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The Intimacies of Four Continents
In this uniquely interdisciplinary work, Lisa Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries, exploring the links between colonialism, slavery, imperial trades and Western liberalism. Reading across archives, canons, and continents, Lowe connects the liberal narrative of freedom overcoming slavery to the expansion of Anglo-American empire, observing that abstract promises of freedom often obscure their embeddedness within colonial conditions. Race and social difference, Lowe contends, are enduring remainders of colonial processes through which “the human” is universalized and “freed” by liberal forms, while the peoples who create the conditions of possibility for that freedom are assimilated or forgotten. Analyzing the archive of liberalism alongside the colonial state archives from which it has been separated, Lowe offers new methods for interpreting the past, examining events well documented in archives, and those matters absent, whether actively suppressed or merely deemed insignificant. Lowe invents a mode of reading intimately, which defies accepted national boundaries and disrupts given chronologies, complicating our conceptions of history, politics, economics, and culture, and ultimately, knowledge itself.
329 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 20, 2015
86 people are currently reading
2212 people want to read
About the author
Lisa Lowe
25 books59 followersLisa Lowe is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale University, and an affiliate faculty in the programs in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Prior to Yale, she taught at the University of California, San Diego, and Tufts University. She began as a scholar of French and comparative literature, and since then her work has focused on the cultural politics of colonialism, immigration, and globalization. She is known especially for scholarship on French, British, and United States colonialisms, Asian migration and Asian American studies, race and liberalism, and comparative empires.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 35 reviews
June 18, 2022
Intimacies claims that by 19th century, some very strong connections have been established between four continents of Europe, America, Africa and Asia.
Starting from 1810, the British Empire supplanted the cotton manufacture industry in India, established in England its own textile industry which "imported over 70 percent of its raw cotton from the United States, where it was picked by African slaves on plantations in the American South." (p. 98) The British then used Indian lands to plant opium, exported it to China, destabilised the Chinese empire and transferred approximately two million indentured Chinese workers to colonies in America, Australia, Africa and Pacific.
Meanwhile in England, liberalism as developed by the likes of J.S. Mill, became the dominant ideology of the Empire. In spite of its pretensions of universalism, Lowe believes, the liberal call for individual freedom was based on a division of world into civilised societies which deserved a representative government and colonised peoples who would better be ruled by despotism. In that, liberalism was an imperialist ideology as it helped British imperialism to expand and rule over other societies in a better and more stable way. That's why the great liberal J.S. Mill, when defending the oppressive practices of the British East Indian Company, wrote of despotism as "a necessary medicine for diseases of the body politic which could not be rid of by less violent means."
This is a good book but crippled to an extent by the author's attempts to inject some postmodern literary theory and jargon into her historical analysis and to me they add no extra depth to the book's arguments.
Also, you may want to skip it if you are already familiar with the "slavery and capitalism" debate. For a general overview of this and relevant debates, I recommend The Birth of Capitalism: A 21st Century PerspectiveThe Birth of Capitalism: A 21st Century Perspective. Regarding these global connections and struggles, both After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 and Empire of Cotton: A Global History are good resources.
Starting from 1810, the British Empire supplanted the cotton manufacture industry in India, established in England its own textile industry which "imported over 70 percent of its raw cotton from the United States, where it was picked by African slaves on plantations in the American South." (p. 98) The British then used Indian lands to plant opium, exported it to China, destabilised the Chinese empire and transferred approximately two million indentured Chinese workers to colonies in America, Australia, Africa and Pacific.
Meanwhile in England, liberalism as developed by the likes of J.S. Mill, became the dominant ideology of the Empire. In spite of its pretensions of universalism, Lowe believes, the liberal call for individual freedom was based on a division of world into civilised societies which deserved a representative government and colonised peoples who would better be ruled by despotism. In that, liberalism was an imperialist ideology as it helped British imperialism to expand and rule over other societies in a better and more stable way. That's why the great liberal J.S. Mill, when defending the oppressive practices of the British East Indian Company, wrote of despotism as "a necessary medicine for diseases of the body politic which could not be rid of by less violent means."
This is a good book but crippled to an extent by the author's attempts to inject some postmodern literary theory and jargon into her historical analysis and to me they add no extra depth to the book's arguments.
