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Prospects of Empire Slavery and Ecology in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain Prospects of Empire

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Prospects of Empire Slavery and Ecology in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain Prospects of Empire prospects of empire Slavery and Ecology in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain prospects of empire Cover Henry R. Cock after William Blake (1757–1827) and Michele Benedetti (1745–1810). The Skinning of the Aboma Snake. Indian Female of the Arrowauka Nation. Etching, 20.5 x 26 cm (sheet). Copies after illustrations from John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative, of a Five Years’ Expedition, Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam… 1772–1777, 1796. Published 20 November 1812 by Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown. The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, 812.11.20.01 prospects of empire Slavery and Ecology in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain An exhibition at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University 20 October 2014 through 27 March 2015 Curated by Heather V. Vermeulen, Doctoral Candidate in African American Studies and American Studies, Yale University, and Hazel V. Carby, Charles C. & Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies and Professor of American Studies, Yale University Fig. 1 Artist unknown, The Colonies Reduced. Its Companion (detail). Etching, 18.8 x 12.2 cm (plate). From The Political Register and London Museum, vol. 3. London: J. Almon, 1768. The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, 768.12.00.02 Silences enter the process of historical pro- Prospects of Empire: Slavery and Ecology in 3 duction at four crucial moments: the moment Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain examines the of fact creation (the making of sources); the relationship between slavery and ecology in the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); British West Indies and metropole in the long the moment of fact retrieval (the making of eighteenth century. It brings together a diverse narratives); and the moment of retrospective array of visual and written material to explore significance (the making ofhistory in the final conflicting constructions and understandings of instance).1 British colonial projects and their circulations. The exhibition surfaces latent anxieties in the prospects of empire management of bodies and borders as it tracks Scholars who analyze historical sources and the the forces that the British Empire mustered to archives that order them often emphasize the curtail perceived threats to its regimes of power power structures that shape both. They stress and knowledge. It considers projects of natu- the silences—and, often, violences—that occur ral history—its conscription of ecologies and in the creation, classification, and interpretation their inhabitants into fantasies of preordained of documents, and rightly so. Further, modes domination—alongside the racialization and of archival classification resonate with those of gendering of subjects, empire’s speculations and eighteenth-century natural history, a project desires, the exploitation of seized land and labor that went hand-in-hand with colonization. in the interest of financial gain, and the human Mary Louise Pratt argues that “eighteenth- and geographic boundaries of empire and slavery. century classificatory systems created the task of Uniting these processes is the notion of imperial locating every species on the planet, extracting “prospects” as well as the empire’s failure to man- it from its particular, arbitrary surroundings age its would-be subjects, the unruly ecologies (the chaos), and placing it in its appropriate spot that unsettle its accounts. in the system (the order—book, collection, or Archives and curators have prospects, too, garden) with its new written, secular European and the creation of an exhibition requires archi- name.” 2 val prospecting. Further, archives of empire often The forced relocation of persons from the eerily resonate with the “historical” prospects for African continent to the colonial Americas and which one consults their contents. their enslavement together with indigenous per- sons there attended and enabled these processes. a curator’s prospects Between 1698 and 1807, roughly 11,000 British In his memoir One Man’s Education (1967), ships transported at least three million enslaved Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis recalled a conver- men, women, and children from Africa to the sation that he had in the 1950s with his wife colonies. In the British West Indies, the majority and collaborator, Annie Burr Lewis, regarding of enslaved persons labored on plantations, the formation of the print collection at the producing such commodities as sugar, which Yale Walpole Library, later renamed the Lewis colonists shipped to Britain for sale. Walpole Library (lwl) in their honor. Lewis