It is not indeed necessary to own a country in order to do trade with it or invest capital in it.
—J. A. Hobson, 1902
W
HEN WE EXAMINE Alfred Tennyson's and Matthew Arnold's poetic depictions of the wealth of the East, we find that most poems respond to one of two impulses. Some poems seem motivated mainly by the same classic orientalism that is exemplified by those poems of the Romantic period that represent the East as a world apart, untouched by time. But Arnold and Tennyson also wrote poems driven more by the imperialist currents that strengthened throughout the Victorian period; these poems show the East becoming increasingly assimilated into the very modern world of commerce within the British imperial system. In their poems on Eastern wealth, then, Arnold and Tennyson seem not only to be working through their inheritance from Romanticism (specifically, Romantic orientalism), but also to be negotiating between more traditional notions of value and those specific to the developing political and economic systems of the Victorian age. Ultimately, these poems' conception of the wealth of the East is at least consistent with, if not also implicated in, the conflicted evolution of imperialist ideology.
Tennyson and Arnold were among the Victorian poets most consistently drawn to the Orient. In their poems about the East, both typically characterized the region as wealthy. Along with the great majority of their peers, they had learned from childhood readings of The Thousand and One Nights and its derivatives that the East was gilded, a place of fantastic splendor and opulence. They were equally aware of British stakes in the East; not only was the Orient a repository of varied riches, but it was an arena of financial opportunity for those Englishmen who were in a position to exploit it, whether by investing from home or by traveling abroad.
When Arnold and Tennyson write about Eastern wealth in its exclusively indigenous context, divorced from the political and economic realities of empire in the Victorian period, they characteristically depict wealth in the form of various materials and structures. Gold is chief among these, but it is usually either an architectural ornament or (metaphorically) a characteristic of oriental nature; gold as money is absent. As portrayed in these poems, the indigenous economies of the Orient are essentially barter economies in which transfers of wealth depend upon the use value rather than the exchange value of the commodities being transferred. On the other hand, when Tennyson and Arnold portray Eastern wealth in the context of empire, their poems explicitly connect commerce with British imperialism. In this case, gold is a far less characteristic marker of wealth, and the transfer of commodities occurs unidirectionally, from the extended empire towards the center.
The poems that depict an independent, indigenous context clearly reveal their Romantic inheritance, both in that (by emphasizing gold, for example) they adopt Romantic orientalist formulae, and more importantly, in that they present the Orient as what Saree Makdisi calls a “self-enclosed and self-referential enclave…of the anti-modern” (12). Thus these poems present the East as a potential place of respite from worldly pressures. Yet precisely these same pressures dominate the poems that instead situate the East within the contemporary global scene, politically as well as economically. As both the pressures and their countermeasures recur within each poet's opus, we can see how Tennyson and Arnold struggled to determine not only the status of the East, but also the value of wealth. Because of the East's reputation as a place and source of wealth, and because of its many intersections with empire, the wealth of the East thus becomes a significant arena for the two poets' elaboration of these difficult issues. The conclusions that they reach are often uncertain, evidence of the complexity of developing an imperialist ideology within the ideals and constraints of Victorian culture.
To evaluate the significance of Tennyson's and Arnold's articulations of Eastern economies both independently and within the framework of empire, we might begin by recognizing–as will become especially obvious in the final section of this essay–that even when we read Victorian poetry as post-Romantic, we should also read it in terms of what Colin Graham defines as an “active and complex engagement not only with the narrowly political but with the conceptual politics and ethics of nationality and imperialism” (5).1
Kaul makes a comparable argument about the long eighteenth century. Poets, he says, “imagined poetry to be a unique and privileged literary form for the enunciation of a puissant (and plastic) vocabulary of nation, particularly one appropriate to a Britain proving itself great at home and abroad” (5). He continues: “Poetry…is…a viable and even vital way of intervening in, and molding, public discourse” (8). Although the increasingly forceful presence of the novel in the Victorian period makes this description less apt later, poetry remains, as Kaul puts it, “part of the larger cultural conversation of the nation” (9)–including those elements of the conversation that had to do with the formulation of imperialism.
But the extent and impact of such engagement are not evenly distributed among poets, and in this sense it is important to remember that both Arnold and Tennyson functioned to a virtually unique degree as cultural spokesmen. Antony Harrison proposes that the work of both poets “operated as a mode of cultural intervention” (1). In Tennyson's case, direct access to the (figural) head of government played a key role in his effectiveness; as Harrison argues, “[f]rom 1837 to 1892 Tennyson's growing dedication to Queen Victoria and the aristocratic milieu over which she presided bears directly upon the process of poetic self-creation that enabled a poet's unprecedented attainment of cultural power in an era subsequently often called ‘the age of Tennyson’” (46). Citing the comments of William Gladstone, who was Prime Minister four times between 1868 and 1894, Harrison concludes that “Tennyson, in short, is a master of ideology who through its dispensation has accrued a level of influence and authority, in Gladstone's view, comparable to that normally exercised in openly political arenas” (68). In particular, Harrison points to “[t]he success of Tennyson's poetry as ideologically imperialistic work” (67). Although Arnold's impact derived less from direct political connection than did Tennyson's, and had a greater bearing on middle-class than on aristocratic world views, it was in its own way comparably strong. Harrison identifies Arnold as “the preeminent intellectual authority of late Victorian England,” explaining that by the early 1880s “Matthew Arnold had become a public institution, a cultural force unprecedented in Victorian England” (103). He adds that “Arnold was, through his engagements with particular Victorian social and political discourses, eventually able to attain a position of enormous ideological influence, influence over middle-class values, behavior, and tastes” (120).
2 Although Harrison treats cultural alterity in the form of the socially estranged gypsy in Arnold's work, he does not address the ways in which Arnold's approach to this question might relate to his perception of imperialism. See for comparison Pecora's analysis of Arnold's ethnology; Pecora describes Arnold's version of culture as “always…anchored, whether vulgarly or vaguely, in a theory of racial inheritance, a theory that both explains culture's origins and determines the natural aptitudes of those who are to be cultivated” (377–78).
As we try to characterize the intersection between imperialist ideology and Victorian conceptions of empire, commerce, and indigenous oriental economies, it is therefore particularly appropriate to focus on the work of Arnold and Tennyson.
