The Stillbirth of Capital by Siraj Ahmed

Author:Siraj Ahmed
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2012-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Nation/Imitation

Burke’s allusion to the English breakfast insinuated, in short, that the global economy had compromised the nation’s moral sense. Because he could no longer appeal to that sense, he looked elsewhere for a judgment in the impeachment. Just before describing the torture of the Rangpuri peasants, Burke told the Lords, “You have had enough, you have had perhaps more than enough, of oppressions upon property and oppressions upon liberty, but here the skin was not touched” (6:418). If his recitation of the East India Company’s crimes against civil society had not moved his audience, Burke implied that the graphic description of physical suffering to follow would. The Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) argued that such images of suffering intrinsically provoke an affective reaction.73 Three decades later, Burke put the theories he had outlined there into practice. Just before the opening speeches, he privately confessed his willingness to be, in his words, “mobbish” in his attacks on Hastings, dwelling on episodes that, like the torture at Rangpur, would “if anything, work upon the popular Sense.”74 Burke insinuated that because the British public was bereft of a moral sense, he would have to describe the Company’s crimes in lurid detail, in order to elicit a response from it. He saw the British nation not as a civil society but as a mob, and appealed to it as such: not to its moral sense but rather, in the absence thereof, to its affective reflexes.

Sheridan’s speeches in the impeachment also did not hesitate to “touch the skin,” working on the popular sense, if anything, only more mobbishly than Burke’s did. Consider, for example, his account of how peasants responded to the Company’s alleged devastation of their province in order to finance its army: “The natives, . . . on the banks of the polluted Ganges, panting for death, . . . tore more widely open the lips of their gaping wounds, to accelerate their dissolution, and while their blood was issuing, presented their ghastly eyes to Heaven, breathing their last and fervent prayer that . . . their blood . . . might . . . rouse the eternal Providence to avenge the wrongs of their country.”75 This passage would be collected, remarkably, in countless nineteenth- and early twentieth-century handbooks of rhetoric, oratory, and elocution. Observers considered another speech Sheridan gave during the impeachment (7 February 1787) to be “the most eloquent . . . ever delivered in Parliament.”76 Burke called it “the most astonishing effort of eloquence, argument, and wit, united, of which there was any record or tradition.” Fox exclaimed that “all that he had ever heard—all that he had ever read when compared with it, dwindled into nothing, and vanished like vapour before the sun.” And even Pitt declared that “it surpassed all eloquence of ancient or modern times.”77 Years later, Byron called it the “very best Oration . . . ever conceived or heard in this country.”78

Yet this speech and the four, almost equally celebrated, that followed in June 1788 offer little to match these claims.

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