I

By the time Stevenson published The Wrecker, the success of Haggard's King Solomon's Mines and She (1887) and their subsequent imitators had established the imperial romance as a flourishing and easily recognizable popular genre. Drawing on a range of literary forebears – notably the classical epic, the medieval quest romance, and Walter Scott's historical romances – these narratives were typically organized around a British male protagonist or group of adventurers tasked with a dangerous colonial quest. In the course of such plots, the imperial romance typically staged a racialized contrast between its British heroes and the savage population inevitably surrounding them, foregrounding violent action – what Andrew Lang described as “the love of adventure, and of mystery, and of a good fight” (104) – rather than the psychological development of character, at the same time as representing the penetration of an unknown, exotic, and dangerous colonial terrain.Footnote ³ It is something of a truism that the political exigencies of the New Imperialism can be seen playing out at a thematic level in these narratives of African exploration and exploitation, with their unhesitating evocation and legitimation of the expansion of British sovereignty, capitalism, and cultural influence, but in one of the most compelling recent accounts of the genre Franco Moretti has further argued that the formal qualities of the genre also reflect this environment. Most evidently, he contends, its linear plots mimic “the single, one-dimensional line that has been the standard sign of African explorations in map after map”:

In this view, the romance reflects and normalizes the extractive logic of “redirecting the local economy outwards: towards the sea, the metropolis, the world market” (61). It also mystifies that economic logic by replacing the brutal realities of commodity extraction with a quest for treasure, whereby “the bloody profits of the colonial adventure are sublimated into an aesthetic, almost self-referential object,” whether diamonds or an exotic lover (62). Yet if the success of Haggard and his imitators leads Moretti to assume that such an analysis is readily generalizable across all zones of Victorian imperial endeavor, his underlying assertion of an intrinsic relationship between spatiality and form raises the possibility that a reconfiguration of the genre and its ideological commitments might be enabled by a markedly different geographic environment and colonial context.

Both The Ebb-Tide and The Wrecker display a clear family resemblance to these earlier African romances. Indeed, during the last decades of the century, the “main zones of competitive land-grabbing were . . . in Africa and Oceania” (Hobsbawm 68), and the novels accordingly offer tales of British and American adventurers faced with quests in exotic colonial spaces that promise enrichment and excitement. Yet if the narratives that ultimately eventuate in this imperial zone “read like botched romances in which adventure turns sour or squalid” (Brantlinger 239), it is important to recognize that this thematic turn is matched by a number of formal divergences from genre norms. These include markedly discontinuous and non-linear plots; Euro-American characters whose development is similarly discontinuous if not static, as well as falling short of gentlemanly ideals; multiple geographic settings; sporadic and unpredictable outbursts of violence between European characters; and a persistent interest in the trading ship and the volatile consequences of financial speculation. In a related example, Jed Esty's account of the late Victorian and early Modernist colonial Bildungsroman stresses the parallel between representations of “unseasonable” colonial youth and “the dilated/stunted adolescence of a never-quite modernized periphery” (415). Yet whereas the examples canvassed by Esty foreground the temporal thematics of “failed or postponed modernization” (416), Stevenson's concern with the romance is in the first instance spatial in nature. In contrast to the linearity of the African romance, set within the territorial horizon of a single nation's imperial interests, The Ebb-Tide and The Wrecker are framed by a denationalized maritime environment in which a multiplicity of overlapping trading routes are both connected to and destabilized by specific island sites of primitive accumulation.Footnote ⁴

It is important to recognize, however, that prior to providing Stevenson with a particular subject matter, the physical and cultural environment of the Pacific enabled him to undertake a certain kind of spatialized thinking about empire and trade. The emergence of this new perspective can be glimpsed in the posthumous travelogue In the South Seas (1896), which recounts the voyages that Stevenson initially took in the region during 1888–89. Constructed around the itinerary of these journeys, the structure of South Seas itself mimics Stevenson's overriding conception of the region as a vast and heterogeneous archipelagic entity:

This general impression of a vast, uneven geography is overlaid in South Seas with a more granular sense that each island group also constitutes a distinct culture or “new province of creation” (157; part 2, ch. 1). As a consequence, the traversal of that discontinuous space is presented as being inseparable from an encounter with cultural difference. At the same time, Stevenson's account is also highly conscious of the homogenizing effects of the English language and British culture that were actively reshaping the region:

The version of the “South Sea islands” offered in this work thus finds the Pacific's spatial heterogeneity mirrored in its cultural complexity, which encompasses an archipelago of different indigenous cultures, as well as “places where the encounters between Westerners and indigenous peoples created ‘hybrids’ that were neither completely European nor completely native” (Colley 872), and the homogenizing forces of imperial trade and the English language. Crucially, Stevenson was also predisposed to understand and narrate this spatialized experience of diversity in terms that were simultaneously temporal in nature.

Stevenson's intellectual inheritance from the anthropological thought of the Scottish Enlightenment, mediated in particular by the novels of Scott, is nowhere more apparent in South Seas than in his readiness to liken the traversal of geographic space to travelling through time. According to the “four stages” theory of sociocultural development, most influentially articulated by Adam Smith and John Millar, the territory occupied by a particular society existed in a discrete stage of historical development, in accordance with its mode of subsistence (Meek 99–130). This spatiotemporal notion of uneven development was powerfully disseminated throughout nineteenth-century British literary culture by Walter Scott's Waverley novels (Chandler 131), and Stevenson imported this historiographical sensibility to Samoa along with Scott's complete works.Footnote ⁵ Hence, in the opening chapter of South Seas, the pre-Westernized Pacific is introduced as promising a zone of cultural purity because it exists in a different temporality to the west:

This stadialist approach to the region is also evident in Stevenson's tendency to draw parallels between Pacific Islanders and Highland Scots. “It was . . . important that I had enjoyed in my youth some knowledge of our Scots folk of the Highlands and the Islands,” he notes in South Seas; “Not much beyond a century has passed since these were in the same convulsive and transitionary state as the Marquesans of to-day. In both cases an alien authority enforced, the clans disarmed, the chiefs deposed, new customs introduced, and chiefly that fashion of regarding money as the means and object of existence” (12; part 1, ch. 2). The sentiments of this passage resemble those expressed in the concluding chapter to Waverley (1814), in which Scott reflects on the “complete . . . change” experienced in Scotland since the Jacobite rising of 1745, including the “destruction of the patriarchal power of the Highland chiefs” and Highlands “manners and customs,” which he attributes largely to the “gradual influx of wealth, and extension of commerce” (340; ch. 71). Such moments therefore need to be seen not just as a coping mechanism, a “strategy of assimilating the strange to the familiar” (Edmond 163), or as a means to “occasionally eradicate the presumed differences between the two societies and even defy or subvert confidence in colonial authority” (Colley 871), but as drawing on a well-worn anthropological model for framing and comprehending the dynamics of imperial encounter that had long been assimilated by the romance.

This stadialist model of understanding cultural difference in spatiotemporal terms also provided a powerful structuring logic for Haggard and other imperial romancers. In Anne McClintock's influential description, texts such as King Solomon's Mines are founded upon the idea of “anachronistic space,” where the “journey into the interior is, like almost all colonial journeys, figured as a journey forward in space but backward in time” (242). About halfway through The Wrecker, with its narrator about to enter the Pacific, Stevenson also appears to signal the beginning of yet another imperial quest across a spatiotemporal frontier into primitive colonial space. Its protagonists, Jim Pinkerton and Loudon Dodd, have purchased the rights to the wreck of the Flying Scud for an exorbitant price on the assumption that it is full of opium, and Dodd is consequently tasked with recovering it from a tiny and unimaginably isolated Pacific atoll. Standing at the San Francisco docks, he is captivated by the journey's imaginative possibilities:

Dodd's expectations recapitulate the opening gesture of South Seas and raise the reader's own expectations of a narrative exploration of “anachronistic space,” yet what is ultimately most remarkable about this promise of a glimpse “into zones unromanised” is how completely the novel fails to deliver on it. As Rod Edmond comments with equal truth about The Ebb-Tide, and in contrast to South Seas, “Islanders figure hardly at all” (180). Put another way, if even “admirers” of The Ebb-Tide “must concede it to be uneven” (Fowler 116), the unevenness animating both novels has surprisingly little to do with the comparativist stadial model so evident in South Seas. Instead, crossing into the “unromanised” Pacific paradoxically inaugurates what, in the words of one contemporary reviewer, is better described as a “romance of the modern” (qtd. in Maixner 462). In these fictions, the Pacific setting is used to foreground trade and speculation among Americans and Europeans, turning away from the stadialist norms of the imperial romance to portray a vision of capitalist modernity as itself fundamentally fractured, discontinuous, uneven.

II

Once in the Pacific, Stevenson became increasingly convinced that the region was uniquely suited to offer a window onto the workings of modern capitalism. “I do begin to know something of life in the XIXth century,” he wrote in a letter during the writing of The Wrecker, “which no novelist either in France or England seems to know much of” (Booth and Mehew 7: 192). The conviction of such an insight is evident throughout that novel, which Stevenson describes in its epilogue as “full of the need and the lust of money, so that there is scarce a page in which the dollars do not jingle; full of the unrest and movement of our century, so that the reader is hurried from place to place and sea to sea” (370; epilogue). The uneven contours of a modernity characterized by the unsettling effects of trade and capital came into focus for Stevenson, I suggest, in large part because his settlement in Samoa coincided with the establishment in 1889 of the island group as a “tridominium,” a unique example of a joint British, German, and United States protectorateship under nominal indigenous rule.Footnote ⁶ This “multi-national” form of western expansion is at the center of Stevenson's other major non-fiction Pacific work, A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa (1892), an account of imperial maneuverings and indigenous resistance there during the 1880s. Near its beginning, he offers a description of the multinational zone of the “Eleele Sa, the ‘Forbidden Soil’ or Neutral Territory” (24; ch. 2) that had been established in the Samoan capital:

Such an imperial environment differs markedly from the more familiar example of the extractive colony dominated by a single power, and it demonstrated in microcosm something of the nature of western penetration of the region as a whole. Tridominium constituted a rare formalization of a more general trend for national interests to be layered and overlapping in the archipelagic geography of the Pacific, where islands were increasingly linked and reshaped by maritime trading networks serving private or multinational interests.

As Footnote to History attests, trade was the lens through which Stevenson consistently viewed and comprehended the European presence in the Pacific. On the one hand, he portrays trading firms as the vanguard for national imperial interests. “[T]he island is seen to bear its signature” (29; ch. 2), Stevenson observes of the enormous Samoan plantations of the German DHPG, and its vast commercial interests equate to a proportionate political significance:

On the other hand, specific national origins and interests are frequently blurred in Stevenson's commercial Pacific.Footnote ⁷South Seas recounts a visit to Nuka-hiva (Nuku Hiva) in the Marquesas, an entrepôt comprising “a handful of whites of varying nationality, mostly French officials, German and Scottish merchant clerks, and the agents of the opium monopoly” (71; part 1, ch. 8). Tellingly, the same space of “varying nationality” is also the setting for the opening chapter of The Wrecker, which presents the “yarn of Loudon Dodd” to an audience of “various English, Americans, Germans, Poles, Corsicans, and Scots” (3, 11; prologue). This audience is not so much divided along national lines as abstracted from them, and in the place of the nation they are united by trade.

