Coils

This chapter reads Charles Brockden Brown’s 1799 novel Ormond in the context of Philadelphia’s newly intimate commercial relationship with the East Indies during the final decades of the eighteenth century. The novel draws from accounts of the Pacific and Siberia by such figures as Maurice Benyowsky, August von Kotzebue, and John Ledyard. Ormond embodies many of the features of the new merchant millionaires whose Philadelphia fortunes derived from transoceanic speculations in the East India trade. Such a transoceanic context aligns Ormond’s revolutionary politics with the logic and temporality of global finance capital rather than the Illuminati conspiracy with which he is often associated. Similarly, the narrative pace of Ormond mimics the expectant temporalities of financial investment and revolutionary discourse to show how seductive spectacles of the future distract us from the present acts of violence necessary to arrive at them.