Peopling the World: Representing Human Mobility from Milton to Malthus

By Charlotte Sussman

A compelling study of views about population and demographic mobility in the British long eighteenth century

In John Milton's Paradise Lost of 1667, Adam and Eve are promised they will produce a "race to fill the world," a thought that consoles them even after the trauma of the fall. By 1798, the idea that the world would one day be entirely filled by people had become, in Thomas Malthus's hands, a nightmarish vision. In Peopling the World, Charlotte Sussman asks how and why this shift took place. How did Britain's understanding of the value of reproduction, the vacancy of the planet, and the necessity of moving people around to fill its empty spaces change? Sussman addresses these questions through readings of texts by Malthus, Milton, Swift, Defoe, Goldsmith, Sir Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, and others, and by placing these authors in the context of debates about scientific innovation, emigration, cultural memory, and colonial settlement.

Sussman argues that a shift in thinking about population and mobility occurred in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Before that point, both political and literary texts were preoccupied with "useless" populations that could be made useful by being dispersed over Britain's domestic and colonial territories; after 1760, a concern with the depopulation caused by emigration began to take hold. She explains this change in terms of the interrelated developments of a labor theory of value, a new idea of national identity after the collapse of Britain's American empire, and a move from thinking of reproduction as a national resource to thinking of it as an individual choice. She places Malthus at the end of this history because he so decisively moved thinking about population away from a worldview in which there was always more space to be filled and toward the temporal inevitability of the whole world filling up with people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Apr 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9780812296891

Book preview

Peopling the World

PEOPLING

THE

WORLD

Representing Human Mobility from Milton to Malthus

Charlotte Sussman

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sussman, Charlotte, author.

Title: Peopling the world: representing human mobility from Milton to Malthus / Charlotte Sussman.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, [2020] Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2019034599 | ISBN 9780812252026 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: English literature—18th century—History and criticism. | Emigration and immigration in literature. | Population in literature. | Great Britain—Emigration and immigration—History—18th century. | Great Britain—Population—History—18th century. | Great Britain—Colonies—History—18th century.

Classification: LCC PR448.E43 S87 2020 | DDC 820.9/355—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034599

For Raoul

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1. A Race to Fill the Earth:

Mobility and Fecundity in Paradise Lost

Chapter 2. The Afterlives of Political Arithmetic in Defoe and Swift

Chapter 3. The Veteran’s Tale:

War, Mobile Populations, and National Identity

Chapter 4. Remembering the Population:

Goldsmith and Migration

Chapter 5. The Emptiness at The Heart of Midlothian:

Nation, Narration, and Population

Chapter 6. Islanded in the World:

Cultural Memory and Human Mobility in The Last Man

Chapter 7. Prospects of the Future:

Malthus, Shelley, and Freedom of Movement

Afterword

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I have been studying how I may compare

This prison where I live unto the world;

And for because the world is populous,

And here is not a creature but myself,

I cannot do it; yet I’ll hammer it out.

My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul,

My soul the father, and these two beget

A generation of still-breeding thoughts;

And these same thoughts people this little world,

In humors like the people of this world:

For no thought is contented.

—Shakespeare, Richard II (1597, V.I–II)

If the British colonies had never been planted, Mr. Malthus would never have written.

—William Godwin, Of Population (1820)

When Shakespeare wrote Richard II, the adjective populous existed, but the noun population did not. In the two centuries that followed, however, population became an object of ever increasing interest, and the doomed king’s struggle to people the little world of his mind with still-breeding thoughts found many twisted mirrors in the people of this world as Britain devised schemes to populate its expanding territories with living souls. The verb to people reminds us how entangled the concept of population is with both reproduction and territorial expansion. As Richard imagines his brain as a female upon which his soul can beget still-breeding thoughts—an image that will find its nightmare echo in Milton’s Sin impregnated by Death—so those intent on peopling living worlds had to locate and encourage human wombs to generate self-reproducing populations. Richard by necessity confines his ambitions to the territory of his mind, but the ambitions of real-world proponents of peopling were farther flung, as they hoped to stake claims to territories in the New World by planting them with people.