In emphasizing the way in which these poets conceive of and depict the wealth of the East, my essay departs from the dominant trend in recent scholarship (both literary and historical) on economics and imperial British relations with the East. Scholars have tended to focus on how the economic situation in England affected the management of the empire abroad. Patrick Brantlinger's Fictions of State, for example, explains the complexities of “the symbiotic growth of [the British] empire and [the] national debt” (38). Treating the topic more broadly, P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins argue in British Imperialism that “the metropolitan economy” is central to “Britain's historic role as a world power” (5). In contrast, I begin in this essay to consider the nature and role of British conceptions of indigenous economies. Rather than investigate how the economic conditions of the center motivate or support imperial development, I look instead at how the perceived nature of economic conditions in Eastern regions subject to imperialism might participate in Victorian debates about both commerce and empire.
Material Wealth
ARNOLD'S AND TENNYSON'S EMPHASIS on gold as a marker of oriental wealth was no doubt inherited from their Romantic-period predecessors. Thomas Moore's prose introduction to his extremely popular Lalla Rookh (1817), for instance, sets the scene with “hundreds of gilded barges” (374). The body of the poem mentions gold frequently as well, in images such as “rich moresque-work of the roof of gold” (377) and “th' enamell'd cupola…/All rich with Arabesques of gold” (387). Another long orientalist poem, Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Revolt of Islam (1818), includes dozens of references to gold. This poem (whose original title was Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City) often conflates gold with tyranny, presenting both gold and tyranny as distinctly Eastern phenomena. Shelley's ideal is “That gold should lose its power, and thrones their glory” (VIII.xvi.137). Although neither Tennyson nor Arnold adopts Shelley's political program, both accept his and Moore's image of a gilded Orient.
Tennyson's Romantic orientalist inheritance is especially notable early in his career. His “Recollections of the Arabian Nights” (1830), for example, presents a strikingly Romantic vision of an East made of gold. The poem consists of fourteen stanzas, each followed by the refrain “the golden prime/of good Haroun Alraschid.”3
Harun al-Rashid was one of the most important of the Abbasid caliphs (r. 786–809). He also figures largely in The Thousand and One Nights.
Obviously, “gold” here is not a concrete commodity, but rather an abstract feature that plays an important role in defining the poem's setting, ontologically as well as geographically and chronologically. This abstract form of gold is, however, complemented from the very beginning of the poem by more concrete versions. Gold appears in the first stanza as exterior architectural ornamentation (“Bagdat's shrines of fretted gold” [l. 7]) and in the second and eleventh stanzas as part of the interior décor (“Gold glittering through lamplight dim” [l. 18]; “golden balustrade” [l. 118]). In stanza 8, gold moves outdoors again, but as a natural rather than an architectural feature; palm leaves are described as “rich gold-green” (l. 82). The poem's final stanza contains its last reference to gold: “a cloth of gold” (l. 149). In none of these instances does gold appear as money, and except perhaps in the “cloth of gold,” gold is not even a commodity that could readily be subject to exchange.
4 Arnold's and Tennyson's exclusion of money also underscores the extent to which their Orients are spaces more constructed than authentic. Both poets (along with other readers of The Thousand and One Nights) must have been aware that money was in use in the East during the periods depicted. Edward W. Lane's 1838–40 translation of the Nights, for instance, describes many complicated financial transactions, and Lane adds a footnote “On the Deenár and Dirhem” in which he values the dinar at “about ten shillings or half a guinea” and the dirham at “about sixpence” (76). Lane's widely-read The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836) also details the various denominations of contemporary Egyptian money and gives British equivalents. Another travel-writer, Alexander Burnes, whose Travels into Bokhara (1834) was a major source for Arnold, even calculates the annual income of the public baths in Bukhara, giving precise figures in the local currency. Lengthy reviews of both Burnes's Travels and Lane's Manners and Customs, in the Quarterly Review and elsewhere, include excerpts that mention money.
Tennyson's other early orientalist poems follow the same pattern, presenting the East as a static and temporally distance place where architecture and nature are gilded, but where gold never exists independently. His “Persia” (1827), for example, describes the architecture of Persepolis as “Irradiant with the pomp of gold” (l. 31), and the Indus River as a “stream of gold” (l. 52). In “The Ganges” (1827?), there are “gilded Pagods glittering” (l. 8); the Ganges river itself has both “golden tide” (l. 1) and “sands of gold” (l. 24). Another poem of the same year, “Thou camest to thy bower, my love” (1827), calls “Himsagar” “the sea of gold” (l. 12).5
The name “Himsagar” seems to have been taken (corrupted) from Sir William Jones by way of Moore's Lalla Rookh; see Tennyson 1: 149–50.
In short, gold appears as a stock characteristic of both Eastern architecture and Eastern nature in Tennyson's early orientalist poetry. Even when gold is clearly evidence of wealth it always exists as an integral part of some other entity (shrine, tree, cloth, sand) rather than standing alone as it would if it were either money or a commodity in its own right. It is valuable as a primary indicator of a specifically oriental(ist) form of luxury, a form characterized not only by its excess but also by its difference from contemporary European, money-based versions of luxury. The East in this poem remains a timeless, self-contained locale entirely disconnected from any other geopolitical entity. Isobel Armstrong argues that the “contrived” nature of Tennyson's early poems indirectly “enables [them] to be an experiment with the experience which comes from another place, and experiment in alternative worlds and consciousnesses” (45–46). As I have shown, the world represented in Tennyson's early poems on the Orient is in particular one of economic innocence–or to borrow Armstrong's terms from another context, this is a gilded world “free of any economy but the pleasure principle” (47).
