driven by technologies and practices of ever-increasing rates of acceleration, whether of transport, communication or, most importantly for Virilio, forms of military surveillance and weapons technology. History advances, he argues, “at the speed of its weapons systems.”41 While his focus has been almost wholly on late twentieth- and twenty-first century visual technologies in which war is accelerated to the absolute speed of light, he has nonetheless developed a longer history of military speed that assigns a foundational role to the French Revolutionary era. It was here that a modern military logistical infrastructure was first brought to full development through forms of mapping, statistics, and architecture that allowed ever more efficient and rapid control of a population.42 A broader culture of speed has also been seen to have taken hold of Britain during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, in particular through the remarkable acceleration in the speed of communication brought about by the telegraph, balloons, improved postal systems, and expanding news distribution.43
That such concerns were related specifically to military mobility in Britain can also be seen, for example, with the debate that followed the publication of James Glenie’s A Short Essay on the Modes of Defence best adapted to the Situation and Circumstances of this Island in 1784. Glennie, a military engineer, had been consulted by the Duke of Richmond, as Master General of the Ordnance, for his opinions on the construction of naval fortifications.44 Glennie wrote in response to Richmond’s plans, addressing the general question of how Britain should secure itself against invasion by debating whether the best defense of the nation was through an extensive series of fortifications or by utilizing a more mobile and flexible defense centered on the navy and army. Glennie came down firmly against large fixed fortresses because they were not only prohibitively expensive, they also tied down one’s forces and, even worse, could be captured and used by an enemy.45 Insisting that vigor is crucial in war, he argued that a military force must be kept mobile to defend an island nation. His essay gave rise to an extensive debate about the nature of Britain’s defense, the Critical Review so m ew h a t h y p e r b o l i c a l l y i n s i s t i n g that no pamphlet had so immediately and completely taken hold of the public’s attention.46 But when threatened with invasion only a few years later, the government did broadly accede to Glennie’s views on national defense as it mobilized the nation’s armed forces rather than undertake a large scale project of constructing fortifications.
The barracks constructed at the start of 1790s are integrally related to such concerns with mobility, speed, and vigor in the defense of the nation. Far from simply enclosing soldiers, barracks were established to facilitate the speed at which military force could be mobilized. Drawing from Virilio’s insights, two basic dimensions of speed can be identified with regards to barracks. On the one hand, they were built with substantial external walls that could enable a garrison to withstand mobs or rioters who might attempt to storm the barracks. Designed almost quite literally as what Blackstone had termed “inland fortresses,” they were clearly too small to hold out for long and were hardly on a scale to match the massive fortifications that still protected many European towns or English ports.47 As fortifications, they more closely Ramsey | 31
resembled the Martello towers along the English southeast coast that were, similarly, far too small to defeat an invasion, but which could delay an enemy’s advance while news of the attack was relayed so that more substantial defenses could be mounted. In this sense they even resemble the telegraph system that was established from the southern coast to London in 1796.48 Equally, though, the concentration of soldiers in barracks close to manufacturing towns increased the speed at which force could be brought to bear upon disturbances. Contemporary accounts of the Birmingham riots in 1791 made much of the delay in the military response, as rioting in the streets of Birmingham was in part dependent upon the speed with which cavalry could arrive.49 De Lancey attended the Birmingham riots in his capacity as Deputy Adjutant General, and his experiences there may well have played some role in his perception of the usefulness of such barracks (although the riots, notoriously targeting the house of Joseph Priestly, were not seen to have been driven by revolutionary sentiments). De Lancey certainly wrote of his belief that barracks could be useful because they would prevent rioters from attempting to delay the concentration of soldiers housed in taverns or inns.50
Associated with questions of mobility, circulation, and speed, the barracks established in England at the start of the 1790s can, in other words, be viewed as more than simply disciplinary or carceral institutions. Admittedly, those constructed at the start of the 1790s were of a distinctive form, less concerned with housing soldiers than subsequent barracks constructed in England during the nineteenth century. After 1794, the government’s continuing construction of barracks appears to have been driven far less by this policing rationale.51 Yet the barracks erected by De Lancey nonetheless serve as a reminder that barracks exert control over spaces outside of themselves as much as they exert control within their interior spaces. Their efficacy must be read as much in terms of how they control space and populations as how they provide institutional control over individuals. Benjamin Bratton has even argued that we need to read Virilio’s ideas on mobilization and speed in relation to ideas on the biopolitical management of populations that has emerged from the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. We might say that at the least Virilio’s concerns with military speed have relevance to Foucault’s conception of security apparatuses that responded to problems of urbanism at the end of the eighteenth century and which would evolve into more fully elaborated biopolitical forms.52 Gilles Delueze, for example, argues that Foucault’s work is far broader than a concern with confinement, that his disciplinary analysis must be set alongside Virilio’s thoughts about the mastery and control of speed.53
