COLONIAL CAPITALISM AND THE DILEMMAS OF LIBERALISM: LOCKE, BURKE, WAKEFIELD AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Onur Ulas Ince August 2013 © 2103 Onur Ulas Ince Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism: Locke, Burke, Wakefield and the British Empire Onur Ulas Ince, PhD Cornell University 2013 This dissertation offers a historical investigation of liberalism as a unified yet internally variegated intellectual field that has developed in relation to “colonial capitalism.” I examine the impact of colonial economic relations on the historical formation of liberalism, which is often overlooked in the scholarship on the history of political thought. Focusing on the British Empire between the late-seventeenth and early-nineteenth centuries, I analyze three historical cases in which the liberal self-image of capitalism in Britain was contradicted by the manifestly illiberal processes of displacement and coercion in its imperial possessions. I situate this contradiction within the debates on property claims in American colonies, the trade relation between Britain and its Indian dominions, and the labor problem during the colonial settlement of Australia and New Zealand. Corresponding to the three nodal questions of “property,” “exchange,” and “labor,” I analyze the works of John Locke, Edmund Burke, and Edward Gibbon Wakefield as three prominent political theorists who attempted to reconcile the liberal image of Britain as a commercial and pacific society with the illiberal processes of conquest, expropriation, and extraction of British colonialism. Highlighting the global and colonial as opposed to the national or European terrain on which modern economic relations and their political theorization have emerged, I emphasize the need to situate the history of political thought in a global context. I conclude that the historical evolution of liberalism cannot be properly grasped without an account of the colonial origins of global capitalism and of the problems of legitimacy these colonial origins posed for political theory. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Onur Ulas Ince completed his undergraduate studies in Political Science and International Relations and in Sociology at Bogazici University in 2004. He received his M.A. degree in Sociology from the University of British Columbia in 2006 and his Ph.D. degree in Government from Cornell University in 2013. Ince’s research is grounded in the history of political thought, history of capitalism, theories of empire, and modern social theory. His articles have appeared in Polity and The Review of Politics. iii Annem Hülya İnce ve Babam Nedim İnce’ye. Desteğinizi hiçbir zaman esirgemediğiniz için sonsuz teşekkürler. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As it takes a village to raise a child, it takes an intellectual community to write a dissertation. Cornell University not only provided me with such a community but also granted me the opportunity to extend it beyond Cornell’s institutional boundaries. I have incurred many debts in bringing this project to fruition. The heaviest of these are owed to my committee members: Susan Buck-Morss, whose penchant for unorthodoxy kept me going when I doubted the sense and sanity of my dissertation; Isaac Kramnick, whose great mentorship, emotional support, and magnanimity in buying drinks buoyed me in the Odyssey of graduate studies; Jason Frank, who astutely illuminated the questions I was chasing in the thick of research when those questions were obscure to me; Richard Bensel, who never wavered in his commitment to provide extensive feedback, practical advice, and a steady pressure to produce one chapter after another; and Diane Rubenstein, who combined her sharp acumen with her generosity of spirit to make all of our exchanges, on and beyond academic matters, intellectually stimulating and truly enjoyable. Aziz Rana deserves special thanks for his incisive comments at various stages of producing this work, especially in his capacity as the external reader. My partner, Sinja Graf, has my everlasting gratitude for her formidable patience, receptivity, and care in listening to my ruminations, however inchoate, and reading every piece of writing I have thrown at her since the inception of this project. I am looking to more of the same for the decades to come. Some of the ideas and insights central to this project emerged from several institutional involvements during my time at Cornell University. I found an intellectual home at the Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM) and benefited greatly from its lecture series, conferences, v and reading groups, as well as from interactions with individual ICM members. Among the latter, I should mention Barry Maxwell, Shelley Wong, Raymond Craib, Fouad Makki, Viranjini Munasinghe, Natalie Melas, and Salah Hassan. I will always be thankful to Barry Maxwell for pulling me into the ICM as soon as it got off the ground. I was also fortunate enough to be part of the New Enclosures Research Working Group (NERWG) at Cornell, which