1
Published in Kate Flint, ed., Poetry and Politics (Essays and Studies, 1996), 19–
41.
TRADE WINDS
Timothy Morton
Introduction
The representation of the trade and consumption of luxury goods played a
special topical role in relationships between poetry and political
conceptions of the trading status of Britain. Moreover, capitalist rhetoric
was generally consistent as a template for locally diverse representations of
consumption. The ‘trade winds’ topos, for example, was a commonplace in
seventeenth, eighteenth-, and early nineteenth-century panegyrics to trade,
didactic poetry and epic, employed in such works as Blackmore's Creation
(1712), Thomson's The Seasons (1726-1730) and Darwin's The Botanic
Garden (1789, 1791). The topos represented the perfumed winds, scented
with spice, flowing from the islands associated with the spice trade, for
example the Moluccas, towards the imaginary nose of the reader. It did not
necessarily imply the actual trade winds, but they were often the literal
referent of the topos. The topos was part of the contested figuration of
transnational trade, the language of praise and blame. While it was
employed in poems which advertise or criticize Britannia's trading powers,
it was also used in the poetry of natural science, religious mystery and
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theodicy, and there may be many other uses of the topos besides these.
The politics of the topos' figurative structures was significantly orientalist,
exoticizing the lands from which the spices flow and the flows of trade
themselves, and spicing up the poetry in which it is placed. Moreover, as a
topos about trade, to use it was to be preoccupied with translation, or
metaphor, or tropology. Consequently, it is difficult to separate its political
and poetic functions.
Milton's representation of Satan through the trade winds topos in
Paradise Lost (1667) provides ways of showing the ambiguous political
significance of spice which continued for a century and a half. My discussion
of Milton is followed by an analysis of Dryden's Annus Mirabilis (1667), and
a close reading of a short extract from Shelley's early radical poem Queen
Mab (1813). I have also included some remarks about the difficulty of
making cultural-historical distinctions between spices and other foods, using
Italian poetic representations of chocolate in the eighteenth century as a
guide. The final section draws some conclusions about relationships
between poetry and politics which arise in the discourses of the spice
trade.
Milton's pharmacy
‘ “If God allowed the inhabitants of Paradise to trade, they would deal in
fabrics and spices,” ’ declared Mohammed (Braudel, II, 559). Long-distance
trade, including the spice trade, practised by an upper echelon of
merchants, was a powerful motor of early capitalism. Historians like
Jacques Heers and Peter Matthias, according to Fernand Braudel, often
3
‘tend to place large-scale production or trade in the foreground’ (Braudel, I,
382; see II, 403-408). The apparently superficial luxuries of life, however,
often marketed as what Kopytoff would call ‘enclaved commodities’,
circulated only among social elites, are not so easily distinguishable, for
Braudel, from those necessities which seem to underpin ‘everyday life’ (see
Arjun Appadurai, ed., 22). For ‘What historians have called the hunger for
gold, the hunger to conquer the world or the hunger for spices was
accompanied in the technological sphere by a constant search for new
inventions and utilitarian applications’ (Braudel, I, 415). Developments in
cartography beyond portulan charts, for example, involved new
technologies of perspective in order to allow the Portuguese to navigate
beyond the equator, around the coast of Africa and towards the spice
islands in the Indian Ocean. Moreover, long-distance trade helped to
create early versions of firms, and mediated between local and global
trading concerns, and between pre-capitalist and capitalist economies
(Braudel, I, 440; see II, 436-7).
As a granular commodity, which could be stored and transported
with great ease, spice approached the status of specie. Yet it was often
used as a form of payment in kind (Braudel, II, 203). Baratto or barter was
central ‘even to the Levant trade: where since before the fifteenth century,
the secret of success lay in obtaining spices, pepper or gall nuts in exchange
for fabrics or glass ornaments from Venice, thus avoiding paying cash’
(Braudel, I, 470). Unlike the British East India Company, the Dutch East
India Company used spice as an indirect mode of payment (Braudel, III,
220). The spice trade, then, always involved something tropological, aside
from its figuration in poetic language. The flow of spices, their troping from
east to west, substituted for gold and silver, which flowed east to saturate
4
India and China, so that Europe's balance remained in deficit in this area,
‘until as late as the 1820s’ (Braudel I, 462; see II, 208). Spice gradually and
sporadically assumed many roles, between food, capital and money. These
roles took it beyond its status as an object of luxury consumption and its
use in feast-and-fast economies, for example festivals like Christmas and
Easter. Spice itself was not necessarily destined for a particular dinner
plate: it was often imported in order to be recirculated, at a greater profit,
in an act which the economic writer Thomas Mun (1571-1641) described as
Transitio (Mun in Purchas, 746).
The tropological uncertainty of the spatio-temporal processes of
stock markets affects Braudel's uncertainties about the nature of tropical
trade. It is difficult to tell whether le commerce d'Inde en Inde or inlandse
handel, to use the Dutch term, resembled a ‘village market’ or an ‘outdoor
Stock Exchange’ powered by the cycling flows of the monsoon (Braudel, II,
120). Besides, long-distance European trade provided ways of
synchronizing other kinds of trade, for example the spice trading-fairs of
Cairo and Alexandria, which could be intercepted with a working
knowledge of the movements of caravans and pilgrims (Braudel, II, 128; c.f.