Barracks and Military Security At one level, Giorgio Agamben’s work on biopolitics and the state of exception has an obvious significance for understanding the construction of barracks in the 1790s.54 Barracks were one of a range of extraordinary legal and political measures that the British government introduced during these years in response to the French Revolution, such as the government’s suspension of habeas corpus in 1794. For Agamben, the state of exception is exemplified by the suspension of law and the operation of sovereign authority as pure force over a given population, a control of lives that strips away questions of legality to focus on biological processes, survival, and vitality. Agamben principally focuses in his writing on the broader constitutive nature of this state of exception and how it implicates life at the heart of modern politics. For example, he 32 | English Language Notes 54.1 Spring / Summer 2016
is less concerned with such emergency events as the suspension of habeas corpus than he is concerned with examining how the very nature of habeas corpus places life, the body, at the center of liberal conceptions of law.55 What is relevant here are his thoughts about how a state of exception politicizes life at the same time that it strips individuals of their legal rights. For Agamben, the state of exception reveals the basic operation of biopolitics. It establishes what he terms bare life: lives denied rights, but which are subject to the full measure of sovereign political calculation, force, and rationality.
Blackstone had presented his concerns about the construction of barracks in England as involving the constitution of just such a state of exception. Their presence would be akin to the imposition of martial law, a form of law he deemed “entirely arbitrary” and hence not truly a state of law at all.56 The barracks De Lancey built next to the manufacturing towns placed these towns within the lens of political calculation, establishing them as such spaces of arbitrary martial law, as spaces or zones of what Agamben terms bare life or “anomie.”57 Imagined in relation to a spirit that was circulating through Painite literature, the towns formed a collective vision for De Lancey and Pitt of the political, social, and cultural anomie that Burke had prophesied as emerging from the French Revolution.58 By late 1792, Burke’s fears appeared to have become manifest as England was beset with lurid accounts of the Paris massacres of that year.59 Although De Lancey originally saw any disturbances in the manufacturing towns as local grievances that were entirely unrelated to one another or to any revolutionary sentiment, by the time the barracks were constructed these grievances had been redefined through the concept of an amorphous spirit that haunted England. The specific legal concerns and rights that crossed the British polity were recoded as a homogenous zone of emergency that was to be met with exceptional measures.
The barracks could, then, be read as the imposition of the uniformity and standardization of military surveillance and control over the manufacturing towns. Resembling domestic disciplinary buildings more generally and so rendering military force ubiquitous and invisible, they could be seen to have exerted surveillance not within the confines of a disciplinary institution, but across a whole territory and population. In their classic work of British social history, J.L. and B. Hammond suggested this is how we should see the birth of industrialism in the English manufacturing towns. With the imposition of barracks it was as though the towns themselves were effectively turned into barracks and subject to the extra-legal controls that operated within disciplinary spaces.60 But the forms of surveillance under which England’s manufacturing towns were placed clearly worked in a distinct manner to the kinds of surveillance operating within the barracks themselves. The nation’s manufacturing towns were not regulated spaces like those of the barracks but, quite the opposite, they were subject to security measures precisely because they were seen to be beset with an amorphous Painite spirit. The towns represented something unknown, unconstrained, contagious, and porous. Designed to address questions of movement and speed, the barracks operated through mechanisms that Foucault argues were fundamental to security as opposed to disciplinary control.
As defined by Foucault, security is unlike discipline because it does not attempt to exercise direct control over individuals and their actions.61 Instead, security refers to governmental mechanisms Ramsey | 33
that are focused on whole populations, mechanisms that endeavour to understand and thus develop the natural processes and propensities that inhere within those populations. Rather than creating idealized forms of bodily control, security works through forming and maintaining a milieu that can allow natural or real processes to operate and strengthen. Foucault argues that the town was central to concerns with security because it was here, particularly from the second half of the eighteenth century, that questions of populations, their behaviour, processes, and risks, first began to be posed as crucial issues of government.62 Mechanisms of security can be seen almost quite literally as the imposition of sovereignty upon the free space of the town, albeit an imposition of sovereignty that did not alter the underlying freedom of the towns.
