‘So foul a sky clears not without a storm’ is the uninviting epigraph of Nostromo. In Shakespeare's King John the line is addressed by the king to a messenger who bears bad news; the French have raised a vast army for an attack on England, which King John will not survive. The epigraph has no real analogy to Nostromo, except that both works deal with politics, internal civil wars and foreign intervention. What meaning did Conrad intend? Only one seems plausible. That the present overcast sky will not clear up without another storm. In any case, the epigraph is surely not primarily meteorological; it suggests a political or historical interpretation for the novel; and this has, in fact, been found by many critics. Most commonly they raise the issue of whether the coming storm in the novel does, or does not, support our lingering belief in historical progress.

Some three decades ago this question was raised by at least four of Nostromo's early significant critics: Albert Guerard, Robert Penn Warren, Arnold Kettle and Irving Howe. Guerard, in his brief monograph, Joseph Conrad, of 1947, writes that the mine ‘corrupts Sulaco, bringing civil war rather than progress’ (71). In his much-read introduction to the Modern Library edition of Nostromo in 1951 Warren disagreed: ‘That strikes me as far too simple. There has been a civil war, but the forces of “progress” - i.e. the San Tome mine and the capitalistic order - have won. And we must admit that the society at the end of the book is preferable to that at the beginning.’ When Guerard came to write his second and longer book, Conrad the Novelist, in 1958, he agreed; but only on condition that we take ‘as beginning the savage old days of Guzman Bento's tyranny and as end the quiet moment when Dr. Monygham makes his prediction’ (GU, 198). But what if we take as the ‘end’ that which the narrator discusses, the one with a Sulaco of ‘cable cars’ and ‘serious, organized labour troubles’? Is that preferable? More generally, how do we face - over eighty years later than Nostromo - the contrast between the old ways of life and the new?