Gold is a less prominent feature of Arnold's orientalist poetry, but his use of it is very similar to Tennyson's. One of Arnold's first poems, “Constantinople” (1839), looks to “The sun that gilds the glorious eastern sky” over the Turkish city (l. 9), and describes the city's “spangled vest/Of gay barbaric gold” (ll. 17–18). Ten years later, “The Sick King in Bokhara” (1849) mentions “golden mace-bearers” (l. 34) in the King's court. “Consolation” (1852) portrays “the gilt terraces/of holy Lassa” (l. 13–14). Arnold's best-known and most substantial orientalist poem, “Sohrab and Rustum” (1853), describes Rustum's saddle-cloth as “broidered green/Crusted with gold” (ll. 277–78). Like Tennyson, Arnold does not allow in these poems for any interaction between the East and Europe. And as in Tennyson's poems, gold's value here is displaced onto nature (sun and sky), architecture (terraces), or other ornamentation (saddle-cloth, maces). If, as Susan Brown proposes, there is in Victorian culture “a confusion in the role of gold…, as on the one hand a sign of intrinsic value or virtue, and on the other, as part of a system of exchange” (94), Tennyson and Arnold seem in these poems to settle firmly on the side of gold as “a sign of intrinsic value or virtue.”
Both Arnold and Tennyson use oriental architecture as their other principal marker of wealth and value. Even when not decorated with gold, oriental architecture reveals wealth, as nineteenth-century readers of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's “Kubla Khan” (1816) would have assumed. “Kubla Khan” never mentions gold. Instead, it expresses Eastern wealth in terms of domes, walls, towers, and gardens. Other Romantic-period orientalist poems, such as Lord Byron's “The Bride of Abydos” (1813) with its “pictured roof and marble floor” (l. 272), present a similar vision. Arnold retains Coleridge's and Byron's linkage between architecture and wealth; in “Constantinople” Arnold even explicitly labels “The sparkling mosque or minaret” as a “sign of wealth” (ll. 14–15). His more mature poems avoid the unsubtle label, but not the strategy. The King of Bokhara, for instance, lists “Houses, arcades, enamelled mosques” (l. 199), along with “a fretted brick-work tomb” (l. 221), as evidence of his wealth. Similarly, Tennyson's “Written by an Exile of Bassorah, while sailing down the Euphrates” (1827) speaks of the “splendour” (l. 9) of Basra in terms of its architecture: “thy tall towers are beaming” (l. 13), “minaret and mosque in the distance are gleaming” (l. 15). In “Recollections of the Arabian Nights,” Tennyson alludes to “High-walled gardens” (l. 8), “garden porches” (l. 16), “obelisks” (l. 107), “carven cedarn doors” (l. 115), “Broad-based flights of marble stairs” (l. 117), and “mooned domes” (l. 127).6
The archaism “cedarn” also appears in Coleridge's “Kubla Khan” (l. 13).
Although these poets rely most heavily on gold and architecture to represent eastern wealth, they do depict other riches as well. Arnold's “The Sick King,” for instance, mentions “silken raiment” (l. 194) and “rooms of treasures” (l. 214). He describes a “store of rice,/…all kinds of fruits,/Grape-syrup, squares of coloured ice,/With cherries served in drifts of snow” (ll. 194–97)–all extraordinary luxuries in a time of great heat and drought. In “Sohrab and Rustum,” Arnold's speaker praises the fine work of a Chinese artist who “Pricks with vermilion some clear porcelain vase,/An emperor's gift” (ll. 673–74). Tennyson's “Persia” refers to “incense” (l. 3) and “spice” (l. 43). Similarly, his “Thou camest to my bower” depicts “chrystal cups” which “glow with musk and wine” (l. 15). Haroun's throne in Tennyson's “Recollections” is made of silver, and is surrounded by six silver columns (ll. 143–46). The natural environment of the East is equally marked by such riches, as Tennyson's descriptions reveal. For example, “The Ganges” refers to the flow of another Indian river as “the rich emerald of thy velvet meads” (l. 28). In “Recollections,” “all/The sloping of the moon-lit sward/Was damask-work, and deep inlay/Of braided blooms” (ll. 26–29). A few lines later, a waterfall becomes “diamond rillets” flowing “Through little crystal arches” (ll. 48–49). The pattern of light shining through palm-fronds onto water becomes “diamond-plots” (l. 85), and the sky is “inlaid” with stars.
Indigenous Economies and the Value of Wealth
EXCEPT FOR the King of Bokhara's “houses” and perhaps the gardens in “Recollections,” the Eastern architectural forms, ornaments, and other riches in this poetry are identifiable as specifically oriental, rather than generic, markers of wealth. Moreover, Arnold and Tennyson construe the Orient's wealth not only as distinctively Eastern, but also as somehow inherent in the Orient, as inseparable from both its natural and built environments. This image of opulence is almost entirely uniform and stereotypical for the younger Tennyson. Arnold's version is more nuanced and complex in that he portrays poorer eastern settings and subjects even while sustaining a vision of the Orient as wealthy. For instance, “Consolation” depicts a “blind, led beggar,/Age-bowed,” who asks for alms “Through sun-proof alleys/In a lone, sand-hemmed/City of Africa” (ll. 26–30).7
“Consolation” depicts several locales, including Tibet, Rome, and (here) Libya. Geographically, of course, Libya is as far south of England as it is east. I accept this portion of the poem as “eastern” based on the fact that Arnold's source clearly identifies the region as Arab; nineteenth-century readers would usually have characterized Arabs as “Orientals” regardless of their country of origin. (For the sources of this poem, see Arnold 118–19.)
Similarly, the “Moollah” who seeks judgement in “The Sick King” enters the scene “with his robe/All rent, and dust in his hair” (ll. 31–32). While the king has been eating sherbets during the drought, the mullah and his family have suffered for lack of water to drink.
“The Sick King” is also one of only a very few Arnold poems that portray the transfer of wealth within the East. In the poem's opening scene, a group of “cloth-merchants” has arrived at court to pay their taxes to the King's vizier. Because the King requires his vizier's presence, the vizier must postpone the tax collection. He speaks to the merchants:
O merchants, tarry yet a day Here in Bokhara! But at noon, Tomorrow, come, and ye shall pay Each fortieth web of cloth to me, As the law is, and go your way. (ll. 5–9)
Clearly, wealth is to be transferred here according to specific, legislated, and well-understood rules. The medium for this transfer, however, is not money but goods.