Rather than rendering the towns themselves into the controlled space of barracks then, it was because of the use of barracks that sovereign authority did not need to exert itself in an overt or direct manner. Bringing out soldiers to confront rioters can be viewed as a direct imposition of sovereign force, but the enduring effect of barracks is not in their use so much as in their very existence. They constitute a new milieu of security within the manufacturing towns that did not seek to prevent or halt the free circulation within and through those towns. Far from interrupting or reshaping life, they establish their own counter-response to the circulation of spirit in terms of a militarized movement or mobilization that Virilio argues has been central to modern forms of militarization. So too, while the barracks have been seen as a response to the emergency presented by the French Revolution, they were built as permanent structures. Far from being established as an emergency measure, a temporary suspension of constitutional law like the suspension of habeas corpus, the new barracks established a new constitutional order that overturned Britain’s long-standing rejection of barracks. They normalized a state of exception around a new technique of security. The freedom of the towns was in this sense both taken for granted and yet underpinned by the imposition of barracks.
It is also notable that the newly developed barracks were designed for internal as well as external defence along England’s southeast cost. A similar set of security mechanisms were conceived in response to French invasion and potential disorder in the manufacturing towns, as though the national borders could be drawn both on the coast and around the margins of the towns. Those opposed to the barracks such as Erskine and Thelwall had followed Blackstone to insist that the barracks separated the soldiers from the population and thus broke the basic connection of the army with the people, allowing the soldiers to serve instead as monarchical tools of tyranny. But in constructing barracks, De Lancey and Pitt were essentially separating the towns from the soldiers, simultaneously establishing their control over the soldiers by placing them within the confines of disciplinary spaces while abandoning the towns to martial law because they represented contagious spaces of free circulation. The towns, in this sense, were identified as natural, anomic spaces at the same moment that the disciplinary interiority of the barracks was coming to be implemented across Britain.
This process is akin to what Virilio terms endo-colonization—the end result of the operation of military mobilization where the necessities of military security see a government turn on its own population.63 Barracks more generally represented one of the most basic institutions that England had up till this point used to establish military control over colonial regions such as the Highlands 34 | English Language Notes 54.1 Spring / Summer 2016
or Ireland. They were also integral to the colonization of Australia in the 1790s. Writing to London in 1792, Arthur Phillip, the Governor of the settlement at Botany Bay, observed that “settlers have little to apprehend from the natives; against whom I have never thought any defence necessary, more than what outhouses and barracks afford us.”64 Frantz Fanon has even argued that barracks constitute the most basic dividing line or frontier between the colonizer and the colonized, that they underpin the very logic of otherness.65 For Achebe Mbembe, such colonial practices associated with military security form the basis of the subsequent biopolitical states of exception that manifested in Europe and found their realization in the camp.66 At t h e ve r y l ea s t, i t is p ossi b l e to draw a parallel between colonial barracks that keep at bay “natives” and barracks in England that were responding to the manufacturing towns as spaces of anomie. The barracks, in other words, might be seen not simply as the archetype of discipline, but equally as an example of the security measures that formed a significant strand in the development of biopolitical measures of control. They resonate with Agamben’s understanding of modernity as defined not by the prison, but by the concentration camp, by the state of siege and martial law.67
Virilio’s own concerns are more broadly with how security practices associated with military speed overawe political processes because they occur too quickly for political deliberation to take effect.68 The construction of the barracks was itself undertaken at speed in a deliberate effort by Pitt to have them constructed before any substantive parliamentary opposition could be raised. But the very design of the barracks located within the manufacturing towns equally has a relationship to a growing culture of speed that had taken root in Britain. At one level, the barracks can be seen to have become a permanent response to the emergency of the revolution because they were not so much dealing with revolutionary sentiment as with a new kind of problem that had been introduced by the rapid expansion and circulation of print at the end of the eighteenth century. Barracks on the one hand kept print away from soldiers, limiting the spread of Painite literature, but on the other hand they also allowed the military to move as fluidly and rapidly as the literature associated with Painite radicalism. The barracks enabled the relative acceleration of military power in relation to the speed of writing, recreating security around the speed of military force. Virilio charts a history of military security as a history of ever accelerating rates of military speed, a movement from the British navy as a fleet in being through the mass mobilization accompanying the French Revolution, with its militarization of the streets, and on to the totalitarian state as a vital space of permanent mobilization.69 It is a process that leaves the whole nation redefined logistically as one vast camp.70 The cavalry barracks Britain constructed represent one such step in this historical development of military security and speed, a militarization of the streets and imposition of martial law that remolded England’s industrial towns as occupied camps.