This interest in peopling now seems nearly defunct, a topic perhaps best reserved for speculative fiction about the discovery of new stars and planets. In today’s world, a world so saturated by nations, territories, and increasingly defended borders that the dispossessed are harried at every turn, the term’s encapsulation of mobility, fecundity, and territorial expansion is anachronistic, even quaint. And yet, of course, people, great numbers of people, are still on the move, made homeless by war, climate change, and racial hatred. Indeed, the unprecedented refugee crisis of the past decade has led many back to a trenchant passage from Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1948), in which she characterized post–World War II mobility as migrations of groups who, unlike their happier predecessors in the religious wars, were welcomed nowhere and could be assimilated nowhere. Once they had left their homeland they remained homeless, once they had left their state they became stateless; once they had been deprived of their human rights they were rightless, the scum of the earth.¹ Arendt’s vision resonates powerfully today. We see many of the issues central to Peopling the World playing out again all around us: Who has a right to move freely across borders? Who has a right to unimpeded settlement? Who has a right to the state’s care and who will be denied it? And furthermore, what are the prerequisites for exercising these rights? Natality? Employment or investment of labor? A story of suffering that demands redress?

Yet before we slip too easily into equivalencies between today’s world and the world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we need be aware of the shape of Arendt’s argument, a shape that, as we will see, had eighteenth-century precedents. Arendt makes her point through reference to the implicit ideals of unimpeded settlement and freedom of movement: the happier predecessors of twentieth-century migrants—like French Huguenots—who found new homes and new states to which they could assimilate. Not only that: these happier predecessors are presumed to have had homes in the first place, secure settlements of which they were dispossessed. Appealing and affecting as this rhetorical turn is—and it is a turn at least as old as Oliver Goldsmith’s 1772 assertion that A time there was ere England’s griefs began / When every rood of ground sustained its man—I hope that the following chapters will offer a valuable counter-narrative. While one might say that Peopling the World documents the formation of the modern mobile subject, that is true only with the understanding that all three of those terms are being redefined during the long eighteenth century: the nature of modernity; the experience of mobility; and the question of who counts as a subject and why. While we often consider secure settlement and free movement to be natural, if lost, ideals, I hope to demonstrate that they themselves are constructs, with their own history, and their own instrumentality in the expansion (and collapse) of empire. The story of that construction is integral to our understanding of the long eighteenth century.

The colonies Britain settled in North America, the Caribbean, and, even earlier, in Ireland, provided evidence of the complex politics of population growth that Godwin claims underwrote Malthus’s 1798 prediction that humanity would be destroyed by its own reproductive success. In the years between 1597 and 1798, as we will see, the prospect of peopling the world shifted from a worthy endeavor to an impending catastrophe. In Paradise Lost (1667), Adam and Eve are promised that they will produce a race to fill the world, a thought that consoles them even after the trauma of their fall. By 1798, the idea that the world would one day be entirely filled by people had become, in Malthus’s hands, a nightmarish vision. Peopling the World considers how and why this shift in the representation of population expansion took place, examining British literature during the long eighteenth century with an eye for debates about the conjoined issues of fecundity and territorial expansion. Truly understanding that history, however, demands that we take seriously the connections between the imagined spaces of the mind and the practical projects of empire building. Richard’s scheme, like so many subsequently devised by real people, transpires entirely within his own head, in his imagination. Yet his impotent, solitary thoughts alert us to the intimacy between fantasy and policy in many actualized schemes for peopling the world. This book engages the role of imagination in social and economic policy, as well as the importance of literary forms—poetry, drama, and the emergent novel—in both shaping our understanding of the value of peopling and resisting the tenets of that project. Peopling the World demonstrates that such stories changed dramatically over the course of the long eighteenth century, as they rendered the mobility exacted by expansion visible, comprehensible, and memorable.