Also, you may want to skip it if you are already familiar with the "slavery and capitalism" debate. For a general overview of this and relevant debates, I recommend The Birth of Capitalism: A 21st Century PerspectiveThe Birth of Capitalism: A 21st Century Perspective. Regarding these global connections and struggles, both After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 and Empire of Cotton: A Global History are good resources.
January 10, 2017
Lisa Lowe's work is excellent. This is a wonderful genealogy of liberalism and is an exciting read as well.
I was pointed to this book through Colin Koopman's "Genealogy as Critique" where he claimed it was a prime example of genealogical methods entail, and I agree fully. But it is also a careful and attentive account of how liberalism become the dominant political ideology, and how this history erases itself in its own mythologizing.
Besides the wealth of historical detail, the two main things I took from this work were 1) details on how genealogy functions as a methodology that makes sense of how past contingencies ossify into present universalisms in order to figure out the logic of our current situation 2) a method of critical reading that takes the dominant texts of an ideology and reads them alongside and against the 'minor literature' of imperial reports (or other kinds of documents "on the front lines" of that ideology) to create a fuller account of such forms of thought.
There's a lot going on in this short work though, so aside from my personal interests in it, I would recommend this for anyone interested in the history of this vexed term, 'liberalism', especially as a stepping stone of making sense of so-called neoliberalism. Highly recommended.
I was pointed to this book through Colin Koopman's "Genealogy as Critique" where he claimed it was a prime example of genealogical methods entail, and I agree fully. But it is also a careful and attentive account of how liberalism become the dominant political ideology, and how this history erases itself in its own mythologizing.
Besides the wealth of historical detail, the two main things I took from this work were 1) details on how genealogy functions as a methodology that makes sense of how past contingencies ossify into present universalisms in order to figure out the logic of our current situation 2) a method of critical reading that takes the dominant texts of an ideology and reads them alongside and against the 'minor literature' of imperial reports (or other kinds of documents "on the front lines" of that ideology) to create a fuller account of such forms of thought.
There's a lot going on in this short work though, so aside from my personal interests in it, I would recommend this for anyone interested in the history of this vexed term, 'liberalism', especially as a stepping stone of making sense of so-called neoliberalism. Highly recommended.
January 13, 2022
I didn’t read this all in one day because I wanted to, but because I had to. It was still a good read though.
January 4, 2017
As a citizen, but especially as an educator, I am so glad that I read this book. Lowe's work and the insights that follow from it are immeasurably significant. Each chapter offers a new but rooted lens through which to experience her overall points. The text is clear but decidedly "academic", so if you're out of school practice you'll have to put on your best thinking cap. It is worth it. Thank you, Dr. Lowe!
March 11, 2022
While there has, for some time, been an emerging exploration of the interweaving of modernity and coloniality as both modes of thought and of practice, Lisa Lowe pushes this discussion a step further. In this superb, global cultural and intellectual history she explores the interweaving of and distinctions between settler colonialism, slavery and indentured South and East Asian labour, further woven into the growth of liberal philosophies and politics. In doing so she weaves four continents – Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe – into an interlinked, intimate material and cultural network posing profound questions for the ways we grapple with and make sense of empire and colonialism. It’s a significant rethinking of key elements of imperialism and colonialism and imperial histories managed succinctly through judicious readings and deployments of classic texts.
The argument runs along several trajectories that she manages to intertwine through her compelling juxtaposition of changing forms of labour exploitation (enslavement, indenture and so forth in the mid 19th century), shifting forms of government and economic relations especially in South and East Asia and the solidification of forms of racial capitalism in ways that concurrently critique the Eurocentrism of major forms of social thought while deploying their modes of analysis and thought. It’s elegantly done, for instance, running a discussion of commodification and class alignment that plays Marx off against Thackray’s Vanity Fair as factors influencing CLR James.
James is an important figure in the exploration, notably in the way she uses his work on the Haitian Revolution in Black Jacobins and WEB Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction to highlight both the limitations of Marx’s continuing use of a stadial mode of history recast from Hegel, while unpacking the way both draw on Marxist dialectics to accentuate the place of ‘race’ in capitalist development. Elsewhere her critique of Hegelian dialectics alongside the changing character of the East India Company and the British management of the opium trade to offset its balance of payments deficit with China allows her to unpack the notions of liberty so deeply woven into this intimate intercontinental formation of Empire, with its distinct forms of exploitation in settler colonialism, African enslavement and Asian indenture.
