UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Comparative Geographies of Servitude: Servitude, Slavery, and Ideology in the 17th- and 18th-Century Anglo-American Atlantic Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7s71b95x Author Martin, Laura Elizabeth Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ THE COMPARATIVE GEOGRAPHIES OF SERVITUDE: SERVITUDE, SLAVERY, AND IDEOLOGY IN THE 17TH-AND 18TH-CENTURY ANGLO-AMERICAN ATLANTIC A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in LITERATURE by Laura E. Martin September 2012 The Dissertation of Laura E. Martin is approved: _________________________________ Professor Susan Gillman, co-chair _________________________________ Professor Jody Greene, co-chair _________________________________ Professor Carla Freccero _________________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Laura E. Martin 2012 Table of Contents Abstract ……………………………………………………………………………… v Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………………… vii Introduction ………………………………………………………………………… 1 Chapter One “Servants Have the Worser Lives”: The Poetics and Rhetorics of Servitude and Slavery in Inkle and Yarico’s Barbados …………………………. 31 Part One: The Invention of Inkle and Yarico and the Servant Problem Paradigm I. Ligon’s “Yarico,” Servant Mistreatment, and the Colonial Transition to Capitalism …………………………….. 35 II. Steele’s “Inkle,” the Abstraction of Paternalism, and the Disavowal of Colonial Servitude ……………………………... 50 Part Two: Servitude Mediation in Inkle and Yarico’s Long Century of Adaptation I. Inkle and Yarico’s Heroic Epistle Phase I: Servitude Mediation and the Poetics of Debt and Indenture …………………….. 61 II. Inkle and Yarico’s Heroic Epistle Phase II: Disciplining Mercantilism and the Peculiar Transformations of Class in the English Civil War ………………………………………. 84 III. The Reemergence of Colonial Servants: Paternalism as Cultural Dictate and Inkle and Yarico in Drama and Prose …………… 96 IV. Slave Pastoralism, Chapman’s Barbadoes, and Paternalism as Class Divide: Re-collectivizing Servant and Slave Imaginaries …….. 138 Chapter Two The Myth of Convict America in Oroonoko’s Surinam: The Contradictions of Colonial Servitude and Slavery in Behn’s “Other World” …………………... 159 I. “Slaves for Four Years”: The Interchange of Servitude and Slavery, Colonial Servitude Debasement, and the Contradictions of Labor and the Crowd in Behn’s Surinam ………... 164 iii a. Servant Degradation and the Dialectics of the Servant/Slave Relation in Oroonoko’s Recruitment Scene …………………. 166 b. The Corrupt Antagonism of Colonial Servitude, Behn’s Popular Unconscious, and the Contradictions of Political Order in Oroonoko’s Rebellion ………………….. 172 c. Convict Governance, Colonial Scapegoating, and the Contradictions of the Crowd in Oroonoko’s Execution Scene ………………………………… 179 II. Behn’s “Other World”: Colonial Labor, Amerindian Contradiction, and Anglo-Dutch Relations in Oroonoko’s Surinam ………………….. 196 Chapter Three The Myth of the Servant-Planter: The Economics of Colonial Servitude in Colonel Jack and Defoe’s Chesapeake ……………………. 224 I. On Transportation: The Competing Discourses of Colonial Servitude and the Trope of Illusory Advantage ……………. 229 II. On the Servitude Pattern: The Persistence of Colonial Servitude and the Servant/Slave Relation ………………….. 254 a. The London Thieving Years: Domestic Servitude as Disguise ……………………………… 255 b. The Plantation Management Phase: Grateful Subordination and The Dialectics of Servitude and Slavery ………………………….. 261 c. The Jacobite Era and the Reprise of Transportation: European Military Adventuring, Colonial Political Asylum, and Spanish Caribbean Exploits …………………… 279 Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………… 288 iv Abstract The Comparative Geographies of Servitude: Servitude, Slavery, and Ideology in the 17th-and 18th-Century Anglo-American Atlantic by Laura E. Martin In this dissertation, I examine the ideological formation and geographical coalescence of colonial servitude in the literature of the 17th-and 18th-century Anglo-American Atlantic. The figure of the colonial servant, typically consigned to a marginal literary position, embodies a fundamental dialectic illustrating the precarity of labor in the English Atlantic. Its formulation is exemplified in Francis Bacon’s 1606 address to James I on the planting of Ireland. In this discourse, Bacon articulates colonial transportation as “a double commodity,” a twin advantage and dual solution to the labor surpluses of England and Scotland and the characteristic labor shortages of the colonial plantations — a simple but cutting design that links the “avoidance of people here” with the “making use of them there.” Rendered