The main characters of The Ebb-Tide and The Wrecker have all abandoned their nations for a maritime world of morally dubious trade and speculation. The former novel begins, “Throughout the island world of the Pacific, scattered men of many European races and from almost every grade of society carry activity and disseminate disease” (123; ch. 1), and it relates the erratic movements and actions of three “scattered” agents of capitalism's destructively homogenizing spread: the English protagonist, Robert Herrick, alias Hay; Davis, alias Brown, an American; and the cockney Huish. The first part, the “Trio,” begins in Papeete with the three being given command of the schooner Farallone, “hundred and sixty tons register, out of ‘Frisco for Sydney, in California champagne” (146; ch. 3), whose white crew has died of smallpox. Hoping at first to sell the champagne themselves, they realize too late it is almost entirely a cargo of bottled water, and they have inherited a transnational insurance scam that is essentially worthless. The second part, the “Quartette,” begins when they stumble upon a mysterious island where the ominous Attwater is running a secret pearl-diving operation as a “business, and a colony, and a mission” (204; ch. 8). The Wrecker similarly centers on commerce and speculation, but employs an even broader canvas as it follows the erstwhile artist Loudon Dodd and the entrepreneur Jim Pinkerton across the United States, France, Britain, and the Pacific. It begins with an account of Dodd's disenchanting education in an American “commercial college” that offered a “simulacrum of a market”:

After failing to succeed in Paris as a sculptor, Dodd eventually relocates to San Francisco to become Pinkerton's clerk in his various business ventures. “I could never fathom the full extent of his speculations,” Dodd reflects, “No dollar slept in his possession; rather, he kept all simultaneously flying, like a conjurer with oranges” (84, 85; ch. 7). One of these interests is speculation in “wrecks and condemned vessels,” which through legal sleight of hand “found their way to sea again under aliases, and continued to stem the waves triumphantly enough under the colours of Bolivia or Nicaragua” (85; ch. 7). This interest climaxes in the disastrous wager of their entire business empire on the Flying Scud, wrecked on the “God-forsaken spot, that Midway Island” (229; ch. 17); hoping that it is full of opium, they instead discover it to have been the scene of a massacre perpetrated by its crew in defense of the wealth earned on their own speculative voyage. Rather than suggesting these erratic characters and their risky acts are licensed or triggered by proximity to primitive cultures, both novels attribute these qualities to the forces of trade and investment that emanate in the west but prove to be most visible far from the metropolis.Footnote ⁸

Stevenson's critical vision of empire, organized around the intersection of geography, modernity, and capitalism, can be helpfully clarified by reference to David Harvey's theories of uneven geographic development. Whereas the dominant Marxist understanding of uneven and combined development employs a critical model of stadial difference in charting the coexistence of differing modes of production within a distinct historical period,Footnote ⁹ Harvey's model of uneven development emphasizes the forms of spatial unsettlement produced by capitalism itself. Capitalism renders inherently unstable any space it encompasses, he argues, because of an innate tension between the constant drive to expand into new regions and the need to invest in fixed locations: “Economic growth under capitalism is, as Marx usually dubs it, a process of internal contradictions which frequently erupt as crises. Harmonious or balanced growth under capitalism is, in Marx's view, purely accidental because of the spontaneous and chaotic nature of commodity production under competitive capitalism” (238). These “internal contradictions” can only be solved temporarily by geographic expansion, and imperialism constitutes the paradigmatic “spatial fix,” as Harvey terms it, initially relieving these internal pressures by opening up new territories for capital accumulation only for those colonized spaces to then fall victim to the same chaotic forces. Building on this account, Neil Smith has argued that the period from 1898 to 1917 inaugurated an ongoing era of uneven geographic development as the Great Powers effectively finished incorporating the whole world within the capitalist system. This “victory of geo-economic over geopolitical power” (187), marked by a shift in imperial activity from territorial control to dominance over markets, necessitates a different account of uneven development than that grounded in stadial difference: “Unevenness now primarily emanated from the laws of capital themselves rather than from the archaeology of past social and geographical difference” (186). Stevenson's Pacific romances capture something of this emerging globalized economy and its inherently contradictory and unsettling character. Indeed, I shall suggest that it is precisely because of his insights into what would later be called uneven geographic development that Stevenson's attempts to portray the Pacific “realistically” took the form not of realism but of romance.