Central to its explanation of those changes is the fact that, in the age of imperial expansion, projects of peopling almost invariably became projects for moving people around. We might even posit 1597, the year Shakespeare wrote Richard II, as a watershed, as it was in this year that an Act for the Repression of Vagrancy provided that dangerous rogues should be banished overseas. In 1603, a Privy Council order exile[d] [such rogues] to Newfoundland, the East and West Indies, France, Germany, Spain, and the Low Countries, although in practice most were sent to the American colonies.² This act proposed that persons who were both homeless and unemployed—that is, vagrant—could become useful again to England by being involuntarily removed to new lands.³ In this deployment of population as a tool of empire, we begin to see the way mobile populations—including the landless poor, transported felons, and indentured servants, as well as African slaves—were crucial to English expansion during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries.

That period—sometimes known as the long eighteenth century—has often been characterized as a distinct era in British history, spanning the years between the restoration of Charles II in 1660 and the ascension of Queen Victoria in 1834. But it also marks the regime of a particular way of thinking about mobility, both inside and outside of Britain. These years were governed by a specific set of Poor Laws—the Old Poor Law—that enforced parish-level poor relief by regulating the mobility of the landless poor. The same years, not coincidentally, were characterized by a particular set of tensions about the role of emigration in British colonial expansion. Although it is not a central focus on this book, they also mark the years of Britain’s greatest involvement in the transatlantic slave trade.⁴ During this era, it becomes apparent that peopling has two, often closely entwined, meanings: the (re)production of bodies and the holding down of territory. The term marks the crucial intersection of fecundity, mobility, and imperial expansion.

When James Belich, in Replenishing the Earth, documents a surge in British emigration beginning in 1815, which corresponded with a surge in emigration literature, he highlights one piece of that literature, a prize essay by Thomas Arnold entitled The Effects of Distant Colonization on the Parent State, which inveighs against opponents of emigration by brandishing the words of Genesis: And God blessed them, and God said unto them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it’ (Genesis 1:28).⁵ Here, says Belich, was the creed of a new colonizing crusade.⁶ Concerned as he is with what he calls the Settler Revolution of the nineteenth century, in which twenty-five million people emigrated from the British Isles, Belich does not document earlier uses of this allusion. Yet the same phrase had a robust life among seventeenth-century proponents of emigration. In 1624, for example, Richard Eburne, in A Plain Pathway to Plantations, wrote, when finding a Country quite void of people, as no doubt in America yet there are many, we seize upon it, take it, possesse it, and as by the Lawes of God and Nations, lawfully we may hold it as our owne, and so fill and replenish it with our people; and Samuel Purchas declared in 1625, we have a natural right to replenish the whole earth.⁷ And yet between these two moments—the early seventeenth century and the early nineteenth century—such rhetoric was rarely deployed. What happened in the years between these two celebrations of British mobility and fecundity? As we will see, they reveal that Britain had a much more complicated and vexed relationship to both emigration and colonial expansion than we have previously understood.

From Act of Settlement to Acts of Settling: Regimes of Mobility in the Long Eighteenth Century

In 1828, a pamphlet protesting government-subsidized schemes to promote emigration from Britain evoked the style and subject matter of Jonathan Swift’s savage critique of Irish poverty and colonial oppression, A Modest Proposal: If we were to attempt to export children, the supply would at once increase with the demand, and we should neither lessen our distress, nor diminish our population. Our wagons would be filled with ‘children for exportation,’ as at Christmas our coaches are with Norfolk turkeys.⁸ The reappearance of these rhetorical techniques—the satirical dehumanization of children and their comparison to food—a hundred years after Swift’s tour de force reminds us that the problem of what came to be called redundant or surplus population occupied Britons throughout the eighteenth century and long predated Malthus. Most often the issue was linked, by both policy makers and the concerned public, with the possibilities for human mobility, or, more cruelly put, the exportation of bodies.