Neil Ramsey The University of New South Wales Canberra
NOTES 1 Research for this article was funded by a UNSW Canberra Early Career Researcher Grant. 2 W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (London: Vintage, 2002), 229–30. Ramsey | 35
3 Steve Redhead, “Before the Bunker,” Nebula 6.2 (2009). 4 See, for example, John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989); and Anthony Page, Britain and the Seventy Years War, 1744–1815: Enlightenment, Revolution and Empire (London: Palgrave, 2015). 5 Bruce Collins, War and Empire: The Expansion of Britain, 1790–1830 (New York: Routledge, 2014), 397; Clive Emsley, “The Military and Popular Disorder in England 1790–1801,” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 61.245 (1983), 17. 6 James Douet, British Barracks 1600–1914: Their Architecture and Role in Society (Norfolk: Stationery Office, 1998), 67. 7 H. M. Stephens, “Lancey, Oliver De (c.1749–1822),” rev. Troy O. Bickham, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edition January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com. rp.nla.gov.au/view/article/7436. 8 Oliver De Lancey, Statement of the Case of Lieutenant-General De Lancey, Late Barrack-Master-General (London: Printed by C. Roworth, Bell Yard, Temple Bar, n.d.), 7; The First Report of the Commissioners of Military Enquiry. Appointed by ACT of 45 GEO. III. cap. 47. Office of the Barrack Master General. Arrears of Barrack Office Accounts (1806), 5–6. 9 Oliver De Lancey, “Copy of a letter from Colonel Oliver De Lancey, Deputy Adjutant-General, giving non-military intelligence gained in the course of a tour of inspection of regiments made on the orders of the Secretary- at-War,” June 13, 1792, National Archives HO 42/20/173 Folios 386–95. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 112. 13 De Lancey, “Copy of a letter.” 14 Stephen Johnson, From Bailey to Bailey: A Short History of Military Buildings in Sheffield (Stephen Johnson, 1998), 4. 15 De Lancey, “Copy of a letter.” 16 Emsley, “The Military and Popular Disorder in England 1790–1801,” 17. 17 De Lancey, Statement of the Case, 5. 18 General Evening Post, July 28–31, 1792. 19 Douet, British Barracks 1600–1914, 63. 20 Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, Tuesday, August 21, 1792. 21 Oliver De Lancey, “List of Barracks specifying those erected and now building or engaged for by the Barrack Master General”, Windham Papers, vol. L. (ff. 311). Returns of the Forces in Great Britain and Ireland and of ordnance and other stores, lists of barracks and quarters, accompts and estimates, papers relating to the Secretary-at-War’s office, etc.; 1794-1809. British Library Add MS 37891 ff11-12. James Douet notes that a number of barracks that De Lancey had planned were never completed, Douet, British Barracks 1600–1914, 71. 22 Emsley, “The Military and Popular Disorder in England 1790–1801,” 20. 23 The First Report of the Commissioners of Military Enquiry, 6. 24 H. M. Stephens, “Lancey, Oliver De (c.1749–1822)” 25 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, in Four Books. By Sir William Blackstone, Knt. One of the Justices of His Majesty’s Courts of Common Pleas. The Fourteenth Edition, with the Last Corrections of the Author; and with Notes and Additions by Edward Christian, Esq. Chief Justice of the Isle of Sly and the Downing Professor of the Laws of England in the University of Cambridge (London: Printed by A. Strahan, Law-printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, for T. Cadell and W. Davies, in the Strand, 1803) 26 St. James’s Chronicle or the British Evening Post, January 17–19, 1793. 27 Emsley, “The Military and Popular Disorder in England 1790–1801,” 17. 28 De Lancey, “Copy of a letter.” 29 David Stewart Erskine, On the Impolicy of a Standing Army, in Time of Peace. And, on the Unconstitutional and Illegal Measure of Barracks; with a Postscript, Illustrative of the Real Constitutional Mode of Defence for 36 | English Language Notes 54.1 Spring / Summer 2016
