The Intimacies of Four Continents

In this section, Lowe continues her dig through history to show the depth of history at its core. Lowe argues through the example of the ending of the East India Company, instead of showing the imperialism of free trade and freedom, the nineteenth-century “free trade” employed and innovated combinations of settler colonialism, slavery, indenture, imperial war and trade to innovate and expand an Anglo-American led world system, which permitted a vision on early 19^th century liberalism and empire.  Lowe argues that literature mediates the histories behind the commodities of the “free trade” system of the early nineteenth century. Lowe ultimately argues that these literatures “simultaneously recognize and ingeniously suppress the histories and geographies of production.” Through this theory, the history and intimacies of four continents can arguably be traced through the commodities and histories of certain literary novels. In this sense, the histories of certain intimacies are hidden behind commodities, but can also be traced through those same commodities. We can find that our history books only tell us half of the story. They tell us the economic and possibly political sides of a movement, but almost always fail to tell the humanitarian side. Rather than teach why something matters to the human race as a whole, history teaches why an event matters to a country, those of a certain citizenship that is determined by imaginary boundaries. 

Lowe goes on to argue that liberalism furnished the economic, political and humanitarian rationales for British imperial governance in Asia. Lowe uses the end of the slave trade and the beginning of Asian contract labor in the Americas to tie together the post-Opium War Chinese treaty ports and the China Sea to the shifts in colonial labor relations in the colonized Americas. This means that not only is the end of plantation slavery and brokered emigration linked, but also colonial expansion. Lowe shows how criminalization and migrant slave labor was used to bypass the colonialized Americas outlaw of slavery, while still incorporating free or cheap labor.

Throughout history we as a human race have codified different levels of humanity. Some are labeled "vital and productive," while others are "vile or unincorporable." Whether that humanity is based on citizenship, ethnicity or race, the people in power deemed who was superior to whom and used the inferiors as slaves, whether that be literal or figurative, to their benefit.  Colonized bodies render themselves "docile."

Lowe's main argument is not an attempt to rule out any narratives of “history,” rather it is an attempt to show other contingent possibilities. Through looking in multiple lenses, Lowe is able to tie together four separate continents through their underlying economics and liberal politics, as well as tell the stories of unknown links and interdependencies in the emergence of liberal capitalism and modern empire.

In the modern United States, you can see how the lack of teachings or research similar to Lowe’s is causing a deficient in today’s society. The one-sided media of today is expected to tell the whole truth and teachers are expected to teach hundreds of years of history in 50-minute periods over 180 sporadic days. With literacy on the decline and a lack of diverse teachings in high school and some college classrooms, even the best valedictorians in the United States are graduating with one-sided views of history thinking they understand what it means to be "free." They graduate with this idea that freedom was won over an eight-year war and that slavery was ended with a four-year war, and that pretty much encompasses all of history hat affects them. They accept truth at its face with little questioning behind the narrator’s position, intentions or possible role in history.

History, rather, should take a more in-depth view at what history actually is. Historians and researchers alike should question the narrative of history, as well as the writers. They should dig behind the face value of each war or political controversy and see the faces of human that were suffering as result of a lack of human interest. We ask if narrators are reliable in English classes, but somehow miss that history is written by biased narrators as well. We as a people have forgotten how to make connections without being told the whole truth upfront. 

If we continue to teach history as “slavery is bad” and “religious freedom is good,” we will continue to miss the political, economic and humanitarian struggles behind each “gain” we as human beings made in history. Thus, we will fall in the same traps as our ancestors dehumanizing races, ethnicities and genders in order to fall under the rank of superiority in history.