THE INTIMACIES OF FOUR CONTINENTS

My study investigates the often obscured connections between the emergence of European liberalism, settler colonialism in the Americas, the transatlantic African slave trade, and the East Indies and China trades in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Cuban Counterpoint (1940), Fernando Ortiz described "peoples from all four quarters of the globe" who labored in the "new world" to produce tobacco and sugar for European consumption. Observing that sugar linked the histories of colonial settlers, native peoples, and slave labor, followed by Chinese and other migrants, Ortiz commented that sugar was "mulatto" from the start. C. L. R. James asserted in The Black Jacobins (1938), that the eighteenth-century slave society in San Domingo connected Europe, Africa, and the Americas. He declared that the fortunes created by the slavery-based societies in the Americas gave rise to the French bourgeoisie, producing the conditions for the "rights of man" demanded in the Revolution of 1789. These understandings that the "new world" of European settlers, indigenous peoples, Africans, and Asians in the Americas was intimately related to the rise of liberal modernity are the inspiration for my investigation. Yet I work with the premise that we actually know little about these "intimacies of four continents," despite separate scholarship about single societies, peoples, or regions. The modern division of knowledge into academic disciplines, focused on discrete areas and objects of interest to the modern national university, has profoundly shaped the inquiry into these connections. Even the questions we can ask about these histories are influenced by the unevenly inhabited and inconsistently understood aftermath of these obscured conditions.

Historians, philosophers, and sociologists have written quite a lot about the origins of liberalism in modern Europe, whether they focus on the French Revolution of 1789 as a key event in the shift from feudal aristocracies to democratic nation-states, or whether they emphasize the gradual displacement of religious explanation by secular scientific rationalism, the shift from mercantilism to industrial capitalism, the growth of modern bureaucracy, or citizenship within the modern state. Yet these discussions have more often treated liberalism's abstract promises of human freedom, rational progress, and social equality apart from the global conditions on which they depended. I join scholars like Cedric Robinson, Saidiya Hartman, Uday Singh Mehta, Paul Gilroy, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Saree Makdisi, Walter Mignolo, Susan Buck-Morss, Jodi A. Byrd, and others, in arguing that liberal philosophy, culture, economics, and government have been commensurate with, and deeply implicated in, colonialism, slavery, capitalism, and empire. There is a distinguished historiography of the Atlantic slave trade and slave economies, which documents slavery throughout the Americas, but it is rare for these scholars to discuss the relationship between slavery and settler colonialism or imported indentured labor. There is work on indentured labor systems utilizing Europeans and Africans, with some attention to the role of Chinese and Indian migrations to the Americas, but there is less work that examines European colonial conquest and the complex history and survival of native indigenous peoples in the Caribbean, and scarcely any that considers the connections, relations, and mixings among the histories of Asian, African, and indigenous peoples in the Americas.

In examining state archives out of which these historical narratives emerge, I observe the ways in which the archive that mediates the imperatives of the state subsumes colonial violence within narratives of modern reason and progress. To make legible the forcible encounters, removals, and entanglements omitted in liberal accounts of abolition, emancipation, and independence, I devise other ways of reading so that we might understand the processes through which the forgetting of violent encounter is naturalized, both by the archive, and in the subsequent narrative histories. In a sense, one aim of my project is to be more specific about what I would term the economy of affirmation and forgetting that structures and formalizes the archives of liberalism, and liberal ways of understanding. This economy civilizes and develops freedoms for "man" in modern Europe and North America, while relegating others to geographical and temporal spaces that are constituted as backward, uncivilized, and unfree. Liberal forms of political economy, culture, government, and history propose a narrative of freedom overcoming enslavement that at once denies colonial slavery, erases the seizure of lands from native peoples, displaces migrations and connections across continents, and internalizes these processes in a national struggle of history and consciousness. The social inequalities of our time are a legacy of these processes through which "the human" is "freed" by liberal forms, while other subjects, practices, and geographies are placed at a distance from "the human."

My study could be considered an unlikely or unsettling genealogy of modern liberalism, which examines liberalism as a project that includes at once both the universal promises of rights, emancipation, wage labor, and free trade, as well as the global divisions and asymmetries on which the liberal tradition depends, and according to which such liberties are reserved for some and wholly denied to others. In this sense, the modern distinction between definitions of the human and those to whom such definitions do not extend is the condition of possibility for Western liberalism, and not its particular exception. This genealogy also traces the manners in which the liberal affirmations of individualism, civility, mobility, and free enterprise simultaneously innovate new means and forms of subjection, administration, and governance. By genealogy, I mean that my analysis does not accept given categories and concepts as fixed or constant, but rather takes as its work the inquiry into how those categories became established as given, and with what effects. Genealogical method questions the apparent closure of our understanding of historical progress and attempts to contribute to what Michel Foucault has discussed as a historical ontology of ourselves, or a history of the present. By modern liberalism, I mean broadly the branches of European political philosophy that include the narration of political emancipation through citizenship in the state, the promise of economic freedom in the development of wage labor and exchange markets, and the conferring of civilization to human persons educated in aesthetic and national culture — in each case unifying particularity, difference, or locality through universal concepts of reason and community. I also include in this definition the literary, cultural, and aesthetic genres through which liberal notions of person, civic community, and national society are established and upheld.

In this sense, my study involves connecting what we might call an "archive of liberalism" —...