I don’t write often about academic monographs on here, because the audience is much smaller, but this is truly one of the most exciting and brilliant scholarly works that I’ve read in awhile, so I really feel obligated to spread the word. Cohen uses the idea of “the Indies” — the seemingly odd pairing of the Caribbean and South Asia, that we often think of as a kind of lingering mistake building on Columbus’ blunder — as an entry point into exploring 18th century ideas of the world. She dazzlingly reveals the ways in which both the similarities and the differences between these two areas (and various ways they were instrumentalized!) illuminate all kinds of other ideas — about race, empire, slavery, freedom, etc — and how they were thought about both in the past and today. In particular, she illuminates shifting ways of defining “slavery” — from a more capacious definition that combines political slavery and chattel slavery, to a more narrow definition where it is synonymous with chattel slavery. This shift, she argues, emerges from the perceived hypocrisy of American revolutionaries decrying their “enslavement” by colonial Britain while their economy was completely dependent on chattel slavery. But, fascinatingly, this also produces a shift whereby abolitionists celebrate the benefits of ‘free’ Bengal sugar as opposed to that produced in Jamaica by enslaved people, thereby facilitating the expansion of colonialism in India — and significantly narrowing the definition of freedom. This is only one of the through-lines that the book tracks — it is such a rich, nuanced account of how people thought about the world, and why it matters.
It’s a really stunning book, one that evinces an incredibly impressive knowledge of both history and theory (in both breadth and depth!), and an ability to move comfortably and fluidly between historical minutia of the eighteenth century, detailed close readings of texts, arguments about method, and connections to present-day debates. It’s the kind of comparative work that would seem to be impossible, because what one person could have such a commanding, detailed knowledge of so many different fields, histories, places, languages, texts? I’m just kind of in awe, it’s so smart. Required reading for anyone in eighteenth and nineteenth century studies, I think, especially for anyone working in world and comparative literature, as a model for what scholarship that thinks globally can and should be.
Kasia Reads 