The University of Chicago Rendering Empire

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO RENDERING EMPIRE: RENT AND THE WRITING OF LIBERAL IMPERIALISM, 1776-1833 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE BY CASSIDY PICKEN CHICAGO, ILLINOIS DECEMBER 2016 Contents List of Figures iii Abstract iv Acknowledgements vii Introduction Imperial Improvement and the Rent Chronotope 1 Chapter One Development, Romance, and the Fiction of Feudalism 34 Chapter Two The Geography of Atlantic Capital and the Romance of Accumulation 76 Chapter Three Annihilated Property: Slavery and Reproduction After Abolition 119 Chapter Four Bare Possession: Property and History in a Liberal Empire 172 Coda Romanticism, Rent, and Immaterial Labor 218 Bibliography 237 ii List of Figures Figure 1. From James Montgomery, The West Indies. Page 144. iii Abstract At the beginning of the nineteenth century, British political economists invented the “doctrine of rent” to explain how the limited powers of the soil are turned into the returns of property ownership. “Rendering Empire” is a literary history of this political economic concept. It shows how writers of the British romantic period both contributed and responded to a new conception of nature and value that arose from a series of crises in Britain’s domestic and colonial territories. Whereas eighteenth-century sciences of wealth had conceived value to be rooted in nature’s providential gifts, the classical political economists of the nineteenth century saw rent as a product of nature’s declining capacity to sustain human communities. Reading across the archives of romantic literature and the political economy of imperialism, I argue that Britain’s transition from an empire of “improvement” to a global rent-collector coincided with this broad shift in the relationship between nature and value. My title “Rendering Empire” points to the representational and poetic implications imbedded in the word “rent,” which derives from the Latin “reditus” to signify both a profitable iv “return” and a tributary “rendering.” As a category of economic surplus that is not simply made, but rendered from a tenant to an owner of land, rent both activates and re-inscribes a relationship of power across a hierarchy of property and possession. As such, it reveals how the creation of value depends on the impositions of law over the natural powers of the land. “Rendering Empire” shows how romantic-era writings in and about Britain’s agrarian peripheries trace the complex dynamics of natural and imperial power that give rise to rent. In doing so, these texts reimagine the political, ecological, and epistemological forms embedded in landed property. I argue that the global-regional literatures of British romanticism innovated received literary genres—especially romance—in order to demonstrate the contradictions of liberal political economy when applied to Britain’s colonial territories. Literary scholars have demonstrated the role of commerce and labor in the development of novelistic and poetic form, but they have neglected the force of landed property on the literary imagination. In focusing on the third term of classical political economy’s tripartite conception of wealth (stock, wages, and rent), “Rendering Empire” shows how the writing of imperial rent demanded a radical reinterpretation of the genre of romance. Romance had been theorized during the enlightenment as a genre rooted in the landed economies of ancient feudalism. Whereas the popular appeal of eighteenth-century gothic romance novels derived from the window they were supposed to provide into ancient manners, I show how the key tropes of romance were redeployed after the 1790s in narratives of the colonial periphery, in ways that disordered progressivist notions of civilizational development rooted in the improvement of the land. If romance is the preeminent genre of the ruin, I argue that its “romantic” displacement throughout the spaces of imperial rent reveal empire as a system that turns ruination into value. v The four chapters of “Rendering “Empire” are arranged geographically, each focusing on a distinct region of liberal-imperial transformation (Ireland, America, the West Indies, and India). Chapter One, “Development, Romance, and the Fiction of Feudalism,” looks at how Maria Edgeworth’s treatment of absentee landlordism in her Irish Tales upsets the distinction put forward in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations between “natural” and “unnatural” development. Chapter Two, “The Geography of Atlantic Capital and the Romance of Accumulation,” reads William Wordsworth’s Excursion (1814) with John Thelwall’s The Daughter of Adoption (1801) to show how the figurative ideal of America as natural ground of Republican virtue was challenged by a