Not surprisingly, there are places where the argument is dense and demanding – but to Lowe’s credit much of the analysis is grounded in the ways her key texts link to and represent practice on the ground making for a highly accessible piece of academic writing. Part of this accessibility lies in her refusal to accept the boundaries as imposed by received reading of texts and the composition of archives. She reads across archives, asking how they inter-relate and illuminate each other, and in doing so ruptures the binary basis of much Imperial history, and the compartmentalisation of the forms of labour exploitation she explores to expose the network of ideas and practices that sustain Empire.
Amid it all, this is a profound critique of liberalism that when read alongside writers such as Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano and Priyamvada Gopal and others represents a significant rethinking of our understandings of Empire and Imperialism. This has been sitting in my to-read pile for several months and my to-read list for several years: it should have made it off those lists quite some time ago!
The argument runs along several trajectories that she manages to intertwine through her compelling juxtaposition of changing forms of labour exploitation (enslavement, indenture and so forth in the mid 19th century), shifting forms of government and economic relations especially in South and East Asia and the solidification of forms of racial capitalism in ways that concurrently critique the Eurocentrism of major forms of social thought while deploying their modes of analysis and thought. It’s elegantly done, for instance, running a discussion of commodification and class alignment that plays Marx off against Thackray’s Vanity Fair as factors influencing CLR James.
James is an important figure in the exploration, notably in the way she uses his work on the Haitian Revolution in Black Jacobins and WEB Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction to highlight both the limitations of Marx’s continuing use of a stadial mode of history recast from Hegel, while unpacking the way both draw on Marxist dialectics to accentuate the place of ‘race’ in capitalist development. Elsewhere her critique of Hegelian dialectics alongside the changing character of the East India Company and the British management of the opium trade to offset its balance of payments deficit with China allows her to unpack the notions of liberty so deeply woven into this intimate intercontinental formation of Empire, with its distinct forms of exploitation in settler colonialism, African enslavement and Asian indenture.
Not surprisingly, there are places where the argument is dense and demanding – but to Lowe’s credit much of the analysis is grounded in the ways her key texts link to and represent practice on the ground making for a highly accessible piece of academic writing. Part of this accessibility lies in her refusal to accept the boundaries as imposed by received reading of texts and the composition of archives. She reads across archives, asking how they inter-relate and illuminate each other, and in doing so ruptures the binary basis of much Imperial history, and the compartmentalisation of the forms of labour exploitation she explores to expose the network of ideas and practices that sustain Empire.
Amid it all, this is a profound critique of liberalism that when read alongside writers such as Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano and Priyamvada Gopal and others represents a significant rethinking of our understandings of Empire and Imperialism. This has been sitting in my to-read pile for several months and my to-read list for several years: it should have made it off those lists quite some time ago!
June 11, 2025
Attempts to uncover the intimacies of four continents occluded and forgotten by the teleology and historiography of liberalism’s ‘will-to-freedom’. Here these four continents are primarily understood through the figures of the Chinese ‘coolie’ laborer, the white European settler colonialist, the Black slave, and the dispossessed indigenous native. Yet while purporting to elucidate “intimacies”, Lowe more accurately paints with broad conceptual brushstrokes to justify an argument which largely invisibilizes South Asian coolie labor and indigenous genocide to primarily recuperate the centrality of the imported Chinese laborer (even if she claims precisely to not do so). Moreover, some of her readings were gratuitous at best and simply poor at worst. That being said, this is a very interesting conceptual frame to think about more nuanced issues than merely the ‘lies of liberalism’. Maybe this reads as trite because its arguments are obvious to anyone who’s read Marx or other decolonial theory? I don’t know… the methodological choices of triangulation and the ‘figurative’ are informative nonetheless
January 14, 2022
Read it for school, it didn’t make me hate my life or question my intelligence and that’s the biggest compliment I can give.
