by Arielle Xena Alterwaite
Many sperm whale teeth can be found on the island of Nantucket. It is hard to say just how many silver-scaled bodies and tentacular masses once slipped through their widths. Hard, too, is determining their origin; whether it was droplets from the Pacific or the Atlantic that once fell from these teeth as wrought-iron hooks and hemp-woven ropes chafed away at their cementum to expose ivory beneath. One tooth, in particular, reveals scrimshaw from almost two hundred years ago. A sailor stands hat in hand and spraddle-legged in front of an American flag and an eagle bearing the banner “FREE TRADE AND SAILORS RIGHTS.” On another, also nearly two centuries old, an Indigenous man and woman hold hands. He wields a hatchet in his right hand and her left hand is raised. On the reverse side of the tooth—and, thus, beyond their horizon of vision—sails a ship with another eagle and banner. This one announces: “SHIP AMERICA.” The Native Americans brandish no words and speak only through the impression of their limbs.
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When Ishmael, the narrator of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851), talks of whales’ teeth, he compares the whaler and their scrimshaw to the “Iroquois” and their “wonderful patience of industry” (295). “As with the Hawaiian savage,” Ishmael continues, “so with the white sailor-savage. With the same marvellous patience . . . he will carve you a bit of bone sculpture, not quite as workmanlike, but as close packed in its maziness of design, as the Greek savage, Achilles’s shield” (295). According to Melville, imagination takes flight in these dentine depictions. That is to say, Ishmael sees something beyond representation in such a tooth. “With a frigate’s anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for spurs,” he envisions “mount[ing] that whale and leap[ing] the topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight!” (296).
The novel, however, does not simply seek to impart the escapism of cosmic heavens. Rather, it offers a view of a world shaped by colonial violence and capitalist plunder in which a glimpse of an alternative future is nonetheless possible. For more than a century, New England whaling functioned not only as a productive industry but also as a vital node in overlapping systems of economic extraction and social domination. Whale oil and spermaceti candles from Nantucket illuminated the brutality of around-the-clock slave labor on Caribbean sugar plantations. The profits of this “enlightenment” flowed back into New England’s mercantile houses, banks, and shipyards, financing a broader Atlantic system in which the same vessels that lit the plantations also carried the rum, fish, timber, and enslaved Africans needed to sustain them. All the while, laborers from disparate lands, including formerly enslaved and colonized peoples, navigated new spaces of rough equality and shared exploitation up on deck.
Given the political-economic context of nineteenth-century commerce in the circum-Western Atlantic, to carve “SHIP AMERICA” into a whale’s tooth both figuratively and literally inscribed the entanglement of maritime labor, resource extraction, trans-Atlantic slavery, nationalist ideology, Indigenous dispossession, and colonial expansion into one frame. It is this nexus of material conditions that gives these scrimshawed carvings their layered meaning. For many scholars, this meaning appears unsurprisingly bleak. Now, as in the past, capitalist interests dictate social relations and ravage the environment in the process. However, by returning to Melville’s Pequod, one can see another way to write about the past and, thus, think differently about the present. One finds with the Pequod a different “chronotope” for representing capitalist modernity. Here, the liberal American, the sovereign Indigenous person, the enslaved African, and many other political identities are brought together to momentarily instantiate a “counterculture to modernity.” It was precisely this historical fusion that the historian C.L.R. James discerned as the brilliant lesson of Moby-Dick.
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In 1952, James set off to write a book about Melville and Moby-Dick when he had nowhere to go. Imprisoned on Ellis Island for six months, James was confined with others similarly accused of being “communist adherents” by McCarthyites. Upon his release one year later, he self-published the resulting text, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1953), where he turned his attention to the substance and style of Melville’s magnum opus. Melville himself had conceded: Moby-Dick was full of “tragic graces” (17). However, as James saw it, Melville had told a true story of the “meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways” by “spread[ing] a rainbow over [their] disastrous set of sun” (17). “Yet how light in the scales,” James concluded, “is the contemporary mountain of self-examination and self-pity against the warmth, the humor, the sanity, the anonymous but unfailing humanity of the renegades and castaways and savages of the Pequod, rooted in the whole historical past of man, doing what they have to do” (114). James invokes this metaphor of the rainbow perceptively. From his cell, he read in Melville a form of storytelling capable of enlivening the deadening material conditions that defined both the whaling vessel and the sugar plantation. It is in this spirit of radical optimism that James cast Melville’s weighty world of men, not as a tale with a singular silver lining, but one with many colorful seams.