III, 76). The flow of commodities involved sequences of tropological
substitution. Coins and glass beads left Venice for Alexandria, to be
exchanged for ‘pepper, spices, and drugs’ and brought back to Venice to be
sold at the Fondaco dei Tedeschi (Braudel, II, 140ff). On the coast of
Coromandel, where the Dutch East India Company bought fabrics, the
‘exchange currency was spice from the Moluccas or Japanese copper’
(Braudel, II, 142). The longer the return journey, the higher the profit, even
in antiquity (Braudel, II, 168). Certain goods have their luxury status thrust
upon them through transportation. The Javanese, living in the spice islands
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themselves, were observed by Johann Albrecht Mandelslo to be inflating the
price of imported rice in 1639 (Braudel, II, 406). There was no inherent
distinction between luxury and necessity considered from the standpoint of
exchange value.
Just as long-distance trade itself contained a tropological element, so
too did the literary topoi which advertised, evoked and criticized it in
figurative language. For example, depending on the mood of the passage
concerned, spice could be imagined as the product of a fantasy land, or the
specious frippery of dreams: ‘worlds of abundance and of happiness, and
above all of immortality, inhabited by multiple-centenarians, evergreen trees
and the ineffable phoenix; and it is there that spices grow’ (Montanari, 63).
The range of moods associated with the literary representation of
spice is nowhere more powerfully demonstrated than in a close reading of
Milton's representation of long-distance trade. Milton is significant for any
study of the politics of poetic language about trade, precisely insofar as
there is no firm and single political reference in his use of the trade winds
topos. Milton is a good example of the autonomy of figurative language
relative to its political referents. Milton's representation of the spice trade
plays deviously between a topical and a tropological moment. He oscillates
between conceiving of spice as a marker of the blessed space of Paradise,
and spice as an unstable signifier in a chain of tropological, and mercantile,
substitution. The presence of spice on both sides of the equation
demonstrates the extent to which long-distance trade had permeated
seventeenth-century poetics.
Spice in Milton retains the multiplicity of meanings which it had
accrued in other practices and discourses. Boundaries between medicine
and food, and between confectionery and nutrition within the category of
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food, were not fixed as Europe moved towards capitalism. And narratives
about the value of substances traded over transnational distances were
associated with orientalist legends of medicinal riches. Networks of trade
established modes of evaluation. Nicolás Monardes' popular herbal on
medicinal products from the West Indies (1569) was translated from
Spanish into English as Ioyfull Newes out of the New-found Worlde (1596).
Along with a dialogue on the virtues of iron and a little treatise on the
medicinal properties of snow, it contains a treatise on the ‘Bezar’ (bezoar)
stone, removed from a giant hart, and the herb ‘Escuerconera’, mythical
medicines like unicorn's horns. The Portuguese pay high prices to the
Indians for these stones, ‘that they doo so take out, and they carrye them
to the China, to sell: and from thence to Maluco, and from Maluco to
Calicut, for there is the greatest utterance of them, and they do esteeme so
much of them, that one is woorth there, beeing fine, fiftie crownes as they
are here’ (Monardes, fol. 122).
Value is bound up with translation, tropological substitution and
trade. From the very beginning of Milton's poem, God is described as being
worshipped with ‘Ambrosial odours and ambrosial flowers’ (II.246).
‘Odours’ may imply spices burnt in sacrifice. Satan, however, is the
exemplar of the tropical use of spice. He is associated with threatening
processes of trade, translation, intoxication and metaphor. He traps Eve
like Hamlet trapping his uncle, ‘Tropically’ (III.ii.216). This indicates a larger
problematic in Milton's figurative register. Milton's use of epic simile in the
context of theodicy suggests that trade and processes of intoxicating fancy
have always existed in the garden of Paradise. Topos is grounded in tropos.
Place, indeed the ultimate place of places, exists within a broader context
of space and spacing, crossing spaces and reaching other shores, moving
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towards or away from spaces. Eve can dream and Adam can be carried
away on linguistic flights of fancy. Spices can be enjoyed and the first
humans can luxuriate in the sensual. The poetics of prehistory is being
mediated through the long historical narratives and discourses of trade.
Descriptions of the devils in the opening books of Paradise Lost are
often orientalist, but Milton does not let the occident off the hook. The
orient is the place of meeting between European and Asian traders. It is
the place of luxury trade. The devils are described as being like merchants
flocking to Ormus (II.2-4): Ormuz, in the Persian Gulf, was an important
site for the jewel trade. In book II, Satan is described as a trader leaving the
Moluccas or spice islands, and hugging their shore with his ship as he sails
southwest towards the Cape of Good Hope. Here Milton uses the trade
winds topos:
As when far off at sea a fleet descried
Hangs in the clouds, by equinoctial winds
Close sailing from Bengala, or the isles
Of Ternate and Tidore, whence merchants bring
Their spicy drugs: they on the trading flood
Through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape
Ply stemming nightly toward the pole. (II.636-42)
‘The trading flood’ may be explained as the place where the trade winds
blow. ‘Bengala’ is modern Bengal, while Ternate and Tidore are islands in
the Moluccas. The ‘spicy drugs’ anticipate the apple. The image also
8
anticipates the moment at which Satan approaches Eden. In a wonderful
demonstration of narrative continuity, book IV describes him as a trader
excited to be approaching the exotic scents of the coast of Mozambique
and the island of Madagascar, mediated through archaic topoi about Arabia
felix. The trade winds topos sounds again:
and of pure now purer air
Meets his approach, and to the heart inspires
Vernal delight and joy, able to drive
All sadness but despair: now gentle gales
Fanning their odoriferous wings dispense
Native perfumes, and whisper whence they stole
Those balmy spoils. As when to them who sail
Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past
Mozambic, off at sea north-east winds blow
Sabean odours from the spicy shore
Of Arabie the blest, with such delay
Well pleased they slack their course, and many a league
Cheered with the grateful smell old Ocean smiles.