Our ideas about European emigration to the New World have been retrospectively colored by the vast, voluntary migrations of the nineteenth century. We tend to starkly contrast the seeming freedom of those movements with the coercion of the slave trade. But our celebration of the former and our condemnation of the latter sometimes work to obscure the peculiar status of the long eighteenth century in the history of human mobility. And yet this era of increased mobility has a number of important characteristics that reward our attention, including new varieties of both inter- and intranational movement. Some of these varieties were spurred by elective affinities, such as the spiritual desire to congregate based on belief rather than location. The meeting of like minds across great distances resulted in the traveling ministries of the Society of Friends and other religious groups. This need for free association based on ideas saw its most extreme outcome in emigration for religious freedom, such as that which produced the Massachusetts Bay colony. The peaceable movement for ideas, however, had a bloody counterpart in Cromwell’s New Model Army, a professional force whose lack of regional affiliation allowed it to be swiftly deployed anywhere in the British Isles. After Charles II’s restoration in 1660, these types of movement were succeeded by other forms of mass mobility. England no longer had a standing army, but it continued to fight international wars, recruiting and impressing soldiers who became a disturbingly unsettled population during times of peace. Migration spurred by religious belief also continued, as seen, for example, in the Wesley brothers and their Methodist followers.

Other new forms of mobility were motivated not by ideological but by economic concerns, such as the general migration from rural to urban environments. London, for example, grew from 400,000 inhabitants in 1650 to almost a million in 1801. Economic gain also motivated secular emigration from England to the New World during the seventeenth century, with about 210,000 people emigrating to the American colonies between 1630 and 1660.⁹ While this surge of British emigration peaked during the 1650s, when about 70,000 people migrated, the demand for labor in the Caribbean colonies continued, precipitating the era’s most brutal form of mass mobility: the transatlantic slave trade.¹⁰ While this book only tangentially considers the history of British slavery, that catastrophic human upheaval should be considered as haunting, either explicitly or implicitly, all the other histories it examines.

We can characterize the migrations of the long eighteenth century as occurring along a continuum of human agency, from completely voluntary (such as that of itinerant preachers) to completely involuntary (such as that of captured Africans sold into slavery). Conceptualizing them as a continuum allows us to remember that there was a vast gray area between those two poles, forms of movement that were neither entirely free nor entirely unfree, such as indentured labor, penal transportation, and subsidized emigration. In the Atlantic arena, the era from approximately 1650 to 1830 was a regime of primarily unfree human movement, for British migrants and slaves alike. As Ted McCormick has noted recently, forced migration was a conspicuous feature of early modern state formation and imperial expansion.¹¹ David Eltis claims that until the 1830s, four out of every five migrants from both Europe and Africa sailed with the expectation of being in some kind of servitude at the completion of the voyage, whether that servitude was indentured labor, a sentence of penal transportation, or slavery.¹² Servitude, writes Aaron Fogleman, is the word that best characterizes the status of the vast majority of immigrants to the new world in the era before the American Revolution.¹³ Steven Pincus and James Robinson argue that many of these indenture contracts were bought out by the British government as a way of bolstering the colonial labor force, but such subsidized emigration still falls short of an ideal of free movement.¹⁴ Indeed, this research seems to show that, without detracting from the horrors of chattel slavery, it is still possible to think of slavery and European emigration as having a relationship that is different from the binary opposition in which they are often placed. We might posit slavery instead as the limit case at one end of a continuum of coerced movement and servitude. The language for describing such compromised forms of agency has never been well-formulated; developing such terms can help us better understand why the long eighteenth century tended to denigrate mobility even as it was increasingly dependent upon it.

This mobility was both feared and needed. Ambivalence about mobility, and also about the prosperity of which it was both symptom and cause, permeated many aspects of British culture. London, for example, was decried as the monstrous head of an ailing body, but also celebrated as a nodal point in the great flows of global trade, enjoying, as Joseph Addison says, the Harvest of every Climate.¹⁵ The poor were imagined to be both a drain on national resources, and a vast untapped market for the consumerism that would power the British economy.¹⁶ Emigration, as we will see, was always a subject of controversy: at times something to be encouraged to fill the space of new territories, and at others something to be bemoaned, a sinkhole that consumed and destroyed the settled communities of Britain.

The fact that most mobility in this era did not conform to the binary of free/unfree is central to the argument of this book. We tend to think of freedom as it relates to mobility as meaning the freedom to go where one wants, as freedom of movement, predicated on the right to cross territories and pass easily through borders. During most of the eighteenth century, however, liberty more often meant the freedom to stay put—to be protected from the various kinds of removal prevalent during the period—not just the strictures of the Poor Laws, but also impressment into the army or navy, penal transportation (offered as an alternative to the death penalty), the displacements of land enclosures, the late-century Scottish clearances, or, in the form that marked the limit of the unfree, capture into slavery in Africa. This book argues that during most of the eighteenth century, mobility, or vulnerability to removal, was as much a marker of subalternity as race, class, or gender.

