Rethinking Colonial State Kathleen Wilson

Rethinking the Colonial State: Family, Gender, and Governmentality in Eighteenth-CenturyBritish FrontiersAuthor(s): Kathleen WilsonReviewed work(s):Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 116, No. 5 (December 2011), pp. 1294-1322Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/ahr.116.5.1294 .Accessed: 31/12/2011 02:21

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Rethinking the Colonial State: Family, Gender, andGovernmentality in Eighteenth-Century British Frontiers

KATHLEEN WILSON

States, if the pun be forgiven, state . . . They define, in great detail, acceptableforms and images of social activity and individual and collective identity . . .Indeed, in this sense, “the State” never stops talking.1

STUDIES OF THE COLONIAL STATE may seem to be characterized more by plenitude thanby lack. Scholars have been assiduous in suggesting theories of its nature and itsrelationship to the legal and political structures of Western imperial modernity.2However, the eighteenth-century British colonial state has received far less atten-tion. Historians of Britain have recently been keen to examine the expansion of theHanoverian state in a period of protracted war and intense international rivalries,but generally have limited their inquiries to the targets and reach of the amalgamatedmetropolitan “British” state. That this “fiscal-military state,” as John Brewer fa-mously dubbed it, precociously forged some of the unique capacities of modernstates is now taken as read, as is the role of these capacities in Britain’s domination

I would like to thank William Roger Louis for the productive misunderstanding in 2004 that led me towrite and deliver a first version of this article as a paper at the University of Texas Ransom Center.Subsequent versions were given to the Center for Historical Analysis, Rutgers University; the BritishStudies Seminar, Columbia University; the History Department, University of Glasgow; the DelawareValley Seminar in British Studies; the Institute for Historical Studies, University of Texas; and the BritishStudies Seminar, University of Chicago. Thank you to all the participants for their constructive questionsand comments. Special thanks also go to Nick Mirzoeff, Timothy Alborn, Jenise DePinto, Hannah WeissMuller, Brooke Newman, Jennifer Pitts, and the anonymous reviewers for the American Historical Reviewfor terrific advice and engaged critique (in the French sense). Finally, thanks to the following institutionsfor funding the research for this project: the National Endowment for the Humanities; the GuggenheimFoundation; the Center for Historical Analysis, Rutgers University; and the College of Arts and Sci-ences, Stony Brook University.

1 Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution(Oxford, 1985), 3.

2 E.g., Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1992); Said, Orientalism (New York,1976); Etienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene (London, 2002); Timothy Mitchell, “The Limits ofthe State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics,” American Political Science Review 85, no. 1(March 1991): 77–96; Akhil Gupta, “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture ofPolitics, and the Imagined State,” American Ethnologist 22, no. 2 (May 1995): 375–402; David Scott,“Colonial Governmentality,” Social Text, no. 43 (Autumn 1995): 191–220; David Lloyd and Paul Tho-mas, Culture and the State (London, 1998); John Comaroff, “Reflections on the Colonial State, in SouthAfrica and Elsewhere: Factions, Fragments, Facts and Fictions,” Social Identities 4, no. 3 (1998): 321–361; George Steinmetz, ed., State/Culture: State-Formation after the Imperial Turn (Ithaca, N.Y., 1999);Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta, eds., The Anthropology of the State: A Reader (Oxford, 2006). Forcolonial modernities, see Antoinette Burton, ed., Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities (London,1999); Tani E. Barlow, ed., Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia (Durham, N.C., 1997); andDipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago, 2002).

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and ultimate victory in the century of war for trade and empire that ended at Wa-terloo.3 Perhaps as a result of the effectiveness of this institutional model, imperialhistorians of the period have been less interested in thinking about “a colonial state”as such, which has been conceptualized by default either as un etat manque of weakinstitutional forms and limited coercive powers, or as the unfinished product of ne-gotiation between metropolitan and colonial authorities that bestowed considerableautonomy on British domains from North America to the Indian Ocean.4 What re-mains striking is that the performative nature of state power, and the cultural in-timations and practices of state-building, tend to escape sustained attention: the“great arch” of English state formation as cultural revolution, so masterfully de-scribed by Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer some years ago, remains curiously under-constructed within eighteenth-century British colonial history, while the studies ofinstitutional forms of state power in turn tend to forget that the entity called “theState” is a fiction.5

Examining the practices of governance in three frontiers of the British empire—Fort Marlborough (Sumatra), St. Helena, and Jamaica—can help revivify a culturalperspective on the arts and strategies of colonial state-making in the long eighteenthcentury (1660–1820). It puts into play a different notion of state power, one that wasperformative rather than rigidly institutional and that focused on the organizationof social life and national affiliation among colonizers and colonized alike.6 In doingso, we can build on two strands of exciting work on European empires and colo-nization. The first, executed largely by feminist scholars, has demonstrated the cen-trality of white male privilege, marital strategy, and concubinage to the establishmentand legitimization of European authority in colonies and outposts across the globe—

3 See John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York,1988); Lawrence Stone, An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689–1715 (London, 1994); Patrick K.O’Brien, “The Political Economy of British Taxation, 1660–1815,” Economic History Review 41, no. 1(February 1988): 1–32; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992).For the Continent, see Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Oxford,1992); Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early ModernEurope (Princeton, N.J., 1994).

4 C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London, 1989);Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (London, 2004).Cf. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Econ-omy (Princeton, N.J., 2000); Jack P. Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political andConstitutional History (Charlottesville, Va., 1994); Christopher L. Tomlins and Bruce H. Mann, TheMany Legalities of Early America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001); Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy,Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820 (London, 2002); John Smolenskiand Thomas J. Humphrey, New World Orders: Violence, Sanction and Authority in the Colonial Americas(Philadelphia, 2005); Peter Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America,c. 1750–1783 (Oxford, 2004); Janice E. Thompson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Buildingand Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, N.J., 1994).

5 Corrigan and Sayer, The Great Arch, 96.6 That is, constituting through discourse or practice that which is alleged to be represented. In

colonial environments, “state” power was necessarily performative—creating through day-to-day prac-tices the outlines of authority that a state would or could possess—and theatrical—enacting hierarchiesof authority, class, and caste into realms of the everyday that institutional forms of power did not usuallyencompass. For other examples of performative state-making, see Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race:Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2003), chap. 4; Carol Watts, TheCultural Work of Empire: The Seven Years’ War and the Imagining of the Shandean State (Edinburgh,2007); Sudipta Sen, “Uncertain Dominance: The Colonial State and Its Contradictions,” Nepantla: Viewsfrom the South 3, no. 2 (2002): 392–406; James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes toImprove the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn., 1999).

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and indeed, across the centuries.7 The second, undertaken mainly by scholars ofnineteenth- and twentieth-century empires, has looked at the colonial governmen-talities—the rationalities and techniques of governance—through which hybridforms of local authority were used to manage everyday social and intimate rela-tionships, sometimes with a view to inducing their targets to monitor themselves.8Through an examination of Fort Marlborough, St. Helena, and Jamaica—“frontiers”of British authority and identity in that they marked both borders of English do-minion and limits of imperial knowledge—these lines of inquiry can be brought to-gether in pursuit of a set of related issues. The first is how problems of governance,discipline, and population permeated early modern forms of colonial rule almost acentury before they are usually acknowledged to have done so. Fort Marlboroughand St. Helena, although largely neglected by imperial historians, were East IndiaCompany (EIC) colonies of marginal economic and substantial strategic significance,where the imperatives of “trade,” security, and social stability often violently con-tended. Jamaica, in contrast, a self-governing sugar colony and the jewel of the mid-eighteenth-century empire (and thus intensively studied), was as notorious for itssocial disorder and rebellion as it was famed for its profits. In each site, their differentpolitical structures notwithstanding, issues of population, sexual and family regu-lation, and national belonging loomed large in the dynamics of local governance, asofficials attempted to mark national affiliation and sexual and kinship relations asdomains of organization and control.

Secondly, the conjoined analysis of the arts of governance in these three Atlanticand Indian Ocean peripheries also raises some important questions about the long-established historiographical division of the eighteenth-century British Empire into“first” and “second” periods—characterized by the mercantile “empire of the seas”

7 On the New World, see, e.g., Jennifer S. H. Brown, Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Familiesin Indian Country (Vancouver, 1980); Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and AnxiousPatriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996); Ann Marie Plane,Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000); Adele Perry, On the Edgeof Empire: Gender, Race and the Making of British Columbia, 1849–1871 (Toronto, 2001); Kirsten Fischer,Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Ithaca, N.Y., 2002); Linda Colley,Captives (London, 2002); Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imag-ination, 1830–1867 (Chicago, 2002); Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender inNew World Slavery (Philadelphia, 2004); Diana Paton, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, andGender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780–1870 (Durham, N.C., 2004); Jennifer Spear, Race, Sex, andSocial Order in Early New Orleans (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2009). On India and the East Indies, see JeanGelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia (Madison, Wis., 1983);Indrani Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India (New Delhi, 1999); Sudipta Sen, DistantSovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (London, 2002); Durba Ghosh, Sex andthe Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (Cambridge, 2008). For the Pacific, see LenoreManderson and Margaret Jolly, eds., Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and thePacific (Chicago, 1997); Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda, eds., Domesticating the Empire: Race,Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (Charlottesville, Va., 1998); Harriet Guest,Empire, Barbarism, and Civilisation: Captain Cook, William Hodges, and the Return to the Pacific (Cam-bridge, 2008); Joy Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in ColonialAustralia (Cambridge, 1997); Wilson, The Island Race ; Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics:Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (London, 2003); Levine, ed., Gender and Empire (Oxford,2004); Kathleen Wilson, ed., A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and theEmpire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge, 2004).

8 Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Co-lonial Order of Things (Durham, N.C., 1995); Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race andthe Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, Calif., 2002); Sen, “Uncertain Dominance”; and fn. 2 above.

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of trading posts and settler colonies and the sprawling territorial empire of rule overlarge numbers of non-British peoples, respectively.9 It suggests, instead, significantcontinuities in techniques and targets of rule over the period, the “first” stage inBritish expansion incorporating significant numbers of alien peoples and quantitiesof authoritarian rule, and the “second” taking cues from the peripheries about thetenor and reach of reconstituted British authority. British overseas endeavors overthe century, in other words, had produced a domain of contested sovereignties, ofpeoples, territories, and commodities, linked together by the reach of British poweror ambition. Finally, a brief survey of the view of colonial governance from the “out-side in” can point to rather different “new departures” than dominant narrativeshave led us to expect, which lay in the realms of state-making and racial marking,as the imposition of racialized and gendered categories of family, household, andnational belonging became critical aspects of administration. Using governmentalityas an optic, the case studies of Fort Marlborough, St. Helena, and Jamaica illustrateimportant moments of transition from early modern to modern forms of colonialgovernance, a transition marked by the movement between governmental modes oftreating subjects like family and apprehending them as population.10

9 “Territorial empire” is generally taken to begin in 1763, after Britain’s acquisitions of the SevenYears’ War, or in 1783, at the end of the American Revolution, when in each case the imperial gov-ernment sought to impose more rationalized and authoritarian modes of rule. See P. J. Marshall, “AFree Though Conquering People”: Eighteenth-Century Britain and Its Empire (London, 1994); Bayly, Im-perial Meridian.

