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Crystal Bartolovich

Preface 2021: A lot can change in a decade. If I wrote this essay today, I would still maintain that “the ‘common’ had to be suppressed on a worldwide scale for capitalism to emerge” as I argue here; in that respect, I think the essay holds up well. But returning to it now, I would put far more emphasis on the ecological aspects of this suppression of the common and address the ecocritical turn in early modern studies (for a helpful overview, see Hiltner) as well as the inflection of theories of primitive accumulation with the ecological in the work of Jason Moore. In this way, I would all the more strongly argue for the superiority of a Marxist perspective over the so-called new materialism that characterizes most strains of premodern ecocriticism. As even some geologists recognize, the colonization of the Americas was an ecodisaster of massive consequence (e.g., Lewis and Maslin). Moore’s view of the history of capitalism as an ecological as well as social catastrophe from the late fifteenth century onward must be underscored. By denying totality – and therefore this history – I would suggest that the new materialism renders impossible confronting the fundamental changes in property relations on a global scale that would need to occur to produce a healthy planet for humans and nonhumans alike, as I have argued in more recent work, such as “Learning from Crab” (2020).

Although the “England first” position continues to have considerable purchase in debates about the emergence of capitalism, problems remain when we attempt to determine an absolute distinction (much less priority) of “domestic” over what we might call the “oceanic” – or global – aspects of this process.¹ Certainly “internal” and “external” forces were already imagined in the period as fluid and interconnected. Take, for example, the tantalizingly suggestive assertion – presented as a generic justification for travel writing – that “History without Geography wandreth as a Vagrant without a certain habitation.”² As we shall see, this recognition of the dangers of history – and its association with globally uncontrolled “masterless” subjects, at a time in which vagrancy was a considerable domestic preoccupation in England – is by no means incidental. Just as early modern English vagrancy law and writing attempt to contain potentially dangerous – to elites – historical possibilities, colonialism, trade and “world writing” (geography), too, attempt to settle the uncertainties of history – and direct it toward hegemonic European interests. As this essay will argue, both local and global flows of labor power – and resistance to its privatization – were implicated in the formation of early modern subjects at the dawn of capitalist accumulation. The “common” had to be suppressed on a world scale for capitalism to emerge, since it holds out the possibility of an alternative way of living and being that unquestionably proved attractive to large numbers of ordinary people in the early modern period – both in Europe and beyond. Thus, domestic as well as colonial dispossession and enclosure – along with the incipiently global circulations of labor – are imbricated materially and ideologically; both concern themselves with the course of history and who will be (recognized as) making it. Ultimately, a certain enclosure, or limiting, of historical possibilities, along with spatial ones, prepares the way for the enclosure of modern subjects: it is the price “individualism” – and nationalism – exacts.

As the expanding market sets labor in motion on a grand scale – that is, divides it from subjects and circulates it in vast trade routes that increasingly elude the tracking capacity of either the agents of the labor or its distant users – it creates historical and subjective crises that cannot be fully addressed, or even understood, in market terms alone. Georg Lukacs explains that the alienation of labor power in the wage relation assumes the form of putatively “natural” laws that “confront [us] as invisible forces that generate their own power,” until the entire world appears to exist in conformity with this – reifying – imperative in spite of the continuous movement and flux in which we may find ourselves individually (87). John Wheeler’s Treatise of Commerce already describes (and mystifies) this market power in 1601, when he writes that “all the world choppeth and changeth, runneth and raveth, after Marts, Markets and Merchandising, so that all things come into Commerce, and passe into traffique (in a maner) in all times and in all places,” including one man selling the products of “another mans labour,” thus turning labor, too, into a commodity (6). By wrenching labor into a trade object from which its merchants profit at the expense of its agents, circulating it far beyond the knowledge of either, this commodification reciprocally transforms the “self” – the remainder after labor has been alienated – into the isolated proprietor of both labor and the self, making it seem “self”-evident that we are, in the end, implicated neither in the world, nor each other, except as indifferent actors in the market, because – our supposed compensation – we are “individuals.”³

Such hermetic “individualism” is the primary “fictional direction,” as Lacan helpfully puts it, in which modern – market – subjectivity moves (2). Georg Simmel has described this situation and its effects thus:

The modern metropolis … is supplied almost entirely by production for the market, that is, for entirely unknown purchasers who never personally enter the producer’s actual field of vision. Through this anonymity the interests of each party acquire an unmerciful matter-of-factness; and the intellectually calculating economic egoisms of both parties need not fear any deflection because of the imponderables of personal relationships.