So entertained those odorous sweets the fiend
Who came their bane. (IV.153-67)
(There is a similar passage in Diodorus Siculus' account of Arabia felix;
Diodorus Siculus, 85.) Thus, while seemingly closer to Eden, Satan as the
merchant has now doubled back on his course and is travelling in a
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northeasterly direction around the Cape of Good Hope. Is Satan
approaching or leaving a place here? There is a remarkable ambiguity of
movement, forwards to Eden or backwards within the similes. A distance
is established between figurative language and what it represents. Milton,
whose very syntax sustains the warp and weft of his ideas, cannot have
meant this by accident. As the poetic location of likeness, simile should
lead the reader towards a contemplation of the harmonious relationships
between what is described and the process of description. Here, figurative
language is a kind of trafficking in meaning which may not embody reality,
but only remain contiguous with it.
The Portuguese had mastered the particular trade route around the
coast of Africa to the Moluccas which the epic similes delineate. This might
suggest a nationalistic impulse behind Milton's choice of imagery as a
contribution to the English ‘spice race’, as John Keay calls it. The rise of
Portugal in the wake of Vasco da Gama had ‘culminated spectacularly in the
direct shipment of pepper and spices to Lisbon, a revolution in itself’
(Braudel, III, 139). Mozambique in particular was a Portuguese province.
Madagascar was perceived as strategically important for England in the
1630s, and was invested with all manner of fantastic, utopian significance
(Gilman). Luis de Camões (1524/5-1580) had written a Portuguese epic
about Vasco da Gama entitled The Lusiads (1572), which had been
translated into English by Sir Richard Fanshawe (1665), an ambassador in
the Court of Spain who died in Madrid in 1666. Mozambique is described
suggestively in terms of flow, evoking the circulation of trade and the
ocean's currents:
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The warlike People the sale Ocean plough
Leaving the South, and face the Orient,
'Twixt MADAGASCAR'S Isle, where all things flow,
And ETHIOPIA'S barren Continent. (I.42)
The images of the flow of goods from a wondrous island resembles Milton's
representation of the East Indies, and though it is possible to read Camões'
poem as a more straightforward, less interiorized narrative than Milton's,
and not so interiorized a one, both are about ennoblement and cupidity,
and both attempted to out-trope Classical epic (see Helgerson, 155-63).
Some ‘specific allusions’ to The Lusiads have been found in Paradise Lost,
and Satan's journey has been compared with the Portuguese epic (Smith,
227). Yet, the parallels between Satan and Camões' new Argonauts, as he
calls them, are not clear-cut. In terms of the rhetoric of the spice trade,
Satan is acting more like the Dutch in some envious representations by a
contemporary economic writer, usurping the wondrous islands, possessing
nothing of value himself but only recirculating others' goods, a master of
substitution.
It is also possible, however, to show that the referential instability of
the similes is saying something about the tropological nature of spice, and
about Satan as a figure who is himself an embodied trope, a twisting, turning
character well suited to the body of a snake. In a similar fashion, Dalila is
imagined in Samson Agonistes (1647-53?) as a merchant ship, ‘an amber
scent of odorous perfume / Her harbinger’ (720-21). Dalila is revision of
Desdemona, who is described both as a precious cargo and as the vessel in
which she travels. The Moors at Mombassa in The Lusiads play a similar
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role, dissimulating about the riches to which they have access in order to
gain control over Vasco da Gama's fleet:
Moreover, if thou seek for Merchandize
Produc't by the Auriferous LEVANT;
Cloves, Cinnamon, and other burning Spyce;
Or any good or salutiferous Plant;
Or, if thou seek bright Stones of endless price,
The flaming Ruby, and hard Adamant:
Hence thou may'st All in such abundance beare,
That thou may'st bound thy wish and Voyage Here. (II.4)
Satan's voyage through sheer space, his bridging of Chaos, is
described as a figuratively unstable process: is he swimming, sinking, wading,
creeping or flying (II.949-50)? In contrast, the animals who walk, swim or
fly in the description of creation are precisely differentiated (VII.501-504).
Creation provides Chaos with a syntax by cutting into it with the word
‘Silence’, spoken by the Son as its inaugurating word. But the syntactical
instability of Satan's journey may also be read as being about the radical, or
structural, instability of the space of trade, capital and colonialism. Just as
Chaos is neither empty nor full, but has a kind of spectral, ectoplasmic
existence, so trade involves a processural sense of spatiotemporality which
only agglutinates into something as solid as a place for particular, strategic
reasons, which may then be abandoned in favour of another location. If
trade was cutting up and re-articulating the world of the seventeenth
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century, it was doing so in ways that were not always as predictable and
providential as the Son's verbal swordplay. The terrestrial space of trade
and the extraterrestrial one of Chaos, are not so much a Judaeo-Christian
spatiotemporal constructs as Lucretian ones, a seemingly endless flux of
material in which a single turn, trope or clinamen can result in the creation
of a universe.