proposed that the library, dedicated to the On the other hand, for the Lewises, the cat- study and contextualization of Horace Walpole aloging system “open[ed] up the collection from (1717–1797), had yet to give prints their due. many approaches.” Classification might serve to “We have to depend on the British Museum’s isolate a print and manipulate its interpretation, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires and its but, if persistently and innovatively reworked, Engraved British Portraits,” he remarked to Annie classification also might undermine such (impe- Burr Lewis; “They’re invaluable, but they aren’t rial) ordering. The example that Lewis deployed equal to the caricatures and prints themselves to highlight the catalog as process, not end, is, and they are not complete.”3 To remedy this, the one might argue, anti-imperial; it stresses the Lewises “learned how to store, catalogue, and unsettling of the eighteenth-century empire to index their material from Lawrence Wroth who which the collection’s contents owe their exis- had devised a system that brings order out of tence: “The hidden thoughts of the time are clas- chaos and opens up the collection from many sified when they have been discerned,” he mused, approaches.” They found expanding the subject “such as ‘Dismemberment of the Empire’”—the file in particular to be a fruitful exercise.4 subject for prints such as The Colonies Reduced. Imagination and a vision of the archive as a Its Companion (1768; fig. 1).7 Lewis’s reflections shared and dynamic space characterized Annie suggest a vision of the archive as an ecology of Burr Lewis’s curatorial practice. At the time of sorts, its contents far from settled, its subjects far W.S. Lewis’s writing, he could declare proudly, from complete, let alone laid to rest. “The subject file goes from Abolition of the Slave The most basic definition of “ecology” is a Trade to Zebra.” Annie Burr Lewis labored in system of relations. An ecological framework, the print room for four years before she died in then, is particularly useful for studying the rela- 1959; it became a space that bore witness to her tionship between empire and archive. Deploying life and in which she might live on. “She used such a framework, Prospects of Empire considers to wonder wistfully whether anyone would ever the ecologies that empire, natural history, and the use her cards,” Lewis wrote, “but visitors are plantation economy collided, altered, and engen- doing so now and are finding material they have dered. Card catalogs old and new contain invalu- not found elsewhere on subjects ranging from able information for tracking empire’s reach and Queen Charlotte to wallpaper.”5 considering processes of subject formation past, On the one hand, there are undeniable reso- present, and future; and so, in this accompanying nances between Lewis’s description of the system essay, we take up Annie Burr Lewis’s efforts as one “that brings order out of chaos” and the to interrogate the present state of the archive ways in which eighteenth-century natural histo- as it appears through the works featured in the rians conceived of their imperial labors. Echoing exhibition. We reflect upon archiving practices the language that empire used to glorify its global in the lwl card catalog and Yale University’s invasions, Lewis concluded, “Annie Burr built a online catalog, Orbis, for what technologies of six-lane highway straight across ‘the vast and rel- classification both foreclose and make possible in atively unexplored continent’ that will be traveled terms of how we understand historical moments as long as the Lewis Walpole Library exists.”6 and their relation to the present. negro-prospecting: archival order echoes taxonomic containment, 5 subjects be made seeming to suggest that the processes that the “You’ll have to think like a racist and search for cards detail are not overlapping or coconstitutive, terms like ‘Negro’” was one librarian’s sugges- but might be isolated and inspected individually. tion, particularly regarding the subjects in the “Negroes, barbarities to”—or, Negroes card catalog at the lwl, though it remains a subject to barbarities—is the “species” of “genus” useful search term in Orbis as well. To collect Negro in James Gillray’s Barbarities in the West pieces for an exhibition on “prospects of empire,” Indias (1791; fig. 2). The categorization repro- one must go Negro-prospecting. There is no duces the language of the print’s title and, in subject “White”; white people are, quite literally, turn, threatens to lock the print into a particular the unmarked bodies of the archive. moment, rendering the work referential only The lwl card catalog entries for the subject to itself. And it presents such “barbarities” as “Negro” lie within a drawer that bears the range isolated incidents, rather than as integral to the label “Negro—Perjury,” alphabetization’s forces that constructed the category “Negro”— curious coupling. The majority of the cards for or “slave”—in the first place.
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