In the opening chapter of Lisa Lowe's astonishing new book, The Intimacies of Four Continents, we are directed to an archived document titled “Secret Memorandum from the British Colonial Office to the Chairman of the Court of Directors of the East India Company.” Writing in 1803, just as the Haitian Revolution was ending, a British colonial administrator named John Sullivan penned the memorandum in support of introducing Chinese indentured workers to the island of Trinidad. Arguing for such measures, Sullivan suggested that the Chinese could not only provide a reliable labor population, but also contribute to the stabilization of the island by serving as a barrier between black slaves and the white British landowners. Sullivan's plan came to fruition after the British slave trade ended in 1807, when a British ship named Fortitude transported Chinese laborers to the West Indies for the first time. Reading the process by which a slave revolt in Haiti motivated the decision to import workers from China as a type of “intimacy,” Lowe forges the kind of connection between the people of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe that stands as the defining feature of her book. She writes that the intimacies of four continents have become “a way to discuss the coeval global processes of settler colonialism, slavery, and imported colonial labor, as the conditions for British and American national formations for liberty, liberal personhood, society, and government at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries” (21).

Lowe's historical investigation into the formation of modern liberalism is divided into five interrelated chapters. Aside from the staggering amount of research required for each chapter, what is most evident and intriguing is the profoundly dialectical nature of her thinking. In chapter 1, mentioned above, she unites the histories of slave labor with “free” Asian labor to reveal how the concept of freedom was a necessary component to early nineteenth-century “racial governmentality” (24). In chapter 2, she demonstrates linkages between Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano and Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, arguing that both embody, in radically different ways, the liberal philosophy of self-sufficiency and freedom through personal industry. Equiano's implication in the discourses of liberalism is further explored through an examination of the conclusion of his autobiography, where he connects the abolition of slavery with the development of free trade and labor. Chapter 3 similarly binds a written aesthetic form to the material world by examining the abundant descriptions of commodities in William Thackeray's Vanity Fair. By tracing the production of commodities like tea, cotton, and silks, the romantic intimacy of the English family is connected with slave labor in the US, weaving and textile design in Asia, and trading in East India and China.

Lowe's most fundamental observation, visible throughout these chapters, is that modern liberalism (free trade, democracy, personal industry) and all of its philosophical underpinnings are tied dialectically with their apparent opposites of colonialism and slavery. Chapter 4 explores this point in depth by tracing the development of “liberal government” in the writings of John Stuart Mill and British colonial administrators, as well as in the ordinances and practices of the colonial government of Hong Kong (107). In these documents, Lowe finds a shift in British governing practices whereby the early nineteenth-century model of territorial conquest and occupation was superseded (although never entirely replaced) by a focus on managing and enlightening the population. Mill in particular was an important figure in this shift toward liberal governmentality, for he emphasized the necessity of educating a population and controlling it through force in order to establish beneficial conditions for free trade. Although her argument is not framed as such, in this chapter Lowe narrates the emergence of modern biopower throughout the British Empire, rather than in Europe as did Michel Foucault.

Given the Foucauldian nature of her analyses, and the dominance of Foucault's vocabulary – biopower, archive, governmentality, genealogy, discourse – it might seem odd to speak as I have done in terms of the dialectic, a concept most often reserved for a different tradition. But in an intriguing surprise, yet another unsettling intimacy, Lowe focusses in the final chapter on Hegel and Marx and their link to C. L. R. James and W. E. B. Du Bois. In her understanding, both James and Du Bois engage in an immanent critique of dialectical history, which involves appropriating the form of the dialectic but rejecting or exposing the limits of its traditional content: Hegel is thus repudiated for having designated Europe the most developed expression of Spirit while excluding Africa from history entirely, while Marx is critiqued for conceiving of slavery as a precapitalist form rather than an essential component of capitalism. Lowe evidently takes a stance on Marx and Hegel that is similar to James's and Du Bois's, and it is precisely this immanently critical relationship that makes her work energizing.

Readers may find that some of these wide-ranging theoretical, historical, and cultural intimacies feel forced, as if Lowe were attempting to bring two like magnetic poles together. But at these moments it is less important to criticize her scholarship and more important to realize, as she does, that our sense of disconnection is the consequence of being trained too well in singular national histories and isolated theoretical traditions. In turn, such a feeling should confirm the absolute necessity of Lowe's efforts to combat that very sense of fragmentation by revealing what has always already been part of a heterogeneous totality.

Needless to say, a book so interested in joining the seemingly unconnected can only produce problems for our concepts of academic disciplines. The Intimacies of Four Continents comes categorized as “global humanities,” as “world literature,” and as “postcolonial theory,” all of which prove to be both accurate and not. I would argue that this book transcends the many hermeneutical categories that are regularly used to describe the kind of scholarship it pursues, including the “transnational” and the “post-national.” Moreover, this book seems to have no intention of presenting itself as a field-changing paradigm or as a reproducible analytic. “To write about the intimacies of four continents,” Lowe explains, “is thus intended to open an investigation, and to contribute a manner of reading and interpretation, and not to identify an empirical foundation or establish a new historical object” (21). Her contribution is conceived of as one piece of a larger collective effort to unite disparate struggles and histories. For scholars in American studies, this book might best be read as an invitation to participate in that undertaking.