10 Thanks to Jennifer Pitts for encouraging me to frame the argument in this way. The movementback and forth between the familiar and more abstract demographic strategies of rule was evident inthe colonies examined here from the late seventeenth to late eighteenth centuries. Cf. John Wilson, The

Map by Christopher Sellers.



ONE WAY TO WARM UP that “coldest of cold monsters,” as Michel Foucault called thestate, is to examine it as a collection of practices and discourses that began to drawtogether, albeit unevenly and haltingly, the techniques of administration and pro-cesses of subjectification necessary for economic extraction and local social order.As his lectures from the 1970s and his History of Sexuality make clear, Foucault lo-cated the history of governmentality in the raison d’etat and policing of early modernEuropean monarchies, although the implications of his insights have rarely beendeveloped in the historiography of the period.11 To be sure, Foucault’s chronologyof the practices and theories leading to governmental initiatives targeting popula-tion, security, and discipline and their interlinked goals of state- and subject-makingare notoriously vague and sometimes contradictory.12 But his reflections can still beilluminating in charting some of the key shifts in discourses and practices of gov-ernance, both within the English (and later British) metropole and in colonies andoutposts themselves in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In thisperiod, when “government” referred not only to political organization but also toproblems of self-control, household management, and even spiritual guidance, ju-ridical paradigms of sovereignty and law were being redirected by newer paradigmsof virtue and manners that sought to render populations and things commensuratein the burgeoning global systems of commercial capitalism.13 Beginning in the 1660s,the problem of population—its manners, productivity, and health—was twinned withthe problem of order and thrust into the limelight by political arithmeticians suchas Sir William Petty and John Graunt. As Graunt argued, “Trade and governmentmay be made more certain and Regular” only through the knowledge of “how manyPeople there be of each Sex, State, Age, Religion, Trade, Rank or Degree,” and thesearts of “government by demographic manipulation,” as Ted McCormick has calledthem, were first applied to the management of colonial populations.14 The censusesthereby produced—sporadically at first under Cromwell and Charles II, and then

Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in East India (Cambridge, 2008), which sees the transitionfrom governance by familiars to the rule of strangers as marking the emergence of the modern colonialstate in British Bengal between 1780 and 1835.

11 My use of governmentality as an optic is based on Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population:Lectures at the College de France, 1977–1978, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke,2007), esp. Lectures 2–5, 12–15, quotation from 109; Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures atthe College de France, 1975–1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (Bas-ingstoke, 2003), esp. 239–263; Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke, 2008); Foucault, “Governmentality,”in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmen-tality (Chicago, 1991), 87–104; Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1985);Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, eds., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar withMichel Foucault (Amherst, Mass., 1988).

12 A point made by Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire.13 See J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly

in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1982); Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2: Narratives of CivilGovernment (Cambridge, 1999); Daniel O’Quinn, Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London,1770–1800 (Baltimore, 2006).

14 Sir William Petty, Several Essays in Political Arithmetick, 4th ed. (London, 1755); John Graunt,Natural and Political Observations Mentioned in a Following Index, and Made upon the Bills of Mortality(1662; repr., New York, 1975), 78–79; Ted McCormick, William Petty and the Ambitions of PoliticalArithmetic (Oxford, 2009), 10. As McCormick notes, their strategies involved the “transplantation” and“counter-transplantation” of different populations and their intermixture through marriage and gen-eration; Ireland and North America were crucial test sites.



more regularly following the establishment of the Board of Trade and Plantationsin 1696—mobilized information on households, men, women, children, servants, andslaves that, along with figures on livestock, acreage, and natural resources, becamea potential resource for king, privy council, and Parliament as well as colonial of-ficials.15 This apprehension of population as an entity that needed to be managednot only made the governance of extended polities possible; it also produced politicalknowledge that could be integrated into techniques of rule, exerting pressure on thesubjects of polities to organize their lives in specific ways.16

Crucially, according to Foucault, the recognition of population as an entity alsohad the effect of transforming the significance of the family from a model or analogyof the state to an instrument of governance of use to that state or its surrogates,becoming the crucial “segment” through which population could be accessed, reg-ulated, or reformed and sexuality managed.17 But what Foucault called “the de-ployment of alliance,” or the management of matrimonial relations, was in practiceincorporated into early modern modes of British colonial governance as part of,rather than antecedent to, the “deployment of sex” (which he saw emerging in thelate eighteenth century), as local officials sought to use cultural and religious codesnot only to distinguish between lawful and illicit sexual practices, but also to extendpolitical authority in alien domains.18 In other words, contrary to Foucault’s schema,family remained a model for, even as it became an instrument of, authority throughmuch of the eighteenth century; it also retained an irreducible political importance.“The extension of the authority of the English crown into its peripheries” was neversimply a jurisdictional matter, Michael Braddick has reminded us, but “was regardedas a broader programme to promote civility . . . [and] social and economic reform.”19

In the context of the nation-making and nation-marking that were so central toclaims to sovereignty and to colonial governance alike (and which, in the British case,involved welding multiple ethnicities together under the sign of English liberties),the modes of making families and the delineation of civil and domestic spheres werekey to claims to national belonging in foreign environments, and to what was ar-guably the most crucial distinction in British colonial sites: who had access to therights and privileges of Englishmen, and who did not.20 Even jurists and political

15 Robert V. Wells, The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776: A Survey of CensusData (Princeton, N.J., 1975). For England, which did not begin to count its citizens on a regular basisuntil 1801, see Andrea A. Rusnock, Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-Century England and France (Cambridge, 2002), 4; James C. Riley, Population Thought in the Age of theDemographic Revolution (Durham, N.C., 1985).

16 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 29–32, 117. This triangulation between polity, population,and authority was clearly paradigmatic to empire, even one conceived of as a loose congeries of coloniesand outposts. For the “conduct of conduct,” as Foucault called such techniques of governance, and theirrelationships to the “counter-conducts” of people and populations, see Foucault, “Governmentality,”102–103; and Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dart-mouth,” trans. and ed. Mark Blasius, Political Theory 21, no. 2 (May 1993): 198–227.

17 Foucault, “Governmentality,” 99–100.18 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 105; Foucault, “Governmentality,” 103; Foucault, The

History of Sexuality, 106–108.19 Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000),

25. For the importance of governance to the early modern East India Company, see Philip J. Stern, TheCompany-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India(Oxford, 2011).

20 For which see my Island Race, and Elizabeth Mancke, “Negotiating an Empire: Britain and Its



theorists acknowledged this fact. The flip side of English liberty, William Blackstoneasserted, was a social discipline that found its instrumental form in family structure.“By public police and economy,” he argued,

I mean the due regulation and domestic order of the Kingdom, whereby the individuals ofthe state, like members of a well-governed family, are bound to conform their general be-haviour to the rule of propriety, good neighbourhood and good manners; to be decent, in-dustrious, and inoffensive in their respective stations.21

In other words, it was the regulation of individual and collective behavior that politydepended upon, rendering “domestic order” within and without the state possible.In colonies, such regulation was taken on by masters and mistresses as well as gov-ernors and councilors, upon whose ability to “see like a state” depended the re-production of national manners, the organization of coercive labor regimes, the ex-ertion of moral and intellectual suasion, and the imposition of social hierarchiesamong their various charges.

Local examples from across the Indian Ocean and Atlantic worlds demonstratehow the arts of governance, moving continually between the familial and the de-mographic, embraced a rationality that linked a well-governed colony with well-gov-erned families and self-governing individuals.22 Using governmentality as an optic,and so considering each site from the perspective of a general economy of power,will bring into focus similarities as much as differences in the practices of rule, be-ginning with these colonies’ shared status, from the metropolitan perspective, asmarchlands of Britishness, where national social and cultural forms refused to takehold.23

Overseas Peripheries, c. 1550–1780,” in Daniels and Kennedy, Negotiated Empires, 235–266; Ken Mac-Millan, Sovereignty and Possession in the English New World: The Legal Foundations of Empire, 1576–1640(Cambridge, 2006). For Continental examples, see Julia Adams, The Familial State: Ruling Families andMerchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, N.Y., 2005); Peter Sahlins, Unnaturally French:Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After (Ithaca, N.Y., 2004); and Tamar Herzog, “Early ModernSpanish Citizenship: Inclusion and Exclusion in the Old and the New World,” in Smolenski and Hum-phrey, New World Orders, 205–225. This essay follows the by now conventional distinction between“English” and “British,” the former applying to people hailing or descending from England, the he-gemonic power within Great Britain, and the latter incorporating the Welsh, Scots, and Irish. But asGargi Bhattacharyya wryly observes, “British is the name imposed by the English on the non-English”(quoted in Robert Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity [Malden, Mass., 2008], 5). In the eighteenth-century empire, while subnational distinctions could be subsumed under the sign of “British,” who hadaccess to the cultural capital of Englishness and who could claim the right to be called British remainedcontested political issues.

21 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England: In Four Books; with an Analysis of theWork, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1893), 2: 162.

22 This article is part of a larger study that will take in New South Wales and India as well as thesites briefly discussed here. Throughout both projects, it is the targets of colonial strategies of admin-istration that are of interest, rather than the assessment of their short- or long-term effectiveness. SeeScott, “Colonial Governmentality,” 197, who aptly argues that scholars must ask “in any historical in-stance, what does colonial power . . . take as the target upon which to work?”

23 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 117. As Braddick has noted, it is often precisely in suchmargins that the contours of political and social order are thrown into sharpest relief; State Formationin Early Modern England, 340. See also Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford,2001), 551–578.



TO BEGIN AT YORK FORT in western Sumatra, Britain’s easternmost possession at thebeginning of the eighteenth century, is to begin at the most unruly and tentative ofcommercial outposts, where contending sovereignties—Indonesian, European, andAsian—vied for power and profit.24 Founded by treaty with Indonesian rulers in1685, after the Dutch had expelled them from Bantam, the fort quickly acquired areputation as a pestilential death trap for its European residents and an eradicatorof vaunted national characteristics. Its early governors were “barbarous and brutish,”William Dampier reported in 1690, ruthlessly pursuing private fortune regardless oflocal customs, and clamping Indonesian rajas in stocks “for no other Reason butbecause they had not brought down to the Forts such a quantity of Pepper as theGovernour had sent for.”25 Not surprisingly, perhaps, Malay and Rejang chiefs wereuninterested in extracting EIC quotas of pepper from their reluctant and restivesubjects. The “overseas Chinese” of the China junk trade, who had been officiallyencouraged to trade and settle in Benkulen, were highly valued craftspeople, buttheir tea and arrack houses only increased residents’ penchant for various forms of“intemperance”—gaming, women, and drinking. The struggle to obtain sufficientsupplies of laborers, usually “Coffrey” or African, and especially Malagasy slaves,who provided the bulk of workers in the Company’s service, and the inability ofresident Topaz soldiers (Christians of Portuguese and Malay descent), Bugis mer-cenaries, and unseasoned British recruits to secure protection of the fort and out-stations caused additional anxiety.26 The melange of peoples, alliances, and trans-gressions led observers to comment that the settlement looked like a “Batavian”colony—perhaps the gravest of insults, for the Dutch colony was notorious for itsmestizo culture and departures from European norms of civility in political and so-cial life.27 Hence the essential goal of any effort to reform the government of thefort and its factories was to make the pepper trade profitable and the inhabitantslegible and accountable to administration and regulation.