In contrast to the uncertainty of capitalism and Chaos, the Edenic
representation of spice is intended to be a topos about the correct
application of tropes. Temperance in eating is the syntax of health and
goodness, cutting through and articulating the sensual and material, which
are not then seen as epiphenomenal to true experience, but as its divine
clothing or integumentum. This is why Michael's vision of the lazar-house,
which haunted Shelley when writing his vegetarian prose and poetry, is
about the consequences of intemperate diet, and why this passage leads
directly to a condemnation of the idolatry of icons (XI.466-524). To be
attracted to what is on one's plate qua sheer sensuality, pure appearance, is
to be unable to ascend the Neoplatonic ladder. In Paradise Regained
(1667-70), Christ resists the spicy temptation of Satan's superbly-prepared
meal, with its ambergris flavouring: ‘Thy pompous delicacies I contemn, /
And count thy specious gifts no gifts but guiles’ (II.390-91). Milton is playing
on the significance of ‘specious’, which is etymologically linked to ‘spice’ and
‘specie’, as well as to ‘species’, from the Latin species, signifying appearance
and a certain lack of a universal, generic attribute. In both epics, the
language of standing implies the steadfastness of individual conscience and
faith, and a resistance to the tropical, twisting qualities of language which
undermine the place on which one stands. But this does not mean negating
the role of spice, balms and drugs, or their eroticism. In reward for his
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steadfastness, Jesus is rewarded with celestial food at the end of Paradise
Regained (IV.588-90). Dalila's tomb will be visited with ‘odours’ or burnt
spices (Samson Agonistes, 987). The Attendant Spirit in Comus (1634)
leaves for the Hesperides, where ‘west winds, with musky wing / About the
cedarn alleys fling / Nard, and cassia's balmy smells’ (988-90). Nard, found
in Milton's Eden, was used to anoint Jesus' head in Mark xiv.3, 8. Indeed, it
is Satan who comes as ‘the bane’ of the spicy ‘odorous sweets’ of Eden
(IV.166-67). He will put an end to sensuality by peddling it.
Shelley and spice
In the literature of the following century, the rhetoric of spice played
between topography and tropology, between the uneasy instability of scent,
desire, flavour and drug and the fixed location of righteous consumption,
love and medicine, and between the boundaries of national place and the
locus of a meal, and the unstable fluctuations of commerce. The trade
winds topos was deployed from different political positions throughout the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Milton, as we have seen, used it to
suggest the mercenary quality of Satan's journey, and to establish a register
of figurative instability in which spice could either be a poison or a cure.
Dryden, in seeking to encourage the expansion of the British monopoly in
the East Indies, poetically redirected the flow of commodities away from
Amsterdam and towards London. Blackmore employed the topos to justify
Britain's place at the centre of the theatre of the globe; trade was figured as
the performance of divine providence. Thomson revised Dryden, justifying
a later phase of colonial expansion through a paternalism which claimed
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that the Edenic medicines of the tropics were being wasted without profit.
The botanist Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) modified the medical mode of
the topos in a panegyric to the British appropriation of a naturalized, global
pharmacy.
Ostensible differences between spices and other luxury commodities
break down before the evidence of their consistent representation as
aspects of capitalist panegyrics and culinary encomia. Cultural historians of
spice have often tried to establish clean temporal and categorical
demarcations in these areas, yet this often simply leads to reinventing the
wheel by pointing out distinctions between medieval and modern in terms
of phenomenological distinctions between spices, coffee and chocolate (for
example, Schivelbusch, 3-14). This is not to deny that distinctions were
made between different commodities at different times, and that different
cultures employed different kinds of rhetoric. But the rhetoric of longdistance trade is remarkably consistent. For example, Giovanni Battista
Roberti (1719-1786), in praise of sugar, wrote in Le fragole (1752):
‘From Virginia and from Caracas,
The Moluccas and far Mexico,
Others wait for cinnamon,
Vanilla, cocoa and carnations;
And that which modern noses yearn,
Like Helen searching for Menelaus,
Powder from Brazil and Havana,
Soft, subtle and sweetly scented.’ (In Camporesi, 158)
15
The topos of products of the world wafting towards the Bolognese
sensorium resembles Blackmore. In Il mondo creato diviso nelle sette
giornate (1686), Father Guiseppe Girolamo Semenzi of the University of
Pavia wrote:
‘The Indian ship carries to European lips
The sugars of Brazil, the nuts of Banda,
And strong-smelling goods originating from
The Moluccas, Ceylon and other strange shores.’ (In
Camporesi, 112)
He also warned of the dangers of the ‘ “Indian broth” ’ of chocolate, which
could inflame the blood too much and create a state of appetite in which ‘
“taste turns remedy to poison” ’ (in Camporesi, 112). The tropologically
unstable aspect of this rhetoric is hard to miss, this time in the context of
chocolate. Piero Camporesi describes a new Enlightenment taste for
delicate rather than powerful flavours, such as chocolate with a light dusting
of vanilla and cinnamon, and delicacies prepared with great difficulty, such
as jasmine chocolate. It is evident, however, that the ‘global’ ideologies of
long-distance trade tended to provide a long-lasting framework for these
cultural highlights. Lorenzo Magalotti (1637-1703) worked in didactic and
panegyric genres, translating John Philips' Cyder and attempting the first
Italian translation of Paradise Lost. He employed the topos of the spicy
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Zephyr in a poem about drinking chocolate from Lettere sopra le terre
odorose d'Europa e d'America dette volgarmente buccheri (1695):
‘You feel running through your veins
The rush of wind from a fan and bellows,
As if the Zephyr hard was blowing
Fully throated through your lips:
As if its breath was bringing you
All the western drugs from sunrise:
Balsam, bezoar and, melted, drenched,
Several tears of rich quinquina:
Soconosco, Guatemala's source of wealth.
And also,. . .
