1At first sight it may seem surprising, or even strange, that George Lillo’s The London Merchant, that most famous example of eighteenth-century domestic tragedy, should refer to topics of national relevance like war and peace. It was, after all, an explicit and central concern of this genre in the eighteenth century to turn away from the “fall of nations” and to concentrate on “private woe”1 instead. A playwright could at best establish a connection between the domestic subject and its public, that is, its political, relevance if the characters’ actions represented those of rulers or governments, or if matters of State assumed the dimension of latent politics, of an ideological power struggle. Accordingly, in this paper I shall deal with the representation of conflicts between nations or within a nation in the form of warring creeds and with the discourse of personal relations in terms of a political discourse. More specifically, I will focus on the new and discontinuous ways in which Lillo’s The London Merchant, as a prime example of domestic literature, maintains a mercantile ideology of peace while waging a war with words.2

2The very title of the play contains an element of public relevance. It evokes the prototypical representative of London's mercantile life. Interestingly, Lillo separates the theoretical dimension from the individual case: The London Merchant; or, the History of George Barnwell.3 In doing so, he distances the mercantile sphere from the tragic action of his play. In his role as merchant, the figure of Thorowgood indeed seems to have no part in the domestic story. This exclusion entails discontinuities in terms of dramatic structure. The play does not open with the tragic hero, or indeed, with an exposition for the plot. It opens with a discourse presenting the values and attitudes of the ideal merchant. Thorowgood first asserts the immense political power of the group he represents, for it is a group which decides about war and peace; then he demonstrates his role as an exemplary father presiding over a well-regulated household. In the following scene, the vixenish Millwood prepares to seduce Thorowgood’s apprentice Barnwell. As the embodiment of the antagonistic principle, she challenges the ideal set by Thorowgood. Far from being an incidental flaw in construction, the disjunctive structure of this beginning plays a vital role in shaping the drama’s meaning. It sets the frame which defines the ideology of domestic tragedy in general and that of The History of George Barnwell in particular, with Thorowgood embodying the ideals of peacefulness, order, civilization, and Millwood embodying their opposites, namely war, civil disorder, and barbarous exploitation. Thus Thorowgood’s presence, which critics have frequently found obtrusive and unmotivated in terms of dramatic necessity,4 is important in terms of ideological necessity. Validated by the respect accorded to him by all of the characters except Millwood, Thorowgood’s viewpoint provides the standard against which Barnwell’s behaviour is measured.

3In the first scene, Thorowgood introduces Trueman, the exemplary apprentice, to the ideology of peace and a stable order as inherent in the mercantile ethos:

THOROWGOOD…. you may learn how honest merchants, as such, may sometimes contribute to the safety of their country as they do at all times to its happiness…. (1.i.16-18)

4Thorowgood supports his assertion of the political importance of trade by using terms appropriate to international relations and foreign policy:

THOROWGOOD. The Bank of Genoa had agreed, at excessive interest and on good security, to advance the King of Spain a sum of money sufficient to equip his vast Armado. Of which, our peerless Elizabeth (more than in name the mother of her people) being well informed, sent Walsingham, her wise and faithful secretary, to consult the merchants of this loyal city, who all agreed to direct their several agents to influence, if possible, the Genoese to break their contract with the Spanish court, (1.i.31-39)

5In having Thorowgood recount the British merchants’ efforts to prevent a Spanish invasion, Lillo places the action of the play in Elizabethan times. However, his forceful construction of the merchant’s public identity belongs squarely within an eighteenth-century context. The social and political legitimation of the merchant class can be found in Steele’s The Conscious Loyers (1722-23) as well as in The Spectator (1711-12) and in The Gentleman’s Magazine launched in 1731; and both Defoe and Addison contributed to this kind of discourse.5 Lillo’s mercantilist propaganda indicates how early the merchant class had become aware of its importance in British political and social life. In Thorowgood's statement, the London merchants are responsible for providing political stability:

THOROWGOOD. ’Tis done. The State and bank of Genoa, having maturely weighed and rightly judged of their true interest, prefer the friendship of the merchants of London to that of a monarch who proudly styles himself King of both indies. (1.i.39-43)