The EIC directors chose Joseph Collet, a London merchant, bankrupt and Bap-tist, for just this task in 1711. His position as deputy governor of York Fort quicklythrust him into new and unfamiliar roles as administrator, military captain, and pol-itician, over a settlement and outstations numbering five hundred inhabitants.28 Yet

24 After, that is, the Dutch had expelled the English East India Company from Bantam.25 William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World, with an introduction by Sir Albert Gray (Lon-

don, 1937), 346; Dampier, Voyages and Discoveries, with an introduction and notes by Clennell Wilkinson(London, 1931), 125.

26 Robert J. Young, “Slaves, Coolies and Bondsmen,” in Klaus Friedland, ed., Maritime Aspects ofMigration (Cologne, 1989), 391–402; thanks to Iona Man-cheong for this reference. Anthony Farrington,“Bengkulu: An Anglo-Chinese Partnership,” in H. V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby, eds.,The Worlds of the East India Company (London, 2003), 111–117; Alan Harfield, Bencoolen: A Historyof the Honourable East India Company’s Garrison on the West Coast of Sumatra, 1685–1825 (Barton-on-Sea, 1995), 65.

27 John Bastin, The British in West Sumatra, 1685–1835 (Kuala Lumpur, 1965); Taylor, The SocialWorld of Batavia.

28 See Bastin, The British in West Sumatra, xi–xxiii, 1–65; F. C. Danvers, “The English Connectionwith Sumatra,” Asiatic Quarterly Review 1 (1886): 410–431, here 420. For Collet, see British Library,Oriental and India Office Collections [hereafter IOR], European Manuscripts [hereafter MS EUR]D1153/1–5; Joseph Collet, The Private Letter Books of Joseph Collet, ed. H. H. Dodwell (London, 1933).Collet’s domain consisted of some three hundred miles, six or seven garrisons, the fort and its slavevillage, the Malay town of six or seven hundred houses, two outstations, and approximately 100 civilianEuropeans, of whom 36 were in Company service and 189 were Company slaves. Estimates from IOR,



Collet exceeded all expectations but his own in his ability to reform, enlarge, andimprove British prospects in the archipelago. He quickly discerned that it was variousforms of inefficiency and immorality—twinned signs in his mind of a failure of self-government in both senses of the term—that were the source of local discontents.The native Malay and Rejang peoples “had been injuriously treated” by EIC servantsand were consequently disinclined to improve their pepper plantations, while theEnglish Council members, whom he described as “profoundly ignorant, cross andobstinate,” were lost in vice and petty conflicts. So he promptly took administrationout of their hands and focused on three things. First, to improve pepper productionand better compete with the Dutch, he offered rewards to fractious rajas who im-proved the estates of their subjects, and he agreed to arbitrate their internecinedisputes. Second, he made a plan to abandon cramped York Fort, built in swamplandby the sea, and build a larger, stronger fort a few miles away on higher and healthierground, with accommodations for all the Company employees, so that he could keepa closer eye on the conduct of his subordinates. This he named “Fort Marlborough,”after the great Whig general, “a name which I endeavor to perpetuate in India be-cause it seems to be forgot in England,” thus establishing the irrefutably Whig andEnglish credentials of his mission and, by proxy, those of his charges.29

Third, Collet vigorously campaigned to reform and regulate the sexual and gen-der as well as agricultural and political practices of local people, targeting men andwomen, Indonesian, European, and Eurasian, for improvement. Unlike his prede-cessors, or the Dutch at Batavia, Collet refused to condone the “deployments ofalliance” of European men with Indonesian women, no matter how useful they werein ingratiating traders into local social and economic networks.30 Just as “drinkingand women” caused EIC factors and writers to degenerate in the west coast littorals,so Malay men were “addicted to Women,” Collet asserted, and thus prevented frommaking progress toward civility and self-restraint. Yet he admitted to finding localwomen unlikely intoxicants. As he wrote to his sister-in-law in London, local womenwere both “amorous” and oppressed by their men; they were “destitute of all thoseCharms wch attract the eye or engage the mind, their Complexions betwixt Copperand black; their features strong and Masculine” and their ideas “but one degreeremov’d from their four legg’d Sisters.” Local white women, wives of the soldiers andcouncilors, had the education of “your woodman’s daughters in Oxfordshire.”31

Collet’s display of connoisseurship of women and his apprehension of Malays asa population with distinctive manners were meant to signal a larger masculine com-petency in governance and authority extending from Sumatra to London. Living ina ramshackle British fort far across the world, Collet nonetheless managed the livesof his four teenage daughters back in England, prohibiting them from marrying idlearistocrats, “Quality or Bigots,” as he put it, and sending them black slaves (probablyMalagasies) as presents. From among the young men in his charge in Benkulen,

G/35/7, February 28 and October 16, 1712; and G/35/8, fol. 116; A List of the Company’s Civil Servants,at Their Settlements in the East-Indies, the Island St. Helena, and China (London, n.d., [1723]); and Har-field, Bencoolen, 50–55. It does not include the Bugis but does include Topaz soldiers.

29 IOR, MS EUR D1153/2, fol. 130.30 Taylor, The Social World of Batavia, 71–72.31 IOR, MS EUR D1153/2, fol. 170.



factors and officers, he arranged an engagement for his eldest daughter (pledged bythe exchange of miniature portraits and a chunk of the soon-to-be-deceased’s EastIndian fortune), and legacies for the three remaining from similarly unlucky Com-pany servants. His paternal management thus insinuated slavery into English struc-tures of social advancement as it redefined structures of kinship alliance to determinestatus and privilege across three oceans. From Fort Marlborough he involved himselfin metropolitan theological disputes and local Christianizing efforts, conveyed hisnatural history findings to the Royal Society, and sent Richard Steele of The Spectatora sketch he had written about a conversation between a Brahmin and an Eng-

Fort Marlborough. Detail from East India Isles, drawn and engraved by T. Clerk for John Thomson, A NewGeneral Atlas: Consisting of a Series of Geographical Designs, on Various Projections, Exhibiting the Form andComponent Parts of the Globe (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1817). David Rumsey Map Collection.



lishman.32 This “man of Sense and Honour” clearly had no intention of letting thegrass grow under his feet, involving himself in projects that aimed to reform theconduct of everyone in his charge, from London to its putative suburb of south-western Sumatra.

Collet saw the task before him as one of establishing good governance, fromwhich all other forms of order would spring. Because he was an East India Companyservant, his idea of subjectship, whether “natural” or acquired, clearly derived fromestablished English models that analogized the polity and the family, with the fatheras the primary authority. As he put it, in reviewing his success by 1714,

Their Kings and Princes obey my commands with as great readiness as if I were their NaturalSovereign, so that without assuming the title I am really an Absolute Prince with respect tothe Malays. The Buggese [sic] and Chinese who live here are Properly subjects to the Com-pany and consequently under my immediate Government. And as for the English we makeup one great Family of which I am the head and common Father, to whom all pay the Rev-erence, Respect and Obedience of Children. All this together renders my Government veryeasy; the Publick Affairs prosper abundantly, and my private Affairs are also in a Flourishingcondition.33

Hence his self-proclaimed status as “natural sovereign” was calibrated according tothe sensibilities of his charges: he was an “absolute prince” to the Malays (an at-tribution that incorporated European fantasies of “Oriental” despotism); an impe-rial overlord to the “proper” subjects of the Bugis and Chinese, pseudo-feudal ten-ants toiling for the East India Company; and a paterfamilias to the “English” inCompany service (which included European and Eurasian men and their kin), anersatz “national” community among whom he administered peace and order. As thephysical representative of the Crown and its surrogate, the East India Company,Collet proclaimed his local status as “natural sovereign” in more performative ways,via public spectacles and rituals that bespoke a particular moral order: his peram-bulations were attended by a horse guard and footmen with blunderbusses, theUnion flag carried before him, and Bugis soldiers bringing up the rear.34 Such theaterattempted to express and manage the relations between heterogeneous bodies, econ-omies, and military power under the sign of British authority. Yet compared to pre-vious and future governors, he lived modestly, with few servants and no personalguard. A careful merchant and accountant, he kept censuses of EIC civilian per-sonnel, slaves, and private traders, as well as muster rolls for the military garrison,and quarterly bills of marriage, birth, and mortality, through which he carefully dis-tinguished British and others—Chinese, Bugis, Topaz, and European—living in hisjurisdiction.35 He also conspicuously remedied the egregiously exploitative tradingpractices of his predecessors, adhering to strict models of fair if energetic trading.

32 IOR, MS EUR D1153/3, fol. 11 (Convocation); 1153/2, fols. 98 (slaves), 106–107 (legacies), 119–120 (Steele); The Private Letter Books of Joseph Collet, 17–18, 126–127 (Royal Society).

33 The Private Letter Books of Joseph Collet, 78–79, Joseph Collet to Samuel Collet, March 1, 1713/14.34 Bastin, The British in West Sumatra, 43–44. Such performances were central to British demon-

strations of sovereignty and authority in East India Company domains from the earliest periods; seeAparna Balachandran, “Of Corporations and Caste Heads: Urban Rule in Company Madras, 1640–1720,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 9, no. 2 (Fall 2008), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history/v009/9.2.balachandran.html; Stern, The Company-State,29–30, 93–94.

35 IOR, G/35/7, February 2 and October 16, 1712; G/35/8 bills of mortality, 1713–1730, unfoliated;



Through such appropriate governance of self and others, Collet was soon able todischarge his debts and begin accumulating a fortune that, buoyed by the profits fromhis later preferment to the governorship of Fort St. George, at Madras (1716–1720),ultimately allowed him to retire to Hertfordshire in considerable style.