(Simmel, 411–412; emphasis added)

As the trajectories of their locally disembedded – vagrant – labors increasingly elude them, modern subjects are “freed” from a sense of mutual responsibility, despite their actual mutual dependency and the increased entanglement of their labors.⁴ To theorize the emergence of capitalism and modern subjectivity, then, the circulation of labor-power – or in early modern parlance, travail – can be just as crucial as following the travels of thought about subjectivity, as Edward Said does in his “Traveling Theory,” from which I borrow my title, with a pointed change in spelling. By insisting upon “following the labor” – as well as the laborer – I am also adding a novel perspective to the writing about vagrancy, even to the most recent studies that have, refreshingly, expanded their focus beyond the shores of England.⁵

Specifically, an examination in these terms of the work of the colonial surveyor Richard Norwood (1590–1675) – who produced the first maps, as well as a detailed description, of Bermuda in the second decade of the seventeenth century – allows us to track the emergent ideology and practice of enclosure arising to negotiate, and reinforce, this crisis of subjective as well as “historical” movement of labor, through the active suppression of certain “common” historical possibilities on a global scale.⁶ His father’s estate being decayed, Norwood had to make his own way in the world, a path that included stints as a fishmonger’s apprentice, a mercenary on the continent, a vagrant, a seaman, a self-taught mathematician, and, ultimately, a colonial schoolmaster as well as land – and slave – owner on Bermuda, where he also experiences a conversion to radical Protestantism, which he details in a spiritual autobiography. Because Norwood offers an example of personal upward mobility via a nationalist–imperialist agenda – “improvement” of both self and land (domestic as well as colonial) via mathematics and surveying, supplemented by radical antinomian religious conviction – his case is a particularly interesting site in which to think through the emergence of modern individualist ideology. In his fascinating autobiography, written as he approached 50 and started to worry about the ebbing of memory, Norwood assembled a textual constellation through which to construct a life narrative and, thus, his – enclosed – “self,” as an attempted antidote to a deep sense of what he repeatedly called “alienation.” Though he self-consciously modeled his autobiography on Augustine’s Confessions, the two texts are different in ways that have implications for the debates about the shift from “medieval” to “modern” subjectivity. Most strikingly, whereas Augustine tends to present particular details of his life history as instances of the universally human, Norwood’s text draws attention to his singularity and isolation. Paradoxically, Norwood’s strategy is indicative of a reification and abstraction of a “self,” not Augustine’s, whose conceptualization, on the face of it, seems to be the more abstract. To situate and understand Norwood’s texts properly, however, we have to first see how the “self” was being substituted for the “common” at the heart of social life at the time in which he wrote. This situation alters subjective experience in ways that necessarily distinguish his world from Augustine’s, such that when the Confessions travels into it, it becomes a very different text.

In the mid-seventeenth century, when Norwood was writing, everyone seemed to agree that, in the beginning, the world had belonged to all men in common, though there was considerable disagreement about what had altered this originary condition. For example, the Diggers, one of the dissident groups that emerged during the Civil War period in midcentury to assert a more general revolution than Cromwell and his comrades had in mind, used the image of an originary radical commonality to agitate for a return to it. With their visceral understanding of exploitation, they complained, as Gerrard Winstanley writes, that “those that buy and sell land, and are landlords, have got it either by oppression or murder, or theft; … they have by their subtle imaginary and covetous wit got the plain-hearted poor, or younger brethren to work for them for small wages, and by their work have got a great increase …” (85). They thus assert that private property was not only unnatural but was the cause – not the consequence, as elite rationalization of inequality would have it – of the Fall of man:

[When] whole mankind walked in singleness and simplicity each to other, some bodies were more strong than others, as the elder brother was stronger than the younger, and the stronger did work for the weaker, and the whole earth was common to all without exception … [until the] elder brother, seeing the outward objects before him, thereupon imagines and saith, ‘why should I that do all the work be such a servant to these that do least work, and be equal with them?’ … This imagination is the serpent that deceives the man … and mankind falls from single simplicity to be full of divisions.

(263–264)

The Fall here takes on a strikingly human and materialist dimension: the Devil is social division. Accordingly, for the Diggers, the Fall is reversible if people begin living according to Edenic – which is to say radically common – principles rather than against them. Long before Marx, Winstanley suggests that social relations should be guided by the imperative that Marx would later propose: “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” (Gotha, 10). Specifically, the Diggers assert that the traditional agrarian commons, with its hierarchies and the feudal divide between those who labored and those who merely – by this time – collected rents, had to be radicalized into communes of mutual labor and shared fruits, a condition that they assumed should be generalized to “the whole world” as the originary commons had been (Winstanley, 108). When they attempted to put this plan into effect, however, by squatting and collectively planting corn on “waste” [unused] land, the “powers” – as they referred to elites – saw to it that the Digger encampments and movement were utterly wiped out.

