Aphra Behn, Captivity, and Emperor of the Moon

The London Gazette, No. 1338, September 12-16, 1678

The September 12, 1678 issue of The London Gazette features an advertisement for an enslaved youth who has run away from his master after "the first instant." Detailing the twelve-year old male's distinguishing characteristics, the notice captures the markings of the domestic and the global as displayed on the young boy's body. He wears a "gray cloth Livery," "the Lace mixed with black, white, and orange colors." It was fashionable among London elite to have enslaved Africans as servants, and "young black males of the period" were particularly "prized for their youth." The twelve-year old's livery likely marks his labor as a footman or personal attendant. The livery's condition, "somewhat torn," might suggest its intense use or a moment of violence upon the clothing or the youth himself. The uniformity of the livery sits perhaps uneasily with the child's more exotic details like the "Silver Ring in one of his ears." His hair "newly clipped very close" could indicate that, in accordance with the style of the time, a wig is part of his required attire; or, perhaps, as contemporaneous paintings suggest, the closely cut hair was the preferred style for enslaved young boys. His polylingual skills, for he "speaks some English, Dutch, and Blacks," echo the languages circulating in the Surinam of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688). While distinguishing the two languages of the dominant colonial powers, English and Dutch, the description erases the complexity of multiple African languages, conflating them simply as "Blacks." The youth's very name, "Africa," summons a place at once partner in and subject to English imperial power. The reward for the youth's recovery can be made at James Street in Covent Garden, just blocks from where Behn's Sir Patient Fancy had debuted at the Dorset Theatre a few months before.

For a seventeenth-century reader, this listing would have been unremarkable. Such advertisements, widely found in London newspapers, reveal that attempts at escape by the enslaved (or, in fact, English subjects apprenticed, indentured, or pressed into military service) frequently occurred within London's urban space, which offered the opportunity for concealment, disguise, and reinvention. It also suggests that enslavement, like other forms of captivity, had been somewhat normalized; Behn did not have to go to Surinam to encounter enslaved Africans. "People of African descent were part of the rural and urban landscape of late Stuart England," writes Susan Amussen. "[T]hey were highly visible in London, Bristol, and other ports and present in smaller numbers through the rest of the country."

For the twenty-first century reader, however, such a notice signals something more complicated about the culture in which Aphra Behn lived: a culture regularly marked by the intersection of the imperial and the domestic, the foreign and the familiar. Scholars have long relied on Oroonoko (1688) to understand Behn's response to colonial practices in the West Indies, the dominant site of England's imperial presence throughout the Restoration. Behn spent time in the then-English colony of Surinam between summer 1663 and February 1664, providing her with the material for that well-known prose fiction. Behn's formative experience in Surinam, however, shaped a much wider constellation of her texts than Oroonoko. Among these we might include Emperor of the Moon, which similarly represents English practices of colonialism, human commodification, and captivity. Situated within a culture brimming with domestic manifestations of colonial power, Emperor of the Moon reveals the degree to which Behn's experience as what she termed an "American" informed her understanding of fundamentally asymmetrical relationships between imperial power and the colonial subject. Emperor of the Moon suggests the degree to which Behn perceived those same power dynamics structuring English culture as well.

Behn lived in a world shaped by daily evidence of the financial and imaginative investment in England's increasing dominance in the British Atlantic. Behn witnessed English imperial expansion that accelerated dramatically with increasing control over the trade of enslaved people in the British Atlantic and the...