Collet used his dominion as governor of the East India fort to perform state-making functions that extended the rights and privileges of Englishmen beyond thosehe could claim, as a Baptist, within England. For example, as was customary in EastIndia Company territories, he tolerated religious diversity as he embraced a publiclife from which he was excluded at home.36 His political domain was equally capa-cious; he treated with native chiefs, extended trade up the coast, and bestowed libertyupon especially meritorious Company slaves.37 His interest in regulating the sexualmores and manners of his various charges in Sumatra was intimately linked to thesenational and spiritual commitments. Collet’s zeal for good governance engaged notonly with the larger “civilizing” impulses of early modern British imperialism, butalso with metropolitan reform campaigns such as the Society for the Reformationof Manners, which targeted lechery, drunkenness, fornication, and Sabbath-break-ing.38 Again, the imperative to regulate and reform worked symbiotically through selfand other, reshaping individual and collective intimate practices and household or-ganization. “No less than three [Malay rulers] made separate Offers of Wives orDaughters to attend me,” Collet wrote to his brother Samuel. “I have always givena Serious reply that the Christian Religion does not allow such practices.”39 Like theSociety for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, founded in 1701, whichsimilarly strove to intertwine religious and social reform, and indeed like Protestantdissenters elsewhere in the empire, Collet enacted a version of “patriarchy” thatmade family constitution and sexual practice both models and instruments of po-litical authority, social order, and indigenous reclamation.40 In contrast to his pre-

G/35/8, Sumatra dispatches, 1711–1737n. unfoliated, February 27, 1712. Collet kept up a copious barrageof letters to the Court of Directors during his tenure.

36 See, e.g., his letters to fellow dissenter Rev. Nathaniel Hodges in London, who had been silencedfrom preaching by the Schism Act: The Private Letter Books of Joseph Collet, xxiii, 22, 37. For the religiousmotivation of much early colonizing in India, see Frank Penny, The Church in Madras: Being the Historyof the Ecclesiastical and Missionary Action of the East India Company in the Presidency of Madras in theSeventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1904), 292; Glenn J. Ames, “The Role of Religion in theTransfer and Rise of Bombay, c. 1661–1687,” Historical Journal 46, no. 2 (June 2003): 317–340.

37 The Private Letter Books of Joseph Collet, 22, 37. Collet’s understanding and mediation of slaveryas a temporary condition alleviated in the here (if deserving) and hereafter is discussed at length in mylonger study.

38 The devotion to “the duty of rebuking” was held to be particularly important for masters andparents, as models and instruments of rule. Alan Hunt, Governing Morals: A Social History of MoralRegulation (Cambridge, 1999), 46; quotation from Rev. John Howe, A Sermon Preach’d before the So-cieties for the Reformation of Manners at Salter’s Hall, Feb. 14, 1698 (London, 1698), 35. David Hayton,“Moral Reform and Country Politics in the Late Seventeenth-Century House of Commons,” Past andPresent, no. 128 (August 1990): 48–91; T. C. Curtis and W. A. Speck, “The Societies for the Reformationof Manners: A Case Study in the Theory and Practice of Moral Reform,” Literature and History 3 (1976):45–64; for sexual regulation, see Randolph Trumbach, Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlight-enment London (Chicago, 1998), 91–94; for the empire-wide nature of such efforts, see Paul Hair, ed.,Before the Bawdy Court: Selections from Church Court and Other Records Relating to the Correction ofMoral Offences in England, Scotland and New England, 1300–1800 (London, 1972).

39 To avoid the implication of irregularity, he also required that his housekeeper return to her ownquarters in the town. IOR, European Private MS D1153/5, vol. 2, fol. 127, August 23, 1714.

40 Such as Plymouth Colony, where well-ordered families and individual and collective morality were



decessors, who had “made the name of English odious to the Mallays,” Colletclaimed to have instilled faith in English fairness and equity, among indigenes andEnglish alike. “Tho’ I have the love of the Natives, I think am rather fear’d by theEnglish . . . No man dares be profane, obscene or intemperate before me and for therest I carry it with chearfullness and freedom.”41

Collet, then, engaged in the project of nation-making and nation-markingthrough techniques of administration in which he made himself both subject andobject. His state-making practices were presciently invested in both the intersectionand the regulation of population, sexual relations, and commercial interests, movingbetween the familiar and the abstractedly collective in order to pursue appropriatekinds of exchanges. Sent to establish profitability in an imperial margin, Collet spenta surprising amount of his public and private time counting and categorizing bodies,imposing familial protocols, and amending wider sets of relations (political and sex-ual) in order to secure the circulations that produced a satisfying social environmentand greater agricultural yields of pepper, inventing familial alliances across space,and managing sexual and political alliances in everyday time. His perceptions andgoals showed the stakes, in his case personal, political, and spiritual, involved incrafting a recognizable, if hybrid, “English” gender order that demarcated theboundaries of rule, maximized collective and individual forces, and made the varioussubjects under his purview legible to administration.42 His solution to ethnic het-erogeneity and multiplicity, in other words, of space and place—and here Colletdiffered dramatically from EIC governors of the 1770s and 1780s—was to hold ev-eryone equally accountable to the protocols of English patriarchal governance, hisprimary tool of performative state-making and rule.43

That Collet had a notable lack of long-term success in reshaping local familialand authority structures should not obscure the energy he put in or the techniqueshe utilized to bring order to a distracted outpost, where he was celebrated as the mosteffective of Fort Marlborough governors until the Raffles administration of 1818–1824. Significantly, his success in incorporating heterogeneous ethnicities into a hy-bridized “English family” secured by the authority of the Company and Crown en-couraged later population experiments on the west coast of Sumatra, including a planin 1770 to import German Protestant families to anchor sugar, arrack, and cottonplantations, and ensured their revision through the incorporation of newly racializedideas of who could perform as proper British subjects.44 Nonetheless, during his

deemed paramount to good government. See John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plym-outh Colony, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2000); Carol Shammas, “Anglo-American Household Government inComparative Perspective,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 52 (January 1995): 104–144; Brown,Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs. For the Society for the Propagation of the Gospelin Foreign Parts, see Frank Klingberg, “British Humanitarianism at Codrington,” Journal of Negro His-tory 23, no. 4 (1938): 451–486.

41 IOR, E/3/98, fol. 119; The Private Letter Books of Joseph Collet, 31, 43.42 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 24–25.43 For the later period, see Clement Hawes, Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community

in British India, 1773–1833 (London, 1996); Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India.44 After Collet’s departure, the return of the allegedly “tyrannical” and self-indulgent governance

resulted in the 1719 revolt of local people, who fired the fort and forced the British to take refuge inships in the sea, not to return until 1723. See Hamilton, New Account, 2: 183. For German Protestants,see Bastin, The British in West Sumatra, 73–79.



lifetime, Collet’s zeal for the exercise of what Foucault has called “pastoral power”remained undaunted, and after his five years spent as governor of Fort St. George,he returned to England to continue the project of “generall reformation” in hisHertfordshire village—and (by proxy) in the English factory at Smyrna—thus com-pleting one more entangled circuit in nation and empire’s synergistic travels.45

ST. HELENA AND FORT MARLBOROUGH WERE intimately linked, by sea routes, kinshipties, and EIC ambition. St. Helena sent vegetables, soldiers, planters, felons, andMalagasy slaves to Sumatra, and took, in return, West African and Mauritanianslaves, spices, and, in the 1810s, Chinese laborers. They also shared a mentality ofgovernance.46 Held by royal charter granted to the EIC in 1659 (though claimed bythe Company a decade earlier), the tiny African island bore the burden of an arrayof fantasies and hopes: of its earliest settlers, that it could be turned into an earthlyparadise, a utopia of democracy and amity; and of the EIC directors, that it couldbecome a South Atlantic Barbados, reaping high profits and relatively quiescentslaves from valley plantations of indigo, coffee, and sugar.47 Neither would come topass. Instead, the island became a supply station and a hedonistic oasis for home-ward-bound Company ships coming around the Cape of Good Hope, its slavesbrought from Madagascar, Malabar, West Africa, and the Caribbean to raise yams(“cocos” in local parlance), plantains, bananas, and English cattle, sheep, and veg-etables. The resultant rapid deforestation brought ecological devastation to the is-land, attracting the attention of nascent environmentalists such as Sir JosephBanks.48

If the flora and fauna were a combination of indigenous, East and West Indian,African and English elements, St. Helena’s white inhabitants were resolutely Eng-lish—“English to a man,” as Joseph Banks noted in 1771. “All the people of theisland speak English, dress after the English mode, and are generally of a tall slendershape, but somewhat tanned,” another traveler explained, belying, no doubt, theracial crossings out of which such island societies were invariably made. Yet whatis equally significant is that the population identified as English. As the same observerput it, “They always speak of England as their home, and most of them . . . expresseda strong inclination to see it.”49 Most were in fact descendants of the colonists who

45 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 127–130; The Private Letter Books of Joseph Collet, 196,209; IOR, MS EUR D1153/3, fol. 56.

46 For the EIC project of governance, see Stern, The Company-State, 19–60.47 For St. Helena, see IOR, G/32/1–155; T. H. Brooke, A History of the Island of St. Helena, from

Its Discovery by the Portuguese to the Year 1806 (London, 1808); and British Library, Additional Man-uscripts [hereafter Add. MSS] 20239–20240. For early St. Helena, see Stephen Royle, The Company’sIsland: St. Helena, Company Colonies and the Colonial Endeavour (London, 2007). For the democraticpropensities of early settlers, see IOR, E/3/90, fols. 272v–274v, May 6, 1685; and E/3/96, fols. 195–196,May 5, 1708.

48 See Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and theOrigins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge, 1999), chap. 6. For a critique of Grove’s “islandenvironmentalism,” see Gregory A. Barton, Empire, Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cam-bridge, 2002).

49 J. C. Beaglehole, ed., The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1768–1771, 2 vols. (London, 1962),2: 264; Charles Frederick Noble, A Voyage to the East Indies in 1747 and 1748: Containing an Accountof the Islands of St. Helena and Java, of the City of Batavia, of the Government and Political Conduct of



had been sent from England since 1673, when the Company began concerted effortsto populate the island (after twice briefly losing it to and retaking it from the Dutch).London placards and notices advertised St. Helena as an earthly paradise of free landand friendship for Protestant English men and women. As in Virginia, a vigilantlycalibrated set of regulations bestowed property and privilege on male emigres: everyunmarried Englishman was to have ten acres of land and one cow, ten acres moreand another cow if he married “a planter’s daughter, or an English woman,” andadditional allotments for marrying planters’ widows and widows with children.Women functioned as both producers and commodities in this scheme, with theirreproductive value incorporated along with crop yields, pasturage, and other im-provements into the terms of freehold tenure. Here as elsewhere, the family, withthe father as the head, was to be the main instrument of cultural and agriculturalreclamation.50

the Dutch, of the Empire of China, with a Particular Description of Canton, and of the Religious Ceremonies,Manners and Customs of the Inhabitants (London, 1762), 16, 36.