This suppression of the possibility of a radically common “whole world,” and the alienation characteristic of the private property that emerges instead, I want to insist, is the most distinctive and widespread subjective feature of emergent capitalism. From the Digger’s perspective, enclosure was the cultivation of Satan – a fantasy that Michael Taussig has also tracked in latter-day peasant communities when the market was thrust upon them.⁷ And what this Satan drives out is the common. Joan Thirsk, in an uncharacteristically elegiac passage, comments on the social effects of enclosure thus:

Common fields and pastures kept alive a vigorous co-operative spirit in the community; enclosures starved it. In champion country people had to work together amicably, to agree upon crop rotations, stints of common pasture, the upkeep and improvement of their grazings and meadows, the clearing of ditches, the fencing of fields, and they walked together from field to village, from farm to heath, morning, afternoon and evening. They all depended on common resources for their fuel, for bedding, and fodder for their stock, and by pooling so many of the necessities of livelihood they were disciplined from early youth to submit to the rules and customs of the community. After enclosures, when every man could fence his own piece of territory and warn his neighbors off, the discipline of sharing things fairly with one’s neighbors was relaxed, and every household became an island unto itself. This was the great revolution in men’s lives, greater than all the economic changes following enclosure.

(1967, 255)

The commons that the Diggers advocated attempted to intensify the “vigorous cooperative spirit” at a moment in which even its traditional form was under attack. The implications of the suppression of a potentially global radical commons are even more profound than the demise of the patriarchal and hierarchical English agrarian commons that Thirsk laments. Dispossessed, a growing landless population must sell its labor power to survive. Because they now must buy the means of subsistence, distinct marketplaces are swept together by the generalized abstraction of a national–globalizing market as food, clothing, household goods, and tools, as well as luxuries big and small, are detached from any visible connection to localized labor. As Thirsk observes:

new occupations in bewildering variety appeared in so many townships in the kingdom in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, [that they] … set the wheels of domestic trade turning faster, encouraging the making of yet more consumer goods, spinning an ever more elaborate web of inland commerce.

(1978, 8)

Circulating in this “elaborate web,” labor power becomes – potentially – what early modern elites called “vagrant” – that is, in the vocabulary of period legislation, masterless, detached from immediately and identifiably constraining social moorings (though laborers were the accused).

To keep labor power from becoming vagrant, elites not only tried to control the movements of laborers – to secure them in workhouses or in the places where they had been born and were known – but they also increased both the variety of commodities traded as well as the numbers of their partners, expanded empire, and diverted a larger proportion of the population into supporting these maritime activities.⁸ In this way, the labor power that might have been collectivized in a global commons was diverted to elite purposes both “inside” and “outside” England in a new form and at an expanding scale. Struggles to set history down a different path were vigorously suppressed, and individualism – self-possession – offered instead as a justification and compensation. On the one hand, then, labor – instantiated in commodities – moves around ever more anonymously, profusely, and expansively, while, on the other, the “self” is encouraged to become ever more private and enclosed. And the “market” in which these novel selves and commodities were inserted did not stop at the ocean but pushed across it – as did resistance to it.

Narratives of travel and colonization signal the global dispersion of labor in their virtually ubiquitous habit of list making. Not only do these texts circulate widely themselves, but also they record endless movements of labor in ships, settlers, books, letters, manufactured goods for home, farm and craft, weaponry, and a wide range of flora and fauna, though they tend to obliterate the activity of labor and focus their attention on its end products. Richard Norwood observes in his account of Bermuda, for example:

[T]here hath been brought thither, as well from the Indies, as from other parts of the World, … Vines of severall kindes, Sugar-canes, Fig-trees, Apple-trees, Oranges, Lymons, Pomegranets, Plantaynes, Pines, Parsnips, Radishes, Artichokes, Potatoes, Cassdo, Indico, and many other: Insomuch that it is now become [a] … Nurcery of many pleasant and profitable things.

(lxxxii)

The passive voice here is replicated in text after text. Early settlers were urged to carry myriad items with them from England, including food, clothing, sewing supplies, cooking utensils, bedding and other small consumer goods, as well as farming, carpentry and artisanal tools and materials, which, too, seemingly make themselves (Thirsk 1978, 49–50). Fresh water, fuel, and food for ships stopping en route to mainland and Caribbean colonies or going back to Europe, as well as tobacco, sugar, ambergris, and numerous other primary commodities, circulated off the island in turn. In every case, social labor circulates in these items, without which they would not exist, but as employers increasingly siphon labor, rendering it alien to its agents in the wage relation, it becomes more anonymous, disembedded, and abstract; products confront their users as if they have a life of their own. Thus, the “common” labor they contain does not result in the creation of a global “commons” but rather works to secure its opposite: the estrangement and atomization of laborers. In Norwood’s autobiography, we find a narrative of subjective response to such conditions of continuous circulation, displacement, and containment of labor rather than a detailed depiction of them; just the same, it indicates that the process of cartography and surveying that attempts to limit and control historical movement repeats itself at the level of the subject, albeit not without a struggle.