III

Most commentaries tend to relate the discontinuous, non-progressive plotting of The Wrecker and The Ebb-Tide to Stevenson's portrayal of imperial character. Rod Edmond, for example, describes The Wrecker as “a novel whose loose, meandering, improvisational structure expresses perfectly the shifting, opportunistic and illusory aspirations of its characters” (179). Yet such narrative structures also function to rob the romance, and the speculative behavior it recounts, of the teleological drive that Moretti points out is fundamental to the genre and its imperial ideology. The uneven plotting of The Wrecker is in the first instance intrinsically related to the story's repeated geographic transitions: it begins in a comic-satiric mode, moving from Dodd's capitalist education in America, to his time in Paris studying art, to Pinkerton's speculative partnership with Dodd in San Francisco; it then opens into a markedly more sensational mode, with Dodd's frantic voyage to the wreck of the Flying Scud, his subsequent pursuit of one of the wreck's crew to Britain and France, and the tale he eventually hears of the mysterious ship's origins in Australia as The Currency Lass. The parts of The Ebb-Tide are even more misaligned in geographic terms, with one reviewer describing the transition between the seafaring story (the Trio) and the subsequent island adventure (the Quartette) as “abrupt and painful” (qtd. in Maixner 456). Even within the Trio, any narrative drive is circumvented by the aimless oceanic wanderings of the Farallone after Davis and Huish become permanently drunk on the champagne they think comprises its entire cargo, an outcome that is in turn revealed to be a repetition of the actions of the previous, ill-fated European crew. The Trio comes to a halt when the indigenous crew spies an island in the so-called Dangerous Archipelago, described in South Seas as a region where “navigation [is] so beset with perils” that “insurance offices exclude it from their field” (158; part 2, ch. 1), so that the Quartette commences in the midst of this uneven spatial environment.

Stevenson's broken plots build on this general sense of aimless mobility to portray a vision of capitalist modernity as unable to homogenize and rationalize imperial space. Instead, they emphasize the ability of violence and disease to break out spontaneously and unpredictably at the island nodes of the trading network. Two of the most remarkable scenes in The Wrecker describe eruptions of violence on the stranded trading vessel, the Flying Scud. The first is a brutal massacre of seabirds, attracted by the cargo of rice jettisoned onto the deck during the “fury” (208; ch. 15) of Dodd's search for the opium:

The second scene, which reveals the truth of the wreck, further underscores the inseparability of such atavistic behavior from the speculative “gold hunt.” After a successful trading foray among the islands, the crew of the Currency Lass had been stranded on Midway Island with a “chest of bills and specie [that] dominated the mind like a cathedral” (330; ch. 23), and the captain of the Flying Scud demands that treasure in exchange for their rescue. The marooned speculators respond by slaughtering him and his entire crew:

These episodes on a deserted island in the very center of the Pacific, at latitude 0º, ironically attest that Dodd's initial hope of a glimpse into “zones unromanised” has only served to reveal something of the instability and brutality of capitalist modernity as it manifests itself on the frontier. That is, while Midway Atoll might appear to be a world away in geographic, temporal, and cultural terms from the Midwestern “commercial college” where Dodd's education began, the geographic and thematic movements charted by The Wrecker ultimately intersect at the zero point of the Pacific in such a way that the novel suggests these violent acts must be seen as nothing less than another “simulacrum of a market.” “Stevenson's proposal,” Watson argues, is that “the true mechanisms of the centres of civilisation can be most clearly discerned out here on the open margins of the new world. This is not a frontier ethic, in other words, but a fair reflection of what lies at home, in London, Paris or New York” (118). The nature of the frontier under late imperial capitalism, however, is addressed most directly in The Ebb-Tide.