In Models of Value, James Thompson argues that with the transformation of money into capital, “a semiological crisis [arises] over the concept of value,” whereby it becomes unclear whether money's value is located “in the signifier, in its referent, or in some signifying process that occurs in the act of exchange” (17). However, such a crisis of financial value has evidently not occurred for the merchants and government officials in Arnold's poem. To begin with, there is no discrepancy between the exchange value and the use value of the item being exchanged, since the cloth is valuable only in so far as it is usable. The cloth is principally a referent in which value resides; it functions only to a minimal degree as a signifier. The act of transfer (the merchants' payment of the cloth to the vizier as tax) may appear to separate the use value of the cloth from its exchange value, since the vizier is obviously not taking possession of the cloth in order to use it. This act of transfer also puts the cloth in the position of representing (signifying) the merchants' submission to law and to government authority. However, these two circumstances do not affect the value of the cloth in the way proposed by Thompson. Even for the vizier and his government, the value of the cloth must continue to reside in its usefulness, not in any ability to quantify wealth abstractly. In other words, the cloth continues to be value rather than to represent value (Thompson 77).
Thus while the cloth does in some respects fulfill what Michael Haupert terms the “three major functions of money”–“a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value” (16)–it is neither universal nor exclusive, as true money would be.8
Thompson's definition is relatively standard; compare for example Scott Meikle's four-part definition: “a store of wealth, a means of payment, a means of exchange, and a measure of value” (cited in La Blanc 371).
First, merchants of goods other than cloth would presumably be taxed accordingly, with a leather trader contributing one hide out of forty, a copper-ware dealer one tray or pot out of forty, and so on; cloth, therefore, does not work as a universal currency. Second, although these merchants pay tax in cloth, the King's wealth is measured in many other commodities as well; cloth is thus not an exclusive currency either. At most, the cloth's financial role corresponds to what Thompson, following Marx, delineates as the first stage of the development of money: “money…as a measure of accumulated labor or value” (32). It is clear that the cloth does not reach the second stage of money's development, where money functions “as a universal equivalent or medium of exchange, that is as price” (32). Certainly it does not function as capital, the third stage of money's development as described by Thompson. And most importantly, to the very limited extent that this cloth can be said to serve as money, its role is entirely incongruent with that of money as capital in nineteenth-century Britain. The financial conditions of Arnold's Bokhara are indeed much closer to those described by Marc Shell in
The Economy of Literature as a “barter economy,” in which “no commodity (not even gold) attains the status of money” (56).
“The Sick King in Bokhara” ends with the King's assertion that he will prepare the executed mullah for burial with his own hands and will bury him in his own royal tomb. Arnold thus presents the East as a moral refuge, a place in which wealth and “pity” (l. 226) are not mutually exclusive. If we now juxtapose this poem with Arnold's “Consolation,” we start to see more clearly the consequences of his depiction of indigenous Eastern economies as essentially barter economies in contradistinction to the European capitalist model. “Consolation” begins by detailing the speaker's dismal circumstances:
Mist clogs the sunshine, Smoky dwarf houses Hem me round everywhere; A vague dejection Weighs down my soul. (ll. 1–5)
The speaker then contrasts his outlook and situation with those of hypothetical figures in a range of Eastern locations. The first of these locations is, as so often, characterized by its wealth:
Far hence, in Asia, On the smooth convent-roofs, On the gilt terraces, Of holy Lassa, Bright shines the sun. (ll. 11–15)
This wealth (as usual, unconnected with money) is the predominant feature that distinguishes this hypothetical setting from its British counterpart, which is redolent of the sort of crowded, smoky, modern, urban poverty that develops in a Britain whose socioeconomic structure has become predicated upon the exchange of money as capital.
Thus the portrayal of Eastern economies as pre-capitalist–evident in both “Consolation” and “The Sick King”–is essential to Arnold's fantasy of the East as a moral and spiritual alternative to Europe. The roots of this fantasy are of course ancient; Cedric Watts traces back to classical Greek literature the assumption that “commerce” can spell the end of what he aptly titles “Golden Ages” (10–11). However, as “Consolation” shows, this assumption manifests itself during Victorian times in quite specific ways. Writers since Plato may have lamented the incursions of modern life, but as Antony Harrison argues persuasively, Arnold's particular version of “modern life” is “uniquely the effect of the industrial revolution” (30). Harrison analyzes Arnold's “The Scholar-Gipsy” in terms of “the work's engagement with the contemporary discourse of the Other,” explaining that “[t]he concluding stanzas of Arnold's poem do not merely replicate its escapist themes; they demonstrate a process of elision and imaginative transfiguration that Arnold may well have viewed as a prospective cure for this ‘strange disease of modern life’” (117). We can detect a similar process both in “Consolation,” which ends with a culturally relativist view of human experience and the value of wealth, and in “The Sick King,” which ends with the restoration of the king's spiritual health through a fusion of “pity” with wealth. In each case, Arnold's vision of intact non-European cultures becomes an essential component of the remedy he projects.
Tennyson's vision of Eastern economies is likewise central to his construction of the Orient as a haven from the pressures which dominate Victorian society. In “Locksley Hall” (1842), a poem famously based upon a classical Arabic model ('Imr al-Qais's Mu'allaqa), Tennyson's speaker fantasizes about taking refuge in “some retreat/Deep in yonder shining Orient” (ll. 153–54). He describes this retreat in terms of natural abundance and the absence of commerce and industry:
Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies, Breadths of tropic shade and palms in cluster, knots of Paradise.
Never comes the trader, never floats a European flag, Slides the bird o'er lustrous woodland, swings the trailer from the crag;
Droops the heavy-blossomed bower, hangs the heavy-fruited tree– Summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea.
There methinks would be enjoyment more than in this march of mind, In the steamship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake mankind. (ll. 159–66)
In this indigenous economy, goods are attained through individual labor, not through exchange, even barter:
Iron jointed, supple-sinewed, they shall dive, and they shall run, Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun;
Whistle back the parrot's call, and leap the rainbows of the brooks, Not with blinded eyesight poring over miserable book (ll. 169–72)
Two factors distinguish this self-contained oriental economy from the diffuse European one with which Tennyson contrasts it. First, the goods depicted (fruits and goats) have, as far as one can tell, only use value at a subsistence level. Second, the oriental economy does not involve any type of exchange or transfer of wealth; indeed, oriental wealth becomes defined at least partially in terms of its resistance to exchange. A number of critics including Catherine Gallagher have pointed out that a determination of value based on labor and use value will appear stable or even fixed, unlike one based on money and exchange value.