February 22, 2022
i've really enjoyed what I've read so far for class! Only got to read like 2 chapters but in much appreciation of Lowe's un-hesitation in unsettling our imaginations of intimacy and how the term can be extended into a geopolitical critique of biopower
September 12, 2024
Justice for Australia
March 12, 2022
Is it possible to imagine a storyline that connects the transatlantic slave trade, the transcontinental railway, Harlem in New York, a cotton field in Georgia, a sugar plantation in Haiti or Jamaica, the opium production in India, and the silk trade in Hong Kong—all in the 1800s? If such a storyline exists and presses on our consciousness, what might it try to teach us? A very material history of the ascendence of liberalism’s abstract promise of freedom for all.
The title of the book, The Intimacies of Four Continents, might suggest an intellectual ambition too big to pack into a singular volume. Or a temporal-spatial scope too vast to anchor in it the consistency of narration of something seemingly enclosed—intimacy. But it is precisely against the singularity of “intimacy” and its underlying liberal political economy that the assemblage of “four continents” is working. While drawing inspiration from feminist and queer scholarship on “intimate” realms in sexual, reproductive, or household relations, Lowe’s use of “intimacies,” emphatically pluralized, turns the concept into a heuristic tool to observe the forgotten connectedness of the world that we are taught, by the ways in which archives were made and kept, to see only in light of division. To undo the coloniality of knowledge that indoctrinates separation and eclipses connections, Lowe actualized the unlikely juxtaposition and intertextual reading of separated histories to make meaning not just of what had been documented in the archives, but to read their gaps and make sense of “the politics of our lack of knowledge."
Indentured laborers from South and Southeast Asia, in the name of “free labor,” were put into the place of Black slaves in the Americas in the wake of the abolition of slavery and slave trade, first by the British in the early 1800s and then by the Americans half a century later. The use of “authentic” individual ex-slave’s voice in the literary format of autobiography did much of the “publicity” work of characterizing abolition as a progressive move of benign white republicanism. In return, the ex-slave’s humanizing could not be complete without the white audience/readers and their sensationalized catharsis over the Black (and by extension, Asian, Indigenous, and Latinx) autobiographers’ successful defection from their native authoritarian states. Alaudah Equiano’s autobiography in 1789 did not just attest to white abolitionists’ belief that a Black slave could also arise to be like a European (i.e. a human)—though always just a step away from being recaptured by slavery—but set up a useful precedent of using BIPOC autobiographies, as a technique of “giving voice,” to confuse individual entrepreneurship with collective liberation and set the visibility of one oppressed individual against the unreadable multitude of his/her origin.
Interestingly, almost all the painstakingly marketed BIPOC autobiographies circulated today docilely observe the tacit rules of not crossing over to other races and indulging in inward-looking ruses of wounds and heals. Such industrialized literary production solicits the sentimental long-tailed “Awwww” from the liberal (white) readers, followed by “I can’t believe s/he had to endure so much” and a conclusion with relief that “s/he at long last can speak freely.”
The differentiated racialization of nonwhite peoples began with the invention of an Asian “free race.” Derived from the category of “free labor” seized from early 1800s Hong Kong and Canton, it was a strategic move to set up a human buffer between whites and Blacks, redirecting the latter’s rage toward the incoming Asians as job stealers while allowing the white capitalists to keep harvesting interests from cheap and dehumanized labor. And yet, the sharing of laboring time and space in the Americas conditioned alternative possibilities of collaborative survival—the other multiple intimacies—between African and Asian laborers, opening inquisitive space for the heterogeneity of “what could have been” that had been foreclosed by the homogenizing pathway to a liberated/liberal post-Enlightenment European “Man/humanity.”
The less-than-human labor had to be kept accessible for both economic and political reasoning of liberalism as the standard of living a human life and the only worthy and meaningful future for which the lesser non-European civilizations should strive. Between “should be” and “could have been” stood the hegemonic "economy of affirmation" conditioned in the scheme of forgetting the connections from the ground up. Between the duly recognized “intimacy” of European domesticity as an essential element of being human and the readily erased lived experiences of toil and torture stood colonial governing that ruled by dividing and classifying. This practice that would later give rise to the technology of surveillance was matured in and by the East India Company, on whose ground of trade expansion to Hong Kong via illegal opium business and transition from a corporation in to a de facto colonial state with civil, criminal, and military administration powers John Stuart Mill contemplated on “liberalism” in the mid-1800s.
