UC Santa Cruz

In this dissertation, I examine the ideological formation and geographical coalescence of colonial servitude in the literature of the 17th-and 18th-century Anglo-American Atlantic. The figure of the colonial servant, typically consigned to a marginal literary position, embodies a fundamental dialectic illustrating the precarity of labor in the English Atlantic. Its formulation is exemplified in Francis Bacon's 1606 address to James I on the planting of Ireland. In this discourse, Bacon articulates colonial transportation as "a double commodity," a twin advantage and dual solution to the labor surpluses of England and Scotland and the characteristic labor shortages of the colonial plantations -- a simple but cutting design that links the "avoidance of people here" with the "making use of them there." Rendered economic, social, and political liabilities at home, English and Scottish laborers are refigured as potential assets of colonial elsewheres. It is a logic that will outlive the overpopulation crises of Elizabethan and Jacobean England and obtain as the basic model for transatlantic colonial servitude -- the condition assumed by over half of all migrants to the English colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries and one comprising indentured servants, convict transports, political prisoners, redemptioners, maids-for-wives, as well as spirited, or kidnapped, transports. Presenting the colonial laborer as an object of use and exchange, Bacon's characterization of transportation as a twofold benefit highlights the commodity status of the colonial laborer and underscores the fundamental economic character of colonial servitude. My principal effort is to demonstrate that this fundamental economism of colonial servitude is continued, if also ideologically refracted, in the literature of the Anlgo-American Atlantic, as evident in each of this study's literary geographies -- Inkle and Yarico's Barbados, Oroonoko's Surinam, and Defoe's Chesapeake. Whether taking up the extensive, adaptive network of the Inkle and Yarico myth (1657-1833), Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688), or Daniel Defoe's Colonel Jack (1722), my central claim is that the literary colonial servant is a figure of human commodification that serves an important mediating function in the transition to colonial capitalism and the emergence of racial slavery in the Anglo-American Atlantic.