Monsoon cultures: Climate and acculturation in Alexander Hamilton's A New Account of the East Indies

New Literary History

Volumn 38, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 527-550

  Markley, Robert ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA CHAMPAIGN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 67649975595     PISSN: 00286087     EISSN: 1080661X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2007.0047     Document Type: Review

References (92)

1. Alexander Hamilton, A New Account of the East Indies, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: J. Mosman, 1727), l:xxvi (hereafter cited in text). All quotations are from this edition. Hamilton retired to Scotland and died in either 1732 or 1733.
2. See Dictionary of National Biography, 2004 ed., s.v. "Alexander Hamilton."
3. Between 1500 and 1800, more than 1,500 books about Asia were published in Europe, far more than about the Americas and Africa; before 1750, the vast literature of exploration and trade was skewed heavily towards descriptions of the tropical monsoon regions of South and Southeast Asia rather than to the Caribbean or the Americas. This body of literature is surveyed in the indispensable work of Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe, 3 vols. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1965-93).
4. On the tradition of historical geography, see particularly Peter Heylyn, Cosmographie (London: Henry Seile, 1652)
5. the most popular such work in the latter half of the seventeenth century (with eight editions before 1700). I discuss Heylyn and his contemporaries in Robert Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600-1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), 57-64.
6. On the Mughal War, see John Keay, The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company (London: HarperCollins, 1991), 144-45.
7. For other contemporary accounts by British observers of this conflict and later battles in the region, see Charles Lockyer, An Account of the Trade in India (London: printed for the author and sold by Samuel Crouch, 1711);
8. and Clement Downing, A Compendious History of the Indian Wars; with an Account of the Rise, Progress, Strength, and Force of Angria the Pirate (London: Printed for T. Cooper, 1737).
9. On Hamilton's career as an independent trader and his often vexed relationship with the East India Company, see Keay, The Honourable Company, 253-54.
10. For introductions to the key concepts of political ecology, see Paul Robbins, Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004);
11. and Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Politics, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2004).
12. On actants and on actor-network theory more generally, see Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987);
13. and Latour, Resassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005). There is an extensive bibliography on situated knowledges in science studies;
14. see particularly Lucy Suchman, Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987);
15. and Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledge: The Science Question in Feminism as a Site of Discourse on the Privilege of Partial Perspective," Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575-99.
16. Anthony Reid, "Humans and Forests in Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia," in Environmental History in the Pacific World, ed. J. R. McNeill (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001), 218.
17. On the significance of climate change and its effects on both biological and cultural evolution, see H. H. Lamb, Climate History and the Modern World, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1995);
18. Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Niño and the Fate of Civilizations (New York: Basic Books, 1999);
19. Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 (New York: Basic Books, 2000);
20. Fagan, The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization (New York: Basic Books, 2004);
21. William J. Burroughs, Climate Change in Prehistory: The End of the Reign of Chaos (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005);
22. and Eugene Linden, The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006).
23. Ronald Schleifer, Modernism and Time: The Logic of Abundance in Literature, Science, and Culture, 1880-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), 13-15.
24. On perceptions of the tropics in the eighteenth century, see Felicity Nusshaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-century English Narratives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1995);
25. Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804 (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1999), 29-70;
26. Beth Fowkes Tobin, Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760-1820 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2005);