...
each and every
Perfume of the Orient,
The rivers of the mosques and harems
And all is fetched to noble lungs
As to a precious gold alembic,
And in a fresh new style's distilled,
The twinning treasure of East and West.’ (In Camporesi, 7475)
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The ‘new style’ is expressed through rather old styles, in which aristocratic
taste becomes an alchemical vessel for the transformation of the raw
materials of orientalism into the pure gold of European cultural capital.
Dryden is particularly useful for the argument that the trade winds
topos was a persistent example of a capitalist poetics which transcended
local differences of politics and style. For in the long history which
encompasses Milton and Shelley, it is Dryden (1631-1700) who stands out
as the strongest proponent of such a poetics. Annus Mirabilis (1667) shows
him to be a poet of the mercantilist emporium and of expanding imperial
trade interests. Despite the decline in the vogue for pepper after 1650,
war with the Dutch and their massacre of British merchants and their
Japanese agents at Amboyna inspired Dryden to write a play, Amboyna
(1673), and Annus Mirabilis. Like the prose of contemporary economists
such as Barbon, mercantilist poetics helped to neutralize the moral taint of
luxury, and to reinvent the trade winds topos as a figure for trade
supported by nature and providence.
There is little doubt about the Satanic register of Dryden's figurative
attempt to out-Dutch the Dutch. Dryden appears to support the naked
opportunism which characterizes their trade. Annus Mirabilis contains an
account of the interruption at Bergen of a Dutch spice fleet from India, in
which the Dutch, described as ‘perfum'd prey’ (106) are killed by luxury
commodities:
Amidst whole heaps of Spices lights a Ball,
And now their Odours arm'd against them flie:
Some preciously by shatter'd Porc'lain fall,
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And some by Aromatick splinters die. (113-116)
This passage was found somewhat ridiculous by Samuel Johnson, and
the entire poem was criticized as too full of conceits like this by Scott
(Dryden ed. Kinsley and Kinsley, 295, 389-91). However, an anonymous
contemporary pamphlet (1673) praised Annus Mirabilis as if poetry was
both trade and plunder, and Dryden a merchant adventurer in poetics
(Dryden ed. Kinsley and Kinsley, 62-63). The linguistic register is a
poetically just echo of the ways in which the Dutch torture the English in
Amboyna (V.i.145-47, 360-62). There, burning matches placed on the
fingernails are associated with hot nutmegs. The Dutch are described as
‘Castors’ or hunted beavers, from whose sacs a perfume is obtained
(Dryden ed. Hooker and Swedenberg, I.285). Besides showing the Dutch
to be hoist by their own spicy petard, the lines convey the fetishistic, selfmoving power of the commodities over their consumers, rising up as if in
revenge against too luxurious an appetite. To play with spice is to play with
fire: to risk the object becoming more powerful than the subject who
assumes he or she is in control of his or her own desires.
The commodities circulated in the East Indian trade are figured as
fixed raw material, capable of plunder as simple as the plucking of Eden's
forbidden fruit. The East Indies are a zone ‘Where wealth, like fruit on
precipices, grew, / Not to be gather'd but by Birds of Prey’ (43-44). The
dialectic between restriction or territory and flow or deterritorialization is
here expressed in combative terms. The large structure of the poem
gradually accumulates, hardens and fixes spice in place within the processes
of imperialism. The early contemplation of trade's fluidity, mediated
19
through natural law theory, was only a gambit to get the figurative
movement started. Flow is justifiable only if it is in a certain direction,
towards a certain territory. London becomes the territory into which the
flows of spice, perfume and porcelain are concentrated: an emporium of
luxury (see stanzas 3, 5, 11, 293, 298, 302, 304). It is imaged as the final
resting-place of ‘The vent'rous Merchant’ (1197), a happy play on words
which suggests both adventure, the ‘venting’ of trade and the Merchant
Adventurers' Company. Stanzas 297-98 celebrate the ‘silver Thames’
(1189), a revision of Spenser which was in turn revised by Blake, in
‘London’, whose early draft contemplated the ‘dirty Thames’ and later the
‘chartered Thames’ (2; see Blake ed. Johnson and Grant, 53; see Erdman,
81). Dryden's Thames is a veritable ‘domestick Floud’ of prosperity (1189).
The final stanza proclaims ‘Thus to the Eastern wealth through storms we
go’ (1213), figuring trade as better for profit than sheer piracy. By the end
of the poem, the free trade discussed by writers like Grotius has become
the imperial pax Britannica of a ‘British Ocean’ (stanza 302). The final two
lines again echo the providentialism of Grotius (Grotius, 5, 8, 63; see
Weinbrot, 237-75): ‘A constant Trade-wind will securely blow, / And gently
lay us on the Spicy shore’ (1215-16).
The natural history of the spice islands had interested writers since
their discovery, but in the late eighteenth century, it began to be employed
in ways which went beyond the medicinal hagiography of precious plants.
In the middle of the third canto of The Loves of the Plants (1789) Erasmus
Darwin comments on the devastation caused by a certain Javan tree. The
Upas, or Poison Tree, devastates its environment:
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Where seas of glass with gay reflections smile
Round the green coasts of Java's palmy isle;
A spacious plain extends its upland scene,
Rocks rise on rocks, and fountains gush between;
Soft zephyrs blow, eternal summers reign,
And showers prolific bless the soil,—in vain!
—No spicy nutmeg scents the vernal glades,
Nor towering plaintain [sic] shades the mid-day vales;
No grassy mantle hides the sable hills,
No flowery chaplet crowns the trickling rills
...
