The ocean of capital: The cultures of maritime capitalism in U.S. sea narratives, 1830-1855

For literary scholars, the sea has remained for too long as if it were history-less and unpeopled. Only recently have critics begun to salvage the ocean out of a long neglect. This dissertation takes up the ocean to flesh out the overlooked configurations of maritime capitalist cultures in U.S. sea narratives. Production, consumer culture, industrial labor, and market economy have been the terms pivotal to the study of U.S. capitalist culture. This dissertation deprivileges such "terracentric" problematics of capitalism, and seeks to complicate analytic perspective by reframing it around the agents of maritime commerce such as ships, sailors, captains, pirates, privateers, and slave traders. While I thus trace the maritime system of capitalism, I reconstruct the forgotten genealogy of U.S. sea narratives by recuperating James Fenimore Cooper's sea romances and Richard Henry Dana's influential sea narrative and re-anchoring Herman Melville's well-known texts in oceanic issues. Simultaneously, I examine ambivalent and self-contradictory negotiations with maritime technology and the inhuman attrition of maritime labor, and U.S. sea captains' incoherent, though repressed, filiations with piratical war and slave trading. More specifically, I examine how Cooper's counter-intuitive fascination with maritime technology and its globalizing mobility spells out the ineffectuality of his own critical stances about U.S. capitalist commerce; how Dana's labor reformism that seeks to expose and improve the inhuman conditions of sailors cancels itself by identifying the Manifest Destiny of U.S. capital with the destiny of overexploited labor; how Captain Ahab's anti-economic oceanic war reveals itself to be a function of capitalist economy; and how Captain Delano, who is allegedly humanitarian, proves complicit with the inhuman traffic of human beings.