The Intimacies of Four Continents

Lisa Lowe's "The Intimacies of Four Continents" analyzes the intimacies between colonial commodities and early Victorian households and their imperial relations to Africa, Asia and the Americas. We see this displayed in chapter three as she uses "Thackery" to explore how  bourgeois English households were intimately dependent on slave labor within cotton fields and textile artisan-ship from free trade workers in east India and china. From this Lowe examines how these trades in tea, cotton, silks, and opium directly connect to the rise of the British "Free trade imperialism". Lowe argues that this free trade imperialism, may resemble older styles of mercantilism, however new experiments in free trade are "intrinsic to both liberal and political economic freedom in England"75. social formation developed fetishism of commodities, which Lowe's defines as the production of value through the relationship of exchange.
Lowe's most compelling argument is that we need to dig deeper into our history into how and why we got here. As well as not only research what history tells us but to read between the lines through the intimacies from these four continents. For example Lowe states that black workers are not only a "crucial historical actor in world history" but "by telling the history of black labor would necessarily transform the historical for that had formerly centered European man" 171. I feel this is very important because many fail to realize that who built the U.S. is the same people who history "tells" were lazy, savages, violent and uncivilized people. Kincaid's "A Small Place" ties into Lowe's economical intimacies in that it explains how the west became rich from the free, undervalued labor workers in Antigua.