The Dangerous Archipelago, where Attwater's island is located, is typical of all the islands in The Ebb-Tide in having been “swept that year from east to west by devastating smallpox” (169–70; ch. 5). This might seem to symbolize trade's relentlessly efficient spread across the region, yet rather than portraying the homogeneous blanketing of the Pacific in infection, the wave-like movements of disease in the novel appear erratic and inexplicable. Herrick, reflecting on “the doom that seemed to brood upon the schooner” after its crew died of smallpox, experiences a “horror that was almost superstitious” (170; ch. 5); Attwater, contemplating the virtual extermination of his workforce by smallpox, invokes “the angel of the Lord [who] smote them and they were not” (204; ch. 8). These supernatural explanations seem well-suited to what Harvey terms the “spontaneous and chaotic” colonial landscape created by trade, but the transition from the Trio to the Quartette at first appears to leave such concerns behind, as the novel abandons its broad archipelagic perspective to focus on a bounded space of primitive accumulation. Despite the impact of disease, Attwater's island appears otherwise immune to the chaos of the wider region. The highly ordered state of the island, which resembles “a substantial country farm with its attendant hamlet” (189; ch. 7), stands as a kind of “spatial fix” to the internal contradictions of capitalism exemplified by the wandering Farallone and its vacillating crew. The stability that Attwater offers to characters “deficient in consistency and intellectual manhood” (125; ch. 1) is most evident in Davis's conversion to his fundamentalist brand of Christianity and subsequent decision to remain on the island. Yet what The Ebb-Tide makes clear throughout is that the “peace” (252; ch. 12) and order of what is a slave colony in all but name are only sustained by Attwater through the “living force that dwelt in him, like fire in flint” (192; ch. 7), ready to break out as violence at any moment. What comes to the fore, in other words, is the sheer artificiality of Attwater's island regime. The island's apparent promise that trade will bring stability is denaturalized through its clear dependence on force, reinscribing The Ebb-Tide's critique of the disruptive, damaging, and unpredictable effects of trade and investment on the frontier of empire.

All these observations lead back to the centrality of genre choice to Stevenson's critique. The self-consciousness of his use of the romance to think about imperial trade is made explicit in The Wrecker through Pinkerton's captivation with the “romance of business” (164; ch. 11), that is, with the fluctuations of profit and loss that galvanize the world market:

In both novels, Stevenson puts the romance to analytical use. Rather than employing a more realist mode, with its underlying commitment to homogeneous space and time, the romance offered Stevenson an appropriate form for a “realistic,” critical portrayal of the unevenness produced by Pacific capitalism. Ayşe Çelikkol has argued that early Victorian portrayals of free trade draw on the romance because its pre-modern roots enable it to represent “expansive space and nonnationalized identity” (39). Originating in forms that predate the nation and the realist novel,Footnote ¹⁰ the romance remains capable of exceeding and resisting the commitment to bounded territorial order they have in common. Stevenson's “wandering” narratives, which intensify the unsettled qualities of the romance to the point of internal collapse while disavowing the possibility that patriotic attachment might anchor their characters or bring closure to their plots, effectively bring the genre in a full circle. In The Ebb-Tide and The Wrecker, that is, just like Pinkerton's “wrecks and condemned vessels,” repurposed in a dubious fashion so that they “found their way to sea again under aliases,” Stevenson's novel also puts the romance to sea again under an alias, drawing on its unsettled origins to chart a borderless modern world that is far from stable, peaceful, or rational.

A final scene from The Ebb-Tide offers a concluding insight into the disruptive and uneven new world order on display in the Pacific. During Herrick's exploration of Attwater's island, he finds his mind “seized on” by a store-house he has stumbled upon by chance, which is “filled with a multiplicity and disorder of romantic things”:

The “confusion and dusk” surrounding the abandoned wreckage of trade invokes the dereliction of its promise of order, and encapsulates the inherent volatility of the expanding global economic system. However, the sight of these “romantic” fragments in the midst of the Pacific also underscores that the attempt to articulate capitalism's uneven transformation of the region necessitated dismembering the imperial romance itself.