Prospects of Empire: Slavery and Ecology in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain
Cupidity and Containment
Thomas Kitchin (1719–1784)
A Chart of the Environs of Jamaica, including its Dependencies, 1774
Engraving
In Edward Long, The history of Jamaica or, General survey of the antient and modern state of the island
London: T. Lowndes, 1774, vol. 1
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
Artist unknown, pseudonym Whipcord
The Fly Catching Macaroni, 1772
Etching with hand coloring
Published 12 July 1772 by M. Darly
When readers opened volume one of Jamaica planter and historian Edward Long’s The history of Jamaica, they unfolded a map of the British Empire’s sprawling rule in the West Indies. The compass’s lines seem to expand without end, charting endless prospects of wealth emanating from the islands. Likewise, the prefatory seal musters stock images of indigenous persons to sanction the Empire, erasing its brutal efforts to enslave, dispossess, and murder them. The Latin caption mixes agricultural, religious, and reproductive language to celebrate the Empire’s branching throughout the globe.
The Fly Catching Macaroni features natural historian and botanist Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820), who traveled to the South Pacific aboard the HMS Endeavour on a research trip led by Captain James Cook and sponsored by the Royal Navy and the Royal Society. The print mocks Banks by dubbing him a “macaroni,” a term used to describe a fashion-conscious, effeminate, and frivolous individual. However, the image also links the sciences to empire. The natural historian’s ability to “rove from Pole to Pole” hinged upon both dispossessing indigenous persons and consulting them for their knowledge of a region’s flora and fauna.
Artist unknown
The Colonies Reduced. Its Companion
Etching
From The Political Register and London Museum, vol. 3
London: J. Almon, 1768
Francesco Bartolozzi (1728–1815) after John Gabriel Stedman (1744–1797)
A Rebel Negro armed and on his guard, 1794
Stipple and etching
Published 1 December 1794 by J. Johnson
Francesco Bartolozzi (1728–1815) after John Gabriel Stedman (1744–1797)
Frontispiece
Stipple and etching with hand coloring
Published 1 December 1794 by J. Johnson
In John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative, of a Five Years’ Expedition, Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam… 1772–1777
London: J. Johnson & J. Edwards, 1796, vol. 1
Bodily integrity was an intense concern in the British Empire. The Colonies Reduced deploys the trope of the dismemberment of Britannia, a personification of the empire, to refer to the independence of its colonies in North America, as well as a severed tree, countering the imperial branching that Edward Long’s History of Jamaica celebrates. A Rebel Negro armed and on his guard illustrated British-Dutch soldier John Gabriel Stedman’s 1796 Narrative and represents another threat to the colonial body. Thus, the work’s frontispiece depicts Stedman having defeated this threatening presence during combat in Gado-Saby, Surinam. Of this image, Stedman wrote, “I may be seen, after the heat of the action, fatigued, and dejectedly looking on the body of an unfortunate rebel negro, who, with his musket in his hand, lies prostrate at my feet.” The lines beneath the frontispiece articulate the man’s death as inevitable, and Stedman’s “empathy” for him erases the man’s pained body and substitutes Stedman’s own emotional response.
William Day (1797–1845) and Louis Haghe (1806–1885) after Richard Bridgens
View of the Pitch Lake, Trinidad, 1836
Lithograph
London: Robert Jennings, 1836
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
The Pitch Lake in Trinidad is a natural deposit of asphalt consisting of solid areas separated by rivulets of water, with boiling pitch at the center. Bridgens’s work in Trinidad spanned slavery and emancipation, and this image is ambiguous. On the one hand, the white male colonist is somewhat vulnerable, requiring the assistance of the two black men; on the other hand, the presence of these assistants marks his power over the colonial landscape. The lake appears globe-like, as though the colonist also traverses islands and continents. The radiating sunlight adds to the insinuation of Empire’s preordained global dawning. However, the name for the lake and its product retains the precolonial Amerindian word for it, “Piche.”
James Grainger (1721/4–1766)
The Sugar-Cane: A Poem
London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1764
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
James Grainger was an English physician and poet who first worked as a surgeon in the army. In 1759 he traveled to the West Indies and served as a doctor in St. Kitts. He also studied botany, managed the plantations of his wife’s uncle, purchased enslaved persons, and wrote this book-length poem, The Sugar-Cane. The work offers advice on growing sugarcane and offers other medicinal and anthropological observations. Here, Grainger documents and mocks the black creole spiritual practice of obeah, and yet a certain anxiety permeates his account. For example, this obeah recipe for protection from one’s enemies includes “Old teeth extracted from a white man’s skull.”
William Heath (1794/5–1840)
A Pair of Broad Bottoms
Etching with hand coloring
Published 1810 [?] by Walker Cornhill [?]
This print satirizes British politician Baron Grenville (1759–1834), Chancellor of Oxford from 1810 to 1834, and politician, playwright, and Drury Lane Theatre manager Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816), together with Saartjie Baartman (ca. 1770s–1815), a Khoikhoi woman who was exhibited in Britain and France as the “Hottentot Venus.” Lay spectators and natural historians alike fixated on Baartman’s buttocks and rumors surrounding her genitalia. Here, Sheridan uses compasses to measure Baartman’s bottom against that of Grenville, a man often caricatured for his large posterior. But the image also reflects European scientists’ erotic fascination with “others” and their relentless practices of measurement, classification, and display.
After Baartman’s death, French naturalist Georges Cuvier dissected her body, and Paris’s Musée de l’Homme displayed her brain, genitalia, and skeleton until 1974. In 1994 President Nelson Mandela requested that France return Baartman’s remains, and in 2002 she was buried near her birthplace in South Africa.
Henry R. Cock after William Blake (1757–1827) and Michele Benedetti (1745–1810)
The Skinning of the Aboma Snake. Indian Female of the Arrowauka Nation
Etching
Published 20 November 1812 by Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown
The images in this diptych first appeared separately in Stedman’s 1796 Narrative. One depicts the skinning of a snake that Stedman and an enslaved man named David shot. Stedman wrote that it was twenty-two feet long and “its thickness was about that of my black boy Quaco, who might then be about twelve years old, and round whose waist I since measured the creature’s skin.” Homoerotic language permeates Stedman’s account of the event, and he also eroticized the Arawak woman in the second image, whom he first saw bathing and compared to “Venus rising out of the sea.”
Francesco Bartolozzi (1728–1815) and John Landseer (1762/3–1852) after Philip Reinagle (1748–1833)
Cupid Inspiring Plants with Love
In Robert John Thornton, Temple of Flora
Published by Dr. Thornton, 1812
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
Temple of Flora by physician and botanist Robert John Thornton (1768–1837) first appeared as an appendix to his late-eighteenth-century illustrated edition of famed botanist Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae. Thornton’s work contains illustrations of various plants accompanied by poetry and personifying descriptions. Here it is open to Francesco Bartolozzi’s engraving after Philip Reinagle, Cupid Inspiring Plants with Love, which with the accompanying poem of the same name by George Dyer reflects the erotic’s presence in botanical study, intensified by Linnaeus’s classification of plants by their sexual parts. The poem links empire and botany, presenting a preordained expansion of imperial knowledge over which a godlike Cupid reigns.