economic, social, and political liabilities at home, English and Scottish laborers are refigured as potential assets of colonial elsewheres. It is a logic that will outlive the overpopulation crises of Elizabethan and Jacobean England and obtain as the basic model for transatlantic colonial servitude — the condition assumed by over half of all migrants to the English colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries and one comprising indentured servants, convict transports, political prisoners, redemptioners, maids-for-wives, as well as spirited, or v kidnapped, transports. Presenting the colonial laborer as an object of use and exchange, Bacon’s characterization of transportation as a twofold benefit highlights the commodity status of the colonial laborer and underscores the fundamental economic character of colonial servitude. My principal effort is to demonstrate that this fundamental economism of colonial servitude is continued, if also ideologically refracted, in the literature of the Anlgo-American Atlantic, as evident in each of this study’s literary geographies — Inkle and Yarico’s Barbados, Oroonoko’s Surinam, and Defoe’s Chesapeake. Whether taking up the extensive, adaptive network of the Inkle and Yarico myth (1657-1833), Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), or Daniel Defoe’s Colonel Jack (1722), my central claim is that the literary colonial servant is a figure of human commodification that serves an important mediating function in the transition to colonial capitalism and the emergence of racial slavery in the Anglo-American Atlantic. vi Acknowledgements This dissertation is a testament, above all, to the dedication, insight, and patience of my tremendous committee members and mentors at Santa Cruz — Carla Freccero, Susan Gillman, and Jody Greene. Carla has provided a model of scholarship and pedagogical commitment that will remain my ideal for years and years to come, and she has offered invaluable comments on this work. Susan Gillman, with her open door and constant enthusiasm, has, in our countless discussions, guided this project from its inception. From the moment that I expressed an interest in colonial servitude, Jody Greene has been my biggest supporter. It would be much less of a project without her involvement — from her endless reading of drafts to her general encouragement of my work. Her input has helped me to refine the dissertation and imagine its afterlife. I have benefited from working with and learning from numerous other UCSC faculty members. Vilashini Cooppan has been an inspiration in her global approach to reading and thinking about novels. It is with her that I first read many of these texts. Harry Berger, Dick Terdiman, Rob Wilson, Chris Connery, and Gopal Balakrishnan have all been invaluable teachers in my time at UCSC. To my parents and siblings, who, though perhaps puzzled by my early interest in all things literary, have continued to offer their support wherever my interests have taken me. To my new family (Tom, Diane, and Matt) who has welcomed me in as one of their own. To all of my friends old and new in and vii beyond Santa Cruz who make my life worth living — you know who you are — I thank you all. In the final instance, this is for David, who has read every word. viii Introduction: On Colonial Servitude Distinct from the other major Atlantic world colonial powers — Portugal, Spain, Holland, and France — England employed its own subjects as principal laborers of New World colonization.1 Colonial servitude, the form this labor would generally take in the Anglo-American Atlantic, is, thus, uniquely inextricable from the English colonial project, playing a fundamental role in the discourse and history of English colonial expansion in the Atlantic. From the earliest appeals for permanent colonial settlement in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, colonization is articulated as an opportunity for developing a New World commodity trade and for alleviating the pressing problems of domestic unemployment, poverty, and crime — collectively derided as the broad scourge of “idleness” in the English realm. The English colonies, according to the projections of early colonial promoters, would serve as a remedy for the mischiefs and misfortunes of the domestic surplus population by providing new market outlets, or “vents,” for the unemployed poor at home and by “venting,” or expelling, the idle poor from England to the colonies where they would labor in hypothetically discovered mines and imaginary sugar plantations, among countless other proposed skilled and unskilled occupations.2 From its discursive inception, colonial servitude embodies 1 For a comparative analysis of the role