For this reason, the same period that witnessed, and even normalized, so many new forms of large-scale mobility also came to value settlement ever more highly. We can see this evidenced in the Settlement Acts associated with the Poor Laws, the increasing emphasis on home and nativeness in cultural discourse, and in the empire’s increasing interest in settler colonialism. If mobility was politicized and policed in certain ways, then so too was settlement. Scott MacKenzie argues that the concept of home evolved out of an understanding of homelessness and not the other way around, and that its etiology can be found in the body of texts that confront poverty in the late eighteenth century.¹⁷ This archive, and the disparate claims that are made within it to legitimate a person’s right to settle, form a significant aspect of Peopling the World. The rights to settlement dictated by the various versions of the Poor Laws include rights based on natality, on contracted labor, and on kinship. But the application of these laws, and the assumptions about settlement they enshrined, were continuously contested, not only in Britain, but also in England’s colonies, where British settlement was underwritten by the removal of the indigenous groups previously occupying the land. Just as settlement cannot be understood as prior to mobility, so too colonial struggles over territorial occupation cannot be understood without an understanding of the struggles over settlement rights that gripped England itself during the long eighteenth century. As Paul Cefalu explains, If we set a more or less monological or unified official culture against an alien native culture [in the colonies], we fail to register the internal divisions within the European culture itself.¹⁸ Or, to put it another way, The worlds of English land use and domestic policies are inextricably linked with those of overseas practices of dispossession through a world system.¹⁹

And yet, while the ideology of settler colonialism has been the subject of much scholarly attention, the fact that an ideal of settlement was simultaneously under construction in England itself has rarely been brought into conversation with that development.²⁰ When it is, mobile figures or groups tend to be seen, at best, as persons who have been deprived of settlement, or persons suffering from a lack of attachment to place, or, at worst, as pernicious beings undermining the incontestable value of settlement. The theorist Hagar Kotef has termed this worldview the sedentarist ideology of the nation-state within a factuality wherein people are, and were, always mobile.²¹ This sedentarist ideological formation, however, occludes the way social expansion has always been predicated on the social expulsion of migrants.²² As Thomas Nail argues, To view migration and movement as lack is also to conceal the conditions of expulsion required by social expansion. It is to treat migration as an ‘unfortunate phenomenon’ rather than the structural necessity of the historical conditions of social reproduction. Nail calls his alternative perspective on the relationship of human mobility kinopolitics,—and the compensatory occlusions kinophobia.²³ Thus the historical establishment of ideals of mobility and settlement can be seen as complementary processes. As Kotef explains, Once this image of stability is established for particular categories of now-‘rooted’ people, it serves to facilitate their growing mobility. Movement and stability thus precondition each other. Finally, these particular categories are formed vis-à-vis other groups, which are simultaneously presumably less rooted and yet constantly hindered.²⁴ Much of Peopling the World investigates how the lives of those presumably less rooted and yet constantly hindered were policed—by the Poor Laws, by penal transportation, and by emigration regulation, among other things. This focus helps us understand the degree to which the British Empire depended on the mobility of devalued populations, such as landless laborers, emigrants, and soldiers, during an era in which human value was increasingly associated with property, productivity, and settlement.

