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u 2 A Blueprint of the Anglo-French Eighteenth-Century World-System The intrinsic, cyclical tensions for competitive advantage within the capitalist world-system propel phase transformations, where each long wave has its own distinctive geocultural features within the larger predicates of historical capitalism. Marx characterized the eighteenth century by its supersession of small workshops with the conglomeration of formerly isolated workers in a single space of production, the manufactory, where economies of scale then allowed for the division of labor into specialized tasks.1 The eighteenth century ’s geoculture, likewise, involves the dual process of expanding the social and geographic domain of trade, consumption, and membership of the bourgeoisie, while increasing social disintegration through the production of modern-looking class and status identity differences (racial, gender, sexual). As noted above, this geoculture is patterned by four intertwining elements: sensibility, as a medium of behavioral distinction that helps to establish an expanded moral community necessary for enlarging the realm of capital’s circulation by reducing the risk of lending and trading among strangers; a sensational consumption of mass-market, processed commodities, such as the superprofitable, parastaples of sugar, caffeinated beverages like coffee and tea, and alcoholic goods like rum, Madeira wine, and gin; Atlantic slavery as the economic mode of labor exploitation on which the production of sensational goods depends; and sentiment as an affect congealed in the visual, aural, and literary artifacts that belatedly arose as a device for regulating the geocultural field by attempting to contain the tensions of competition that would otherwise make it incoherent. For the purposes of argument, these elements will be considered in isolation, but in actual practice they converge to form a mutually enabling geoculture. 1. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 439–91. the geoculture of the anglo-french eighteenth-century world-system Sensibility’s Bourgeois (Civil) Society Most historical and contemporary accounts of sensibility begin by attempting to define and delimit what the term, and its cognates of sympathy, benevolence , sociability, and fellow-feeling, encompasses and resists.2 A broad formulation of sensibility might consider it as involving claims for the subject’s spontaneous, extrarational mimetic response to natural or sensual phenomena and the sight or imagination of a body in distress, particularly those of the socially disempowered (women, elderly, children, servants and the poor) or the parahuman (animals and botanical and geological formations). Recounting the tremendous and often promiscuous surge of contemporaneous reflection on the theme in the eighteenth century, Markman Ellis notes that debates on sensibility “left definitions imprecise and flexible” and produced what he sees as “a philosophical nightmare of muddled ideas, weak logic, and bad writing.”3 For Ellis, the proof of this incoherence is seen with the wide-ranging fields of knowledge that sensibilitarian claims operated within, like aesthetics, science, physiology, and political economy.4 A host of recent studies on sensibility has rigorously documented sensibilitarian claims within these categories in a renewed effort to name its object with greater accuracy, but the contemporary classificatory impulse often falls short of its mark. The initiative of defining sensibility will be interminable not because we need to excavate ever more archival material or require a more comprehensive bibliographic redaction of sensibility’s period usage, but that the very effort to demarcate sensibility’s outlines elides how its profuse claims were meant to bind together a group of social 52 u the culture and commerce of the early american novel 2. G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986); John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); June Howard, “What Is Sentimentality ,” American Literary History 11, no. 1 (1999): 63–81; Julia A Stern, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Bruce Burgett, Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Michael Bell, Sentimentalism, Ethics, and the Culture of Feeling (New York: Palgrave, 2000); and Lori Morish, Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). 3. Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce...

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