Dredging Orientalism

Two recent books, Siraj Ahmed’s The Still Birth of Capital and Michael Franklin’s Orientalist Jones, demonstrate why Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism is not the final word on the voluminous body of writing produced in the eighteenth century on British India. Contrary to the perspective in postcolonial humanities that the Enlightenment, like Orientalism, was universalistic and imperialistic and laid the groundwork for the latter’s scholarly agenda, Ahmed’s solid survey of writing from John Dryden to Walter Scott makes the case that the British Enlightenment had a historical vision of colonialism that needs to be understood on its own terms. Similarly, Franklin’s biography of William Jones (1746–94) is a corrective to the scant attention paid to this pioneering figure in Said’s Orientalism. In that seminal work, Said acknowledges William Jones as one of the first institutional Orientalists who revealed the extraordinary riches of Sanskrit, Indian religion, and Indian history to Europe. He lists Jones’s accomplishments as poet, jurist, polyhistor, and classicist; however, he sees him as a representative of an earlier period of Orientalism, as opposed to a later more modern one instrumentally tied to colonial governance. In so doing, Said subsumes Jones’s eccentric and often radical perspectives under a discussion of the monolithic, scholarly construction of the Orient.

Like Said, Ahmed begins with the postcolonial understanding of the Enlightenment that tends to associate many aspects of European modernity—its origins, its historical vision, and its models of social development—with the drive to conquer resources and land across the globe. Echoing the critique of anachronistic applications of Orientalism to Enlightenment Europe, Ahmed points out that, in contrast to nineteenth- and twentieth-century narratives of European-centered progress, eighteenth-century texts on empire generally acknowledged the supremacy of several non-Western cultures and often associated European colonialism with moral and social degeneration. The importance of this argument, and the rich, nuanced readings of primary material that accompany it, lies in the reminder that histories of colonialism often ignore the countercurrents to the mainstream debates accompanying large historical shifts. In a tripartite discussion of the Enlightenment as “Commerce,” “Conquest,” and “Progress,” Ahmed renders the European perspective “eccentric” rather than unitary, primarily focusing his attention on contemporary debates about the global trade in the Indian Ocean. Why was it, he asks, that so many important figures in the eighteenth century were exercised by, and critical of, a global economy in which England was already beginning to assume supremacy? But this is not solely a book about economic history; rather, it takes on the task of reading the work of canonical literary figures like Dryden, Defoe, Sterne, Foote, Smith, Bentham, Sheridan, Voltaire, Jones, Morgan, and Scott to reveal their fascination with the question of European trade. The startling and often eccentric perspectives each of these important figures held on British mercantilism reveal the historical role of literary writing during this period as it entered and refracted public debates about sovereignty, about the growing power of certain economic classes, and about their self-representations as political powers.

Ahmed’s opening chapter on Dryden’s play Amboyna, or the Cruelty of the Dutch to The English Merchants (1673) shows us why the book title emphasizes stasis rather than progress. Although purportedly written to provide England propagandistic support during the third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–74) and unabashedly allied with aristocratic rather than bourgeois characters, Dryden’s play, as Ahmed reads it, reveals a parallel narrative that criticizes the rise of a monopoly, as well as the development of the mercantile state with its use of global trade to finance its wars. The eccentricity of the play lies in the simultaneous insinuation that the rhetoric of aristocratic honor may be “nothing more than a disguise for mercantilist interests” and a cautionary warning about the rise of statist power (41).

If Dryden...