theoretical and poetic linkage between European enclosure and frontier slavery. In Chapter Three, “Annihilated Property: Slavery and Reproduction After Abolition,” James Montgomery’s The West Indies (1809), Matthew Lewis’ Journal of a West India Proprietor (1815-19/1834), and Cynric Williams Hamel, the Obeah Man (1827) reveal the decline of West Indian property following the Slave-Trade Abolition Act (1807) as the result of an incompatibility between tropical fecundity (of land and of slaves) and liberal political economy. Chapter Four, “Bare Possession: Property and History in a Liberal Empire,” pairs James Mill’s History of British India (1817) with Walter Scott’s The Chronicles of the Canongate (1827) to explore how a liberal-imperial conception of sovereignty (premised not on the “romance of property” but on the global management of scarcity and subsistence) demands the invention of new genres of historical fiction. vi Acknowledgements I am grateful for the tremendous support of my dissertation committee. James Chandler, Frances Ferguson, and Christopher Taylor championed the project from the beginning; their enthusiasm, exacting criticism, and boundless erudition have shaped it in countless ways. Heather Keenleyside provided intellectual inspiration and valuable advice (on the dissertation and beyond), as did Timothy Campbell, whom I was lucky to work for as a course assistant and whose warmth and inventiveness in the classroom I will always strive to replicate. Lauren Berlant was a sincere and spirited mentor in the germinal phases of this project. I must also thank the fantastic teachers I had at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University: Alexander Dick, Miranda Burgess, Deanna Kreisel, Carolyn Lesjak, and Colette Colligan. The greatest joys and memories of the PhD are due to the brilliant peers I’ve had the pleasure to work (and not work) alongside in Chicago: Oscar Chavez, Kevin Kimura, Andrew Inchiosa, Peter Lido, Andrew Peart, Hannah Christiansen, Abigail Marcus, Amanda Swain, Jose Moctezuma. A debt is owed to the circulating inhabitants of 5125 S. Ingleside, who provided an vii island of hospitality for our circle of friends in Hyde Park. I am further thankful for the comradery of Hadji Bakara, Katie Krywokulski, and Rachel Kyne, who read portions of the dissertation and provided keen insights. Samuel Rowe has often lent me his sharp eyes and ears, and has been a trusty workshop co-coordinator and conference collaborator. Megan Tusler, Chandani Patel, and Jonathan Schroeder provided thoughtful criticism and practical good sense. Also at the University of Chicago, I benefited from the opportunity to share work and exchange ideas at the 18/19th Century Atlantic Cultures Workshop, the 18th Century Poetry Working Group, the Transnational Methods Group, and the Fellows at the Franke Institute; my heartfelt thanks goes to coordinators, faculty sponsors, and participants, especially Michael Hansen, Allison Turner, David Womble, Benjamin Morgan, Lauren Schachter, Sonali Thakkar, and Zachary Samalin. I benefitted greatly from the feedback of audiences and fellow panelists at various conferences: Kellie Donovan-Condron, Jamie Rosenthal, and Lauren Jackson, Max McKenna, and Jean-Thomas Tremblay organized excellent panels at the Northeastern Conference of the Modern Language Association, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the Aesthetic Disorders Graduate Student Conference, respectively. The early years of the project were funded by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship; its final year was written with the support of a Humanities Division Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Then there are Mary Gibbons and Wayne Younghans, two profoundly good eggs whose friendship has been a sustaining part of our life in Pilsen (and so it is fitting that I am just now writing these words from your spare room). In a similar fashion, old friends and new compound- mates Matt and Kim Krysko have been a source of escapades, emotional support, daydreaming sessions, and beds: your generosity knows no limits. I am continually enlivened by the humor, conspiratorial genius, and astonishingly analytic minds of Dara Greaves and Scott Howard. The viii writing of this dissertation was joyously interrupted by trips to the woods and other excursions with Kelly and Tyler Mackenzie, Derek Howard, Tolmie Greaves, and John Rogers. My cronies Shawna Picken, Chris Kattner, Ryley Picken, and Charlie Picken have inspired me and kept me sane from afar. Thanks to my grandparents Shirley Leahy, Doreen Smith, Bob Picken, and Barb Picken, and to the constant love and support of Carol-Ann Magee, Shane Picken, Fiona Picken, and Susan Kowal: you have taught me so much. A

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