9 See Gallagher 137; see also Austin 76.
By depicting the indigenous economy of his fantasized East as grounded in labor and use value, Tennyson reaffirms the East as static and timeless, and therefore as an appropriately anti-modern refuge. He prepares for this section of “Locksley Hall” by outlining a disrupted, frantic, and uncertain vision of the future, in which the speaker
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue (ll. 121–24)
The vision ends with the encroachment of “a hungry people, as a lion creeping nigher” (l. 135). Indeed, the speaker's subsequent fantasy of “yonder shining Orient” serves as an apparently secure harbor primarily because of its total dissociation from the alienating and unsettled world of Victorian capitalism exemplified by all of the accoutrements of commerce: trading boats, steamships, railways, and account books.
Empire and Eastern Economies
IF, AS ADAM SMITH explains in The Wealth of Nations (1776), “money has become in all civilized nations the universal instrument of commerce” (28), the absence of money implies the absence of civilization.10
Compare Schoenhof's explanation of the history of English currency and commerce in his A History of Money and Prices (1896): “Henry III., in 1257, struck the first English gold coins, the gold pennies. He could not get them into circulation despite his stringent ordinances that made them legal tenders. England's commerce was in too backward a state to require such costly currency. A hundred years later, in 1344, when England had become somewhat more progressive, Edward III. had no difficulty in getting gold coins, the rose nobles, into circulation” (43). The header on this page reads “Primitive Civilizations.”
Contemporary critics tend to accept the same premise. Watts argues in Literature and Money (1990): “the more economically advanced the society, the more complex and sophisticated become its monetary arrangements. Indeed, that advance and the sophistication of the monetary system usually go hand in hand” (4). La Blanc acknowledges this linkage as conventional rather than intrinsic, but he does not dispute it: “Money and property rights are the constructed landmarks of a more modern social reality” (374).
By presenting Eastern economies as pre-capitalist and ascribing to commodities use value rather than exchange value, Arnold and Tennyson are in effect identifying such economies as “backward” or “primitive.” In a sense, such backwardness is privileged and valorized through the construction of the East as a refuge, but the implied rejection of modernity has other important–and less positive–political implications. If the economic systems of the Orient are somehow immune to progress over time, the population of these regions comes to appear incapable of more highly evolved economic activity. It is a commonplace that imperialist and colonialist ideologies often justify their self-serving policies in precisely these terms, contending that “primitive” regions require the guiding hand of the imperial power while they remain in a supposed condition of immaturity. Especially where the region in question is reputed to have such great wealth, its apparent inability to develop an advanced (capitalist) system to manage the movement of that wealth would leave it crying out for the paternalistic supervision of imperial rule. As Jürgen Osterhammel puts it in
Colonialism, “[t]he Asian was said not to be a ‘homo oeconomicus’ and might have to be coaxed into diligent prosperity” (109).
According to the image presented by Arnold and Tennyson, prospective European imperial rulers would have little reason to suppose that any indigenous form of government might legitimately or effectively contest imperial/colonial claims. Once again, the depiction of wealth is central, for the portrayals of oriental government are inextricable from those of oriental wealth within indigenous economic systems. In the first place, wealth is rarely held by private citizens. I observed earlier that gold is most often either an architectural ornament or an attribute of nature. But shrines, rivers, and the like are not normally property. If they are golden, that gold is obviously not subject to individual ownership as it would be if it were money. When gold or a golden object is owned, as it is by Arnold's Rustum and his King of Bokhara or by Tennyson's Haroun Alraschid, the owner is a head of state. The personal wealth of these leaders demonstrates the power of the state, not purchase power. Arnold's “The Sick King” does of course refer to private ownership of cloth, but this is wealth of a lower order than the gold and other riches depicted elsewhere as royal, architectural, or natural. Moreover, the cloth appears in the context of the merchants paying taxes to a representative of the head of state, whose political power and economic primacy are thereby simultaneously reaffirmed.
Given the linkage between these poets' depictions of Eastern government and their portrayals of Eastern wealth, one would expect that the “backward” economic systems that poets envision would correspond with “backward” forms of government. The Eastern governments depicted are indeed invariably simple forms of monarchy, forms that would appear “backward” by comparison with the British parliamentary monarchy of the nineteenth century. Such an apparently “primitive” government, however powerful in its own context, would seem incapable of real resistance to imperial subjugation. And since the private individuals depicted so seldom hold property in any substantial form, their claim to the right of participation in government would be weak at best according to British standards, where the franchise remained highly dependent on the possession of property even after the franchise Reform Bills of 1832 and (to a lesser extent) of 1867. In other words, from a British imperial perspective Easterners' evident lack of economic agency translates easily into a lack both of political agency for the population as a whole and of legitimacy for the head of state.
Speaking of the later nineteenth century, David Trotter argues that British gentlemen of the sort who participated in England's parliamentary government were backed not only by their personal fortunes but also “by racial gold,” “a national reserve of powers and qualities” (29).11
Cain and Hopkins make a complementary argument about “the ideals of gentlemanly capitalism” (26). See also Gorman's analysis of the role of “character” in the “construction of an imperial identity” (127).
By depicting heads of state as the only Easterners to hold property, Tennyson and Arnold imply that Easterners as a group lack just those “powers and qualities” which would enable them to develop and maintain a more “advanced,” representative (and English) system of government–very much as they lacked the traits required of the “homo oeconomicus” cited by Osterhammel. The inability of “Orientals” to generate English-style social, economic, and political structures would seem to leave the way wide open, both practically and ethically, for the imposition of British imperial control over the East.
12 Of course it did not always work out this way. Several of these poems show small-scale evidence of the sort of political structure that Cain and Hopkins describe as “large, antique, yet still death-defying.” The “indigenous authorities” at issue “could not be taken over without promoting internal disorder, incurring massive expense and risking international conflict” (397).
