Reinstating Restoration

TL;DR: The Modern Language Association (MLA) as mentioned in this paper proposed a reorganization of the divisional structure, which included the consolidation of traditional periods, and the addition of new subfields in emerging areas.

Abstract: Reinstating Restoration Ramesh Mallipeddi (bio) In 2013, the Modern Language Association (MLA) circulated a draft proposal to restructure existing "divisions" and "discussion groups," in an effort to respond to intellectual shifts in the new millennium. The MLA working group's plans for revising the divisional structure included the consolidation of traditional periods, and the addition of new subfields in emerging areas. Among the proposed changes was the amalgamation of the divisions on "Restoration and Early-Eighteenth-Century English Literature" and "Late-Eighteenth-Century English Literature" into a single forum on the "Long Eighteenth Century." Opposition to the move from the eighteenth-century scholarly community was swift and unanimous. When MLA invited comments on the initiative as part of their review process, more than eighty members—graduate students, early career and senior scholars, including four past presidents of ASECS, and several current and former board members of this journal—weighed in, urging the organization not to act on the proposed merger because such rearrangement would, if implemented, not only reduce the number of guaranteed panels at the annual convention, but also excise the Restoration as a literary historical category altogether. While acknowledging the limitations inherent to periodization and noting that divides between periods seldom correspond to divides between centuries, the concerned members nevertheless made reasoned, eloquent, and conscientious appeals for preserving the Restoration as a separate entity, owing to its rich literary output and its importance for understanding the broader contours of the field.1 In response to this groundswell of opposition, MLA maintained the status quo and retained the two-forum structure. [End Page 27] The justness of those energetic, impassioned defenses of a small, already marginalized field came home to me again while revisiting Richard Dunn's account of the ascendancy of the planter class in Sugar and Slaves.2 The story Dunn tells, centered on Barbados, is a mid-seventeenth-century and Restoration story (Jamaica, annexed from Spain in 1655, was England's largest sugar producer in the eighteenth century, but it attained that status only after 1720), one that remains as indispensable today as at its first appearance in 1972. What is noteworthy is Dunn's decision to concentrate on early moments of settlement, neglected for the most part by historians. Opening with a detailed, nine-page close reading of Henry Colt's account of his 1631 voyage to St. Christopher, with particular attention to Colt's figurative language (especially similes), Dunn seeks to recapture the English squire's perilous undertaking to the tropics, where he hoped to make a fortune by starting a plantation. It was in the second quarter of the seventeenth century that English merchants and planters gradually moved from trade and piracy to agrarian settlement—from, as the historian K. R. Andrews put it, "mobile contact to sedentary attachment."3 State support for these early colonizing efforts was virtually nonexistent, but after 1650 the Commonwealth and the restored monarchy began to exert greater control over colonial affairs, initially enacting the Acts of Navigation (1651, 1660, 1696); waging successive wars against the Dutch (1652–54, 1664–1667, 1672–1678) for commercial supremacy and against Spain (1655) for territorial control; awarding monopolistic privileges for the Atlantic slave trade to the newly-chartered Royal African Company (1671); and establishing the Lords of Trade and Plantations (1675–1696). Consequently, by the end of the Restoration, there was an "administrative structure in place with which to govern the nascent empire."4 Sugar and Slaves remains attentive to these developments in the metropolis, but it concentrates primarily on the rise of slave-based plantation societies in Barbados, Jamaica, and the Leeward Islands (St. Christopher, Nevis, Antigua, and Montserrat). In 1700, these were England's most valuable colonies in the Atlantic, shipping nearly 50% of the sugar consumed in Europe. The economic preeminence of these tropical colonies was not reflected, however, in the limited scholarly attention bestowed on them in the 1970s, with historians mostly concentrating on the mainland colonies. Indeed, when Sugar and Slaves appeared, the Caribbean was a historiographical outlier in early American scholarship, in part because of the paucity of available sources, especially when compared to the voluminous archival records bequeathed by the New England Puritans who...