recognition of the dangers of history – and its association with globally uncontrolled “masterless” subjects, at a time in which vagrancy was a considerable domestic preoccupation in England – is by no means incidental. Just as early modern English vagrancy law and writing attempt to contain potentially dangerous – to elites – historical possibilities, colonialism, trade and “world writing” (geography), too, attempt to settle the uncertainties of history – and direct it toward hegemonic European interests. As this essay will argue, both local and global flows of labor power – and resistance to its privatization – were implicated in the formation of early modern subjects at the dawn of capitalist accumulation. The “common” had to be suppressed on a world scale for capitalism to emerge, since it holds out the possibility of an alternative way of living and being that unquestionably proved attractive to large numbers of ordinary people in the early modern period – both in Europe and beyond. Thus, domestic as well as colonial dispossession and enclosure – along with the incipiently global circulations of labor – are imbricated materially and ideologically; both concern themselves with the course of history and who will be (recognized as) making it. Ultimately, a certain enclosure, or limiting, of historical possibilities, along with spatial ones, prepares the way for the enclosure of modern subjects: it is the price “individualism” – and nationalism – exacts.
As the expanding market sets labor in motion on a grand scale – that is, divides it from subjects and circulates it in vast trade routes that increasingly elude the tracking capacity of either the agents of the labor or its distant users – it creates historical and subjective crises that cannot be fully addressed, or even understood, in market terms alone. Georg Lukacs explains that the alienation of labor power in the wage relation assumes the form of putatively “natural” laws that “confront [us] as invisible forces that generate their own power,” until the entire world appears to exist in conformity with this – reifying – imperative in spite of the continuous movement and flux in which we may find ourselves individually (87). John Wheeler’s Treatise of Commerce already describes (and mystifies) this market power in 1601, when he writes that “all the world choppeth and changeth, runneth and raveth, after Marts, Markets and Merchandising, so that all things come into Commerce, and passe into traffique (in a maner) in all times and in all places,” including one man selling the products of “another mans labour,” thus turning labor, too, into a commodity (6). By wrenching labor into a trade object from which its merchants profit at the expense of its agents, circulating it far beyond the knowledge of either, this commodification reciprocally transforms the “self” – the remainder after labor has been alienated – into the isolated proprietor of both labor and the self, making it seem “self”-evident that we are, in the end, implicated neither in the world, nor each other, except as indifferent actors in the market, because – our supposed compensation – we are “individuals.”3
Such hermetic “individualism” is the primary “fictional direction,” as Lacan helpfully puts it, in which modern – market – subjectivity moves (2). Georg Simmel has described this situation and its effects thus:
The modern metropolis … is supplied almost entirely by production for the market, that is, for entirely unknown purchasers who never personally enter the producer’s actual field of vision. Through this anonymity the interests of each party acquire an unmerciful matter-of-factness; and the intellectually calculating economic egoisms of both parties need not fear any deflection because of the imponderables of personal relationships.
(Simmel, 411–412; emphasis added)
As the trajectories of their locally disembedded – vagrant – labors increasingly elude them, modern subjects are “freed” from a sense of mutual responsibility, despite their actual mutual dependency and the increased entanglement of their labors.4 To theorize the emergence of capitalism and modern subjectivity, then, the circulation of labor-power – or in early modern parlance, travail – can be just as crucial as following the travels of thought about subjectivity, as Edward Said does in his “Traveling Theory,” from which I borrow my title, with a pointed change in spelling. By insisting upon “following the labor” – as well as the laborer – I am also adding a novel perspective to the writing about vagrancy, even to the most recent studies that have, refreshingly, expanded their focus beyond the shores of England.5
Specifically, an examination in these terms of the work of the colonial surveyor Richard Norwood (1590–1675) – who produced the first maps, as well as a detailed description, of Bermuda in the second decade of the seventeenth century – allows us to track the emergent ideology and practice of enclosure arising to negotiate, and reinforce, this crisis of subjective as well as “historical” movement of labor, through the active suppression of certain “common” historical possibilities on a global scale.6 His father’s estate being decayed, Norwood had to make his own way in the world, a path that included stints as a fishmonger’s apprentice, a mercenary on the continent, a vagrant, a seaman, a self-taught mathematician, and, ultimately, a colonial schoolmaster as well as land – and slave – owner on Bermuda, where he also experiences a conversion to radical Protestantism, which he details in a spiritual autobiography. Because Norwood offers an example of personal upward mobility via a nationalist–imperialist agenda – “improvement” of both self and land (domestic as well as colonial) via mathematics and surveying, supplemented by radical antinomian religious conviction – his case is a particularly interesting site in which to think through the emergence of modern individualist ideology. In his fascinating autobiography, written as he approached 50 and started to worry about the ebbing of memory, Norwood assembled a textual constellation through which to construct a life narrative and, thus, his – enclosed – “self,” as an attempted antidote to a deep sense of what he repeatedly called “alienation.” Though he self-consciously modeled his autobiography on Augustine’s Confessions, the two texts are different in ways that have implications for the debates about the shift from “medieval” to “modern” subjectivity. Most strikingly, whereas Augustine tends to present particular details of his life history as instances of the universally human, Norwood’s text draws attention to his singularity and isolation. Paradoxically, Norwood’s strategy is indicative of a reification and abstraction of a “self,” not Augustine’s, whose conceptualization, on the face of it, seems to be the more abstract. To situate and understand Norwood’s texts properly, however, we have to first see how the “self” was being substituted for the “common” at the heart of social life at the time in which he wrote. This situation alters subjective experience in ways that necessarily distinguish his world from Augustine’s, such that when the Confessions travels into it, it becomes a very different text.
In the mid-seventeenth century, when Norwood was writing, everyone seemed to agree that, in the beginning, the world had belonged to all men in common, though there was considerable disagreement about what had altered this originary condition. For example, the Diggers, one of the dissident groups that emerged during the Civil War period in midcentury to assert a more general revolution than Cromwell and his comrades had in mind, used the image of an originary radical commonality to agitate for a return to it. With their visceral understanding of exploitation, they complained, as Gerrard Winstanley writes, that “those that buy and sell land, and are landlords, have got it either by oppression or murder, or theft; … they have by their subtle imaginary and covetous wit got the plain-hearted poor, or younger brethren to work for them for small wages, and by their work have got a great increase …” (85). They thus assert that private property was not only unnatural but was the cause – not the consequence, as elite rationalization of inequality would have it – of the Fall of man:
[When] whole mankind walked in singleness and simplicity each to other, some bodies were more strong than others, as the elder brother was stronger than the younger, and the stronger did work for the weaker, and the whole earth was common to all without exception … [until the] elder brother, seeing the outward objects before him, thereupon imagines and saith, ‘why should I that do all the work be such a servant to these that do least work, and be equal with them?’ … This imagination is the serpent that deceives the man … and mankind falls from single simplicity to be full of divisions.
(263–264)