Forming a new circuit of trade of silk, tea, and opium to secure Britain’s comparative advantage over Qing China, the colonization of Hong Kong transformed the logic of colonial governance from territorial conquest and mercantilism to the administering of peoples, ports, and processes. A devoted high-level employee of the Company for over three decades, JSM translated his longitudinal observation into key texts of liberal governance, including the famous On Liberty (1859). His recurring argument of liberalism—the principle of a “good government” exercised by a complex set of rules of exclusion and inclusion discriminately applied to different races—identified with the Company’s divide-and-classify principle of colonial rule. In affirming the Europeans as the mature human subjects who fit for self-governing, liberalism justified the use of force and violence by the state to “educate” and “enlighten” the immature and barbarian. Liberalism, therefore, accommodates, depends on, and perpetuates despotic means of governing, at least its residuals. In other words, the way that liberalism was theorized ensured that we must make a counterintuitive mental move to see the intrinsic connection between liberalism and despotism, and it did so precisely by presenting the archival records of each continent as separate and making it very difficult to draw “intimate” connections between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
The exercise of reading against the classics, which Lowe practiced in the first four chapters, gets to Marx in the last one, though this time her voice merged with those of C.L.R. James and W.E.B. Du Bois. Both thinkers drew on Marx’s theorization of capitalism but contra Marx’s biased focus on factory workers in industrialized European societies, recognized enslaved Black labor in Africa and the Americas as proletarian labor at the inchoate moment of capitalism’s expansion. Their writings exemplified Lowe’s thesis of “the intimacies of four continents” as they experimented with cross-racial proletarian alliance and imagination, the project in Walter Benjamin’s words to “blast” heterogeneity out of “the homogeneous course of history.”
The final advice from Lowe on being a humanist thinker and practitioner in the institutionalized performance of liberal values: “to live within but to think beyond this received liberal humanist tradition, and all the while, to imagine a much more complicated set of stories about the emergence of the now, in which what is foreclosed as unknowable is forever saturating the ‘what-can-be-known.’”
The title of the book, The Intimacies of Four Continents, might suggest an intellectual ambition too big to pack into a singular volume. Or a temporal-spatial scope too vast to anchor in it the consistency of narration of something seemingly enclosed—intimacy. But it is precisely against the singularity of “intimacy” and its underlying liberal political economy that the assemblage of “four continents” is working. While drawing inspiration from feminist and queer scholarship on “intimate” realms in sexual, reproductive, or household relations, Lowe’s use of “intimacies,” emphatically pluralized, turns the concept into a heuristic tool to observe the forgotten connectedness of the world that we are taught, by the ways in which archives were made and kept, to see only in light of division. To undo the coloniality of knowledge that indoctrinates separation and eclipses connections, Lowe actualized the unlikely juxtaposition and intertextual reading of separated histories to make meaning not just of what had been documented in the archives, but to read their gaps and make sense of “the politics of our lack of knowledge."
Indentured laborers from South and Southeast Asia, in the name of “free labor,” were put into the place of Black slaves in the Americas in the wake of the abolition of slavery and slave trade, first by the British in the early 1800s and then by the Americans half a century later. The use of “authentic” individual ex-slave’s voice in the literary format of autobiography did much of the “publicity” work of characterizing abolition as a progressive move of benign white republicanism. In return, the ex-slave’s humanizing could not be complete without the white audience/readers and their sensationalized catharsis over the Black (and by extension, Asian, Indigenous, and Latinx) autobiographers’ successful defection from their native authoritarian states. Alaudah Equiano’s autobiography in 1789 did not just attest to white abolitionists’ belief that a Black slave could also arise to be like a European (i.e. a human)—though always just a step away from being recaptured by slavery—but set up a useful precedent of using BIPOC autobiographies, as a technique of “giving voice,” to confuse individual entrepreneurship with collective liberation and set the visibility of one oppressed individual against the unreadable multitude of his/her origin.
Interestingly, almost all the painstakingly marketed BIPOC autobiographies circulated today docilely observe the tacit rules of not crossing over to other races and indulging in inward-looking ruses of wounds and heals. Such industrialized literary production solicits the sentimental long-tailed “Awwww” from the liberal (white) readers, followed by “I can’t believe s/he had to endure so much” and a conclusion with relief that “s/he at long last can speak freely.”