Although a perennial fixture in Black radical historiography, James has more recently entered the broader historian’s canon as a theorist of revolutionary change with The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938). And, with the publication of Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (2004), came David Scott’s reading of James as a champion of Tragic historical narration and a critical diagnosis of the postcolonial condition “drained of the determined fervor of anticolonial revolution and the passionate certainty of the first decades of sovereignty” (207). Quoting Hayden White’s Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973), Scott identifies the narrative art of Tragedy in James as one in which, “‘there are no festive occasions . . . rather, there are intimations of states of division among men more terrible than that which incited the tragic agon at the beginning of the drama’” (47). Tragedy, for Scott, exists in explicit contrast to Comedy, where “‘hope is held out for the temporary triumph of man over his world by the prospect of occasional reconciliations of the forces at play in the social and natural worlds’” (47). To clarify, “Comedy,” in this framework, refers not simply to colloquial jokes, humorous actions, or the elicitation of laughter. When applied as a formal mode of historical emplotment, Comedy speaks to a philosophy of history that refuses inevitability and the foreclosing of possibilities. Or, as White writes: “The appropriate form of all historical emplotment is Comic inasmuch as the historian is constrained always to show what was living and growing . . . he must write of what managed to go on living, even under the most oppressive conditions” (404).
With the fate of postcolonial nations and the triumph of the capitalist world-system, it is easy to read James and his work through the lens of Tragedy. But what happens when Scott’s argument about a Tragic turn in our narratives of modernity and revolution confronts James’s later emphasis on the Comic possibilities in Moby-Dick and, more specifically, James’s focus on the environmental, material, and cultural substance of social imaginaries? For James, in a comparatively “late[r] style” than the James of The Black Jacobins, Moby-Dick was not an “allegory.” He, instead, saw a work of history linked to Melville’s own “experience at sea.” As a historical project where different life-worlds circulated within a single hull, Moby-Dick presented the potential of a history written, like a whale-tooth scrimshawed, with the material realities and socio-political imaginaries of the past in mind and in hand.
If intellectual history is making an ostensible “re-turn” to a “grounded, materialist approach,” James’s attunement to Comic emplotment matters all the more because Comedy reframes such material entanglements not as fatal repetition but as an opening in which the lived experiences of a collective life born of oppressive domination might generate new, colorful forms of relation. Reading James in this light, the whaling ship captures a central tension of nineteenth-century capitalism: While sailing under the banner of free trade and industrious democracy, the profits of enslaved labor and imperial colonialism bound its planks. Yet, on board the Pequod, the daily life of the diverse cast of characters—working together despite these contradictory conditions and profound differences—creates countervailing moments of cooperation and mutual recognition that rupture the fixed social hierarchies the ship was built to enforce. It is in these hopeful openings and constant possibilities of solidarity, rather than in closure or moral restitution, that James locates the Comedy of Melville and, by extension, how one might write histories of ideas and political economy.
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First, for James, as with Melville, there is Ishmael: The archetype of intellectual striving, who “believes in nothing and therefore constantly analyzes all that he sees to find something” (42). Then there is the peg-legged Captain Ahab, desolate in his “‘Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command’” (8) that defines his impossible quest to conquer nature and render the living into a ledger of profit and revenge. His evocations of the slave trade are, as James categorizes, at once tragically historical and comically ironic. Ahab claims self-important mastery over people who were, in fact, brought together by the structural forces of the Middle Passage and colonial expansion. In the very same world, James also foregrounds the formerly enslaved Pip—“a little Negro from Alabama, the lowest of the low in America of 1851,” who, nevertheless, on the Pequod, “shall lift himself to the most exalted positions” (19). There’s also Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo, all Indigenous peoples from the American, Asian, and African continents. On the one hand, these men embody fundamental differences in position and power. On the other hand, their flashes of solidarity convey the Comic possibility of “occasional reconciliations” and shared humanity within, and against, a violent reality. How these respective characters jointly navigate this context—a time and space shaped by slavery, colonization, and capitalism—is where James attributes the narrative force of Moby-Dick.