50 David R. Ransome, “Wives For Virginia, 1621,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 48, no. 1(1991): 3–18; Margaret E. Wilber, The East India Company and the British Empire in the Far East (Stan-ford, Calif., 1945), 196; Court of Committee, August 26, 1674, in Ethel Bruce Sainsbury, A Calendar of

St. Helena. Detail from Emanuel Bowen, Particular Draughts of Some of the Chief African Islands in the Med-iterranean, as Also in the Atlantic and Ethiopic Oceans (London: William Innys et al., 1747). David Rumsey MapCollection.



The Englishness of the island was also displayed in the ungovernable nature ofits inhabitants. They were “a Race of People who were of a leveling and ungratefuldisposition,” one official reported back to his directors, evoking the island’s Crom-wellian origins and continuing “democraticall” sensibilities.51 From the mutiny of1683 that resulted in the murder of the governor, to the sedition and riots of the nextcentury, the islanders maintained a penchant for resistance and disorder, expressedin the “pride, contention and division” about “their civil interests and rights” thatmade them unwilling to submit to Company authority or, it seemed, to govern them-selves.52 The EIC was convinced that its charter from the Crown gave it all the“Power and Authority of Government” in all cases relating to the island, that is, ofa surrogate state: “to constitute the Laws,” “to impose Pains, Punishments and Pen-altys,” and to “Correct, Govern and Rule all and Every” subject on the island throughthe establishment of courts administered by the resident governor and four coun-cilmen.53 On more than one occasion, the directors in London had to remind localofficials that they were “Intrusted by His Majesty with the Exercise of the SovereignPower . . . Legislative as Executive,” and that their orders were to be regarded by“all the Inhabitants of that Island . . . as good Laws as Magna Charta is to England.”54

These strictures were visualized through the Company’s traditional pageantry ofpower: the governor and council would parade to church, lodge, and “castle,” as theEIC’s seaside fortress was called, accompanied by uniformed soldiers and slavesblaring trumpets, pounding drums, and carrying flags emblazoned with the East IndiaCompany insignia. The Court of Directors’ attempts to enforce prohibitions androyal proclamations against vice and immorality were similarly public: “swearing,Taking the Name of God in Vaine, Intemperance, Fornication and uncleanness,”Sabbath-breaking, and “Scandalous women” who went aboard ships were punished

the Court Minutes, Etc., of the East India Company, 1674–1676 (Oxford, 1935), 272–273; Jamestown, St.Helena Archives [hereafter SHA], EIC 1, fol. 61; IOR, E/3/89, fol. 123, March 24, 1680; IOR, G/32/165,Governor Robert Brooke’s Account of St. Helena. A number of Huguenot refugees from France werebrought to St. Helena in 1689, one of whom, John Poirot, became governor. J. Ovington, Voyage to Suratin the Year 1689, ed. H. G. Rawlinson (Oxford, 1929), 57. Catholics were prohibited from emigratingto the island.

51 IOR, G/32/165, fol. 5, Brooke’s Account of St. Helena, 1792. See also SHA, EIC 3/70–72, De-cember 29, 1688, where one planter was prosecuted for having told another that “neither you nor yourpopish King shall keep me in awe.” Clearly the history of the “revolutionary Atlantic” needs to beextended to St. Helena. For the reputation of the English as “ungovernable,” see John Brewer and JohnStyles, eds., An Ungovernable People: The English and Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Cen-turies (New Brunswick, N.J., 1983).

52 For the late-seventeenth-century disorders, see Royle, The Company’s Island, 103–126; quotationfrom Noble, A Voyage to the East Indies, 30.

53 IOR, E/32/1, fol. 3. Until 1754, governors came from London or were transferred from India andwere usually military officers, although a few of the richest planters also fell into the job; councilors wereappointed by the governor from a similar pool. Conversely, Company possession also created Englishsubjects: “all persons Borne upon the said Island” were declared to be “free Denizens and NaturallSubjects of England” in the Charter of Charles II, a provision used in 1992 by “Saints,” as the islandresidents are now known, to sue the British government in the European Court of Human Rights overthe provisions of the 1982 Immigration Act that denied them British citizenship. The court decided inthe Saints’ favor.

54 This order was issued in 1687 after news of the 1684 planters’ sedition, but it was reissued in 1708and 1717. IOR, G/32/1, fols. 1–2, 47–48, 78–82; Add. MS 20240, fol. 1, August 3, 1687; fol. 3, May 5,1708; fol. 5, March 21, 1717.



with whippings and stocks in the square before the chapel.55 Here as elsewhere,obedience to legally constituted authority, self-governance, and properly orderedfamilies were the targets of Company rule.

Yet the regulations of a distant Court of Directors proved to be ineffective inreining in the intractable inhabitants. The “pravity of their manners compares themwith the rankest Soil, productive of nothing but noxious Herbs, untractable to all theArts of Husbandry or Improvement,” one visitor to the island presciently observedin 1683, linking the manners of the people and their environmental depredations.56

The local love of pleasure, which extended from music, dancing, and theater to drink-ing, whoring, and fighting, became famous among voyagers of all descriptions. Oneremarked on the abundance of young ladies looking for husbands, a surplus thatresulted in girls “ship[ing] themselves every year for India, to try a foreign market.”57

Council and quarter sessions records are accordingly filled with the grievances ofplanters and traders, both men and women, whose “liberties and properties” wereinfringed upon by neighbors or whose dependents and slaves were “debauched” byother slaves, dissolute itinerants, or the sailors and soldiers who crowded into thepunch houses of Jamestown. A significant number of the court cases were concernedwith morality and illicit sexuality of some sort: adultery, polygamy, incest, child rape,illegitimacy, prostitution, breach of promise, defamation of character, and sodomy;and the plaintiffs included planters, soldiers, merchants, widows, sisters, wives, andslaves. Neither were the EIC officials sent from England immune: a deputy governorwas dismissed for immoral conduct in 1706, as were at least two clergymen in 1700and 1748.58

Faced with such disorder and incontinence, the councilors twinned good gov-ernance with patriarchy. In their rulings, they supported the privileges and authorityof male heads of household as they attempted to rein in female influence: on anisland with a significant proportion of woman-headed households, the Council or-dered widows and single women to be supervised or overseen by male relatives orcouncilmen.59 They made examples of other transgressors in public stocks or whip-ping posts, and forced repeat offenders off the island. They also established a patternof paternal care for protection of children and servants as well as the poor, infirm,or orphaned, adjudicating lineage and inheritance, protecting minors from avari-cious guardians, and even sending home aged slaves who asked to be returned to

55 For moral regulations, see IOR, G/32/1, fols. 6–10, 23–26, 39–40; SHA, EIC 44/142–144. For otherexamples of Protestant moralism in the empire in this period, see Arthur H. Williamson, “An Empireto End Empire: The Dynamic of Early Modern British Expansion,” Huntington Library Quarterly 68, no.1–2 (March 2005): 227–256.

56 Ovington, Voyage to Surat in the Year 1689, 63.57 IOR, MS EUR D1085, Letters of Alexander Hall, March 26, 1751; see also Alfred Spencer, ed.,

Memoirs of William Hickey, 10th ed., 4 vols. (London, 1948), 1: 240.58 The population in 1722 was 924, just under half of whom were slaves; by 1770 there were 978

whites and 1,738 blacks. For sexual transgressions, see SHA, EIC 1/6, fol. 239; IOR, G/32/120, unfoliated;G/32/10, fol. 211; G/32/18, fols. 225–241v; G/32/17, fols. 323v–324; G/32/128, fols. 2710–2712; G/32/118,November 24, 1724; Ovington, Voyage to Surat in the Year 1689, 57; EIC officials: IOR, G/32/3, March12, 1706; clergymen: SHA, EIC 1/5, July 1700; Noble, A Voyage to the East Indies, 32–33.

59 See, e.g., the case of Mrs. Coulson, who was “made an example of” for refusing to adhere to theCouncil’s environmental directives. IOR, G/32/119, fol. 52. The disproportionate ratio of women to menwas a source of official and unofficial concern on the island.



Madagascar or Malabar.60 The array of transgressions and legal and extra-legal rem-edies testified to the need for a continuous delineation of the boundaries of civil anddomestic spheres and for vigilant enforcement of prescribed cultural norms.

The condition of slaves provided another case in point. Their cruel treatmentshocked observers, even those familiar with slavery elsewhere in the empire. Anoverseer brought over from the Codrington Plantation in Barbados had also im-ported the Barbadian slave code, and its police measures were intensified to preventslaves from becoming “formidable and Dangerous to the Inhabitants.”61 Flogging,branding, amputation, castration, and execution were the escalating punishments fora range of offenses, from insolence to striking a white person and murder.62 Slavesretaliated with plots, poisonings, obeah, suicide, and, when possible, desertion ontovisiting ships.63 But the planters, men and women, all too often exceeded even theseharsh sanctions. The Court of Directors’ early order that all slaves be baptized andeducated in the basic tenets of Christianity was studiously ignored, as was the cor-ollary that after seven years such conversion would transform them into “free plant-ers, [who] injoy the privileges of other planters, both of land and cattle.”64 “[The]want of Education, a confined Situation, and the Misfortune of being connected withslavery renders it difficult for them [i.e., the white settlers] to become blessed witha liberality or humanity of Disposition,” one writer diplomatically explained.65 WhatBanks described as their “wanton cruelty” prompted Governor Robert Brooke toproduce an ameliorated slave code in 1786, ultimately endorsed by the Court ofDirectors in 1792, that among other improvements gave slaves the right to give ev-idence against whites, prohibited cohabitation without legal marriage, and abolishedthe slave trade to the island; significantly, several of the code’s articles were spe-cifically devoted to stamping out rape, forced prostitution, and other sexual abuseof enslaved women and children.66

As with the amelioration of slavery and the enforcement of “civilized” standardsof behavior, it also fell to local colonial authorities to craft some agricultural andecological order on the island. For example, with the prospect of sugar plantationsdead by 1690, the Court of Directors ordered that the Great Woods be enclosed andpreserved for Company use and that vineyards, indigo, and coffee farms be estab-lished on a commercial basis. The scarcity of wood and the English preferences ofthe planters resulted instead in the establishment of common lands and some scat-tered indigo and coffee farms.67 Local governors meanwhile turned their attentionto shaping policies that could actually reverse deforestation and other blights. Gov-ernor John Roberts (1708–1712), decrying the official blindness of the Court to soil

60 SHA, EIC 1/1/372–385, and in each vol. subsequently; IOR, G/32/10, G/32/119, fol. 210; SHA,Minutes of the Widows and Orphans Fund, 1766–1837, vol. 1.

61 Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson A302, May 24, 1683.62 IOR, E/32/1/35–36, 49.63 SHA, EIC 1/66–69; EIC 3/139–142; EIC 4/64–66, 236–237.64 IOR, E/3/88, fol. 44v, December 19, 1673.65 IOR, G/32/165, fol. 17.66 Banks, The Endeavour Journal, 2: 267. Brooke, A History of the Island of St. Helena, gives the old

and new slave codes, 355–363, 378–408. Because of resistance by planters, abolition was not achieveduntil 1816 (children) and 1831 (adults). See SHA, EIC 8/15, Committee of Subscribers for EncouragingDeserving Slaves, 1802–1816.