The differentiated racialization of nonwhite peoples began with the invention of an Asian “free race.” Derived from the category of “free labor” seized from early 1800s Hong Kong and Canton, it was a strategic move to set up a human buffer between whites and Blacks, redirecting the latter’s rage toward the incoming Asians as job stealers while allowing the white capitalists to keep harvesting interests from cheap and dehumanized labor. And yet, the sharing of laboring time and space in the Americas conditioned alternative possibilities of collaborative survival—the other multiple intimacies—between African and Asian laborers, opening inquisitive space for the heterogeneity of “what could have been” that had been foreclosed by the homogenizing pathway to a liberated/liberal post-Enlightenment European “Man/humanity.”
The less-than-human labor had to be kept accessible for both economic and political reasoning of liberalism as the standard of living a human life and the only worthy and meaningful future for which the lesser non-European civilizations should strive. Between “should be” and “could have been” stood the hegemonic "economy of affirmation" conditioned in the scheme of forgetting the connections from the ground up. Between the duly recognized “intimacy” of European domesticity as an essential element of being human and the readily erased lived experiences of toil and torture stood colonial governing that ruled by dividing and classifying. This practice that would later give rise to the technology of surveillance was matured in and by the East India Company, on whose ground of trade expansion to Hong Kong via illegal opium business and transition from a corporation in to a de facto colonial state with civil, criminal, and military administration powers John Stuart Mill contemplated on “liberalism” in the mid-1800s.
Forming a new circuit of trade of silk, tea, and opium to secure Britain’s comparative advantage over Qing China, the colonization of Hong Kong transformed the logic of colonial governance from territorial conquest and mercantilism to the administering of peoples, ports, and processes. A devoted high-level employee of the Company for over three decades, JSM translated his longitudinal observation into key texts of liberal governance, including the famous On Liberty (1859). His recurring argument of liberalism—the principle of a “good government” exercised by a complex set of rules of exclusion and inclusion discriminately applied to different races—identified with the Company’s divide-and-classify principle of colonial rule. In affirming the Europeans as the mature human subjects who fit for self-governing, liberalism justified the use of force and violence by the state to “educate” and “enlighten” the immature and barbarian. Liberalism, therefore, accommodates, depends on, and perpetuates despotic means of governing, at least its residuals. In other words, the way that liberalism was theorized ensured that we must make a counterintuitive mental move to see the intrinsic connection between liberalism and despotism, and it did so precisely by presenting the archival records of each continent as separate and making it very difficult to draw “intimate” connections between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
The exercise of reading against the classics, which Lowe practiced in the first four chapters, gets to Marx in the last one, though this time her voice merged with those of C.L.R. James and W.E.B. Du Bois. Both thinkers drew on Marx’s theorization of capitalism but contra Marx’s biased focus on factory workers in industrialized European societies, recognized enslaved Black labor in Africa and the Americas as proletarian labor at the inchoate moment of capitalism’s expansion. Their writings exemplified Lowe’s thesis of “the intimacies of four continents” as they experimented with cross-racial proletarian alliance and imagination, the project in Walter Benjamin’s words to “blast” heterogeneity out of “the homogeneous course of history.”
The final advice from Lowe on being a humanist thinker and practitioner in the institutionalized performance of liberal values: “to live within but to think beyond this received liberal humanist tradition, and all the while, to imagine a much more complicated set of stories about the emergence of the now, in which what is foreclosed as unknowable is forever saturating the ‘what-can-be-known.’”
June 26, 2024
This has been on my shelf for a while and on my reading list for more than a while, and I loved it! Reading Lowe’s work gives you the insight to tie in historiography and critical theory together to then rake through archival material; precisely what I need for my research! She also has this extensive end notes where she lists not only further readings but also foundational readings to go back to in case one lacks those groundings which I awfully do! My only beef with it is that it’s a bit repetitive and moving between the text and the end notes is not an easy fit as it gets you a bit distracted. The book doesn’t have a formal introductory chapter (part of chapter one sounds like an introduction) but it would actually benefit from having an introduction where many of those foundational readings and what Lowe is drawing from them are introduced.
Super recommended for aspiring historians and analysts!
Super recommended for aspiring historians and analysts!
January 12, 2019
The book has some issues in terms of research amd conclusions, but it is interesting, provacative, and definitely uas its heart in the right place.