6In defeating the powerful Spanish king, the merchants seem not so much to act under the Queen’s commission, as to act like a king on behalf of his country, thus affirming Defoe’s dictum that “Our Merchants are Princes, greater and richer, and more powerful than some sovereign Princes.”6

7While Thorowgood's explanations have no specific historical basis in the sixteenth century, they do reflect a political tendency in the eighteenth century. Those merchants who belonged to the companies of the City of London and who controlled the Bank of England did indeed exercise immense political influence. The government’s financial credit depended on new financial institutions such as the Bank of England, and therefore the trade and financial confidence were essential conditions for the conduct of foreign policy and war.7 In Lillo’s play, however, instead of financing the army and the navy, the merchants prevent military action; instead of assisting statesmen and officers, the merchants replace them. Thorowgood’s apprentice Trueman reacts to his master’s paean to the merchants of London in the following way:

TRUEMAN. Happy success of prudent councils! What an expense of blood and treasure is here saved! (1.i.44-45)

8The ideological substitution of military by mercantile techniques radically changes the nature of the dramatic action: traditional political heroes would have resorted to arms, but merchant heroes need do no more than use their influence to prevent the outbreak of a war between Spain and England.8 The indirect, practical operations of middle-class business affairs have taken over from the direct drama of military heroics. The battle is won with money, not with blood; it is won in the banking house, and not at sea. Thorowgood claims that such merchants deserve the designation “gentlemen” and the attribute “honorable”9 because they have assumed the responsibilities of men of honour.

9Such amalgamations of middle-class and aristocratic elements reflect eighteenth-century realities. Thorowgood’s arguments are based on the historical fact that, during the first half of the century, a close relationship and a mutual dependence existed between the ruling (landed) classes and a broadly-based urban mercantile and commercial community.10 On the one hand, the long-term loans that supplied successive governments with money came in the main from merchants, businessmen, and traders. On the other hand. British merchants and traders relied on the State for advantageous legislation and for the maintenance of law and order that made commercial transactions feasible and safe. In addition, overseas merchants required naval protection on the more dangerous trade routes if they were to have access to captive markets overseas. Thorowgood’s claim that military action could be avoided by the exercise of economic mechanisms was not borne out by historical fact. It does belie the tremendous profits merchants had made from the wars in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Eight years after the first performance of Lillo’s play, Trueman’s vindication of the peace-making results of commerce were again refuted by history: in 1739 a major war broke out against Spain over the British demands for commercial trading concessions in Spanish America, which Britain had originally won in 1713, in return for its participation in the War of the Spanish Succession. A principle motive for undertaking the war was a desire to protect and enlarge English trade with the Americas, which had been restricted by the Spaniards in their own interest. Hence British merchants were among the strongest proponents of the War of Jenkins’s Ear.11 This war proved, in fact, to be a fiasco. But the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), with its huge gains in territory and prestige, seemed to confirm the view that commerce could be united with and made to flourish by war, that, in short, the power of the British State and commercial profit went hand in hand.

10Significantly, in The London Merchant, Lillo’s characters see peace, rather than war, as the best way of furthering economic interests. Trueman expresses his admiration for Queen Elizabeth’s policy of peace in terms of gain:

TRUEMAN. Excellent queen! Oh, how unlike to former princes who made the danger of foreign enemies a pretense to oppress their subjects by taxes great and grievous to be borne. (1.i.45-48)

11Seen in connection with Trueman’s disapproval of the way earlier monarchs had acted, his praise of Elizabeth I is of great significance in terms of contemporary politics. After the War of the Spanish Succession ended in 1713, the tax rate was allowed to decline. Under the Hanoverians, and especially during the years of Whig supremacy under Walpole, a longer period of what passed for peace followed. These twenty-five years of peace meant not only twenty-five years of lower interest rates and land taxes, but also twenty-five years of political stability.12 During these years of relative peace, however, Britain was involved in two major clashes in the Mediterranean with Spain (in 1718 and in 1727) over violations of the Peace of Utrecht. What is characteristic of this period then is not a series of conventional wars, but a prolonged struggle with other contenders for commercial and imperial primacy. This peculiarly pervasive conflict, which in many respects resembles a cold war in the twentieth-century sense, played a crucial part in forging a sense of British national identity by exposing the country to persistent danger from without. The threat of war brought Britons into confrontation with a hostile “other” and encouraged them to define themselves collectively against it.13 The patriotism and nationalism which arose informs Thorowgood’s mercantile discourse in The London Merchant14:

THOROWGOOD. Heaven be praised! The storm that threatened our royal mistress, pure religion, liberty, and laws, is for a time diverted. The haughty and revengeful Spaniard, disappointed of the loan on which he depended from Genoa, must now attend the slow return of wealth from his New World to supply his empty coffers ere he can execute his purposed invasion of our happy island….(1.1.2-8)

12By presenting a nation unified against an external enemy, Thorowgood’s rhetorical strategies ignore the cultural differences within the British nation and the political and socioeconomic differences among the audience.

13The denunciation of the Spaniards, far from being dramatically irrelevant, relates to the ostensibly more private and domestic concerns which follow. It provides the ideological context which defines a central character of the tragic action: the prostitute Millwood serves as the hostile “other,” the alien culture against which British nationality, British cultural identity, and a specifically British Protestant order can be specified. Millwood identifies herself with the Spaniards and their (imagined) practices, thus revealing herself as the villainess of the play and at the same time appealing to the audience’s sense of national identity in terms of her “otherness” (as a prostitute and a pro-Spanish person) and in terms of a potential ideological conflict:

MILLWOOD. I would have my conquests complete, like those of the Spaniards in the New World, who first plundered the natives of all the wealth they had and then condemned the wretches to the mines for life to work for more. (1.3.24-27)

14Millwood’s maid Lucy confirms the oppositional political level of meaning (in the way Millwood describes herself) by answering: “Well, I shall never approve of your scheme of government” (1.3.28). As a counterpart to Thorowgood, Millwood completely contradicts his peaceful and civilized management and methods. When first introduced, she is, although seemingly preoccupied with private activities, symbolically preparing for battle and assuming the role of a female warrior:

MILLWOOD. How do I look today, Lucy?
LUCY. Oh, killingly, madam! A little more red, and you’ll be irresistible!…What new conquest are you aiming at? (1.3.1-5)

15The dialogue which prepares for Millwood’s seduction and enslavement of Barnwell abounds in a vocabulary of struggle, conquest, and subjection:

MILLWOOD. We are but slaves to men.
LUCY. Nay, ‘tis they that are slaves most certainly, for we lay them under contribution.
MILLWOOD. Slaves have no property — no, not even in themselves. All is the victor’s. (1.3.18-22)

16By identifying Millwood with the allegedly warlike, aggressive, tyrannical, and exploitative policy of the Spaniards, Lillo displaces critical recognition of Britain’s own colonial exploitation onto its external counterpart.15 Sir John Eyles, for instance, to whom Lillo's play is dedicated, was appointed Sub-Governor of the South Sea Company, Governor on 31 January 1721. This company transported thousands of Africans to the Americas for sale as slaves.16 The starkly antithetical structure of the play, however, frees Thorowgood for a glorification of foreign trade in terms of universal peace and harmony:

THOROWGOOD. Methinks I would not have you only learn the method of merchandise and practice it hereafter merely as a means of getting wealth. ‘Twill be well worth your pains to study it as a science, see how it is founded in reason and the nature of things, how it has promoted humanity as it has opened and yet keeps up an intercourse between nations far remote front one another in situation, customs, and religion; promoting arts, industry, peace, and plenty; by mutual benefits diffusing mutual love from pole to pole. (3.1.1-9)

17In his extremely idealized representation of commerce as a general principle, Thorowgood unites even the most divergent nations into one peaceful international business community by dismissing the cultural differences among nations as irrelevant. Their only interesting quality consists in their being possessors of exchangeable goods. Here the impulse, immanent in capital, towards global expansion goes hand in hand with the principles of the Enlightenment, pulling down prejudices and trade barriers all at the same time. Thus Lillo is able to construct the British merchant as an empire builder and at the same time as a man of peace, one whose activities serve as nothing less than the catalysts of civilization:

TRUEMAN. I have observed those countries where trade is promoted and encouraged do not make discoveries to destroy but to improve mankind — by love and friendship to tame the tierce and polish the most savage; to teach them the advantages of honest traffic by taking from them, with their own consent, their useless superfluities, and giving them in return what, from their ignorance in manual arts, their situation, or some other accident, they stand in need of. (3.1.11-19)

18This is one of the many versions of the contemporary cult of commerce17 —a cult which was based on the assumption that trade, especially foreign trade, was the foundation of Britain’s greatness. Britain had indeed become a great power in the eighteenth century, and it comes as no surprise that “Rule Britannia,” with its refrain “Britons never shall be slaves,” was composed at that time. Britain’s power was, however, dependent on naval superiority, on controlling the seas, for that power alone made possible dominance in the growing market of imperial trade.