This struggle is hardly surprising, since we know that as an agrarian improvement project, enclosure did not proceed without resistance either in the England in which Norwood grew up. Thomas Tusser’s monumental best-seller Five Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry (1573) has to defend the conversion of “common” to “severall” [private] fields that inhabitants of highly developed capitalist countries now take for granted in order to help push labor into circulation in its capitalist form while establishing the institutional and ideological conditions of possibility for its reification. He contrasts the poverty, drudgery, and inconvenience that he claims arise from the “common” with the wealth, ease, and comfort of enclosed – or “severall” – land: “Againe what a ioy is it knowen,/When men may be bold of their owne” (fol. 60r). He suggests that the open fields discourage innovation while encouraging laziness and inefficiency; thus, he insists that “more profit is quieter found,/(where pastures in severall bee)/Of one silly acre of ground,/then champion maketh of three” (fol. 59v). “Severall” property might displace tenants, but this is not a problem for him because enclosure provides “more work for the laboring man/as well in the towne as the field” than do commons (fol. 59v). Laborers (and labor) can always travel where they are needed. So, while he acknowledges that “The poore, at enclosing do grutch,/because of abuses that fall,/Least some man should have but to much,/and some againe nothing at all,” he ends by proposing that there is a logic to even so unhappy-appearing a situation: “If order mought there in be founde:/what were to the severall grounde?” (fol. 60v). “Order” can ultimately be found in enclosure, whatever the immediate painful consequences, his poem implies, though it also recognizes, in its citation of the complaints of the “poore,” that this “order” is not yet fully accomplished – or, at least, appreciated.

By the middle of the next century, however, when Norwood was writing his autobiography, the ostensible benefits of enclosure are widely enough assumed for it to migrate metaphorically into Leveller discourse, that emphatically claims that men should be bold to enjoy their “owne” – not just in terms of land but also of their selves alongside all other property that should be protected by laws and secured by the state. Richard Overton explains:

To every individuall in nature is given an individuall property by nature, not to be invaded or usurped by any: for everyone as he is himselfe, so he hath a selfe propriety, else could he not be himself … Mine and thine cannot be, unless this be.

(3)

Property in the self remains, even if it is one’s sole possession. As Peter Stallybrass has pointed out, however, “the radical notion of the separate individual has its cost: the reduction of the political subject, language, the author to independent atoms which preceded all social relations” (610). Obscuring this cost, John Locke will underscore and advance this already well-established idiom when, at the end of the century, he simultaneously praises enclosure in terms that are familiar from Tusser and the other “improvers” alongside a discourse of self-property drawn from the radical individualism that we see asserted during the revolution by men like Overton. Thus, Locke’s famous chapter on property concedes one of the commonplaces of the period – that “God gave the world to Adam and his posterity in common” (17), but dismisses it in favor of an individualist paradigm of property; those who make the most productive use of land – at home or in the colonies – deserve exclusive property in it, an imperative Locke models on the individual’s possession of himself: “man, by being master of himself and proprietor of his own person and the actions or labor of it had still in himself the great foundation of property” (27). The catch here is that if you are a “proprietor” of your own person and labor, you can sell it, and then it belongs to its new “proprietor”: “the grass my horse has bit, the turfs my servant has cut, and the ore I have digged … become my property” (18). Between the Diggers and Locke, then, we can see that two paths open up before incipiently modern subjects; the radically “individual” subject triumphed, while the radically “common” one was violently suppressed, with material consequences for the world that we still inhabit.

The writings of Richard Norwood help expose the mechanisms – and costs – of this suppression, which has a colonial as well as a domestic, a social as well as a subjective, front. He is known today, principally, as the first cartographer of Bermuda. Prior to the shipwreck of an English ship there in 1609, seamen of all nations had typically avoided it as haunted and dangerous, but life on the island proved so – unexpectedly – comfortable for the original group of English castaways who lived there for about nine months in their own version of a radical commons, that John Smith later observed: it “caused many of them utterly to forget or desire ever to returne from thence, they lived in such plenty, peace and ease” (349). The earliest writings on Bermuda, in fact, share a preoccupation with justifying the onward colonial enterprise to Virginia of this original shipwrecked population, which manifestly did not willingly leave the well-provisioned, previously uninhabited, island, for hungry Virginia, with the challenges of its large native population.⁹ Norwood’s strategy is to write as if the Edenic moment never happened, and to characterize the island instead as “chaos” in need of “order.”

It is worth examining closely what he obscures to take full account of the loss it entails. William Strachey’s narrative reveals that the hurricane that delivered the 150 or so women and men – including himself – on the Sea Venture to the supposed “Devil’s Islands” disrupted long-embedded social hierarchies by forcing every man – even “such as in all their lifetimes had never done hour’s work before” – equally, without sleep or food, to labor to keep the ship from sinking (16, 12). Then, after landing on the island, abundance, the lack of established property relations, and the memory of the tempest-induced equality encouraged what we might call an accidentally radical commons. For some, the unexpected diversion of the expedition permanently unsettled the apparatus of authority that had previously governed the ship that was intended to deliver them to Virginia:

… one Stephen Hopkins … – a fellow who had much knowledge in the Scriptures and could reason well therein … – alleged substantial arguments both civil and divine (the Scripture falsely quoted) that it was no breach of honesty, conscience, nor religion to decline from the obedience of the governor or refuse to go any further led by his authority (except it so pleased themselves), since the authority ceased when the wreck was committed, and with it, they were all then freed from the government of any man.