It is important in this context that there seems to be no significant difference between poetic treatments of countries (India, for instance) which were solidly embedded in the empire, and treatments of countries (modern Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, among others) which were at various times and to varying extents part of the informal empire. Virtually all of these poems show the economies and governments of the East through one lens, thereby (theoretically) exposing the informal empire to the same range of imperial practices as any part of the officially annexed empire. Thus even if these poems do not directly advocate for expansion, and in fact –by valorizing the East as anti-modern–instead argue implicitly for the preservation of an East untouched by external forces, they nevertheless establish some of the conceptual preconditions for imperial expansion.
It has often been presumed that a central aim (and consequence) of the British Empire was the advancement of British commercial interests. Scholarship in recent decades requires us to modify this view, however. D. K. Fieldhouse, for example, concludes that “[t]he link between economics and empire was not…necessary and immediate but coincidental and indirect” (464). Lance Davis and Robert Huttenback, whose Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire investigates the economic consequences of rather than the impetus for the Empire, demonstrate that “[t]he British as a whole certainly did not benefit economically from the Empire” (267). Davis and Huttenback conclude that “the Empire's development, at least in the political sphere, was largely unrelated to the search for economic profit” (240).13
Cain and Hopkins reach a similar conclusion (348, 336), as do Darby (65) and Doyle (339). Sen contests some of Davis and Huttenback's views, arguing for example that they draw insufficient attention to “the flow of investment income to Britain, a substantial amount of which was from [the dependent] colonies” (191). But even if Sen is right, Davis and Huttenback's main points–that the (limited) economic benefits of the empire were concentrated in certain segments of the population, and that the expansion of the empire cannot be ascribed solely to economic causes–still stand.
But whatever the facts of the matter, the view that the British imperial enterprise was (or at least could be) lucrative certainly predates the great expansion of the Empire and continues through the Victorian period; Davis and Huttenback cite references to this idea from 1828 onward (6–7).
I would propose that the British notion of empire as a source of wealth depends to a significant extent upon Britons' conception of economic and political conditions within the regions subject to imperialism. Although the poems I have discussed thus far either present the East as fundamentally other in relation to Europe (Arnold's “Consolation” and Tennyson's “Locksley Hall”) or situate the East entirely without reference to Europe, these poems develop a notion of oriental economies and governments that would support both the possibility and the legitimacy of British imperial, financial, and commercial engagement in the East. First of all, the material wealth (minerals, metals, textiles, crafts) of the East appears abundant; the possibilities for appropriation or other forms of exploitation of these resources are therefore enticing. In turn, the absence of “modern” governmental and economic structures implies that the East's resources can ethically and legitimately be claimed by non-indigenous agents, who could then be construed as tutors to the economically and politically naïve Easterners. If, as Cain and Hopkins argue, imperialism “was spearheaded…by gentlemanly elites who saw in empire a means of generating income flows in ways that were compatible with the high ideals of honour and duty” (46), the East's evident economic backwardness could enable a necessary point of contact between capitalist desire and the civilizing mission.
The East and Commercial Imperialism
AT THE START OF THIS ESSAY, I mentioned that certain of Arnold's and Tennyson's poems seem motivated more by contemporary imperial concerns than by Romantic-style orientalism. Unlike the poems I have already discussed, these poems–many of them of later date–do not present oriental regions as self-contained locales. Instead, the East appears well within the scope of empire. Moreover, rather than the closed indigenous economies we saw in poems such as Tennyson's “Locksley Hall” and Arnold's “The Sick King in Bokhara,” we find instead economies characterized principally in terms of their engagement with the commercial forces of empire. Tennyson is more likely than Arnold to laud such forces, but both poets consistently present the relationship between the center and the East in economic terms. Thus these poems tend to bear out the conjecture I offered above: that the perceived nature of Eastern economies, wealth, and systems of value supports the complex development of imperialist ideology during this time.
Arnold's view of the intersections between commerce and empire is characteristically skeptical. In “Sonnet to the Hungarian Nation” (1849), for example, he urges Hungary to model itself on classical Greece and “Save the world!” (l. 9), since there is no longer “any hope of heroism” (l. 8) “in rich England, bent but to make pour/The flood of the world's commerce on her shore” (l. 2–3).14
As McLaughlin points out, Victorians often used the term “commerce” derisively (171); see also Armstrong 226–27. However, it is significant that in both this poem and “A Southern Night,” the commerce (or “business”) so disdained is specifically international commerce in an imperial context.
Although he also condemns Spain, France, America, and Germany for various reasons, he accuses only England of international commercial greed. It is tempting in this context to read the poem as a partial response to lines near the end of James Thomson's play
Alfred: A Masque” (1740):
I see thy Commerce, Britain, grasp the world: All nations serve thee; every foreign flood Subjected, pays his tribute to the Thames. Thither the golden South obedient pours His sunny treasures: thither the soft East Her spices, delicacies, gentle gifts (qtd. Kaul 4)15
Alfred: A Masque was co-written with David Mallet and first performed at the order of the Prince of Wales. The play also contains the ode “Rule, Britannia!” (apparently Thomson's composition entirely); this famous poem does not so explicitly link commerce with imperial domination, although it addresses both. “On the Report of a Wooden Bridge” (1737), a more obscure poem attributed to Thomson, shares Alfred's concerns more closely and can also be easily read as a precursor to Arnold's sonnet. Written in the persona of the Thames, this poem expostulates:
Have I, ye merchants, with each swelling tide, Poured Afric's treasure in, and India's pride? Lent you the fruit of every nation's toil? Made every climate yours, and every soil? (ll. 7–10)
While the language here strongly resembles that of Arnold's sonnet, this section of
Alfred is distinguished by what Suvir Kaul calls its “aggressive commercial and naval expansionism” (4). Arnold not only presents a more moderate political perspective than Thomson, but also recasts the relationship between the imperial center and the periphery; whereas Thomson moves quickly to emphasize the supposedly voluntary contributions of the periphery, Arnold comments only on the aggressive intentions of the center.
Arnold offers a similarly critical look at British involvement in the East in a later poem, “A Southern Night” (1861). The speaker laments how “we English” (l. 61) pursue
Our business with unslackening stride, Traverse in troops, with care-filled breast, The soft Mediterranean side, The Nile, the East, And see all sights from pole to pole, And glance, and nod, and bustle by, And never once possess our soul Before we die. (ll. 65–72)
The poem thus presents a remarkable confluence of the commercial, political, and military aspects of the eastern British empire. The preservation of the empire and the pursuit of business appear inseparable. Like “Sonnet to the Hungarian Nation,” this poem does not even intimate the sort of independent existence for the East that a poem such as “The Sick King in Bokhara” assumes. Despite this difference, “A Southern Night” analyzes the human cost of the pursuit of wealth much the way “The Sick King” does; both poems set a higher value on moral and spiritual health than on any material wealth.