67 Grove, Green Imperialism, 106–107; Hudson Ralph Janisch, ed., Extracts from the St. Helena Re-cords (Jamestown, 1908), 17, 57, 42.



erosion and deforestation, imposed a tree-planting program on landowners and triedto install a range of restorative measures, which included eradication of destructivegoat herds and irrigation to reclaim wastelands. Clocking the links between envi-ronmental deterioration and the degradation of the populace, Roberts also issueda series of ordinances that aimed to reduce arrack drinking, control licentiousness,prevent clandestine marriages, raise the age of consent, and institute punishmentsof ducking and whipping upon all “idle, gossiping women, [who] make it their busi-ness to go from house to house, about the island, inventing and spreading false andscandalous reports . . . to the utter extinguishing of all friendship, amity and goodneighbourhood.”68 Yet this respite from business as usual was brief: by 1715, theisland had returned to “a very bad and deplorable condition,” and proposals werefloated for moving the entire population to Mauritius. “The same thing we havealleged for the decay of trees has in great measure contributed towards diseasing thebody,” the Council complained again in 1717. “A pestilent sulphourous air comesdown the valleys which divers have got sudden sicknesses . . . Ripon Wills and Mrs.Coles have each lost an eye.”69

Clearly, as at York Fort, constructing an English society from the ground up wasno easy task, even on a previously uninhabited island. The introduction of Englishcommon law in 1754, which restricted the power of the governor and the council andreferred all disputes to juries or arbitration, encouraged greater cooperation fromthe residents, who nonetheless remained devoted to protecting their status and rightsas British subjects under the Crown rather than as Company subjects.70 The envi-ronmental improvements on the island were similarly made in spite of rather thanin accordance with London directives, including the St. Helena Forest Act of 1731,passed by Governor Pyke, an ordinance that stands as one of the earliest examplesof colonial conservation legislation.71

St. Helena thus provides a crystalline example of the kind of social and culturalengineering and instrumentalization of family life that local governors were forcedto incorporate into their techniques of administration—techniques crafted on anisland periphery and ultimately influencing policy from the center.72 The populationand familial strategies that governors were impelled to adopt suggest how the ex-igencies of rule in a distracted outpost could anticipate or reinforce “the policing ofsexuality in modern Europe.”73 Disordered families, degraded forms of Englishness,agricultural mismanagement and ecological crisis, loose women and licentiousness,

68 For the articles and the inhabitants’ response, see Brooke, A History of the Island of St. Helena,371–378, 150–176. As Brooke makes clear, “riding the rails,” ducking, and the pillory were commonpunishments for social infractions up to the 1780s. See also IOR, G/32/165, Governor Brooke’s Historyof St. Helena, fols. 16–18.

69 Brooke, A History of the Island of St. Helena, 149; Janisch, Extracts from the St. Helena Records,135–136. Some future governors did follow Roberts’s lead in trying to regulate local activities that im-pacted the environment, including Capt. Robert Jenkins (1740–1742) of the War of Jenkins’s Ear fame,who established a hospital in 1742.

70 The inhabitants also revealed a greater willingness to regulate themselves, as evidenced by variouslocal associations targeting social improvement, among them the Planters’ Society (1780), the Widowand Orphans’ Society (1765), and the Society for Encouraging Deserving Slaves (1810–1816). See SHA,EIC 8/15 (Planter’s and Slaves), and SHA, Minutes of the Widows and Orphans Fund, vol. 1.

71 Grove, Green Imperialism, 120–121.72 Indeed, the Court of Directors took seventy-five years, and additional evidence from Mauritius,

St. Vincent, and India, before it endorsed conservation measures in St. Helena.73 Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 42.



and abused slaves: all earned St. Helena international notoriety. But they also gal-vanized colonists and colonial officials in a variety of capacities into action, stim-ulating the formulation of a range of regulations and experiments, demographic,commercial, and agricultural, designed to avert social and environmental catastro-phe.74 This was a prescient moment of a locally mobilized biopower that soughtsimultaneously to discipline bodies and globally regulate social and ecological health.And as Banks would note later in the century, it eventually proved to have somesuccess.

JAMAICA, A CROWN COLONY OPERATING with intermittent and casual oversight from themetropolitan government, offered a differently calibrated field of population prob-lems. Since Cromwell had first wrested the island away from the Spanish in 1655, thecolony had been known as a notorious marchland of Britishness, where the cate-gories of national belonging remained unsettled. Its earliest white inhabitants hailedfrom Barbados, Surinam, and the Windward Islands as well as the British Isles, andeven included some Romany-speaking gypsies. The native Taino had mostly van-ished by 1700, and slaves, predominantly imported Africans, began their dispro-portionate climb to the point at which they outnumbered whites by at least ten toone at midcentury, and by as much as twenty-five to one in some locales. Population,its categorization, increase, and management, was from the start a critical social andpolitical issue, in tandem and sometimes in tension with the concomitant need tosubstantiate and protect social hierarchies of entitlement and abjection. Yet officialand unofficial efforts to “conduct the conduct” of local residents generated a rangeof competing “counter-conducts” that regulation failed to control.

The demographic crisis of this “Constant Mine, whence Britain draws prodigiousriches,” as Charles Leslie described Jamaica, has been well documented. The whitepopulation failed to grow between 1680 and 1756, undermined by tropical diseases,the shift to large-scale sugar monoculture, and the First Maroon War (1729–1739).The black enslaved population, the largest and most rebellious in the British WestIndies, was also notorious for being unable to reproduce naturally. It is claimed thatthis “demographic failure” retarded the development of the kind of settler institu-tions and culture established in continental plantation colonies, and sealed the is-land’s reputation as a vortex of social disorder and rebellion.75 But failure, likebeauty, may lie largely in the eye of the beholder; rather than a “failed settler so-ciety,” it was possible to see Jamaica as a unique constellation of black culture andwhite domination that shared many sensibilities with the English metropole. Whiteimmigration to the island was impressive, with around 125,000 English and Euro-peans moving there before the American Revolution. Their minority status (theyconstituted 6.1 percent of the population in 1774) had the effect of intensifying bothresidents’ links to the “mother country” and their staunch insistence on the pro-

74 St. Helena thus provided an early model of the dynamics of island populations, extinction, andendemism; Grove, Green Imperialism, 342–360.

75 Charles Leslie, A New History of Jamaica: From the Earliest Accounts, to the Taking of Porto Belloby Vice-Admiral Vernon (London, 1740), 12; Trevor Burnard, “A Failed Settler Society: Marriage andDemographic Failure in Early Jamaica,” Journal of Social History 28, no. 1 (Autumn 1994): 63–82, quo-tation from 65.



tection of their British liberties, properties, and independence against the imperialparliament, a contest that increased as residents became more vocal in claiming theirright to define their own identity as British subjects of the empire.76 The majoritypopulation of black Jamaicans meanwhile imposed their own syncretic lifeways onthe island in a semi-autonomous existence, and thus carried the bulk of creole cultureand consciousness, the self-proclaimed Britishness of which seems to elude mosthistorians’ attention.77

White dominance on the island was uneasily maintained through theatrical per-formances of privilege and terror. The conspicuous consumption, grandiose hospi-tality, and notorious brutality of Jamaican planters, who included some of the richestinhabitants of British America, were integral to the performance of power that en-acted the distinctions of rank, caste, and class on the island. “The Master of Familiesin Jamaica, Planters and Merchants, live with as much Pomp and Pleasure as anyGentlemen in the world,” John Oldmixon reported. “They keep their Coaches andsix Horses, have their Train of Servants in Liveries running before and behind them,and for Magnificance and Luxury they have always got the start of the other Col-onies.” The spectacular cruelty of slave punishments was the other side of the coin

76 Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004), 16; Wells, The Population of the British Colonies in Americabefore 1776, 196.

77 See Kathleen Wilson, “The Performance of Freedom: Maroons and the Colonial Order in Eigh-teenth-Century Jamaica and the Atlantic Sound,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 66, no. 1 (January2009): 45–86.

Jamaica. Detail from Henry Popple, A Map of the British Empire in America with the French and SpanishSettlements Adjacent Thereto (London: Willm. Henry Toms & R.W. Seale, 1733). David Rumsey Map Col-lection.



of display: for relatively menial offenses, slaves could be hanged, burned, staked tothe ground, or dismembered. These theaters of terror were supplemented and re-inforced by a steadily increasing military presence, celebrated in militia reviews andmilitary spectacles in Kingston, Spanish Town, and Montego Bay.78 All were integralto the performance of rank, nationality, and entitlement upon which the plantationsystem depended, as the paternalism of the masters performed through grandiosehospitality and consumption was reinforced by the retaliatory terror of the whip, thestake, and the gallows.

Jamaican law attempted to codify these performative distinctions of class, race,and caste, marking inhabitants on the basis of a racialized nationality: “white” peoplecould claim the protections of British rights and liberties, including trial by jury; blackpeople existed beyond the bounds of this protection; and free people of color lay inbetween, some having special privileges granted by private acts of assembly, but mostnot possessing such privileges.79 The law of 1733 that provided that “no one shallbe deemed a Mulatto after the Third Generation . . . but shall have all the Privilegesand Immunities of His Majesty’s white Subjects of this Island” for a time gave de-scendants of black-white liaisons the right to “be called English,” and so shore upthe white population to keep the other three castes under control.80 So, too, did themetropolitan Plantation Act of 1740, which bestowed “natural-born” British statuson foreigners domiciled in an American colony for seven years.81 But in the after-math of Tackey’s Rebellion of 1760, the most serious and long-lasting slave uprisingof the century in the British West Indies, the authorities attempted to clamp downon these previous whitening efforts, the assembly passing an act in 1761 that re-stricted the amount of property that a planter could leave to his mulatto children,since the inheritance of significant estates “tend[s] greatly to destroy the distinctionrequisite, and absolutely necessary . . . between white persons, Negroes and Mul-latoes.” Despite the protests from planters and merchants in Kingston and SpanishTown, the law was successfully defended to the Board of Trade by Jamaican agentLovell Stanhope, who viewed it as vital to “the very existence of that Colony.” The1761 law was the first in the Caribbean to attempt to curtail the power of people ofcolor, anticipating legislation in St. Kitts, Barbados, and St. Domingue as well asBritish Bengal.82 By the 1780s, legislators could confidently describe the essential

78 John Oldmixon, The British Empire in America: Containing the History of the Discovery, Settlement,Progress, and State of the British Colonies on the Continent and Islands of America, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Lon-don, 1741), 2: 412. For the theaters of power in eighteenth-century Jamaica, see Wilson, The Island Race,146–168; Wilson, “The Performance of Freedom.”