(43–44)

Hopkins and other dissidents further insisted that since they had been directed by God to a place where plentiful food could be got with little labor, and where, therefore, each man could live equally freely and comfortably, their departure should not be forced, especially since in Virginia they would likely be subjected to great want, and furthermore “might be detained in that country by the authority of the commander thereof and their whole life to serve the turns of the adventurers with their travails and labors” (44). Such arguments even infiltrated the rank of some of those whom Strachey referred to as “the better sort,” who had to be wooed back with reminders of the duty that they owed the king, their own class, and, not least, the voyage’s investors, since “the meanest in the whole fleet stood the company in no less than £20 for his own personal transportation and things necessary to accompany him” (40, 52). This divide between the (minority) defenders of traditional order, who – reasserting privilege – insisted the Virginia Company should get the bodies it paid for, and the settlers who viewed the shipwreck as giving rise to an egalitarian social order worth preserving, made manifest the tenuousness of social inequality in the absence of its material basis in unequal property.¹⁰

Strachey himself recognizes the social implications of the lack of private property in the curious metaphor that he uses to describe the glee with which the abundant fruit of the palmetto was harvested by persons who, unused to plenty, suddenly found themselves capable of having as much as they desired. He likens the trees – which are capped by fruit – to the members of the middle class (to which he belonged, precariously, himself):

Many an ancient burgher was therefore heaved at and fell not only for his place but for his head. For our common people, whose bellies never had ears, made it no breach of charity in their hot bloods and tall stomachs to murder thousands of them.

(26)

This passage’s expression of elite anxiety in the face of the unleashed appetites of the previously contained and repressed “common people,” and their symbolic “murder” of authority and privilege that the lack of private property made possible, was clearly not lost on the “common people” themselves, who, as we have seen, mounted considerable resistance to losing their newfound equality. Strachey summarizes the situation thus:

And sure it was happy for us, who had now run this fortune and were fallen into the bottom of this misery, that we both had our governor with us and one so solicitous and careful whose both example … and authority could lay shame and command upon our people. Else, I am persuaded, we had most of us finished our days there, so willing were the major part of the common sort (especially when they found such a plenty of victuals) to settle a foundation of ever inhabiting there; as well appeared by many practices of theirs (and perhaps of the better sort). … The angles wherewith chiefly they thus hooked in these disquieted pools were how that in Virginia nothing but wretchedness and labor must be expected … there being neither that fish, flesh, nor fowl which here (without wasting on the one part, or watching on theirs, or any threatening and art of authority) at ease and pleasure might be enjoyed.

(40–41)

It is striking that the very conditions that Strachey calls the “bottom of this misery” are “pleasure” to the “common sort” – pleasure that derives from a completely different set of social relations than the “profitable” ones Norwood would later champion. Whereas the lack of unequal property had put the original castaways on an equal footing, Norwood helps the Bermuda Company stave off such historical irregularities (“chaos”) by surveying the almost-Eden and imposing private property relations upon it in the name of investors to render it “profitable.” Like Norwood, Strachey experiences only chaos (“devilish disquiets”) where the majority of the shipwrecked voyagers found “ease.” For him, the Bermudas turned out to be the “Devil’s Islands” they were reputed to be, then, though not in the way that earlier mariners had proposed. Satan, apparently, is a very malleable sign. In any case, the very freedom and plenty, equality and ease, that for the “common sort” had previously belonged only to fantasies of heaven or Cockaigne, Eden or New World natives, had actually become theirs, and they were not keen to give them up, which put them at odds with the colonial companies and their agents who were determined to return the radical commons to the realm of fairy tale once again. The stakes were nothing less than who would control labor, resources, and history at a moment in which they threatened vagrancy – masterlessness – from the point of view of elites.

What combination of fear of future reprisals, anxiety about the unknown if they were abandoned, appeals to duty or patriotism, the terroristic executions of subversives, religious indoctrination, or concern for loved ones still in England – all of which surface in Strachey’s narrative at some point as weighing heavily on the shipwrecked population – propelled the reluctant castaways on toward Virginia is unclear, but that almost all indeed did go on to suffer exactly the privation, authoritarian subjection, and constant labor that they had feared is clear. It is also clear that when Bermuda was officially colonized a year later, it was organized along martial lines (“a Regiment” in Norwood’s words), not as a radical commons. Norwood’s Bermuda writings, which emerge in this second moment – entirely suppressing the early Edenic period – imply that the compensation for giving up Eden and commonality was individualism, improvement, and “order.” In particular, Norwood explains the benefits of the official surveys he undertook in 1614–1615 (to map the island as a whole) and 1616–1617 (to allot specific plots to shareholders):

And then began this, which was before as it were an unsettled and confused Chaos … to receive a convenient disposition, forme, and order, and to become indeede a Plantation; for though the countrey was small, yet they could not have beene conveniently disposed and well setled without a true description and survey made of it; and againe every man being setled where he might constantly abide, they knew their businesse, and fitted their household accordingly. They built for themselves and there families not Tents or Cabins but more substantiall houses … So that in short time after … the Country began to asprire and neerely to approach unto that happiness and prosperitie wherein now it flourisheth.