16 “A Southern Night” was written in memory of Arnold's brother William, who became ill in India and died after service first in the East India Company (1848–52) and then in the British imperial administration as Director of Public Instruction in the Punjab (1855–59); see Arnold 494–97. William Arnold's experience would no doubt have impressed upon his brother not only the connections between the economic and the political interests of the British empire, but also the price to be paid for the pursuit of those interests.
In this respect, it does not really matter that the wealth at issue here is based on an international transfer of goods rather than on the enrichment of a head of state within a closed economy. Yet it is only in the latter case that health can be restored; paradoxically, the “sick” King achieves spiritually and morally what the vigorously bustling English cannot. When read with “The Sick King” in this way, “A Southern Night” implies that once the East has been assimilated into the economy of the extended empire, it becomes incapable of serving as a refuge from the pressures of modern life.
That is, of course, very much the message of the above-mentioned section of Tennyson's “Locksley Hall.” But unlike “A Southern Night,” which remains regretful to the end, “Locksley Hall” concludes (albeit protesting perhaps too much) in favor of progress and modernity:
Forward, forward let us range, Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.
Through the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day: Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay. (ll. 181–84)
The East's appeal as a place of resort is overwhelmed finally by its detractions: squalor, savagery, primitiveness.
17 In keeping with Armstrong's argument, one can readily see “Locksley Hall” as one of Tennyson's several responses to Arthur Hallam's review of Tennyson's 1830 volume. If, as Armstrong proposes, “Hallam sees modern culture as inflicting a violent wound on ‘community of interest,’ implicitly because of the division of labour and economic competition–‘each for itself’” (61), Tennyson undermines the basis for Hallam's argument by construing premodern economic culture as inherently individualistic rather than communal; “each for itself” appears to apply even in the absence of any division of labor or economic competition (see my discussion above). Moreover, since the poem concludes that “the younger day,” whatever its faults, is clearly preferable to the premodernity nostalgically admired by Hallam, Tennyson's ambivalence about modernity becomes figured as a conversation between Hallam (via the speaker's earlier fantasy) and another persona (via the speaker's later change of heart). The conversation has no clear outcome; as Armstrong observes, “the problem with this poem is precisely its uncertainty of tone. Nothing enables one to see…whether the virulent bluster has a deconstructive moment” (96).
Given this negative response to the East as an economically independent entity, it should not surprise us that some of Tennyson's other poems advocate far more unapologetically (if defensively) than Arnold's for imperial exploitation of oriental wealth. For examples, I turn now to two later pieces by Tennyson: “Opening of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition by the Queen” (1886) and “To the Queen” (1873).
18 Despite the chronological distance from his early work, the politics of these later poems do not reflect any substantial change in outlook. In fact, Tennyson's views on empire appear consistent from the 1830's onward, as an examination of “Hail Briton” (written 1831–33) would show. The Romantic orientalist influence does rest more heavily on “Hail Briton” than on later poems of the same ilk; images such as the “ermined pall” (l. 10) and “golden keys” (l. 24) of “Hail Briton” are absent from both “Opening” and “To the Queen.” There is, however, no major corresponding shift in the political opinions articulated; neither Tennyson's appointment as poet laureate in 1850 nor his family connection with the empire (Kiernan 136, Tennyson 151) seems to have substantially affected his vision. For additional discussion of Tennyson's early and late orientalist interests in the context of imperialism, see McBratney's brief article “Rebuilding Akbar's ‘Fane’: Tennyson's Reclamation of the East.”
“Opening of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition” was composed for official purposes in Tennyson's capacity as poet laureate; the poem is subtitled “Written at the Request of the Prince of Wales.” It presents an unambiguous defense of British imperialism, which it justifies in terms of commerce first and national pride second. “Opening” begins:
Welcome, welcome with one voice! In your welfare we rejoice, Sons and brothers that have sent, From isle and cape and continent, Produce of your field and flood, Mount and mine, and primal wood; Works of subtle brain and hand, And splendours of the morning land, Gifts from every British zone; Britons, hold your own! (ll. 1–10)
Commercial activity here consists mainly of the export of raw materials “From isle and cape and continent” to Britain. Only line 7 (“Works of subtle brain and hand”) suggests any enterprise other than agriculture or mining.
19 Throughout much of the empire, agriculture and mining drew greater investment than any other sectors during the Victorian period (Davis and Huttenback 51).
Whereas the poems discussed in the earlier sections of this essay foreground precious metals and other luxury items, “Opening” replaces these Romantic emblems with more practical commodities, so that the East is de-Romanticized as it becomes commercialized. The idea that the East's wealth exists for the support of the empire–or perhaps that the empire exists to enable the collection of this wealth–is much more fully developed here even than in Arnold's “Sonnet to the Hungarian Nation” or “A Southern Night.” Still, the emphasis on the real material of wealth rather than on wealth as money is completely consistent with the depictions of Eastern wealth in both poets' earlier poems. So too is Tennyson's identification of the commodities in question as “Gifts” from “Sons and brothers,”
20 In the context of the poem as a whole, it seems most likely that these “Sons and brothers” are the Britons transplanted to India and the other colonies, not the indigenous inhabitants of those regions.
for by disguising the commercial nature of the transfer of goods these terms suggest that somehow the Orient has retained an element of its pre-capitalist identity. Yet the colonies appear fully (if not securely) integrated into the supposedly familial structure of the Empire; as in Arnold's “A Southern Night,” the East here, however pre-modern, certainly no longer qualifies as a place of refuge.