May 23, 2023
This is an excellent book that I read for pleasure despite the work it takes. There is so much here, and I wish I had time to do it justice by going back through my notes. But I will do my best given that other duties call...
Ultimately, Lowe makes the point that slavery had to exist in order for the West to become what it did. The Empire doesn't abolish slavery completely until it has not just found but created new sources of exploitable labor -which hopefully would present a lower risk of rebellion than enslaved Blacks. The East India Company enabled British manufacturers to receive the wisdom of Indian textile artistry only to industrialize their methods, thus causing a major disruption to the livelihoods of people in India. Similarly, with the forced free trade agreements they gained in the Opium Wars, England was able not only to dump Opium into China but also to flood Chinese markets with cheaper goods and thereby disrupting livelihoods there as well. Thus, their sources of "Coolie" labor were secured. As Chinese people from the countryside flooded into cities in hopes of finding work, they were arrested for vagrancy and forced onto ships bound for sugar plantations in the West Indies. Like African captives, many died in the voyages along the way.
With the wealth of sugar plantations, England could enter the era of William Thackery's Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero. She examines the material objects of the novel and their relationship to Africa, India, China, and Europe.
The United States is similarly implicated. Just as slavery was coming to an end in the United States, Lincoln's railroad was being built. People originally wanted to exclude Chinese laborers because they were being brought in essentially as slaves to build the railroads, a direct challenge to the cause of abolition. But once the railroads were built and the more capital intensive mining of gold took over California, the push for exclusion came from a darker place. To replace Chinese immigrants in the fields, Japanese were encouraged to immigrate and they were equally successful in forming worker collectives and contracting for agricultural work at lower cost than white laborers. And while she doesn't cover this, we know what happens once they are interned....the Bracero Program. And so it goes.
We cannot view "economic progress" without looking at humanitarian regress. Those most concerned with ethics and morality, such as John Stuart Mill and Hegel found their own ways to justify despotism in the name enlightened European freedom.
Dig in, kids (this seems to be an assigned reading). Wish I understood all this when I was young. If you're just a card-carrying grown-up, it's a wild ride worth the discipline of reading it.
Ultimately, Lowe makes the point that slavery had to exist in order for the West to become what it did. The Empire doesn't abolish slavery completely until it has not just found but created new sources of exploitable labor -which hopefully would present a lower risk of rebellion than enslaved Blacks. The East India Company enabled British manufacturers to receive the wisdom of Indian textile artistry only to industrialize their methods, thus causing a major disruption to the livelihoods of people in India. Similarly, with the forced free trade agreements they gained in the Opium Wars, England was able not only to dump Opium into China but also to flood Chinese markets with cheaper goods and thereby disrupting livelihoods there as well. Thus, their sources of "Coolie" labor were secured. As Chinese people from the countryside flooded into cities in hopes of finding work, they were arrested for vagrancy and forced onto ships bound for sugar plantations in the West Indies. Like African captives, many died in the voyages along the way.
With the wealth of sugar plantations, England could enter the era of William Thackery's Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero. She examines the material objects of the novel and their relationship to Africa, India, China, and Europe.
The United States is similarly implicated. Just as slavery was coming to an end in the United States, Lincoln's railroad was being built. People originally wanted to exclude Chinese laborers because they were being brought in essentially as slaves to build the railroads, a direct challenge to the cause of abolition. But once the railroads were built and the more capital intensive mining of gold took over California, the push for exclusion came from a darker place. To replace Chinese immigrants in the fields, Japanese were encouraged to immigrate and they were equally successful in forming worker collectives and contracting for agricultural work at lower cost than white laborers. And while she doesn't cover this, we know what happens once they are interned....the Bracero Program. And so it goes.
We cannot view "economic progress" without looking at humanitarian regress. Those most concerned with ethics and morality, such as John Stuart Mill and Hegel found their own ways to justify despotism in the name enlightened European freedom.
Dig in, kids (this seems to be an assigned reading). Wish I understood all this when I was young. If you're just a card-carrying grown-up, it's a wild ride worth the discipline of reading it.