(lxxvi–lxxvii)

The Edenic possibilities offered by Bermuda in the earliest years are manifestly lost or forgotten, degraded in Norwood’s account into a “chaos” that Norwood – as Locke would after – seeks to control with private property and possessive individualism rather than with an attempt to remake Eden or even a “brotherly” commonwealth as the earliest English settlement in Bermuda had been described in John Smith’s account (351). After the survey, Norwood claims that landowners “knew their business” and “built for themselves and thir families.” This suppression of the commons, repeated across numerous texts and instantiated in a variety of institutions, from land surveying to chancery court, ultimately has decisive effects for the emergence of not only private property and the nation but also “modern” subjectivity.

Benedict Anderson has emphasized that the emergence of a national imaginary depends on the sort of forgetting and remembering that Norwood enacts in his description of the founding of Bermuda. Communities are formed in particular ways by the memories that they share and the forms in which they are circulated. Norwood preserves and obliterates aspects of the settling of Bermuda such that enclosure triumphs over “common” use of resources. He engages in a related project in his spiritual autobiography, suggesting that the forgetting–remembering dynamic has a role to play in the emergence of “individuals” as well as nations, a supposition that is borne out by the ways in which his autobiography contrasts with that of his model, Augustine. While he draws heavily on the Confessions even to the point of “remembering” as part of his own life story numerous episodes from Augustine’s (stealing pears, resisting persistently strong sexual temptation, and suppressing a taste for stage plays, among numerous others) the two books are, in the end, more interesting in their differences than in their evident parallels. In his journal, Norwood “endeavoured to call to mind the whole course of [his] life past, and how the Lord had dealt with [him]” because he “perceived that some things began to grow out of memory, which [he] thought [he] should scarce ever have forgotten; and considering that as age came on, forgetfulness would increase upon [him], [he] determined to set them down in writing” (3). Writing is a prosthesis to his own mind, a reminder to himself of God’s mercy as much as to any possible future reader. Though his writings also seem to assume a reader who will become privy to aspects of himself that he emphasizes he has never fully described to anyone, they were not published until the mid-twentieth century. Augustine much more expressly assumes a reader (and the Confessions did circulate widely):

This then is the fruit of my confession … in that I confess not only before You … but also in the ears of the believing sons of men, companions of my joy and sharers of my mortality, my fellow citizens, fellow pilgrims: those who have gone before, and those who are to come after, and those who walk the way of life with me.

(Sheed, trans., 175; O’Donnell, ed., 120–121)¹¹

Augustine (unlike Norwood) addresses God directly in this way on almost every page, but he also announces that God already knows him better than he knows himself, so that his writing can, ultimately, only be for human readers, for whom he repeatedly interprets even the most singular aspects of his life as illustrating a particular instance of a human universal. Augustine can thus begin the account of his life before he has any personal memories of it because he knows from watching other infants what all infants are like (Sheed, 6; O’Donnell, 5). Conversely, Norwood’s earliest recorded memory is intensely personalized: an account of falling into a pond and nearly drowning on his way to school on the first day he wore breeches. He makes no attempt to link this to “universal” tendencies or experience but instead emphasizes his personal folly and frailty. Augustine’s narrative is open and interconnecting, frequently deploying collective first-person pronouns, as when he explains his reasons for writing: “we are laying bare our love for you in confessing to you our wretchedness and your mercies toward us: that You may free us wholly as you have already freed us in part” (Sheed, 211; O’Donnell, 148). Norwood’s autobiography only very rarely uses the first-person plural or in any other way addresses or engages the reader directly.