expanded my research horizon and gave me the opportunity to expose my work to the criticisms of James Scott, Silvia Federici, and George Caffentzis. Of the founding members of the NERWG, I owe Charles Geisler special thanks. Finally, the Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP) organized by Harvard Law School provided an ecumenical venue for intellectual exchange. I would like to thank Odette Lineau for her encouragement to get involved, and Matthew Craven, Sundhya Pahuja, and Zoran Oklopcic for their close and insightful engagement with the first chapter the dissertation at the IGLP Workshop 2013. Many friends and colleagues played various parts in the incubation of this project and I can only hope that they will continue to do so in the future. I have found great inspiration, kindred spirits, and collegial support in a number of scholars working in the field of political theory and empire. Amongst those, James Tully, Karuna Mantena, Barbara Arneil, Robert Nichols, and Jeanne Morefield have a special place. I should express my gratitude to J. G. A. Pocock for reading a very long chapter on E. G. Wakefield and taking the time to send written feedback. My exchanges with Burke Hendrix were a kind of intellectual calisthenics that kept my thinking in shape and aware of itself. Daniel O’Neill’s advice and support propped me up at moments of palpable confusion and despair. Ayca Cubukcu and Baris Kuymulu deserve more than my heartfelt thanks for their unflinching honesty about my work as well as for their warm hospitality in Cambridge, MA, which one can expect only from the truest of friends. Pinar vi Kemerli and Simon Gilhooley were always there to share the joys and sorrows that the vicissitudes of graduate school brings in tow. I will fondly remember the long conversations with Anthony Reed and Carl Gelderloos on life, universe, and everything. My Ithacan friends, Gregor Sayet-Bone, Yossi Bronsnick, and Katie Church kept me grounded and sane. I should not forget to mention Tina Slater, the graduate field coordinator of the Government Department, without whom life would be a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare. I will remain grateful to everyone mentioned here and to many more who added to the richness of my life and thought in Ithaca and whom I cannot include in the limited space I have there. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Dedication iv Acknowledgements v Introduction 1 Colonialism, Capitalism, Liberalism 7 The British Empire and Middle-Class Intellectuals 12 Liberalism, Empire, and Beyond 16 Chapter I: Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism Introduction 25 The Empire Strikes Back: An Overview 30 Colonial Capitalism as an Analytic Frame 42 The Dilemmas of Liberalism 57 Overview of the Study 70 Conclusion 80 Chapter II: John Locke’s Global Theory of Property Introduction 84 Locke and the Atlantic 87 Money and Morality of Accumulation 105 Back to the Beginning 126 Conclusion 147 Chapter III: Edmund Burke and the Vicissitudes of Imperial Commerce Introduction 153 British Empire, British Self-Image 161 Burke’s Commercial Ideal 174 The Dialectics of Commerce 186 Burke’s “Peculiar” Universalism 199 Conclusion 209 Chapter IV: Edward G. Wakefield and the Question of Colonial Labor Introduction 212 Political Labor Problem: The Metropole 220 Economic Labor Problem: The Colony 245 Systematic Colonization: Empire in Full Circle 271 Conclusion 302 Conclusion 308 Political Immanence of Capital 312 Prehistory of Liberalism 318 Bibliography 325 viii INTRODUCTION In the first decade of the twenty-first century, “empire” and “imperialism” once again appeared on the scholarly agenda. “Empire” found renewed lease on life in the American invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, and perhaps more importantly, in the intellectual defense of the Anglo-American imperialism as the historical promoter of a distinctly liberal political and economic global order. Part of this defense was an extension of the globalization debates of the 1990s and emblematized by Michael Iganiteff’s Empire Lite.1 The more avowed and controversial advocacy of empire entered circulation with Niall Ferguson’s books Empire and Colossus, which eulogized the British Empire and advised the American empire to derive some lessons from its predecessor.2 Around the same time Ferguson published his imperial apologetics, the field of political theory witnessed a growing interest in the intersection of imperial histories and modes of political reflection, which ran counter to Ferguson’s conclusions.3 The main thrust of this scholarship has been to denounce the liberal portrayals of the British Empire by unearthing the philosophies of exclusion and practices of subordination that typified its history.4 Curiously, however, there has been a striking incongruity between Ferguson’s liberal depiction of the British Empire and the scholarly critiques that lambast it on the grounds of its illiberality. 1 Michael Ignatieff, Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan (Toronto: Penguin, 2003).