The question of whether the mobility of labor is a form of freedom or a form of coercion—liberation or dispossession—lies at the roots of political economy, in the eighteenth century and in our own day. When persons are understood to be valuable in terms of their labor power, rather than their regional or religious loyalties, in theory they become portable. As we will discuss in Chapter 2, Marx credits William Petty with discovering the value-form of the product of labour.²⁵ In many respects, this idealized portability becomes a key to a growing economy. Thus, Adam Smith complains, The very unequal price of labor which we frequently find in England in places at no great distance from each other, is probably owing to the obstruction which the law of settlements gives to a poor man who would carry his industry from parish to parish without a certificate.²⁶ Yet, seen from another perspective, the laboring poor were forced into the mobility of searching for wage labor by the enclosure of common lands and other forces that [create] private property out of commonly held resources and land; in the process … generat[ing] a rootless population ‘free’ to sell itself into wage labor.²⁷

Alongside these economic conditions, the mutually constitutive ideological constructs of mobility and settlement gave rise to what Raymond Williams would call specific structures of feeling.²⁸ These structures of feeling can be understood as regulating how affective attachment is configured or imagined, whether that attachment is to kin, to leaders, or to land. Thus, in Paradise Lost, we can trace a transition from attachment to place to attachment to person, the former predicated on natality and the latter predicated on conjugality. Eve learns that Adam, not Eden, is her native soil, and this consoles her for the exile from Paradise, enabling a narrative of human mobility. We need not fear / To pass commodiously this life [of exile], Adam tells her after the fall, sustained / By Him with many comforts till we end / In dust, our final rest and native home (10.82–85). Eve must leave the flowers she has raised in Eden, because they never will in other climate grow; since Adam and Eve’s native home is soil or dust—the material of their own bodies—their attachment to each other supersedes any attachment to place.

That privileging of attachment to persons over attachment to place, however, evolved over the course of the eighteenth century to become something quite different. Dust, all that remained of a person after death, once interred in the landscape, became itself a place that exerted a hold upon the living. It became, that is, the grave—that site so important to eighteenth-century literature and culture. Perhaps most famously, Thomas Gray depicts how forcefully the frail memorials of the poor implore the passing tribute of a sigh from all who view them (78, 80). In Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, such graves seem to have more to say than the living villagers: Ev’n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries, Gray writes, Ev’n in our ashes live their wonted fires (91–92). In this paradigm, settlement, or being at home, can be understood as the way person fuses with place after death, and the attachment of the living to that fused person/place. In this structure of feeling, when the poor leave their natal place, they seem to lose not only the capacity to settle but also subjectivity itself. In Oliver Goldsmith’s enormously popular poem, The Deserted Village, rural folk forced to desert their beloved Auburn pass silently through the torrid tracts of North America with fainting steps, beset by tigers, snakes, and tornados, while the land they have left becomes a garden and a grave, commemorating them even as they live unimaginable lives in the New World (343, 302). David Rollison articulates the difference between these two structures of feeling—attachment to person and attachment to place—by tracing the etymology of the word region:

When region meant to rule in the epoch of the peasantry (whenever that was), the assumption was that the laboring population went with the land, and only moved if the lord wished it so. In the more populist constitutional milieu that emerged between the late seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, it became desirable to propagate the myth that the people stayed with the land because they were organically connected to it. Once upon a time, they were settled because the ruling class willed it. Now they were settled because they belonged to the biosphere.²⁹

Thus Adam and Eve’s settlement in Paradise depends, quite literally, on their Lord; when He demands their departure, they move, leaving the other elements of that region, like Eve’s flowers, behind. But when Goldsmith’s villagers are forced to leave their land, they more resemble Eve’s flowers than Eve herself, withering in other climates, because their organic connection to their natal place has been severed. Again, paradoxically, we see settlement celebrated—or eulogized—even as British imperial expansion demands ever increasing mobility.