Pursuing the familial metaphors that reveal the same “passionate concern with inheritance, genealogy and degeneration” that Isobel Armstrong identifies elsewhere in Tennyson's work (277), the subsequent stanza of “Opening” elaborates the m/paternalistic relationship between England and its colonial “son[s]” (l. 12). England's past failure to retain control over one of these sons, the North American colonies, is lamented in the third stanza, as the speaker vows that such “careless[ness]” must “never more” be repeated (ll. 22–23). The poem's final stanza makes a plea for the perpetual continuation of the empire:
Sharers of our glorious past, Brothers, must we part at last? Shall we not through good and ill Cleave to one another still? Britain's myriad voices call, ‘Sons, be welded each and all, Into one imperial whole, One with Britain, heart and soul! One life, one flag, one fleet, one Throne!’ Britons, hold your own! (ll. 31–40)
So a poem which begins by characterizing the empire in terms of the transfer of resources and commodities from the colonies to the center ends by defining the same empire in terms of military and political power (“one fleet, one Throne”). To extricate the wealth of the East from the East's power relationship with the imperial center is clearly as impossible in this poem as it was in Arnold's “A Southern Night.” The idea of the East as a self-contained entity and a refuge from contemporary economic pressures is entirely repressed. Instead, the assimilation and retention of the Orient into the empire begin–as they never really do in Arnold's poems–to appear as a potential solution to contemporary difficulties, both economic and political.
21 Tennyson's outlook is not especially unusual in this respect. Klaver describes in Dickens's Dombey and Son, for instance, a similar tendency to see the empire as a solution to economic troubles on the domestic scene (126).
Following Benedict Anderson and others, Colin Graham explains that “[a]n empire…confuses the definition of nation. What tended inward is washed against by an insistent ‘outside’, seeping in, undermining the stability of notional cultural unity” (2; see also 16). Although Graham makes the case that Tennyson contends with such confusion most intensely in
Idylls of the King, it is clear that “Opening”–along with “To the Queen,” as we shall see–is also entangled in this confusion. In both poems, Tennyson's solution seems to be to gather the entire empire into an inclusive “Britain” or “England”; in effect, he is redefining empire as nation.
22 Examining Tennyson's use of Arthurian legend, Kiernan offers a parallel argument: “From Camelot he judged his own England, and found it wanting. From the vantage point of empire he could admire and applaud his England, and reassure himself that beneath all appearances it was still inwardly sound” (145).
The structure that produces and maintains the nation, the “one imperial whole” (“Opening” l. 37), is first and foremost that of commerce, and specifically of the movement of commodities from the imperial periphery to the center.
Tennyson's “To the Queen” was printed as the epilogue to Idylls of the King, a text that Marion Shaw characterizes as “an imperial dream” (160). “To the Queen” begins by rejecting the idea that England should relinquish her Canadian colony to spare the cost. “Is this the tone of empire? here the faith/That made us rulers?” (ll. 18–9), the horrified speaker asks. He asserts instead popular devotion to the empire, both in England and in the colonies:
The loyal to their crown Are loyal to their own far sons, who love Our ocean-empire with her boundless homes For ever-broadening England, and her throne In our vast Orient (ll. 27–31)
Like “Opening,” “To the Queen” emphasizes the political unity of the empire and premises that unity on commercial advantage for the center; Britain, the speaker proclaims, becomes “wealthier–wealthier–hour by hour!” (l. 23). Thus here as in “Opening,” Tennyson evidently sees the colonies' enrichment of England as a foundation of the British empire and as a reason for its continuation in perpetuity. The cost to British taxpayers for the defense and other subsidies of the empire was of course substantial (Davis and Huttenback 265–66). But whatever the administrative and military expense of retaining the colonies, Tennyson seems to argue, the commercial advantages will be sure to exceed it.
23 Tennyson seems not to have been aware that the costs were incurred by one segment of the population (middle-class taxpayers) while the benefits accrued to another (upper-class investors).
It may be useful to recall here Susan Brown's view, mentioned above, that Victorian culture exhibits “a confusion in the role of gold…, as on the one hand a sign of intrinsic value or virtue, and on the other, as part of a system of exchange” (94). Whereas the poems discussed in the first sections of this essay privileged gold as “a sign of intrinsic value or virtue,” we see that this poem, along with “Opening of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition by the Queen,” takes the opposing position; commodities are far less important in themselves than “as part of a system of exchange”–in this case, a system that is specifically imperial.
By directing these two poems to the titular head of government, the Queen, Tennyson emphasizes their function as statements of an idealized British policy. Although his rather chauvinistic posture is not fully aligned with Arnold's more considered and ambivalent judgement, he uses essentially the same terms as Arnold to explore the economics of the British empire. Both poets imagine the empire as a site for the pursuit of commercial as much as of political or military interests. The notion of a wealthy but money-less Orient is fundamental to this vision of empire. Following Edward Said, Marion Shaw has proposed that the “commercial empire” in Victorian times “involved a global spread of English values which depended for their existence on the identification and denigration of differences in those who were not English” (159). However, this is not simply a matter of the “identification and denigration of differences” in general. As I have shown in this essay, it is essential that, in particular, the pre-existing indigenous economies and governments of the formal and informal parts of the empire be understood as both different and inferior, both un-English and primitive. Arnold's and Tennyson's portrayal of Eastern cultures as wealthy societies without money provides the conceptual foundation for their depiction of the British Empire as not only a political but also a commercial enterprise.
As I have suggested, this strategy ably serves the interests of imperialism, whether intentionally or not. Thomas Richards proposes in The Imperial Archive that the “imagery for empire” originates in the Romantic period, and that “[t]he Victorian contribution was simply to reformulate this project as explicitly imperial and redeploy the stock imagery of Romanticism to serve the end and aims of Empire” (7). It is important, however, to situate wealth and value as focal points within this “imagery of empire,” and to understand how this particular linkage between economics and empire in poetry is largely a product of the Victorian period. To look at Tennyson's or Arnold's orientalism without taking the problematic representation of Eastern wealth into account is to ignore a fundamental aspect of the ideology of Victorian imperialism. Wealth appears as a pivotal point of linkage between two conflicting sets of ideals: one which is fundamentally nostalgic and which relies on a vision of an anti-modern Orient as a haven; and another which is instead mainly progressive and positions the East as a component of empire. Although we can readily associate the nostalgic view with Romanticism, it clearly retains some potency even late into the Victorian period, infiltrating to various degrees the more progressive stance that we conventionally identify with Victorian imperialism.
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