East Indies and West Indies: Comparative Misapprehensions

Abstract

This paper discusses how the comparison of the East Indies and the West Indies has generated misapprehensions over several centuries. The stakes involved in comparing these two distinct areas may become clearer when examining their joint imperial legacies, even though our knowledge thereby gained can never be entirely accurate. Comparative studies of vastly different areas need to focus on temporality as well as on a dominant logic of spatiality. This paper analyses previous attempts to compare East Indies and West Indies, by Christopher Columbus, Athanasius Kircher, Daniel Defoe and Richard Madden, and discusses what can be learned from the mistakes made in each of these cases, which range from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Comparisons of the East Indies and the West Indies are revealed to be just as much about willed, imaginative and projective identifications in the past as about hardcore social and cultural reality seen from today's perspective.

Keywords:

• Comparative Studies
• Imperialism
• Anthropological Knowledge
• Temporality and Spatiality
• Exploration and Colonialism

Notes

1. For an illuminating discussion of the transcendental analysis of comparability via Kant, see Osborne 2005.

2. The term ‘imperialism’ is a nineteenth‐century invention, originating as a critique of Napoleonic ambitions within Europe. The earlier term, ‘empire’, in the seventeenth century, describes the rule of law or what we would call state jurisdiction and authority.

3. This is indeed what Antonio Benitez‐Rojo (1997) discusses in relation to the Caribbean.

4. For a wonderful and sustained critique of comparative spatialisation in area studies, see Harootunian 2005.

5. According to Anderson, the contagious discourse of nationalism is spread by comparative perceptions and the elaboration of various forms of imagining that he dubs ‘unbounded seriality’. Yet, the nation's successful constitution of itself through a state leads to a paradoxical occurrence. The state chases out all spectres and all comparisons, recreating the nation as a form of bounded seriality, and by assigning exclusive racial, ethnic and religious identities to its subjects, exorcises the spectre. A nationalist discourse, born out of comparison with other spaces and places, and by way of the return home of the educated middle‐class colonial, consolidates itself by this exorcism. Once the nation‐state has come into being, the citizen's loyalties are bound. At that point, the nationalist can say, ‘my country, right or wrong, and comparisons be damned’, whereas the fluidity of the nation before had allowed for all manner of comparison and unbounded seriality. See ‘Nationalism, identity, and the logic of seriality’ in Anderson 1998, 29–35.

6. For a more extended discussion of the importance of the Moluccas and China to Defoe's economic thought, see Neill 1997 and Markley 2004. For an account of these texts in relation to fetishism, see Aravamudan 1999 and Schmidgen 2002.

7. It would be interesting to make these four examples and four choices of discipline combine with different aspects of the original dream of a four‐field anthropology, but that would be achieved only by deforming the literary evidence to make a spectacular formal gesture. Surely, though, this fourfold array should suffice in indicating an already delirious and wildly unintended effect when brought back to the original idea of a responsible and serious East Indies/West Indies comparative schema?