Abstract
This chapter explores writing by Renaissance humanists about colonies. It argues that before the emergence of the great imperial colonial projects in the late sixteenth century (undertaken by Spain, England, and France, principally) humanist writers developed a somewhat different discourse on colonies—a discourse in which the main point of reference was not America, but Rome and the Roman colonial experience. Through an engagement with Michel Foucault’s writing on space and governmentality, the chapter shows how, in such writers as Rabelais, Machiavelli, More, and Montaigne, colonies function as laboratories for thinking about government, and about the relationship between the government of the self and the government of others.
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Notes
- 1.
I quote from “Of Other Spaces,” the translation by Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27. I quote p. 22. The lecture is also available online at http://foucault.info, accessed on February 4, 2015. The French version “Des Espaces Autres” was published in the French journal Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (1984): 46–49.
- 2.
See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), La Production de l’Espace (Paris: Anthropos, 1974); Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1994), La Poétique de l’Espace (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1954); Louis Marin, Utopiques: Jeux d’Espaces (Paris: Minuit, 1973); Michel de Certeau, “Spatial Stories,” in his The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1984), 91–130, Arts de Faire (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1980); and Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). Edward J. Soja’s synthetic account of the turn to studies of spatial practices is still useful. See his Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989). More recently, see the two books by the geographer David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) and Spaces of Capital (New York: Routledge, 2001).
- 3.
Foucault, 24.
- 4.
Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–78, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave, 2007), 228; French edition: François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana, eds., Sécurité, Territoire, Population: Cours au Collège de France (1977–1978) (Paris: Gallimard—Éditions du Seuil, 2004).
- 5.
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 236.
- 6.
Foucault’s use of the term “insurrection” to describe rapid transformations in social conduct accompanying the changes in power relations echoes his use of the same term in the introduction to one of his most influential series of seminars, the course of a year earlier, 1976, Society Must Be Defended. There Foucault describes the kind of research that characterizes his own historical moment, following the social and political upheavals of the late sixties and early seventies and the rise of feminism, the gay rights movement, and the anti-psychiatry movement. This moment involves the shift from a traditional historiography, centered in the university, to “insurrections of knowledge,” which present themselves as “anti-science,” and question the authority of established discourses of knowledge. Foucault dubs these insurrections “genealogies.” See Society Must Be Defended, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 9; French edition: François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana, eds., “Il faut défendre la société”: Cours au Collège de France (1975–1976) (Paris: Gallimard—Éditions du Seuil, 1997).
- 7.
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 237–8.
- 8.
See the offerings in the 1612 edition of the Dizionario dell’accademia della Crusca, available online: http://www.lessicografia.it. Indeed, Botero goes on to note the relative size of different “dominions.”
- 9.
Giovanni Botero, La Ragione de Stato, ed. Chiara Continisio (Rome: Donizelli, 1997), 7.
- 10.
Botero, Ragione de Stato, 11. On the role of pleasure and the marvelous in late sixteenth-century writing about epic, see Douglas Biow, Mirabile Dictu: Representations of the Marvelous in Medieval and Renaissance Epic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). I have studied the language of the marvelous in political discourse in Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 84–91.
- 11.
See Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–3, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2010); French edition: François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana, eds., Le gouvernement de soi et des autres. Cours au Collège de France (1982–1983) (Paris : Gallimard—Éditions du Seuil, 2008).
- 12.
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 10. The Italian is from Mario Martelli’s edition of Machiavelli, Tutte le Opere (Florence: Sansoni, 1971), 259. For a general account of the transition from early humanist ideals of government as participatory dialogue to Reason of State see Maurizio Virolli, From Politics to Reason of State: The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics, 1250–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). For a more “state-focused” account of the same history, deeply indebted to Foucault, see Michel Senellart, Les arts de gouverner (Paris: Les Éditions du Seuil, 1995).
- 13.
Machiavelli, Prince, 15. In Martelli’s edition, 262.
- 14.
Niccolò Machiavelli, “Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius,” in Machiavelli, the Chief Works and Others, trans. Allan Gilbert (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 1: 384. In Martelli’s edition, 177.
- 15.
Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Clarence H. Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 67.
- 16.
Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 51; a translation of vol. 1 of Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme (Paris: Armand Colin, 1979). Braudel offers an extended discussion of the “overpopulation” of France. For an account of Utopia that stresses the role of the displacement of peoples in the Enclosure Movement see Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), Chap. 6.
- 17.
François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Burton Raffel (New York: Norton, 1990), 247; “en nombre de 9876543210 hommes, sans les femmes et petitz enfans, artizans de tous mestiers, et professeurs de toutes sciences liberales, pour ledict pays refraischir, peupler et orner,” Œuvres complètes, ed. Pierre Jourda (Paris: Garnier, 1962), 1: 405.
