The Stillbirth of Capital: Enlightenment Writing and Colonial India by Siraj Ahmed (review)

The Stillbirth of Capital is looking for a fight. Its introduction begins by retelling two well-established, even orthodox historiographical stories—in order to prove that they are dead wrong. Mr. Ahmed’s first target is the story that “the Enlightenment provided European imperialism its intellectual foundation.” According to this narrative, which Mr. Ahmed traces back to Frantz Fanon, Ranajit Guha, and Edward Said, that is to the founding figures of postcolonial and subaltern studies, the universal claims of the Enlightenment to understand human nature both parallel and underwrite the imperialistic ambitions of European states. Second, he attacks the even more fundamental story that “capitalism is the basis of modernity,” that is, the claim, advanced by Marxists and liberals alike, that capital unmoored from state power and political intervention becomes in the eighteenth century the engine of European economic development and social change.

Instead, Mr. Ahmed argues, the Enlightenment vision of European colonialism was profoundly critical. Far from being apologists for the violent global projection of European power in their time, figures such as Voltaire, Smith, Condorcet, and Kant saw their Enlightenment programs as alternatives to the incumbent world order: “universal ideals tend to function as critical tools, not as historical realities or even as the telos towards which history necessarily tends.” And this is because they realized something that, in Mr. Ahmed’s telling, subsequent scholars have forgotten: that modernity did not begin with the separation of economics from politics, but rather in their predatory synthesis, exemplified in his study by the East India Company: “it is not … the freedom of markets from political intervention—but instead the alliance of corporations and states that lies at the origins of modernity.” Drawing on Hannah Arendt, Mr. Ahmed acutely points out that it is the ancients, not we moderns, who strictly separated commerce from rule.

His study thus coordinates two ambitious revisionist arguments into a complex whole: because the eighteenth-century economy functioned differently than traditional historiography supposes, the relationship between Enlightenment and colonialism is different than postcolonial theorists have claimed. Indeed, his introduction cleverly borrows the form of Said’s argument about Orientalism in order to turn it on postcolonial studies itself. Just as European scholars constructed an imagined “Orient” out of the non-European world they encountered, modern scholars have constructed an imagined “Enlightenment” out of the European past: “As the Orient was the effect of Orientalism, the Enlightenment is now to a great extent the effect of contemporary critical theory.”

Though his opening claims are about capital, colonialism, and Enlightenment more generally, Mr. Ahmed is primarily concerned with eighteenth-century British India and its textual representation in Britain. To a striking extent, the first half of The Stillbirth of Capital is thus an account of minor works by the major figures whose critical heritage is the work of The Scriblerian: Mr. Ahmed dedicates his first three chapters to Dryden’s Amboyna (1673), Defoe’s Captain Singleton (1720), Sterne’s Continuation of the Bramine’s Journal (written 1767), and Foote’s The Nabob (1772), with brief side glances at Behn and Swift. Its second half takes up Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), the speeches of Edmund Burke and Richard Brinsley Sheridan at the impeachment of Warren Hastings, Voltaire’s Lettres d’Amabed (1769), the Orientalist scholarship of William Jones, and finally two nineteenth-century historical novels, Lady Morgan’s The Missionary (1811) and Sir Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815).

The Stillbirth of Capital applies the same critical procedure to nearly all of these texts: it carefully and learnedly relocates them within their Anglo-Indian historical context, and then it shows how this context works as a foil to make the original work visible as a critique of British colonialism and its collusion with corporate mercantile profit. This critique does not always lie at the surface of the works in question, which means that in order to prove its thesis this study must engage in...