Empire Of Necessity Sparknotes
Do subjective ideas of liberty inevitably entail the marginalization of others? Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno and Greg Grandin’s manuscript Empire of Necessity illustrate the case of the San Dominick, a Spanish slave ship sailing through the wild Pacific Ocean near Chile, and its passengers to pose this question. At the turn of the 18th century, such tightly-packed multipurpose commercial ships pitted competing self-interests against each other. While slaves and foreigners derided captain Benito Cereno’s sympathies with the fallen Spanish empire, Cereno clung to traditional patriarchal notions of subjugation to justify his liberty and survive their egoistic attacks on board the San Dominick. Meanwhile, the American mariner Amasa Delano,
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a reborn patriarch, professed the American revolutionary idea of freedom for all men, rejecting slavery and tyrannical European colonialism, while using his gentle ethnocentrism to promote his own material and social interests above Cereno’s and the slaves’ freedoms. Even though the slaves undid white social controls through group liberation, Benito Cereno and Amasa Delano still sought to uphold their competing personal visions of liberty by re-enacting patriarchal white male domination and, thus, subjugating each other and the slaves.
At the time, Cereno, heir to the San Dominick, whose human cargo murdered the ship’s masters, wanted to stay in control of the ship yet lacked the Spanish colonial support necessary to do so.
Before Melville’s account begins, hatchet-wielding slaves, under slave leader Babo’s command, executed the ship’s former owner, Don Alexandro Aranda and other colonial officials on the San Dominick and ordered Cereno to turn the ship around for Senegal. In the aftermath of this traumatic slave revolt, Cereno could no longer watch over human property and exert dominance over enslaved dependents like he did as a traditional colonial patriarch in the past, so he fearfully hoped to eke out survival under their ascendancy. Without any other Spaniards of influence nearby, Babo and Delano humiliated Cereno. As Delano reminded Cereno while Babo tortured Cereno with an uncomfortably close shave using a sharp razor, “it’s well it’s only I and not the King, that sees [the Spanish flag].” Here, Babo used the foreign, naivé Delano to publicly shame the Spanish flag, and reinforce that Cereno’s traditional Spanish jurisdiction paled in the dark aftermath of the San Dominick’s slave uprising. Severed from the security of his imperial network, captain Cereno failed to reproduce patriarchy and exercise his liberty to dominate
others.
a reborn patriarch, professed the American revolutionary idea of freedom for all men, rejecting slavery and tyrannical European colonialism, while using his gentle ethnocentrism to promote his own material and social interests above Cereno’s and the slaves’ freedoms. Even though the slaves undid white social controls through group liberation, Benito Cereno and Amasa Delano still sought to uphold their competing personal visions of liberty by re-enacting patriarchal white male domination and, thus, subjugating each other and the slaves.
At the time, Cereno, heir to the San Dominick, whose human cargo murdered the ship’s masters, wanted to stay in control of the ship yet lacked the Spanish colonial support necessary to do so.
Before Melville’s account begins, hatchet-wielding slaves, under slave leader Babo’s command, executed the ship’s former owner, Don Alexandro Aranda and other colonial officials on the San Dominick and ordered Cereno to turn the ship around for Senegal. In the aftermath of this traumatic slave revolt, Cereno could no longer watch over human property and exert dominance over enslaved dependents like he did as a traditional colonial patriarch in the past, so he fearfully hoped to eke out survival under their ascendancy. Without any other Spaniards of influence nearby, Babo and Delano humiliated Cereno. As Delano reminded Cereno while Babo tortured Cereno with an uncomfortably close shave using a sharp razor, “it’s well it’s only I and not the King, that sees [the Spanish flag].” Here, Babo used the foreign, naivé Delano to publicly shame the Spanish flag, and reinforce that Cereno’s traditional Spanish jurisdiction paled in the dark aftermath of the San Dominick’s slave uprising. Severed from the security of his imperial network, captain Cereno failed to reproduce patriarchy and exercise his liberty to dominate
others.