- 18.
See Gargantua, Chaps. 43–44, where the link between military defeat and disorder is alluded to repeatedly.
- 19.
These passages are all from Rabelais, 248. The French is from vol. 1, 407.
- 20.
The classic account of this problem may be found in the writings of Francisco Vitoria, in particular, in his 1537 “De Indis.” See Vitoria, Political Writings, ed. and trans. Antony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 231–292.
- 21.
Plato, Laws, V, 736, trans. A. E. Taylor. See Plato: The Collected Dialogues, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 1320–21.
- 22.
“… comme au corps humain, la maladie qui survient [de la sédition] est cause qu’on use de saignees et purgations, et qu’on tire les mauvaises humeurs: ainsi les séditions bien souvent sont cause, que les plus meschans et vicieux sont tuez, ou chassez et bannis, à fin que le surplus vive en repos.” Jean Bodin, Les Six Livres de la République, eds. Christiane Frémont et al (Paris: Fayard, 1986), Book 4, 182. My translation.
- 23.
Security, Territory, Population, 236.
- 24.
Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968), 516. “Il se trouve une merveilleuse relation et correspondance en cette universelle police des ouvrages de nature, qui montre bien qu’elle n’est ny fortuite ny conduyte par divers maistres. Les maladies et conditions de nos corps se voyent aussi aux estats et polices: les royaumes, les republiques naissent, fleurissent et fanissent de vieillesse, comme nous.” Essais, eds. Pierre Villey, V.- L. Saulnier (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), 682.
- 25.
Montaigne, The Complete Essays, 517a; “[les médecins] disent que la perfection de santé trop allegre et vigoreuse, il nous la faut essimer et rabattre par art, de peur que nostre nature, ne se pouvant rassoir en nulle certaine place et n’ayant plus où monter pour s’ameliorer, ne se recule en arriere en desordre et trop à coup,” Essais, 682a.
- 26.
Montaigne, The Complete Essays, 517a; “pour servir de saignée à leur Republique et esvanter un peu la chaleur trop vehemente de leur jeunesse,” Essais, 683a.
- 27.
Montaigne, The Complete Essays, 518a; “mais je croy pas que Dieu favorisat une si injuste entreprise, d’offenser et quereler autruy pour notre commodité.” Essais, 683a.
- 28.
Here are the cited passages in Latin: “Nil mihi tam valde placeat, Rhammusia virgo, / Quod temere invitis sucipiatur” and “Troia (nefas) commune sepulcrum Asiae Europaeque.” I have checked Montaigne’s citation against the Loeb Classics edition of Catullus. See Catullus, Tibullus, Pervigilium Veneris, trans. F. W. Cornish, revised G. P. Goold (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 139–151.
- 29.
Montaigne, The Complete Essays, 519a; “constamment, mais encore allegrement,” Essais, 685a.
- 30.
Thus, his opening sentence: “I want to say only a word about this infinite subject to show the simplicity of those who compare the pitiful grandeurs of this time with those of Rome.” The Complete Essays, 519a. “Je ne veus dire qu’un mot de cet argument infiny, pour montrer la simplesse de ceux qui apparient à celle là les chetives grandeurs de ce temps.” Essais, 686a.
- 31.
In one of the few detailed accounts of the essay, David Quint reads it as a dramatization of the situation of the aristocracy, consuming itself in France no less than the Brazil of the cannibals. I would argue that this deeply pessimistic reading of the essay might push it a bit too far. Montaigne does hold out the possibility of political and moral education, even if it is rare and difficult to achieve. See Quint’s reading in Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy: Ethical and Political Themes in the Essais (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 85–88. David Louis Schaefer suggests that this chapter is one of a series in which Montaigne is working out ways of displacing political conflict into other areas of activity. See the section on “Political Adaptability” in The Political Philosophy of Montaigne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 371–386. The problem of the collapsing of oppositions between spectator and participant, prince and noble, and so on as characteristic of late sixteenth-century French political culture is discussed by Biancamaria Fontana in Montaigne’s Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), Chap. 5.
- 32.
For an account of Sancho Panza’s governorship that stresses the imbrication of literary fiction and political fiction in the late Renaissance, see Anthony J. Cascardi, Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), Chap. 6.
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Hampton, T. (2016). What Is a Colony Before Colonialism? Humanist and Antihumanist Concepts of Governmentality from Foucault to Montaigne. In: Miernowski, J. (eds) Early Modern Humanism and Postmodern Antihumanism in Dialogue. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32276-6_5
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