27. and Matthew Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624-1783 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2006).
28. Carole Crumley, "Historical Ecology: A Multidimensional Ecological Orientation," in Historical Ecology: Cultural Knowledge and Changing Landscapes, ed. Carole Crumley (Sante Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1994), 9.
29. Richard Lewontin, "Facts and the Factitious in the Natural Sciences," Critical Inquiry 18 (1991): 147.
30. See also Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985).
31. Elizabeth Graham, "Metaphors and Metamorphism: Some Thoughts on Environmental Metahistory," in Historical Ecology, ed. Crumley, 125.
32. Philip Mirowski, More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature's Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), 75;
33. Graham, "Metaphors and Metamorphism," 124.
34. Robert Markley, "'Land Enough in the World': Locke's Golden Age and the Infinite Extensions of 'Use,'" South Atlantic Quarterly 98 (1999): 817-37.
35. See Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995);
36. Grove, "The East India Company, the Raj, and the El Niño: The Critical Role Played by the Colonial Scientists in Establishing the Mechanisms of Global Climate Teleconnections 1770-1930," in Nature and the Orient: The Environmental History of South and Southeast Asia, ed. Richard H. Grove, Vinita Damodaran, and Satpal Sangwan (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), 301-23;
37. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001);
38. and Jan Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2007).
39. See also Andrew Cook, "Alexander Dalrymple and the Hydrographic Office," in Pacific Empires: Essays in Honour of Glyndwr Williams, ed. Alan Frost and Jane Samson (Vancouver: Univ. of British Columbia Press, 1999), 53-68.
40. See Grove, "Indigenous Knowledge and the Significance of South-West India for Portuguese and Dutch Constructions of Tropical Nature," in Nature and the Orient, ed. Grove, Damodaran, and Sangwan, 187-209.
41. See Ursula Klein and Wolfgang Lefèvre, Materials in Eighteenth-Century Science: A Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 199-210.
42. Quoted in Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998), 15.
43. Rajani Sudan, "Mud, Mortar, and Other Technologies of Empire," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 45 (2004): 147-70.
44. Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce: The Lands Below the Winds, 2 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1988-93), 64;
45. see also John R. McNeill, "Islands in the Rim: Ecology and History in and around the Pacific, 1521-1996," in Pacific Centuries: Pacific and Pacific Rim History Since the Sixteenth Century, ed. Dennis O. Flynn, Lionel Frost, and A. J. H. Latham (New York: Routledge, 1999), 70-84.
46. See William Dampier, A Discourse of Winds, pt. 3, Voyages and Descriptions (London: printed for James Knapton, 1705).
47. On Dampier, see Philip Edwards, The Story of the Voyage: Sea-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994);
48. Glyndwr Williams, The Great South Sea: English Voyages and Encounters 1570-1750 (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1997);
49. and Diana and Michael Preston, A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: The Life of William Dampier, Explorer, Naturalist, and Buccaneer (London: Doubleday, 2004).
50. See Reid, "Humans and Forests," 216-34;
51. and Greg Bankoff, "Coming to Terms with Nature: State and Environment in Maritime Southeast Asia," Environmental History Review 19 (1995): 317-37.
52. Sir Walter Ralegh, The History of the World (London: Printed for S. Cartwright, R. Best, and J. Place, 1614), 56.
53. On the East India Company, see Keay, Honourable Company;
54. K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660-1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978);
55. Michel Morineau, "The Indian Challenge: Seventeenth to Eighteenth Centuries," trans. Cyprian P. Blamire, in Merchants, Companies, and Trade: Europe and Asia in the Early Modern Era, ed. Sushil Chaudhury and Michel Morineau (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), 243-75;
56. Femme Gaastra, "War, Competition, and Collaboration: Relations between the English and Dutch East India Companies in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," in The Worlds of the East India Company, ed. H. V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2002), 49-68;
57. and, in the same volume, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Frank Submissions: The Company and Mughals Between Sir Thomas Roe and Sir William Norris," 69-96.
58. Dampier, A Voyage to New Holland: The English Voyage of Discovery to the South Seas in 1699, ed. James Spencer (London: Alan Sutton, 1981), 224.