19This question of dominance and submission is also one of the central issues of Lillo’s play, for the tasks of the merchant’s civilizing mission include whipping into line the ‘errant’ part of the world, the ‘errant’ rest of society — an activity which is anything but peaceful. The play’s militant partisanship for mercantilist ideology, expressed in Thorowgood’s endless protestations that the commercial principle promotes reason, harmony, and peace, is in itself enough to arouse suspicion that the results of “the method of merchandise” (3.1.1-2) were at least debatable. Moreover, Barnwell’s and Millwood’s crimes belie the claim that the general pursuit of profit makes people reasonable, peaceable, and happy. Their exploitative and violent methods of acquiring money through theft and murder reveal the aggressive side of the economic System which Thorowgood so enthusiastically propounds. Thus The History of George Barnwell demonstrates that humanitarianism and peace, instead of resulting from the commercial principle, only come as the rewards of education towards a civilized, a disciplined behaviour. That is why The London Merchant is a “moral tale” (Prologue 24), a didactic play.

20Since the issue of morality dominates in The London Merchant, it is necessary to take a closer look at the merchant" s civilizing mission in terms of social ethics. The social implications of spreading a particular culture as a “civilizing” force are explored in the domestic story of the play. Barnwell’s tragic fall transforms the external threat of a Spanish invasion into an internal threat to the civil order, to domestic peace, as posed by Millwood’s tactics. The two opposing spheres between which Barnwell is torn confront each other in act four of the play. Here the clash between Thorowgood and Millwood expresses itself in a rhetorical struggle. The outcome of this struggle, however, questions the very integrity of the dividing line between Thorowgood’s position and that of Millwood. In using a vocabulary that is clearly taken from the economic sphere, Millwood, in her own account of her situation, demonstrates that the same commercialism which has made Thorowgood rich has made a commodity of her virtue:

MILLWOOD…. I curse your barbarous sex who robbed me of ‘em [perfections], ere I knew their worth, then left me, too late, to count their value by their loss. Another and another spoiler came, and all my gain was poverty and reproach. My soul disdained… dependence and contempt. Riches, no matter by what means obtained, I saw secured the worst of men from both. I found it, therefore, necessary to be rich and to that end I summoned all my arts. (4.18.11-18)

21In her speeches of accusation, which. incidentally, have been partly cut or watered down by translators,18 Millwood displaces guilt and responsibility onto society. Millwood denounces the hypocrisy, injustice, and corruption found within British religious and legal institutions, and even maintains that the effects of such practices are more devastating than those of war:

MILLWOOD. From suburb-magistrates, who live by ruined reputations, as the unhospitable natives of Cornwall do by shipwrecks, I learned that to charge my innocent neighbors with my crimes was to merit their protection…. (4.18.26-30)
MILLWOOD. War, plague, and famine has not destroyed so many of the human race as… pretended piety has done, and with such barbarous cruelty as if the only way to honor Heaven were to turn the present world into Hell. (4.18.53-56)

22Thorowgood acknowledges her charge: “Truth is truth, though from an enemy and spoke in malice” (4.18.57). Lillo underlines the impression that Millwood has won the rhetorical battle in this scene by allowing her an extensive closing speech, in which she focusses on the destructive powers of a politics of male injustice and on her ensuing vision of an endless series of female retaliatory attacks:

MILLWOOD. Thus, you go on… harassing, plaguing, and destroying
one another; but women are your universal prey
Women, by whom you are, the source of joy,
With cruel arts you labor to destroy.
A thousand ways our ruin you pursue,
Yet blame in us those arts first taught by you.
Oh, may, from hence, each violated maid.
………………………………………………………
From your destruction raise a nobler name;
To right their sex’s wrongs devote their mind,
And future Millwoods prove, to plague mankind! (4.18.66-78)