Indeed, Norwood’s text seems to fear an excess in himself that may well not be assimilable to any universal, and presents himself as enclosed, privately walled off from fellow human beings. These differences do not mean that the slave society in which Augustine writes is superior, or that his subjective solution is to be preferred, but it does historicize the subjective enclosure that modernity takes for granted. Furthermore, both texts insert their narrative of conversion within a wider biographical frame, which makes it easier to situate their different emphases and choices as part of a long historical process. Responding to Augustine, Norwood ruminates continually on his “course of life” – which refers to both his career and his spiritual path. Because his father’s estate is “much decayed,” he cannot count on comfortable routes to his goals of travel and education. Often “destitute,” his choices are severely constrained. Aspiring to knowledge and longing for challenging and satisfying work, he is, instead, “alienated.” Of the “course” he follows before his first Bermuda voyage – from fishmonger’s apprentice, to mercenary on the continent, to vagrant and then, finally, seaman – he observes: “every step I went, as it was further from my native country so it led me and alienated my heart farther from God, from religion and from a desire to return” (22, emphasis added). He is so “alienated” in fact that for a time he “could not endure that men should see me,” and travels only at night. As he wanders alone, without either settled purpose or abode, he sleeps in barns, storehouses, or in the rough, stealing or begging food. He uses this period of vagrant wandering to figure his spiritual condition of doubt and loneliness, so it is striking that regular occupation, when he finally obtains it, whether on land or sea, does not cure his alienation. His sea adventures, as fervently as he had longed for them, ultimately prove unsatisfying, since he discovers that “for that calling I never much affected but only as it was a means whereby I might see the world and learn the art of navigation” (39). Having made a number of voyages as an apprentice seaman and begun his mathematical self-instruction (studying during his breaks and sleeping during his shifts), he recognizes that selling his labor, not simply physical travel and distance – underwrites his alienation – a sense of lack of control over his existence, as well as lack of secure social relations – and decides that “as a master or master’s mate or as a purser or surgeon or otherwise as a passenger I would if occasion required, go to sea, but not as a sailor or for my labour” (40, emphasis mine). Gaining some attention for his mathematical studies fuels his hope of being freed from exploitation and abuse, but he does not resist them directly; instead he deploys the “weapons of the weak” (shirking, flight, and so on), while pursuing upward mobility: “I began to think that the good things that belonged unto others also belonged to me” (45).¹² Even this does not assuage his alienation. He eventually determines, thus, that “a man might have all these things and yet be a most miserable man,” but unlike Augustine, who, upon coming to a similar conclusion, rejects rhetoric and his teaching career, Norwood in the end does not see any need to abandon mathematics or surveying, which, to the contrary, become the idiom in which he finds his saved self: enclosure (76).

Some of the differences in the two texts can be accounted for in the different training, habits, and talents of mind: the great, immensely learned philosopher versus the self-taught mathematician – but such contrasts do not fully account for the ways that Norwood transforms Augustine’s Confessions. What distinguishes them, rather, is subjective privatization and enclosure, an enclosure that emerges with Norwood’s sense of being, in the end, utterly alone in his struggles, especially a “very sensible annoyance of Satan” (93). While he was surveying the individual properties on Bermuda, he experiences the conversion that he describes in a figure familiar to him from his profession: “the Lord was pleased to … keep out Satan as it were with a pale or hedge from making that common inroad into my heart as he had so long used to do” (85). This “pale or hedge” around his newly enclosed “Puritan” self, however, appears to leave him just as alienated as before, albeit in different terms. When he returns to London, he finds himself beset with agonizing spiritual doubts and isolation in the metropolis and resolves “to acquaint some Christians with my condition, and to gain some Christian acquaintance … [since] my heart even thirsted as the parched ground or as one parched and singed by Satan’s temptations, to have some near communion and familiarity with some that were the children of God” (98). This turns out to be difficult to accomplish, not only because locating and introducing himself to such a community is challenging in a vast and disorienting city but especially because he feels unable to reveal the full extent of his misery even when he does find “acquaintance”:

I was very shy and sparing in declaring the worst things, supposing that never any true Christian was in that case. The fearful blasphemies and annoyances of Satan I did but lightly touch upon, concealing my greatest grievances and fears, supposing that if I should lay open all I should be rejected of Christians as a reprobate, a man forsaken of God and given over to Satan.

(101)

The autobiography concludes, in fact, with a page-long prayer that calls attention to his isolation by using a collective pronoun only once. In contrast, Augustine concludes with: “Of you we must ask, in you we must seek, at you we must knock. Thus, only shall we receive, thus shall we find, thus will it be opened to us” (Sheed, 286; O’Donnell, 205). The prayer that constitutes the entire latter part of the Confessions – several chapters – takes collective pronouns (e.g., “nos”) and verb conjugations as the norm, only very occasionally displaced with an “ego” (“I”) or a “meum” (“my”).

If the pronouns and Norwood’s meticulously documented “alienation” suggest a ambiguity in his own sense of belonging to a collective, “Satan” is identified as the agent of this isolation:

Sometimes he seemed to lean on my back or arms or shoulder, sometimes hanging on my cloak or gown. Sometimes it seemed in my feeling as if he had stricken me in sundry places, sometimes as if he were handling my heart and working withal a wonderful hardness therein, accompanied with many strange passions, affections, lusts, and blasphemies.

(93)

While this kind of thing is quite common in spiritual autobiographies in the seventeenth century, there is nothing at all like it in Augustine, who never imagines himself as engaged in a direct struggle with Satan. For Norwood, however, the fight with Satan is personal and physical: in bed, on the street, at any time or place – “almost continual” – he could be subjected thus. What is particularly striking about Norwood’s narrative of these dramatic experiences – as with the others in the genre – is the highly refined “self” consciousness that they illustrate; Norwood’s sense of the “social” when it emerges at all, seems comparatively remote, alien; he is hyper aware of his body, his anxieties, the peril of his soul. The self is assumed to be isolated, pre-social, and, except for grace, ultimately alone in its fight with “Satan.” Even Norwood’s attempts at explicit social connection are impeded by a sense of threat and isolation: walking down the street “all things seemed in their kinds to be my enemies” (99). It is not, of course, that he never describes meetings with, or comforts of, family, friends, and ministers but rather that these are always narrated at a remove from the immediate site of battle between his soul and “Satan.”