79 See The National Archives [hereafter TNA], Colonial Office Records [hereafter CO], 137/23, fol.63, for an example of one such act, which bestowed “the same rights and Privileges with English Subjectsborn of white parents” on various mixed-race progeny of planters.

80 Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (ChapelHill, N.C., 1968), 176; Edward Long, The History of Jamaica; or, General Survey of the Antient and ModernState of That Island, 3 vols. (London, 1774), 2: 332. The law required the subjects to be “brought up inthe Christian religion.”

81 The act created a subordinate category of British subjects liable to various civil restrictions if theywent to England, a stipulation first formulated in the Act of Settlement of 1700. See Great Britain,Parliament, The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, 36 vols. (Lon-don, 1806–1820), 20 (1810): 1327–1345. For examples of the lists of naturalized persons that were for-warded to the metropolitan government, see CO 137/23, June 1740–1741. The Jewish community re-sponded by waging a campaign for civil rights on the island in the 1750s. Wilson, The Island Race, 149.

82 John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (London, 2006);



task of Jamaican law as, in contrast to English models, preserving “a marked dis-tinction between the white inhabitants and the people of colour and free blacks.”83

Laws, however, could not eliminate the intimate practices that continually chal-lenged and collapsed these distinctions. Although their letters “home” were virtuallysilent on the subject, almost every white man on the island had a black or mulattomistress, and most had several illegitimate mixed-race children, practices that thecolonial assembly hypocritically attempted to control through sumptuary regulationsas well as the inheritance legislation. These vast households of mixed-blood families,surrogates of proper “English” kin, provide a model of family structure and cross-blood alliance that is radically different from metropolitan models. Attorney EdwardLong was fond of likening a Jamaican planter to “an antient patriarch,” “conciliatingaffection by the mildness of [his] exertion, and claiming respect by the justice andpropriety of [his] decisions and discipline,” and indeed, in some ways, their house-holds resembled Roman patriarchal models of a family as “the collection of slavesand freed slaves attached to a married couple.”84 Clearly, the exigencies of itiner-ancy, slavery, and colonization had forged a counter-conduct that generated dis-tinctive social and familial forms.

Not surprisingly, as Jamaica rose to imperial preeminence as a wealth-producer,and its planters proclaimed their status as full-blooded British subjects devoted to“the native spirit of freedom,” colonial and metropolitan observers began a rhe-torical assault on their mode of making families as an ostentatious transgression ofEnglish standards of civility and rule. The exalted household position of the blackor mulatto mistress; white women’s use of enslaved wet nurses, whose “blood maybe corrupted” from their own sexual freedoms; and the intimacy with which legit-imate and illegitimate children of a family mixed, each attested to a miscegenatedsocial formation that constituted “a violation of all decency.”85 Moreover, this localcounter-conduct of white male privilege was blamed for having produced an ener-vated and degenerate version of Britishness and a restive population of free coloreds,who seemed poised to transform a British colony into a Spanish-style polity, dom-inated by “a vicious, brutal and degenerate breed of mongrels.” Long, like Stanhope,lamented British men’s “infatuated attachments to black women,” advocating thatinstead of “being grac’d with a yellow offspring not their own, [they] perform the dutyincumbent on every good citizen, by raising in honourable wedlock a race of un-

Edward Cox, Free Coloreds in the Slave Societies of St. Kitts and Grenada, 1763–1833 (Knoxville, Tenn.,1984); Hawes, Poor Relations.

83 Wilson, The Island Race, 148–155; Acts of Assembly, Passed in the Island of Jamaica . . . 1681–1769,2 vols. (Kingston, 1787), 2: 36–39; CO 137/33, fol. 32, June 13, 1763; Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica,vol. 12, November 25, 1830, quoting the earlier act. See also Brooke N. Newman, “Gender, Sexualityand the Formation of Racial Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Caribbean World,” Gender &History 22, no. 3 (November 2010): 585–602.

84 Long, The History of Jamaica, 2: 271; Doris Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in theEarly French Caribbean (Durham, N.C., 2005), 127, quoting Suzanne Dixon, The Roman Family (Bal-timore, 1992). The household average in St. John’s Parish in 1680 was already 20.6 persons, comparedto 16.3 in Barbados in the same period, and the number continued to increase thereafter; Wells, ThePopulation of the British Colonies in America before 1776, 202, 299.

85 Long, The History of Jamaica, 2: 267; Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of theBritish Colonies in the West Indies, 2nd ed., 4 vols. (London, 1794), 2: 22; John Singleton, A GeneralDescription of the West-Indian Islands, as Far as Relates to the British, Dutch, and Danish Governments,from Barbados to Saint Croix (Barbados, 1767), 12.



adulterated beings.”86 Here the fate of nation, colony, and empire was tied to in-dividual sexual choice; the well-governed colony and the self-governing individualwent hand in hand. As the ultimate sign of the colonists’ refusal to govern themselves,concubinage and mixed-race families were resoundingly condemned in the flurry ofrecommendations, reports, and letters to the Board of Trade over the period, all ofwhich were concerned to maximize national sensibilities, resources, and collectivewill on the island.87

Interestingly, the high rate of concubinage was also blamed on resident whitewomen’s insufficiencies—their vulgar manners, indolence, and “early and habituallicentiousness” brought on by the tropical climate and examples set by their slaves.They conspicuously failed, in other words, to perform that Englishness requisite fora socially successful colonial project.88 Marriage was considered the key technologyto social reformation, but for this the men needed a pool of attractive partners. “Toallure men from these illicit connexions,” Stanhope, Long, and estate bookkeeperJ. B. Moreton each suggested techniques to “render . . . women of their own com-plexion more agreeable companions,” including better education, more modesty andeconomy, and segregation of white children from “any of the black or tawny race.”And as the famous Manning divorce case proved, white women were problematic notjust as desired objects but also as desiring subjects, so that their everyday lives weremonitored, surveyed, and reported on by their slaves, servants, and neighbors, as wellas imperial authorities.89 The deployment of alliance and of sexuality here con-verged, as family formation was put to the task of managing sexuality.

The enslaved were not exempted from such surveillance. Here “family,” real andfictive, forged through bonds of descent or experience on the slave ship, was con-sidered a major obstacle to the creation of a tractable labor force, as Orlando Pat-terson pointed out some time ago.90 “Natal alienation,” or the reduction of complex

86 Long, The History of Jamaica, 1: 327, emphasis in the original. Stanhope referred to mixed-racepeople as “a spurious and illegitimate breed of Mulattoes,” whose very existence led to “the Encour-agement of fornication and Concubinage”; CO 137/33, fol. 39r. See also J. B. Moreton, West IndiaCustoms and Manners: Containing Strictures on the Soil, Cultivation, Produce, Trade, Officers, and In-habitants (London, 1793), 78–79.

87 See, e.g., CO 137/23, fol. 9–9v; Add MS 22, 677, Letter of James Knight to the Duke of Newcastle,August 15, 1733; CO 137/33/34–35; Jamaica Archives, Spanish Town, Mesopotamia Conference MinuteBook (Moravian), 1754, 1798–1812; James Grainger, An Essay on the More Common West-India Diseases:And the Remedies Which That Country Itself Produces (London, 1764); Collins, Practical Rules for theManagement and Medical Treatment of Negro Slaves, in the Sugar Colonies (Edinburgh, 1783); Hansard,Parliamentary Debates, vols. 33–34; Benjamin La Trobe, A Succinct View of the Missions Establishedamong the Heathen by the Church of Brethren; or, Unitas Fratrum in a Letter to a Friend (London, 1771);Thomas Coke, A Journal of the Rev. Dr. Coke’s Visit to Jamaica, and of His Third Tour on the Continentof America (London, 1789); Coke, An Account of the Rise, Progress, and Present State of the MethodistMissions (London, 1793).

88 Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, 2: 13. Seealso Singleton, A General Description of the West-Indian Islands.

89 Long, The History of Jamaica, 2: 330, 280; Moreton, West India Customs and Manners, 120; TrevorBurnard, “ ‘A Matron in Rank, a Prostitute in Manners’: The Manning Divorce of 1741 and Class,Gender, Race and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” in Verene A. Shepherd, ed., Working Slav-ery, Pricing Freedom: Perspectives from the Caribbean, Africa and the African Diaspora (New York, 2006),133–152. Elizabeth Manning was accused, among other things, of having improper relations with anumber of black men on her husband’s estate. For the Privy Council’s disallowance of the divorce, seeCO 137/23, fols. 60–61.

90 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 6–8;Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York, 2007).



networks of social bonds to a single legal relationship over which the enslaved hadno control, was not, however, easy to effect. Local officials tried to track the various“nations” of Africans who arrived on their shores, noting “their several names ofAkims, Fantins, Ashantees, Quamboos, etc. from the towns so called at whose mar-kets they are bought” in order to separate those with ties of kith and kin or a pro-clivity for rebellion.91 And despite the harsh treatment of slaves, the planters’ in-ability to control and manage them in quotidian affairs tormented authorities suchas Governor Edward Trelawney. “The English are the worst Managers of slaves ofany people under the Sun,” he complained to the Earl of Bedford. “They will observeno Discipline . . . the very many wholesome Regulations enacted in this Island forthe Government of Slaves, . . . as they are enforced only by due Course of Law, theyare not and cannot be enforced at all, and every one in fact, does as he lists with hisown Slaves.”92 The result was that the enslaved had considerable freedom to engagein their forms of self-fashioning and family formation.93

The specters of anti-slavery and abolition raised the stakes on slaves’ intimate andfictive kin relations, making them objects of metropolitan scrutiny. English reformerswho envisioned making “an empire without slaves” saw proper Christian marriageand the protection of its sacred duties and obligations as the first step toward “civ-ilizing” people of African descent into British subjects. Other proposals aimed at therights of self-purchase, the establishment of rights to property and children, and thedemarcation of a domestic space that slaveholders could not breach.94 EdmundBurke’s “Sketch of a Negro Code” endorsed the enslaved’s adoption of British cul-tural values, including “the state of matrimony and the Government of Family,” asthe best means of fitting them “for the Offices of a Freeman.” Imperial oversight andvirtuous example—both conspicuously lacking on Jamaican plantations—would al-low the Crown, rather than colonial officials, to act as a marriage broker, providingwomen to enslaved men over the age of twenty-one and honoring those who fatheredat least three legitimate children with a certificate attesting to their good manners,morals, and religion.95

Burke’s was a robustly metropolitan perspective; in the colonies themselves, al-lowing slaves to make legitimate families was a concern only of reformers and mis-sionaries.96 And pro-slavery planters had long argued that the enslaved were “the

91 Long, The History of Jamaica, 2: 472; Wilson, “The Performance of Freedom,” 66–67. The mostsignificant effect of such categorization was to provide enslaved and free blacks, such as the Maroons,with foundational ethnicities upon which they would build.