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January 25, 2022"This is not a project of merely telling history differently, but one of returning to the past it gaps, uncertainties, impasses, and elisions; it is tracing those moments of eclipse when obscure, unknown, or unperceived elements are lost, those significant moments in which transformations have begun to take place, but have not yet been inserted into historical time. It is an attempt to give an account of the existence of alternatives and possibilities that lay within, but were later foreclosed by, the determinations of the narratives, orders, and paradigms to which they gave rise. A past conditional temporality suggests that there were other conditions of possibility that were vanquished by liberal political reason and its promises of freedom, and it suggests means to open those conditions to pursue what might have been."
November 29, 2022
pro: remarkably thorough (exhaustive) analysis on a wide range of literary, artistic, and historical texts
con: not fun to read (repetitive, bad flow)
Exhibit A: last sentence of the book
"The contemporary moment is so replete with assumptions that freedom is made universal through liberal political enfranchisement and the globalization of capitalism that it has become difficult to write or imagine alternative knowledges, or to act on behalf of alternative projects or ways of being."
good ideas, but so bloated!
tldr, liberalism/capitalism/racism are a intertwined and insidious
If you disagree with that statement or need/want oodles of textual evidence to support this, then you should read this book. Otherwise you probably get the gist.
con: not fun to read (repetitive, bad flow)
Exhibit A: last sentence of the book
"The contemporary moment is so replete with assumptions that freedom is made universal through liberal political enfranchisement and the globalization of capitalism that it has become difficult to write or imagine alternative knowledges, or to act on behalf of alternative projects or ways of being."
good ideas, but so bloated!
tldr, liberalism/capitalism/racism are a intertwined and insidious
If you disagree with that statement or need/want oodles of textual evidence to support this, then you should read this book. Otherwise you probably get the gist.
August 8, 2021
A fantastic read that led me to some introspection about the roots of the model minority myth and how it was created to construct a buffer between white, Black and indigenous folks upon the abolition of slavery in the US amongst other thoughts. Delves deep into the roots of settler colonialism and white supremacy presented in liberal arguments during the Enlightenment and Hegel. It’s the best non-fiction book I’ve read all year.
May 27, 2021
I love Lisa Lowe and this one had some hard-hitting truths but I found it sort of repeated itself quite a bit. The introduction was so strong and laid out so many lines of relation about the entanglements between colonial projects and the slave trade, between abolition and the extraction of Asian labour.
May 12, 2023
Firstly, Lisa Lowe is a really wonderful thinker. Secondly, this book unsettles in the best way. It radically challenges accepted imaginations of what the world could be and gives us directions to new, transformative imaginings. It’s a good place to look for analysis on colonialism and how it has changed the world, but also, how we can reject thinking or imaginings that colonialism perpetuates.
January 22, 2024
Framing and methodology is interesting, but actual content is somewhat repetitive and doesn’t seem to contribute much new insight to the “slavery and origins of modern liberalism and capitalism” discourse. Feels like it tries to do too much and ends up shallowly covering a number of topics that would benefit from more in-depth exploration.
March 5, 2019
A necessary read for anyone interested in post colonial studies and an incredible feat of interdisciplinary scholarship but Lowe leaves out important considerations from the archive of liberalism that could vindicate it of her critique.
June 11, 2021
Mind-blowing, except the last chapter ends with an uncritical examination of the Asian revolutions in the 20th century, which are hailed as "successes." The author implies that a strong brotherhood exists between the continents of Asia and Africa.
March 30, 2024
This is quite good. At the same time I'm not sure it's as revelatory as it kind of claims to be, but maybe that's because I've already read a number of the works in question/am quite familiar with (and convinced by) the global argument. I'd recommend for a lot of general purposes though.
September 16, 2024
It has some really great parts, but the author makes claims of explaining world imperialism and capitalism by analyzing only Anglo-American cases, which I'd just incredibly weird. If you only work with English sources, maybe don't make claims about WORLD history.
September 17, 2024
3.5. This is ALL theory and there’s no effort to make it an easy experience. On the other hand, if you read Babel and you’re like “I’d like to know the history that R. f. Kuang read to get all of her ideas,” this is it.
July 17, 2018
Helpful account connecting certain strands of global capitalism through liberalism but her over arching theme of the ‘intimacies on four continents’ seemed stretched or unnecessary.
August 22, 2019
LISA LOWE IS MY HERO.
August 14, 2023
Densely constructed interpretations well referenced and defined.
November 26, 2024
used this for my thesis - so worth the read. she’s a genius.
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