The true effect of this Comedic emplotment appears most clearly when the assorted crew members leave the comparative safety of the Pequod to hunt whales on the open sea. Thrown together in the smaller microcosm of the whaleboats to fulfill the fantasies of entrepreneurial madmen, the characters collectively face certain death. In this dire scene, however, Melville emphasized that “‘Gayer sallies, more merry mirth, better jokes, and brighter repartees, you never heard over your mahogany, than you will hear over the half-inch white cedar of the whale-boat, when thus hung in hangman’s nooses’” (25). In these absurdist sentences, James suggests, “the humor and the wit of the mariners, renegades and castaways are beyond the cultivated inter-changes of those who sit around mahogany tables” (25). James continued, “they have to be. Hangman’s nooses hang loose around the necks of countless millions today, and for them their unfailing humor is an assertion of life and sanity against the ever-present threat of destruction and a world in chaos” (25). The sailors’ fate becomes ever more intertwined as the white whale looms and the posed danger of the natural world increases. Yet, if the mahogany-hewn tables that witnessed the violence of Caribbean sugar plantations now weighed down the Pequod, it is the white-cedar whaleboats, native to the forests closer to the Pequod’s point of origin, that ironically end up floating the sailor’s spirits.
The question animating Melville, James contended, was this: “[W]hat are the conditions of survival of modern civilization” (20)? With Melville, James found, “the only way it can be made bearable is by humor” (108). Ultimately, the whaler represents a protracted history of economic extraction, labor exploitation, and environmental destruction ushered in by capitalist modernity. Like James, W.E.B. Du Bois in The World and Africa (1946), for instance,described a similar state of unforgiving material conditions—also suspended between the worlds of slavery and the slave-trade, on the one hand, and of anti-slavery and colonialism, on the other—but regarding the trade in a different kind of ivory. From the pool halls of England, Du Bois hauntingly recounted, the “wild shrieks of pain” of elephants whose teeth now “adorn[ed] civilization” were silent, and “neither the society darling nor the great artist saw blood on the piano keys” (46). And, like Du Bois, James concerned himself with how literary form could render visible the otherwise “bloodless” surfaces of this environmental extraction and lead readers to appreciate the material reality sedimented in the bones of earth’s largest mammals, all without losing hope for alternative futures. Instead of alighting mainly upon Tragedy for this task (or “intimations of states of division” in the words of Hayden White), James alighted upon Comedy. Without “spreading a rainbow” over those “conscripted into modernity” and their persistence in “facing what they have to face” (114), James stressed that history would otherwise be limited to the singular vision of an Ahab and unable to imagine a political economy beyond its inheritances. While Ahab “pursues his whale with foam-glued lips and inflamed distracted fury” confined to the close quarters of his mind, the other men, “responding almost unconsciously to the rhythm of the sea and Nature,” share “skill, danger, sweat and jokes” (29) in the pursuit of life.
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In Visions of History (1983), James motioned for historians to understand different revolutionary movements by paying pronounced attention to the varied, yet shared, “emotions, activities, and experiences” (266) among people in a distinct conjuncture. Although “economic relations produce certain types of people” (271), it is the people, not the economic relationships, who, at the end of the day, produce historical change.
While this Forum is meant to reappraise the “what” of intellectual history and political economy, there exist many possibilities for “how” that history is told. As Carolyn Dean has proposed, we discover in Metahistory that the power of Marx’s “unlikely story about how the wretched of the earth become its saviors” resides in how it “draws its interpretative power as much from poetry as from an analysis of economic development” (1349). In Moby-Dick, James maintained that Melville always began “with the accepted practices, beliefs and even literary methods of his time, and then consciously and with the utmost sureness [left] them behind or rather [took] them over into the world he saw ahead” (40). He further acknowledged: A “great imaginative writer can do . . . what philosophers, economists, journalists, historians, however gifted, can never do” (41). But that does not mean they should not try. Maybe, as James hoped, a book about a white whale need not be Tragic. As long as such stories are grounded in the strange substance of everyday life and the connections made between different people in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, they might inspire something that hovers above the horizon of possibility. It is still far out, but, in such histories, even the whales of Melville’s “hidden ways” (197) and “mystic modes” (198) might have something to say.
This essay is part of the forum “The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History.”
Arielle Xena Alterwaite is joint postdoctoral fellow at the Ruth Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice and the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. She received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2025, and is currently writing a book on Haitian debt in the long nineteenth-century. Her writing has been published in History & Theory, the American Historical Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other fora.
Edited by Tomi Onabanjo
Featured image: The Linnaean Isles and Ice Continent with Cirrus Radiation (1818) by Bernard O’Reilly. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown (JCB) Archive of Early American Images.