59. Dampier, Voyage to New Holland, 147.
60. See Robert Markley, "Global Analogies: Cosmology, Geosymmetry and Skepticism in Some Works of Aphra Behn," in Science, Literature, and Rhetoric in Early Modern England, ed. David Burchell and Juliet Cummins (London: Ashgate, 2007), 189-212.
61. Fagan, Little Ice Age, 103.
62. See also Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996).
63. Edward Terry, A Voyage to East-India (London: Printed by T. W. for J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1655), 92. All quotations are from this edition.
64. In addition to Edwards, The Story of the Voyage,
65. and Williams, The Great South Sea,
66. see Jonathan Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680-1840 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001).
67. See Lisbet Koerner, Linneaus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999);
68. and Staffan Müller-Wille, "Nature as a Marketplace: The Political Economy of Linnean Botany,'" in Oeconomies in the Age of Newton, ed. Margaret Schabas and Neil De Marchi (Durham, NC : Duke Univ. Press, 2003), 154-72.
69. See Frank Perlin, "The Other 'Species' World: Speciation of Commodities and Moneys, and the Knowledge-Base of Commerce, 1500-1900," in Merchants, Companies, and Trade, ed. Chaudhury and Morineau, 145-73;
70. Julie Berger Hoch strasser, "The Conquest of Spice and the Dutch Colonial Imagery: Seen and Unseen in the Visual Culture of Trade," in Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, ed. Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2005);
71. Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-utan and the Bird of Paradise (London: Macmillan, 1883).
72. See Anthony Farrington, "Bengkulu: An Anglo-Chinese Partnership," in The Worlds of the East India Company, ed. Bowen, Lincoln, and Rigby, 111-18.
73. See Tita Chico, "Minute Particulars: Microscopy and Eighteenth-Century Narrative," Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 39 (2006): 143-61.
74. On gift exchange in the Far East, see Cynthia Klekar, "Prisoners in Silken Bonds: Trade and Diplomacy in English Voyages to Japan and China," Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 6 (2006), 84-105.
75. See also Jevamalar Kathirithamby-Wells, "Restraints on the Development of Merchant Capitalism in Southeast Asia before c. 1800," in Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era, ed. Reid, 123-48.
76. On conflicts between the Siamese and Vietnamese, see Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 2:190;
77. on efforts in Siam to curb foreign influence at the end of the 1680s, see Dhiravat na Pombejra, "Ayutthaya at the End of the Seventeenth Century: Was There a Shift to Isolation?" in Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era, ed. Reid, 250-71.
78. John Arbuthnot, An Essay Concerning the Effects of Air on Human Bodies (London: J. Tonson, 1733), 146.
79. In the late eighteenth century, views of the sun's heat as a determinant of both skin color and national or ethnic character gave way to beliefs in inherent racial qualities. See Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2000);
80. Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2004), 83-125;
81. and Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India 1600-1850 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999).
82. On civility see Markley, Far East and the English Imagination, 105-42.
83. On conceptions of race in Southeast Asia during the period, see Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce;
84. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700: A Political and Economic-History (New York: Longman, 1993);
85. Joan-Pau Rubies, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South Asia through European Eyes 1250-1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000);
86. and M. G Ricklefs, War, Culture, and Economy in Java 1677-1726: Asian and European Imperialism in the Early Kartasura Period (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1993).
87. Daniel Defoe, A New Voyage Round the World, by a Course Never Sailed Before (London: A. Bettesworth and W. Mears, 1725), 1, 3.
88. See, for example, Climatological Database for the World's Oceans 1750-1850, http://www.ucm.es/info/cliwoc/ (European Union funded project 2001-3, UE contract EVK2-CT-2000-00090).
89. John Ovington, A Voyage to Sural in the Year 1689, in India in the Seventeenth Century: Being an Account of the Two Voyages to India by Ovington and Thevenot, ed. J. Guha, (New Delhi: Associated Publishing House, 1976), 64.
90. John Fryer, A New Account of East India and Persia in Eight Letters, Being Nine Years Travels, Begun in 1672 and Finished 1681 (London, 1698), 68.
91. On changing European conceptions of climate and health in India, see Harrison, Climates and Constitutions, 58-109.
92. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1960), 2, ¶49, 301.