Mud, mortar, and other technologies of empire

Eighteenth Century

Volumn 45, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 147-169

  Sudan, Rajani ^a  

^a SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149167289     PISSN: 01935380     EISSN: 19350201     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (24)

1. Samuel Johnson, Samuel Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Brady and W. K. Wimsatt (Berkeley, 1977), 91
2. Jack Goody, The East in the West (Cambridge, 1996), 1-10. Goody goes on to uncover the ways in which syllogism, primarily considered of Greek origin, exists in other epistemologies that predate the Greeks
3. Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York, 2002)
4. See, for example, K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia Before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge, 1990)
5. Linda Colley, Captives: The Story of Britain's Pursuit of Empire and How its Soldiers and Civilians Were Held Captive by the Dream of Global Supremacy, 1600-1850 (New York, 2002)
6. Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley, 1998)
7. Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmenlalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge, 1995)
8. and Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000)
9. For Thomas Kuhn, this is a process he identifies as "normal science." In fact, the inception of his argument is a call to deconstruct the idea of history as a "repository" of anecdote and think through the complexities that dominant ideology forecloses. Changing the Eurocentric paradigm of global history, one that is structured by Enlightenment epistemology, is the enterprise Frank, Grove, Pomeranz, and others have been working toward for years. In literary studies, and particularly in post-colonial studies, it is crucial to call into question the automatic assumption that Enlightenment thinking has been the sole province of European endeavor. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962)
10. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Vol. 65:231-32, British Library. Interestingly, this mortar from Madras, containing "Chinam" or lime, was also famous for its startling whiteness
11. Nicholas Downton to the East India Company, Nov. 20th, 1614, BL, Oriental and India Office Collections, Letters Received by the East India Company from Its Servants in the East, Vol. II (1613-1614), Document 181: 169
12. Thomas Kerridge to the East India Company, Jan. 20, 1614 (Agamere), BL, OIOC, Letters Received by the East India Company from Its Servants in the East, Vol. II (1613-1614), Document 235: 298
13. Bruno Latour argues that our use of modernity defines "by contrast, an archaic and stable past ... it designates a break in the regular passage of time, and it designates a combat in which there are victors and vanquished" (10). Latour understands the ways in which "modernity" invokes, simultaneously, a chronological and achronological state is what I am attempting to argue here. That is, on the one hand, the idea of modernity forecloses the possibility of a history of science and technology as effectively as the histories attending scientific discoveries (as Thomas Kuhn has identified). And, yet, those histories, despite their foreclosure from current discourse, haven't disappeared but have been simply buried by the dominant ideology. Part of the project I'm engaged in is a way of restoring the multifarious stories that articulate the production of a scientific fact or technological innovation. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass., 1993)
14. Allen Debus's monumental study, The Chemical Philosophy, gives the most comprehensive account of the origins of alchemy and development. He claims that the general agreement is that alchemy was a combination of medicine and pharmacology, fueled by a persistent belief in a unified nature, and documented primarily in philosophical works. He argues, however, that alchemy wasn't simply an abstract theoretical paradigm, but was rooted in the practical crafts of metal workers and others. Sources for alchemy in antiquity, then, are also in the "surviving texts that illustrate the practical craft traditions of antiquity. In fact, we do find that the oldest surviving works of metal craftsmen combine an emphasis on the change in the appearance of metals with the acceptance of a vitalistic view of nature - a view that included the belief that metals live and grow within the earth in a fashion analogous to the growth of the human fetus. It was to become basic to alchemical thought that the operator might hasten the natural process of metallic growth in his laboratory and thus bring about perfection in far less time than that required by nature." Allen G. Debus, The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Vol. I (New York, 1977), 4
15. Pamela Smith, The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton, 1994), 35
16. Mathematics, arguably, also originates from Indian sources; the idea of zero, coming from a Hindu system, was disseminated by Arab merchants to Europe. Brian Rotman writes, for example: The mathematical sign we know as zero entered European consciousness with difficulty and incomprehension. It appears to have originated some 1300 years ago in central India as the distinguishing element in the now familiar Hindu system of numerals. From there it was actively transmitted and promulgated by Arab merchants; so that by the tenth century it was in widespread use throughout the Arab Mediterranean. Between the tenth and the thirteenth century the sign stayed within the confines of Arab culture, resisted by Christian Europe, and dismissed by those whose function it was to handle numbers as an incomprehensible and unnecessary symbol. (7) Rotman continues to argue that the development of mercantile capitalism in the fourteenth century and the passage of handling numbers from church-educated clerks to merchants and artisan-scientists, among others, resulted in the adoption of zero as crucial to trade and technology. Such artisans, were, according to Smith and Debus, ones that were trained in alchemy, the discourse that was partially responsible for deploying mathematics as a more reliable and useful method of accounting. Brian Rotman, Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (Stanford, 1987)
17. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, 1994), 200
18. William Edwards to the East India Company by the Hope Dec. 2, 1615 (rec'd) Dec. 20th, 1614, Amadavar, BL, OIOC, Letters Received by the East India Company from its Servants in the East, Vol. II (1613-1615), Document 177: 151
19. Nicholas Downton to the East India Company, Nov. 20th, 1614, BL, OIOC, Letters Received by the East India Company from its Servants in the East, Vol. II (1613-1615), Document 183: 173-74
20. See Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven and London, 2000)
21. In particular, Laura Brown's groundbreaking work on both The Rape of the Lock and Windsor-Forest helps identify the ways in which imperialism, commodification, mythological history, and the reconciliation of imperial violence shape the poem. Her recent reworking of the poem alludes to the figures of liquidity as part of the trope of commercial power. Donna Landry's account of violence in Windsor-Forest identifies the poem with the progression of hunting and blood sport: A precondition for the Pax Britannica that is celebrated at the end of the poem would seem to be for the whole colonized world to have been comparably bloodied. Once the British have extended their empire of field sports sufficiently overseas, the colonized will return to the imperial metropolis to gape at the English, who will forever be madly chasing some creature or the other. (117) Landry's focus, of course, is more on the history of sporting and how this affects the invention of the notion of "countryside," and Brown extends the critique of imperial hegemony that she has established in earlier works. Although both approaches are very different from one another, they share an interest in maintaining an understanding of English power in opaque terms: either the blood-soaked hunts that are metonyms of the colonial enterprise, the material commodities scattered throughout the poem in order to mitigate the violence of English colonialism, or even, as Brown argues in Fables of Modernity, Pope's understanding of the "flood" (the Thames, the ocean) as a material embodiment of England's global political and mercantile power. See Laura Brown, Alexander Pope (London, 1985)
22. and Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, 2001)
23. and Donna Landry, The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking, and Ecology in English Literature, 1671-1831 (New York, 2001)
24. Jane Austen, Emma, ed. Lionel Trilling (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), 233