Fierce in the dread silence on the blasted heath
Fell UPAS sits the HYDRA-TREE of death. (II.iii.219-38)
Despite its decline in status as a luxury commodity, nutmeg is still imaged in
Darwin as a delicious aspect of a terrestrial paradise, an eternal season
where zephyrs blow, the harbingers of spring, and the spice makes the gales
fragrant in all their ‘vernal’, spring-like beauty; Darwin's use of ‘eternal
summers’ may simply be an unfortunate debt to correct scansion. But the
‘blasted heath’, an allusion to Macbeth, reconfigures the Edenic island as a
space of death, in a grotesque juxtaposition of Shakespeare's Scottish
landscape with the East Indies.
It is strange, then, that Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), in his
sophisticated radical allegory Queen Mab (1813), would figure commercial
21
activity as the Upas tree, deriving his image from this section of Darwin's
poem, given that the tree is what appears to devastate the trade in nutmeg
which made Java famous, along with its coffee trade:
Commerce! beneath whose poison-breathing shade
No solitary virtue dares to spring;
But poverty and wealth with equal hand
Scatter their withering curses, and unfold
The doors of premature and violent death,
To pining famine and full-fed disease,
To all that shares the lot of human life,
Which poisoned body and soul, scarce drags the chain,
That lengthens as it goes and clanks behind. (V.44).
The imagery of lengthening chains was also used in the poetry of antislavery, which sought metonymically to relate sugar, the blood of slaves and
the British consumer, for example, in Hannah More's Slavery (1788; 103).
The images of the poison tree's scattered leaves, and the lengthening
chain express the sense of evil circulation. The effects of commerce extend
to cultivated and domesticated nature: not only all humans but ‘all that
shares the lot of human life’ will be ‘poisoned’. Shelley's vegetarian writing,
and other sections of Queen Mab, re-employed the poison-tree image. For
example, there is the radicalism of another reference to the Upas tree,
echoed in A Vindication of Natural Diet: ‘Let the axe / Strike at the root,
the poison-tree will fall,’ he declares, finding the cause of war in aggression
22
(Shelley, IV, 82; c.f. VI, 10, 15; see Morton, 178-79, 218-19). Commerce is
thus tropologically unstable: it is part of both nature and culture,
representing for Shelley a faulty circulation in the social body which is a
corruption of its true nature. Shelley's re-employment of Darwin's topos,
however, is further complicated by his re-introduction of the spice islands,
without the spice trade, as an aspect of his reimagined terrestrial paradise
in the utopian eighth section of Queen Mab. The logic of poison and cure
is figured through the spice trade. Yet it is underpinned by a unitary flow of
circulating processes: the wide circle described by the land which the Upas
tree poisons, or the circulation of spicy air in the reinvigorated sensorium
of the new age.
The Upas tree was also used in Blake's Songs of Experience, in ‘A
Poison Tree’, to describe the unfortunate results of repressed anger.
Refusing to tell his ‘wrath’ to his foe, the narrator nurtures his rage, until it
becomes objectified and alienated in the world outside his soul. The tree
parodies the tree in the Garden of Eden, as his foe steals towards it in the
depths of night, eats its deadly fruit, and perishes beneath its shade. The
oppressive architecture suggested by the overhanging branches of the tree
in Blake's illumination is also hinted at in Shelley's condemnation of
commerce's ‘poison-breathing shade’ (V.44). Shelley's A Refutation of
Deism (1814) contains a passage about poison. A remarkable piece of
devil's advocacy, it imparts the idea that the Christian God could have done
things much better. In order to refute Theosophus' anthropocentric
criticism of the injustice of Christianity, Eusebes says:
23
This whole scheme of things might have been, according to our
practical conceptions, more admirable and perfect. Poisons,
earthquakes, disease, war, famine and venemous serpents;
slavery and persecution are the consequences of certain
causes, which according to human judgment might have been
dispensed with an [sic; ‘in’?] arranging the economy of the
globe. (Shelley, VI, 42-43)
Eusebes means this ironically but Shelley himself invested in the idea. The
notion of an economy of the globe, a homeostatic system of regulated
flows, has overwhelmed any final, arbitrating signifier to which it could be
referred. The ‘economy of nature’ was an element of the discourse of
natural religion which was developed further in Haeckel's notion of ecology
in the nineteenth century. The ideal social system would be a kind of
‘restricted economy’, where what was circulated always returned in some
manner to its source. The luxurious squandering of energy would be
impossible. Shelley paints a picture of this kind of economic system as if it
were a secular form of Christianity's narratives of Fall and Redemption.
Indeed, in his utopia, the lion frolics with the lamb, much as they do in
Isaiah 11 and in Milton's Eden (IV.343-44). A good example of redeemed
economy is found at the beginning Queen Mab VIII:
The habitable earth is full of bliss;
Those wastes of frozen billows that were hurled
By everlasting snow-storms round the poles,
24
Where matter dared not vegetate or live,
But ceaseless frost round the vast solitude
Bounds its broad zone of stillness, are unloosed;
And fragrant zephyrs there from spicy isles
Ruffle the placid ocean-deep, that rolls
Its broad, bright surge to the sloping sand,
Whose roar is wakened into echoings sweet
To murmur through the heaven-breathing groves,
And melodize with man's blest nature there. (VIII.58-69)
The Miltonic inverted syntax of the first long clause unlooses the very
energies of the planet for the service of a utopian, reformed humanity.