“Satan” assaults Norwood, not only rendering his body a battleground but also calling attention to its enclosure and his subjective alienation. However, “Satan,” too, as we have already seen, is a battleground in the period, a cultural sign through which personal and interpersonal relations and change are being experienced and understood, though not always in the same way. Strachey, for his part, associated “devilish disquiets” with disruption of traditional social hierarchy. The Diggers, for their part, viewed “the serpent” as a figure for the “imagination” that gives rise to private property and exploitation, and such “division” as Norwood experiences: “the serpent that deceives the man [so that] mankind falls from single simplicity to be full of division.” Norwood interprets Satan another way, as a threat to his individual self, revealing the costs of emergent capital even to someone becoming what Gramsci would later call its “organic intellectual” – an adept and theorist of one of its enabling practices. Later, in his chapters on “primitive accumulation,” Marx calls this alienating “Satan” by its social name – capitalism – to free it from the constraints of the individualizing narrative into which Norwood helps insert it – a narrative through which inequality will be justified as an effect of an earlier historical moment when the “diligent, intelligent and above all frugal elite” were separated from the “lazy rascals spending their substance, and more, in riotous living.” When this “nursery tale” becomes accepted as “history,” exploitation, alienation, and the individual, all become normalized in it (873). The Diggers – with their insistence on the “common” – mounted a resistance to the conditions that later conjure up this tale, suggesting an alternative path to modernity, but they – and the radical commons – were defeated. In enclosing his “self” and land as emergent capitalism demanded, while obscuring other possibilities, Norwood helps to write the history of the victors in a global idiom, in which domestic and colonial practices are allied.

This global history insinuates itself as affirmative, or, at least, necessary, such that any ensuing symptoms at the level of the subject are assumed to be mere personal pathology. Indeed, it is easy enough to transcode Norwood’s affliction from a religious to a psychological idiom, as, for example, Meredith Skura does, but in so doing she moves from one individual-normalizing narrative to another. Michael Taussig, alternatively, has read Devil tales as social: “a stunningly apt symbol of … alienation,” in the Marxist sense of being detached from one’s proper social being by the objectification of the market (xi). Understood in these terms, Norwood’s affliction can be viewed as not only “personal” spiritual anguish, nor psychic dissonance alone, but as symptoms of the social cost extracted by the process of “individualization,” and privatization of “nature,” that the Michel Foucault of Discipline and Punish as much as the early Marx has seen as a site of abjection rather than the freedom with which it is associated in the liberal tradition. To be sure, Norwood, who died a land – and slave – owner in Bermuda, was not one of the great oppressed of history. My point is a different one: I am enumerating the cost to everyone in a world where the “common” has been suppressed, though not, of course, to everyone in just the same way.

In “Traveling Theory,” Edward Said traced the consequences for the theorization of subjectivity in a movement from Lukacs to Lucien Goldman through Raymond Williams and, finally, Foucault. His goal had been not only to demonstrate that theory “travels,” which is, after all, pretty obvious, as he himself notes, but, rather to examine how it changes as it moves, and, especially, to warn that, once institutionalized, “a breakthrough can become a trap if it is used uncritically, repetitively, limitlessly” (239). In other words, the current global rapid transit of theories by no means prevents – it instead seems to encourage – a “hermeticism” that attenuates their power (237). The antidote to a theory that has “drawn a circle around itself,” Said asserts, returning to Lukacs, is “critical consciousness”: “It is the critic’s job,” he insists, “to provide resistances to theory, to open it up toward historical reality, toward society, toward human needs and interests” (245, 242). His essay, thus, repeatedly associates the movement of theory with a paradoxical tendency toward its “enclosing” and offers critical consciousness as a corrective to direct us toward new social possibilities and a common world (230, 242). In Norwood’s writings we can see similar processes at work at the level of the subject: circulation and enclosure; citation and conversion. Rewriting Augustine, he enacts his own enclosure, and transforms autobiography from an expression of identification with the generally human to an expression of alienation from it. At the heart of Norwood’s subjective alienation, however, is not only the textual travel to which Said called our attention but also travail – the increasing abstraction of labor and thus its growing anonymous circulation in everyday life at the expense of the common. In response to this alienation, Norwood transforms Augustine, but also the history of Bermuda, suppressing the common in it, as in his person. Through an exercise in “Travailing Theory” I have been attempting to reopen these texts, this history, “modern” subjectivity, to globally collective “human needs and interests,” and interrupt habits of textual and historical enclosure.