this Island. Containing also a Short Review of the Effects which are Produced by a Standing Army, on Morality, Population and Labour (London: Printed for D. J. Eaton, no.81, Bishopgate-street, and Sold by All Other Booksellers, 1793); John Thelwall, “The Lecture ‘On Barracks and Fortifications; with Sketches of the Character and Treatment of the British Soldiery.” Delivered Wednesday, June 10, 1795,” in John Thelwall, The Tribune, A Periodical Publication, Consisting Chiefly of the Political Lectures of J. Thelwall. Taken in Short-hand by W. Ramsey, and Revised by the Lecturer (London: Printed for the Author, 1795), 85–108 30 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1991), 140. 31 James Cur, Georgian Architecture (Newton Abbott: David & Charles, 2002), 149; Miles Glendinning, Ranald MacInnes, Aonghus MacKechnie, A History of Scottish Architecture: From the Renaissance to the Present Day (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 137. 32 Douet, British Barracks 1600–1914, 63. 33 Gentleman’s Magazine 67 (July 1797), 544–45. 34 De Lancey, “List of Barracks.” 35 Douet, British Barracks 1600–1914, 63. 36 Clive Emsley, “The Social Impact of the French Wars,” in Britain and the French Revolution, 1789-1815, ed. H. T. Dickinson (London: Macmillan Education, 1989), 211–27, 215. 37 Linda Colley, “Whose Nation? Class and National Consciousness in Britain 1750–1830,” Past and Present, 113 (1986): 97–117, 101. 38 Douet, British Barracks 1600–1914, 67. 39 Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, trans. Marc Polizzotti, intro. Benjamin H. Bratton (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006). 40 Ibid., 69. 41 Ibid., 90. 42 Benjamin H. Bratton, “Logistics of Habitable Circulation,” in Virilio, Speed and Politics, 7–25, 14–15. 43 Jeffrey N. Cox, Romanticism in the Shadow of War: Literary Culture in the Napoleonic War Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 54. 44 W. Johnson, “Glenie, James (bap. 1750, d. 1817),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edition January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com.rp.nla.gov.au/view/article/10817. 45 James Glenie, A Short Essay on the Modes of Defence best adapted to the Situation and Circumstances of this Island. With an Examination of the Schemes that have been Formed for the Purpose of Fortifying its Principal Dockyards on Very Extensive Plans, Which Are Ready to Be Carried into Execution by his Grace the Duke of Richmond, Now Master-General of the Ordnance. Addressed to the Public at Large, but Particularly to the House of Commons, and the Independent Country Gentlemen of Great-Britain. By an Officer. The Second Edition (London: Printed for G. and T. Wilkie, St. Paul’s Church-yard, 1785). 46 Critical Review, 10 (1794): 217–8. 47 Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 414. 48 On the telegraph system, see Roger Knight, Britain Against Napoleon: The Organization of Victory, 1793-1815 (London: Penguin Books, 2014), 137–40. 49 An Authentic Account of the Late Riots in the Town of Birmingham, and its Vicinity, From the Commencement on Thursday, the 14th of July, 1791, to the final Suppression on the 19th of the Same Month; Together with the Letter of Dr. Priestly, and an Answer thereto. Also, the Several Letters of Wm. Russel and James Keir, Esqrs. With an account of the Toasts, Drank at the Gallic Commemoration Meeting, at the Hotel, and a Literal Copy of the Seditious Hand-Bill, Which is Supposed to Have Given Rise to These Riotous Proceedings (Birmingham: Printed and Sold by T. P. Trimer, 1791), 10–11. 50 De Lancey, “Copy of a letter.” 51 Emsley, “The Military and Popular Disorder in England 1790–1801,” 18. Ramsey | 37
52 Todd May and Ladelle McWhorter, “Who’s Being Disciplined Now? Operations of Power in a Neoliberal World,” in Biopower: Foucault and Beyond, ed. Vernon W. Cisney, Nicolae Morar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 248. 53 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. and ed. Seán Hand (London: Continuum, 1999), 36. 54 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 55 Ibid., 73. 56 Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 412. 57 On the state of exception as a zone of anomie, see Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005), 59. 58 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies Relative to that Event. Ed. and intro. Conor Cruise O’Brien (London: Penguin Books, 1986). 59 Warren Roberts, Jane Austen and the French Revolution (London: Athlone Press, 1995), 26. 60 J. L Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Town Labourer, 1760-1832: The New Civilization (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1917), 39. 61 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Michael Senellart (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 1–86. 62 Ibid., 64. 63 Mark Lacy, Security, Technology and Global Politics: Thinking with Virilio (New York: Routledge, 2014), 19–20. 64 St. James’s Chronicle or the British Evening Post, August 4-7, 1792. 65 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, pref. Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 38. 66 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11–40. 67 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 19. 68 Virilio, Speed and Politics, 163. 69 Ibid., 133. 70 Ibid., 54.