Mazes of Empire: Space and Humanity in Crèvecoeur's Letters

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782) has been read as a contribution to U.S. national culture, as a text grounded either in a cosmopolitan worldview or in loyalist interests, and as a work with espionage subtext. Despite such contrasting analyses of its political affiliations, critiques of the Letters have converged on one main point: America has invariably, perhaps unquestionably, been perceived as its central, dominant organizing topic.¹ Surprisingly, even though "America" refers to specific delineations of geographic space, a sustained reading of representations of space in the book has yet to be offered. This critical absence is intriguing both because such analysis could have shed light on the questions of political allegiance that the book raises and because spatial concerns must have been significant for the author, who was "a very capable cartographer" and surveyor (Chevignard, "Looking Glass," 185).

Focusing on the intersection of spatial and political concerns in the book, I show here that the Letters subordinates America to an interrogation of the interplay between empire—a political project that aspires to achieve global spatial integration—and humanity—an imagined construct that represents the ostensibly integrated population of globalized space. The Letters was written during a major crisis within the British empire, which led to a redefinition of its means and goals and to its shift from settler colonialism in North America to nonsettler colonization in India. The book responds to this crisis indirectly; instead of limiting its discussion to one historical moment or national culture, the Letters launches a broad critique of Eurocentric European imperialism as a project whose political, epistemological, and philosophical underpinnings are inherently problematic.

Letters from an American Farmer is comprised of 11 letters written by James, a Pennsylvania-born British settler, in response to inquiries about America by an English gentleman, Mr. F. B., and one letter James received from a Russian traveler. The early letters celebrate empire as a utopian project, which seems to foster the welfare of humanity, but James's views gradually change as he learns that imperial practices and discourses fail to protect happy, free human existence which an idealized version of empire seemed to promise. Even though James's subjectivity, his relation to Mr. F. B., and his language are all grounded in imperial British culture, the dedication to the French Abbè Raynal and the inclusion, in Letter XI, of Russia and Sweden within the imperial worldview that the book develops suggest that the European empire which he envisions transcends divisions within Europe. Instead of a narrow consideration of particular events, then, the Letters engages with the topic of empire on a broad philosophical level.

The tensions that engender the book's critique of empire are articulated already in the dedication which precedes Letter I, when "J. Hector St. John"—the name Crèvecoeur assumed in 1769²—addresses the Abbè Raynal:

A few years since, I met . . . with your Political and Philosophical History, and perused it with infinite pleasure. For the first time in my life, I reflected on the relative state of nations; I traced the extended ramifications of a commerce which ought to unite, but now convulses, the world; I admired that universal benevolence, . . . which is not confined to the narrow limits of your own country, but . . . extends to the whole human race. . . . [Y]ou have pleaded the cause of humanity, in espousing that of the poor Africans. You viewed these provinces of North America in their true light: . . . as the cradle of future nations; and the refuge of distressed Europeans.

(7)

This dedication juxtaposes the Letters with the work Raynal edited, Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Euro-péens dans les deux Indes (first published in 1770). Conflicts among the key concepts in this acknowledgement of intellectual debt—"world," "humanity," "benevolence," "limits," "unit[y]," "convuls[ions]," and "distresse[s]"—are rooted in the irreconcilability of humanity and Eurocentric empire as simultaneously mutually constitutive and mutually exclusive terms. Although the notion of a universal humanity was inherent in imperial aspirations to bring the...