Shelley characteristically prefers flow over fixity. The metaphor of ‘fragrant
zephyrs. . .from spicy isles’ and the ‘heaven-breathing groves’ chimes with
eighteenth-century panegyrics to the providence of British mercantilism.
Shelley is saying that the earth has literally tilted back on its axis and that
therefore the flux of the seasons no longer operates, so that the globe is
bathed in the warmth of an eternal spring—a radical scientific as well as
millenarian hypothesis. The scent of spicy islands and groves is a sign of the
providential quality of the subject-position required to smell it: for
Blackmore, an expensive seat in the theatre that is English global trade, for
Shelley, the outlook of a reformist citizen.
However, Shelley was not unambiguous about the spice trade. In his
first vegetarian pamphlet, A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813), which is
adapted from the notes to the very poem I am discussing, Shelley is highly
derogatory about spice. The spice trade, that exemplar of the forces which
25
initiated capitalism in the first place, such as monopolies, long-distance
trade, the stimulated taste for the exoticized, is just what is wrong with a
transnational economy for Shelley. All that supplementarity is just no good
for the moral fibre of the body or the nation.
At the close of the vegetarian note to Queen Mab (note 17), Shelley
shortens a story told in Plutarch's vegetarian prose about a Spartan who
brings fish to an inn and asks the innkeeper to prepare it. Plutarch criticizes
the use of spice as a trophê, a deviation from nature:
But we are so refined in our blood-letting that we term flesh a
supplementary food and then we need ‘supplements’ for the
flesh itself, mixing oil, wine, honey, fish paste, vinegar, with
Syrian and Arabian spices, as though we were really embalming
a corpse for burial. (Plutarch, 995C)
Meat-eating is represented as supplementary to a vegetable diet and
thus as unnecessary for nutrition. Meat, moreover, is associated with
dietary supplements which both disguise death and prepare for death: in
using exotic embalming substances, the consumer is embalming the
stomach for an early grave. In addition, spice here would be the
supplement of a supplement, in a transumptive role which guaranteed its
demoted status as sheer trope without referential stability. The discourse
of the supplement affects the orientalized flow of spices across the integrity
of the Roman imperial boundary. In A Vindication, ‘sanguinary national
disputes’ are created through trade wars over ‘those multitudinous articles
26
of luxury’ such as ‘spices from India’ or wines, dangerously supplemental
commodities (Shelley, VI, 14).
Shelley here contradicted the earliest seventeenth-century
theoretical and ideological justifications of long-distance trade. Elizabeth I,
Samuel Purchas (1575?-1626) and Thomas Mun all advocated the spending
of England's surplus money abroad in the acquisition of goods such a spices,
drugs, silks and calico from the East Indies. For Mun international trade is
‘the very Touchstone of a kingdomes prosperitie’ (Mun in Purchas, 732).
Mun links individual and national prudence in this matter, employing the
same somatic, moral and economic register as Shelley, but to the opposite
effect. Mun deals with the objection that spices are unnecessary by
describing them as wholesome and ‘comfortable’ drugs and flavourings
(Mun in Purchas, 733). (It is not easy to make a firm distinction, as some
sociologists of the commodity do, between luxury and comfort here.)
It is impossible to imagine an argument more diametrically opposed
to Shelley's vegetarian prose. However, there is a contradiction between
Queen Mab's spicy isles and this kind of condemnation. What Shelley
criticizes at the level of content, he emulates on the plane of expression.
Indeed, it is precisely in the context of a healthy, reinvigorated earth that
spices are rather archaically represented. Shelley may therefore be seen as
part of a tradition which criticized the use of spices as a form of degrading
luxury which undermined the individual and national body. In the sixteenth
century, the revolutionary Ulrich von Hütten, had attacked spices in a
similar mode: ‘ “Down with peppers, saffron and silk!” he cries, “. . .my
dearest wish is that no man who cannot do without pepper should be
cured of gout or the French disease”. Was boycotting pepper in the
struggle against capitalism a way of denouncing or protesting at the power
27
of long-distance trade [asks Braudel]?’ (Braudel, II, 418). In Britain, this
tradition was directed against French cooking and the long-distance spice
trade in the eighteenth century, for example in the medical work of George
Cheyne and John Arbuthnot, and by Addison's writing on gluttony, or
Steele and Campbell's praise of simplicity against continental tastes amongst
wealthy town dwellers (Drummond and Wilbraham, 214-15, 252-54). But
Shelley also uses language associated with mercantilist defences of longdistance trade, specifically the spice trade. Nor is it the case that he
entirely rejected transumptive or self-reflexive rhetoric. In ‘Fragments of
an Unfinished Drama’, set in ‘the Indian archipelago’, the Lady, in
conversation with the Indian, depicts a strange plant given to her by a spirit
in a dream:
Its shape was such as summer melody
Of the south wind in spicy vales might give
To some light cloud bound from the golden dawn
To fairy isles of evening. (215-18)
Shelley here demonstrates his penchant for hyperreal images which invert
what readers expect of similes. Instead of an anticipated concretization of
the abstract, he describes an image in terms of something even more
evanescent or figural. He is exploiting the utopian register of the oneiric
horizon: the lands of spice as the land of dreams and desires, the
Hesperides or evening isles (see Le Goff, 230-98). But he is also using spice
in a figure about figurality, and in a positive way. The image continues by
28
describing how the plant, mirrorlike, reflects everything around it. This
positive valuation of dizzying tropology might seem unexpected from an
analysis of other places in his culinary rhetoric. Shelley's ambiguity in this
matter may be explained by exploring his ambivalence towards capitalism,
of which his reformist vegetarian rhetoric is a symptom (Morton, chapter
6). Shelley wished neatly to divide the drug-poison-trope mode of the
pharmacological register from the providence-islands-medicine mode in
Queen Mab, but the presence of a certain sense of commerce, economy,
circulation or flow in both modes contaminated his division. And the role
of the spice trade in his vegetarian rhetoric, which is associated with the
places in Queen Mab where the trade winds topos appears, is negative,
supplementary and corrupting, both of the individual body and of the
nation. However, despite its many shifting valences, the luxurious quality of
spice-as-figure remained, and its role as a literary device persisted.