23Although Millwood emerges triumphant in the play’s war of words,19 Thorowgood maintains the upper hand in the action of the play, and this action unfolds in absolute moral terms. As she lacks the necessary self-discipline which modifies economic individualism. Millwood is called a “sorceress” (4.16.22), a “monster” (3.4.111), and even a “devil” (4.48.4); she is accused of being “the sole cause” (4.16.46) of Barnwell’ s crimes and is sentenced to death. In conceiving morality in terms of the polar categories of immorality and absolute morality, Lillo creates a hopeless either-or-situation. Thorowgood does —at least partly— acknowledge that potential social struggles, as those of class and gender, lie behind the discursive struggle. In doing so. however, he is able to demonstrate the need for the greatest possible discipline and for severe punishment. This helps in part to explain why a brief moment of sexual license suffices to propel Barnwell into a fatal career in crime. Taken in its historical context, the story of Barnwell’s road to the gallows reflects the social problems caused by the enormous increase in the numbers of the urban poor in general and by the exploitative nature of the apprentice System in particular.20 Despite his innate goodness and naiveté and despite the fact that he is victimized, Barnwell must be severely punished because he belongs to an unruly class that must be kept in its place, disciplined, and reformed.21

24Thus, in The London Merchant “the method of merchandise” (3.1.1-2) has a double disciplinary function: on the one hand, it appears as the process of spreading civilized manners in the colonies, and on the other hand it appears as the rigid discipline by which the lower classes, as represented by the apprentices, are to be kept under control. Taken in its ideological context, the equation of colonial and sexual exploitation, of malfeasance and sexual desire, can be interpreted in terms of the strategies of a modem disciplinary society. Such strategies belong to what Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, calls a new “political anatomy,” which was established in the eighteenth century.22 It focusses on the body as the object and the target of power, and it imposes docility and utility upon the bodily forces. The exercise of self-control, required for a disciplinary power which seeks to produce docile bodies, can be seen at its best in Thorowgood’s virtuous daughter,23 the melancholy Maria, who, in pining secretly for Barnwell, shuns the company of the noble lords who court her. Maria sees herself as part of Thorowgood's system of values, for she claims that her “only merit” (I.2.21-22) is that she is his daughter. The conflict between love and duty, a potential cause of struggle between parent and child, can be avoided because Maria has completely internalized Thorowgood's disciplinary power:

MARIA…. my inclinations… shall ever be submitted to your… authority;… love shall never make me act contrary to my duty. (1.2.67-70)

25In addition. Maria constantly observes and investigates her behaviour in terms of sexual morals. Such transformations of external constraint into self-constraint tend to subvert the tragic possibilities of the action. That is why the play ends on a note of reconciliation which emphasizes Barnwell's repentance, and that is why the gallows scene was left out.24

26It is this “civilizing” model of political and social assimilation that most domestic tragedies negotiate. The genre propounds an ideology which aims at substituting the direct, physical means of warfare with the indirect and subtle workings of education and reform, and, in doing so, uses rhetorical violence and the ideological dictatorship of virtue for the rigorous enforcement of middle-class norms. Thorowgood’s well-ordered household thus indicates a highly controlled, because vulnerable, political and social System.25 The outcome of the political and social struggle depends on the behaviour of the domestic characters, who can be seen as metaphorical sites of national or international conflicts. Later domestic tragedies sought to disentangle the language of personal and of sexual relations from the language of politics.26 They tended to individuate the collective body, the body politic, in order to attach personal motives to what had been the openly political behaviour of contending groups. Thus all national and international tensions were privatized to such a degree that it was possible to diffuse and disguise the political nature of the struggles and to dissolve all political discrepancies into more harmonious constructions: domestic tragedies became domestic dramas or melodramas, which exalted the domestic woman. In The London Merchant, however, Millwood can still be identified as a major threat to the British nation and to British society. For no other reason than this could Lillo present Barnwell’s fall as a tragic fall, that is, as an event of general public and political relevance. To consider this domestic tragedy in terms of the categories of political history, like war and peace, then, is not, as it may seem, to present a contradiction in terms, but to identify a paradox that shaped domestic literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.27