92 CO 137/48, fol. 196, Trelawney to the Earl of Bedford, April 14, 1750.93 Michael Craton, “Changing Patterns of Slave Families in the British West Indies,” Journal of

Interdisciplinary History 10, no. 1 (Summer 1979): 1–35; Morgan, Laboring Women; Philip D. Morgan,Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill,N.C., 1998).

94 Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, N.C.,2006); Edmund Burke, “Sketch of a Negro Code,” in Paul Langford, ed., The Writings and Speeches ofEdmund Burke, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1981), 3: 577–579; for similar proposals, see Essays, Commercial andPolitical: On the Real and Relative Interests of Imperial and Dependent States (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1777);and Barbados Museum and Historical Society, Instructions for the Management of a Plantation in Bar-badoes and for the Treatment of Negroes (Barbados, 1786).

95 Brown, Moral Capital, 236–237; Burke, “Sketch of a Negro Code,” 578, 580.96 On St. Helena, for example, the Committee of the Subscribers for Encouraging Deserving Slaves

did not include legal marriage as an avenue to self-improvement, and most planters in Jamaica resistedChristianization and legal marriage for slaves; SHA, EIC 8/15, vol. 1.



King’s subjects” in order to prove that slavery operated as a civilizing instrument thatgave blacks access to the magistrate and the law, arguments that the enslaved them-selves began to repeat as a remedy for mistreatment once the winds of abolitionismbegan to blow.97 But these currents also stimulated efforts to encourage a “naturally”reproducing population of slaves like those in North America. The 1770s saw thebeginning of arguments for planters to adopt pronatalist policies that included re-duced workloads for pregnant slaves and financial payments for successful live births.In 1809, Jamaica and the Leewards passed legislation releasing female slaves with“six children living” from hard labor, and exempting their owners from having to paytaxes on them.98 Thus, a century before feminists and eugenicists advocated prenataland maternalist policies in Europe, the contradictions of slavery had forged theirinvention at the colonial frontier.

IN THREE FRONTIERS OF British identity and authority—the trading factory of FortMarlborough, the supply station of St. Helena, and the sugar colony of Jamaica—itinerant, settler, and hybrid populations engaged in everyday life at great distancesfrom the imperial state. Despite differences in economic purpose and political struc-ture, they shared in an economy of power that took as its object the organization offamily and sexual relations as markers of national affiliation and colonial authority,as rulers and governors perceived the necessity of managing quotidian practices todemarcate social, national, and racial boundaries. The examples of Sumatra, St. Hel-ena, and Jamaica also changed over time toward more racialized ideas about nation-making and nation-marking, as the movement back and forth between family asmodel and instrument of rule and population as an entity to be managed came toproduce increasingly exclusionary notions of national belonging and rights. Finally,the need to rule an array of alien peoples, the interpenetration of commercial andterritorial peripheries, and the mutual impact of chartered company and Crown col-ony governmental initiatives were evident throughout the eighteenth century, en-suring that the British Empire continued to be maritime and commercial as well asterritorial and conquering into the next century.

In Fort Marlborough, Joseph Collet’s performative and exceptionally zealousstate-making, simultaneously quixotic and pragmatic and vacillating between the fa-milial and the demographic, was able to effect significant, if temporary, changes inhow the locals “did business” in both the economic and social senses. St. Helenamakes it clear that Collet was no anomaly; he participated in a broadly shared setof principles common to other EIC governors regarding political obligation, obe-dience to constituted authority, and the protocols of good governance. But St. Hel-ena’s governors were less interested than Collet in creating a hybridized “English

97 Long, The History of Jamaica, 2: 246n; Granville Sharp, A Representation of the Injustice andDangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery . . . (London, 1769), 72n.

98 Barbara Bush, “Hard Labor: Women, Childbirth, and Resistance in British Caribbean Slave So-cieties,” in David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds., More than Chattel: Black Women andSlavery in the Americas (Bloomington, Ind., 1996), 198–199. For a pronatalist argument, see Rev. BeilbyPorteus, A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in ForeignParts: At their Anniversary Meeting in the Parish Church of St. Mary-le-Bow, on Friday, February 21, 1783(London, 1783).



family” and keener to try to reduce their self-proclaimed “English” subjects to sub-ordination to the Company. Faced with recalcitrant settlers determined to resist andto abuse both their slaves and the environment, the authorities of St. Helena hadto exceed metropolitan directives by trying to craft a local social order that workedup from the level of family structure and sexual alliance. As regulative authority waswoven into the fabric of everyday life, colonists and colonial officials alike weregalvanized into enacting forms of biopower designed to avert social and environ-mental catastrophe. These two examples suggest that the East India Company wasa particularly prescient actor in formulating governmental initiatives that targetedpopulation and privileged the family as the instrument through which to regulate andrule, and through which local strategies could come to shape global designs.99

All three sites revealed the “tensions of empire” that invariably resulted from theclash between the ambitions of metropolitan authorities and the interests and abil-ities of colonial officials, who had to deal with counter-conducts of people, Britishand non-British, enslaved and free, that were aimed at a (frequently resistant) self-governance.100 In Jamaica, a self-governing sugar colony, a planter class very awareof the demographic stakes posed by plantation monoculture and slavery sustainedtheir authority, in part, through concubinage and the maintenance of mixed-racefamilies. The local economy of sex, in other words, was managed according to a broadgeopolitical set of priorities (the plantation complex of the Atlantic world) in whichuseful, if non-marital, alliances facilitated control of mixed-race and enslaved peo-ple.101 However, in the face of a dangerous slave uprising, global war, and the island’srise to dominance as a wealth-producer, planters and merchants, in conjunction withmetropolitan overseers, came to see racial mixing as a danger to polity, and cham-pioned white self-governance and properly constituted families as the best means tosustain and expand prosperity and power. Always at the forefront in engineeringtechniques of racialized nation-making and -marking, Jamaican planters created newracial criteria for demarcating who had the rights and privileges of Englishmen andwho did not, supplemented the brutal forms of discipline they used on the enslavedwith subtler biopolitical regimes, and initiated, before any other Caribbean or EastIndian colony, measures designed to limit the property and power of mixed-racepeoples.

How applicable are these insights to other, more successful or differently con-figured colonial spaces? From a methodological point of view, analyzing colonialpower from the outside in, to gauge its place in the general economy of power andto examine the targets on which this power chose to work, brings into view arts ofgovernance that are elided in analyses focused solely on institutions. Demonstratinga pervasive instrumental concern with regulating family and household order, genderprivilege, and sexual alliance, the governmental initiatives undertaken in each siteunderline the political stakes lodged in governing racially diverse and increasingly

99 Stern, The Company-State ; Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India; E. M. Collingham, Im-perial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c. 1800–1947 (Cambridge, 2001). For EIC innovationsin inoculation, environment, and health in British India, see Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions:Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India, 1600–1850 (Oxford, 2003).

100 Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a BourgeoisWorld (New Haven, Conn., 1987).

101 For the locus classicus of this discussion, see Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 52–56.



racialized colonial polities, and conjoin the political theories, ambitions, and as-sumptions of metropolitan states with the more tentative and specific requirementsof colonies. Managing the often contradictory imperatives of population, security,and discipline also required a great deal of invention on the ground, a “performativestate-making” focused on creating a viable body politic that made various forms ofcirculation, security, discipline, and profit possible. The deployment of familial andsexual alliance converging in these sites may encourage historians to look anew atthe eighteenth century in tracking the relations between the emergence of biopolitics“at home,” in European societies, and those “abroad,” in their empires.

A non-institutional approach to state-building has much to reveal about strat-egies of national or cultural reproduction in colonial environments. Governmentaltechniques of administration, both internal and external to the state and enactedthrough operations of rule—discursive, practical, and local—bring into focus themultiform ways in which authority was expressed, exercised, and contested, illumi-nating how the “colonial state” was ultimately called into being, through the practicesof governance, of self and other, necessary for economic extraction and coloniza-tion.102 British settlement in North America, Bengal, and New South Wales revealsremarkably similar patterns of biological and cultural miscegenation, colonial andimperial anxiety about it, and attempts to manage and ultimately eradicate both.103

Given that, in contrast to the French and Spanish colonies, family formation andnational and racial marking had little institutional support and minimal metropolitanoversight, British colonies may have frequently expanded the importance of the fam-ily and the authority of the household head at the expense of civil government.104

In any event, the “geographies of regulation,” their meanings and their targets, canbe established only through careful and contextualized study.105

The consolidation and extension of British authority, uneven and ineffective asit may have been, required gendered technologies of power that sought to intervenedirectly in the domestic organization and the sexual practices of its subjects. Howthese strategies were developed and changed in other colonies, how they operatedin different European empires, and how they may modify current models of biopowerand governmentality in the nineteenth century await further investigation. But itseems clear that the exigencies of Britain’s early modern empire had forged a versionof biopolitics that bequeathed to metropolitan modernity critical issues of colonialgovernance and ethics. Through eighteenth-century colonial governmentality, the

102 This is also true on the frontiers of the European nations themselves: see Nicholas P. Canny, “TheIdeology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 30,no. 4 (October 1973): 577–582; David Dickson, “No Scythians Here: Women and Marriage in Seven-teenth-Century Ireland,” in Margaret MacCurtain and Mary O’Dowd, eds., Women in Early ModernIreland (Edinburgh, 1991), 224–230; R. A. Houston, “Women in the Economy and Society of Scotland1500–1800,” in R. A. Houston and I. D. Whyte, eds., Scottish Society, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1991),118–147; Sahlins, Unnaturally French; and Herzog, “Early Modern Spanish Citizenship.”

103 See especially Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India; Kathleen Wilson, “Empire, Gender,and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century,” in Levine, Gender and Empire, 14–45; Wilson, Re-thinkingthe Colonial State (manuscript in progress).

104 Shammas, “Anglo-American Household Government in Comparative Perspective,” 127–128.105 E.g., Richard Phillips, “Heterogeneous Imperialism and the Regulation of Sexuality in British

West Africa,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, no. 3 (July 2005): 291–315; Jennifer M. Spear, “Co-lonial Intimacies: Legislating Sex in French Louisiana,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 60, no. 1(2003): 75–98.



performance of state and the performance of bodies were twinned, each central toshaping a stable order on which to build and profit.

Kathleen Wilson is Professor of History and Cultural Analysis and Theory at theState University of New York at Stony Brook. She writes on culture, politics,and empire in eighteenth-century Britain and its domains. She is author of theprize-winning book The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism inEngland, 1715–1785 (Cambridge University Press, 1995) and of The Island Race:Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (Routledge, 2003), andeditor of A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain andthe Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge University Press, 2004). She is currently fin-ishing Strolling Players of Empire: Theatre, Culture and Modernity in the EnglishProvinces (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), which explores the pol-itics of theatrical and social performance and colonial rule in sites that rangeacross the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. This article is part of a larger study onstate-making practices in global frontiers of the British empire.



Rethinking Colonial State Kathleen Wilson

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