Conclusion
In conclusion, a number of surprising features emerge. There appear to be
no clear distinctions between ‘modern’ and ‘medieval’ or premodern
representations of spice. The registers of fantasy islands, medicine, festivity,
luxury, religious devotion, lust, eroticism and supplementarity, and so on, all
continue. It is difficult to draw a line in the sand to mark the
commencement of the modern period or of capitalism through the use of
spice in literature. It is possible, however, to delineate shifting emphases in
these different registers and processes. The ideologies of popular
vegetarianism in the eighteenth century, for example, are an obvious
29
instance at which spice becomes, though not for the first time, denigrated
as a non-nutritious and ennervating supplement. There is also no clear
distinction to be established between ‘Augustan’ and ‘Romantic’
representations of the spice trade. In fact, Dryden and Blackmore
reaccentuated what I have called its ‘Satanic’ or mercantile mode, while
Darwin and Shelley developed its Edenic and medical modes. The
commonly-held assumption that Romanticism in general, and Shelley in
particular, augment Milton's representation of Satan, runs aground. The
separation of the luxury and medical status of spice depends upon
contextual circumstances.
The trade winds topos naturalized trade by showing how the earth is
providentially available for the pursuance of trade. Related topoi construed
a planet upon which the scattered limbs of humanity could be knitted
together by trade. In the preface to the 1598 edition of Voyages and
Discoveries Hakluyt declared his intention to ‘incorporate into one body
the torn and scattered limbs’ of English trading narratives (Hakluyt, 35).
When Elizabeth I wrote to the King of Achen in Sumatra, in the context of
the founding of the East India Company (1600), she developed this
rhetorical mode (Purchas, I.iii chapter 3, §3.154; see Keay, 11-12). England,
naturally, was perceived to be rather better for the Sumatrans in this
matter than the Spaniards or Portuguese. This troping of trade continued
in the eighteenth century, for instance in George Lillo's The London
Merchant (1731): trade ‘promotes humanity. . .diffusing mutual love from
pole to pole’ (Lillo, 40). Lillo's phraseology is strikingly similar to Shelley's.
Despite local political differences, a certain rhetorical register concerning
free trade persisted, which could be named ‘antisparagmos’: a drive against
the fragmentation of the global body of mankind.
30
The role of a rhetoric about nature, if anything, increased as
mercantilism declined and laissez faire capitalism grew in influence, coupled
with the rise of imperialism. While Darwin and Shelley wrote, books
appeared on the natural history of the islands, and of the West Indies.
They smoothed over two hundred years of environmental and social
alteration and control with exquisite illustrations of flora and fauna. The
genre of the natural history of the East and West Indies could be used
subversively: Stedman's magisterial narrative about the slave uprisings in
Surinam is a fine example. Outlines of the Globe (1798-1800) by the
naturalist and traveller Thomas Pennant (1726-1798) contains botanical and
proto-anthropological information about the East Indies, and literary
quotations from The Lusiads and elsewhere. The travel narratives of
merchants like Jean Baptiste Tavernier, whom Pennant acknowledges
(Pennant, II, 5), which in their turn had supplanted tales of wonder, had
given way to natural-historical accounts. Darwin and Shelley employed
these new figures. Yet, however natural the islands now begin to seem,
they are ultimately the source of the same commodities, and are described
as such. These phenomena should alert the historian to the impossibility of
accounting for the persistence of the spice trade in English literature as the
effect of a superstructural lag.
The continued use of spices in literary topoi relative to their shifting
status in consumption and long-distance trade should alert us to the
relative autonomy of literary language in its contact with political issues.
The trade winds topos is a form of advertising language, to a certain extent.
It encourages the pleasurable consumption not only of images of delicious
food, but also of images of commercial activity itself. This is one sense in
which its poetics is related to various political agenda associated with
31
capitalism. The aesthetics of spice is not static, to use the terminology of
Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but
kinetic, head-turning: it uses turns of phrase to advert our gaze. Dryden's
rhetoric of spice seems most clearly designed to fulfil this mission. Shelley's
vegetarian rhetoric is often diametrically opposed to this kind of capitalist
poetics: it is aversive, rather than advertising, designed to turn the head
away. As Jennifer Wicke, however, says of advertisements: ‘advertising
does not serve as a simple messenger-boy of ideology, if only because
ideology does not exist in some place apart before it is channeled through
advertisement. The richness of advertisement as a cultural structure. .
.ensures that [it]. . .will not, and cannot, wither away’ (Wicke, 16). The
discourse of the trade winds topos, like advertising, is ‘self-referential and
excessive’, for it ‘relates. . .the ongoing surplus, the extra that must be
deployed in aesthetic form to reveal itself within the social world as a
surplus’ (Wicke, 174-75).
This project was supported in part by a New York University Research
Challenge Fund Grant. I would like to thank Carol Urness, Brad Oftelie
and Brian Hanson of the James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota,
for their assistance.
32
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Timothy Morton