Paine argued imperial trade relations were grounded in interest, not attachment.
Evidence
This chapter is about the logos and pathos of empire, the durabilities of imperial dispositions steeped in matter and mind. In different guises, it wrestles with those habits of heart and comportment recruited to the service of colonial governance but not wholly subsumed by it. It seeks to broach the cast that imperial formations spread over people’s intimate social ecologies—both the intensities and the diminished qualities of their affective lives. European colonial communities built their interior frontiers on social distinctions that were schooled as well as those that could “go without saying” because they were, in C. S. Peirce’s phrasing, “hidebound with habit” and had already been learned. Colonial actors discerned those distinctions with care: colonial agents wrote anxiously about them. Students of colonialism, more geared to what was pressed on those persons colonized, for long did not attend to the analytic purchase such minor nuance could afford. Evidence of disdain, desire, and disaffection for thoughts and things native were basic to the colonial order of things. In recluse and repose, attachments were put to the test. In these taut and tender ties, relations of power were knotted and tightened, tangled and undone. As I have long held, these ties were not the soft undertissue of empire, but its marrow. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1291 (
#contradicts, via linked claim)
“Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas, they are not only different, but have different origins,” Thomas Paine observes to begin the opening section of his world-shattering pamphlet, Common Sense, published in mid-January 1776. “Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness possitively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices.” The first settlers of a sequestered place enter into society for commerce and mutual aid, he states; societies later form governments to enforce social norms and reinforce moral virtue. Then, in a profoundly American remark that set up his entire argument, Paine asserts, “Society in every state is a blessing, but Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.” — Edward J. Larson, Declaring Independence, 49 (
#corroborates, via linked claim)
The United States was itself a product of British imperialism, but it was also its heir, enthusiastically embracing such concepts as manifest destiny, which the British had developed long before it became a guiding principle for American expansion in the nineteenth century. The British believed in the right of conquest of “backward” peoples in the name of civilization (for example, the Irish and Native Americans), while the rapidly growing population of land-hungry settlers (the majority of whom had been dispossessed of land in England through enclosure) pushed for more expansion. The expansionist pressure accumulated so much momentum that by the middle of the eighteenth century, it drove the Anglo-American colonists to provoke the Seven Years’ War and a little over a decade later to rebel against the British Empire. Rather than a rejection of empire, however, the American War of Independence was in many respects a dispute over the proper course of empire in North America. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 198 (
#qualifies, via linked claim)
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Paine grounded American rights in natural society, not British subjecthood. — Edward J. Larson, Declaring Independence, 49; Affective domestic ties were the marrow, not undertissue, of empire — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1291; The American Revolution was a dispute over empire’s course, not a rejection of empire. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 198
Broader Connections
- Affective domestic ties were the marrow, not undertissue, of empire
#contradicts(0.90) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1291 - Paine grounded American rights in natural society, not British subjecthood.
#corroborates(0.85) — Edward J. Larson, Declaring Independence, 49 - The American Revolution was a dispute over empire’s course, not a rejection of empire.
#qualifies(0.75) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 198