A resolution of this paradox in sedentarist ideology can be glimpsed by the end of the period covered by this book. Physicalized over-attachment to place, particularly to graves, becomes pathologized, as in Wordsworth poems like The Thorn or The Ruined Cottage, while the memory of such attachments helps undergird an emergent conception of freedom of movement. Thus, a poem like Felicia Hemans’s, Song of Emigration, published in her Songs of the Affections in 1830, can characterize the feelings of immigrants voyaging toward a new home as A mingled breathing of grief and glee (2). The poem then splits those feelings into two gendered voices. There is a man’s voice, unbroken by sighs, and filled with triumph (3–4). And a woman’s—A murmur of farewell with a plaintive tone (8–9). The voices take turns expressing their sentiments, the male voice anticipating the joys of settlements—building new homes, accumulating wealth, hunting, naming rivers and mountains after himself, and never hearing a voice say Hither, no further pass!—while the female voice provides counterpoint, mourning the things they have left behind—home, orchards, and church. The female voice even invokes Milton’s Eve, asking But who shall teach the flowers, / Which our children loved, to dwell / In a soil that is not ours? (47–49). It is tempting to read the male and female voices as contesting one another, with the female providing a critique of some of the ideologies of settler colonialism. It is she, after all, who suggests that their flowers won’t grow because the soil is not theirs, while the male voice imagines only vacancy: a lake’s green shore, / Where the Indian graves lay, alone, before (45–46). But it is also possible to read the contrapuntal voices as suturing together an ideology based on precisely this contradiction: that the song of freedom of movement is also one of regret. As Kotef suggests, such memories establish an image of stability … for particular categories of now-‘rooted’ people, which serves to facilitate their growing mobility.³⁰ Unlike Goldsmith’s villagers, Hemans’s emigrants can migrate without losing their capacity to speak, because their very psyches evidence their capacity to settle.

Once a subject emerges who can move without attachment to either place or graves, we begin to see something like the modern conception of freedom of movement. In his Commentaries on English Law (1783), William Blackstone records what Edlie Wong dubs a right of locomotion, proposing that personal liberty consists in the power of locomotion, of changing situation, or removing one’s person to whatsoever places one’s own inclination may direct, without imprisonment or restraint.³¹ In this way of thinking, migration was not a violation of one’s rights, but an exercise of them—not the imposition of state power, but autonomy from it. As William Godwin wrote in his retort to Malthus, Of Population, in 1820 (a passage to which we will return in Chapter 7): As long as there is tyranny and oppression among any of the governments of mankind, as long as it is possible for a human being to come under the burthen of unmerited disgraces, as long as there shall exist a pride in men that disdains servitude, and a spirit of industry anxious to free itself from vexation and constraint, so long will emigration form a feature in the history of our race.³² With the overhaul of the Poor Laws in 1834, Bridget Anderson writes, There was a rebalancing of the response to the mobility of the poor. Being mobile and moving from one’s parish was increasingly about being ‘free,’ improving oneself through selling one’s labour rather than being ‘masterless.’³³ Improving oneself could include leaving one’s country: Emigration assumed a totally new character, one commentator wrote in 1819, it was no longer merely the poor, the idle, the profligate, or the wildly speculative who were proposing to quit their native country.³⁴ This shift in attitudes toward emigration corresponded with a huge increase in numbers of people taking that path. In the eighteenth century, writes Belich, about half a million people emigrated from the British Isles. In the long nineteenth century, 1815–1914, the number rocketed to 25 million.³⁵ Attention to representations of human movement during the long eighteenth century allows us to contest the familiar idea that the crucial event of the eighteenth century was the formation of the individual. We can see the period as an epoch of migration for large numbers of people, and the structures of feeling surrounding that dynamic.

David’s Cattle: The Politics of Numbering People

Both aspects of that dynamic—the movement and numbering of people—were under construction during the long eighteenth century. We have already begun to explore how the era understood mobility. We turn now to conceptions of human aggregates during the long eighteenth century: that is, to the emergence of what we now call population. The most influential proponent for the importance of the birth of population has been Michel Foucault, who sees it as a manifestation of the emergence of what he calls biopower. For Foucault, biopower is applied to the living man, to man-as-living-being, ultimately to man-as-species.³⁶ Biopower finds its object in a population, understood as a set of elements that, on one side, are immersed within the general regime of living beings and that, on another side, offer a surface on which authoritarian, but reflected and calculated transformations can get a hold.³⁷ In applying Foucault’s ideas, scholars have emphasized different aspects of this formulation. Some, like Mary Poovey, have focused on the significance of the new kinds of calculations involved in producing the composite subject of the population, understanding their emergence as an important event in the history of epistemology. In A History of the Modern Fact, Poovey argues that a population is a collective subject whose regularities would be the effect of the very mathematical operations that made counting seem to bridge the gap between particulars and generalization.³⁸ As Andrea Rusnock