Nicholas Hudson

‘Hottentots’ and the evolution of European racism

Springing from the argument in recent scholarship that ‘race’ is a doctrine that emerged only in the post-Enlightenment, this essay develops a theory concerning the ideological history of ‘racism’, understood in its modern Western sense. While it is impossible to examine all forms of Western racism, the author focuses on evolving reactions in European travel accounts, belles-lettres and anthropology to the Khoikhoi, popularly known as ‘Hottentots’, a people that became proverbial as the most wretched and degraded of all ‘savages’. The question posed is why the Khoikhoi, a relatively peripheral and cooperative people, attracted this virulent hatred. Challenging the assumption of the small body of modern scholarship on the Khoikhoi, I maintain that this spite derived not simply from a sense of the Hottentots’ ‘Otherness’, but more accurately from the awareness that this people upset models of ethnicity that supported the Western vision of the non-European world. Europeans needed to neutralize the ideological threat represented by the Khoikhoi, a programme that culminated in the development of the modern science of ‘race’. ‘Race’, and its corresponding ideology of ‘racism’, I conclude, involves not merely the exclusion, but an approximation and appropriation of the ‘Other’ into Western systems of thought: the ultimate and fatal destiny of this highly distinct and independent culture.

Challenging Eisenstein: Recent Studies in Print Culture

“Print culture” established itself as a major field of historical scholarship through a series of stages, beginning with the groundbreaking work of Harold Innes and Marshall McLuhan in the 1950s and 1960s, continuing in the more heavily archival research of Jack Goody and Walter J. Ong in the 1960s and 1970s, and culminating in Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979)— which gave the field a new direction, and arguably a new

Creating the ‘classless’ author: authorship and the social hierarchy, 1660–1800

ABSTRACT This essay addresses the following question: ‘What is the social class of the author?’ Previous scholarship on the rise of modern authorship in the eighteenth century has generally answered this question in two different ways. According to some scholars, the ‘author’ emerged during this period in order to articulate and propagate ‘bourgeois’ ideology. According to other scholars, however, capitalist society increasingly excluded the literary artist from its governing aims and values. In revisiting this issue, I trace the emergence of the modern author from the late seventeenth to the eighteenth century. Beginning with the first literary biographies or ‘lives of the poets’ after the restoration, I argue that the problem of defining the authors social status became problematic during the debates over literary property in the eighteenth century. It was left to authors and critics of the late century to define a space for authorship separate from the emergent social hierarchy. Authorship became a distinct hierarchy with its own rules of ranking. Only in this ‘classless’ function could the author serve the officially endorsed role of providing a unifying social vision and harmonising the divisions generated by capitalism itself.

Challenging the Historical Paradigm: Tories, Whigs, and Economic Writing, 1680–1714

Abstract: This essay challenges the paradigm that depicts Whigs as progressive champions of free-market economics doing battle against the land-based and regressive economic policies of the Tories. Particularly in the period after the Glorious Revolution, Tory economic writers such as Charles Davenant, Nicholas Barbon, and Sir Dudley North argued for free trade and the relaxation of government tariffs, particularly as exercised against luxuries imported by the East India Company. Whig economic writers such as John Locke, John Pollexfen, Sir Francis Brewster, and John Cary continued, on the contrary, to equate wealth with the accumulation of bullion, arguing that England must curtail the import of luxuries in order to protect domestic manufacture. This debate reached its climax during the controversy over the commercial pact attached to the Treaty of Utrecht (1713). Tories argued for free trade in their journal the Mercantor while Whigs continued to urge for protection against imports in the British Merchant. A revised understanding of the economic policies of Tories and Whigs should lead to a reinterpretation of poems such as Alexander Pope’s Windsor-Forest (1713) as well as to a reconsideration of the economic debate between Whigs and Tories after 1714.