One Kalbaishakhi several years ago, the dark, dense rain seemed to me to pound out its own iambic pentameter as I read.

In my English honors undergraduate course on Renaissance literature, one of the most gifted teachers I have ever known, Amlan Das Gupta, had just started a set of brilliant lectures on Paradise Lost. I was behind with the reading and finally sitting down with the text, unaware that a poem—this poem—would change my life. So, there I was: in “Bengala,” reading about “Bengala,” and realizing with electrifying clarity the strangeness of “Bengala” for Milton.

Amid the excitement of falling headfirst into one of the most beautiful poems in the world, the remainder of my Milton coursework came to be haunted by a series of questions. Why did “Bengala” come up in the work of a seventeenth-century London-based writer whose travels had been limited to his continental grand tour? (What had John Milton, Englishman, heard or read?) Why was “Bengala” in a simile of hellish associations? (Was Milton not aware that the Bengal countryside was in fact paradise?) Why was “Bengala” invoked in proximity to “Ternate and Tidore,” “the wide Ethiopian,” and “the pole”? (Did Milton not know how far away these were from me?)

As part of this cluster, this essay takes as its point of departure Geraldine Heng’s magisterial Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. As someone from “Bengala” and trained in the European and especially English early modern period, I am indebted to Heng’s work on the connections between the forces of empire making and race making and to her demonstration of the transhistorical mechanisms through which racializing logics are tightly knit with other hierarchizing systems, especially for purposes of disqualification and disenfranchisement of particular demographics.Footnote ¹ Studying colonization, race, and empire in the early modern period, I learn from scholars such as Kim F. Hall, Ania Loomba, Imtiaz Habib, and Jyotsna Singh. With her medievalist specialization and with a focus on literary texts, Heng provides a still longer view of the processes of racial formation and empire making, as do Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Jonathan Hsy, and Don J. Wyatt, among others. Here, I write as a Miltonist engaging with Heng’s demonstrations of racial formation to return to some questions about Milton’s invention of the human in his particular context of seventeenth-century colonially ambitious England. For long before Harold Bloom claimed for Shakespeare an “invention of the human” and a so-called universalism—in studied obliviousness to the facts of empire that above all contributed to making Shakespeare the phenomenon that Shakespeare is in the world—Milton claimed an invention of the human. Milton chose to compose, “beginning late” in life but finally certain of his choice of epic subject matter (Paradise Lost, bk. 9, line 26), the story not of one nation or people but, as he understood it, of all humankind:

As a scholar invested in justice and equity and the rights to life and liberty of all peoples on our shared planet, I interrogate what I love. As a Miltonist, I interrogate Milton.

In the years and decades following my first introduction to Paradise Lost, it became clear that (like me) Milton was likely thinking about empire all the time—indeed, that there was nowhere he could go (again, like me) where the pervasive pursuits of imperial design did not unfold around him. Notwithstanding his republicanism and his intellectual pursuit of questions relating to human liberty—and perhaps compelled to meditate the pertinent contradictions in more intense relief because of his personal and political realities—Milton was enmeshed in enterprises of empire, nation building, and colonization throughout his life.Footnote ² Questions of race, immigration, emigration, settlerism, enslavement, and white and Christian supremacy inched ever closer to Milton as he arrived from childhood to adulthood and to political engagement and poethood.

For context, the Elizabethan proclamations for the expulsion of “divers Blackmoores brought into the Realme” dated from Shakespeare’s years of working professionally in London, and the circumstances of their making seeped into broader public consciousness in Milton’s lifetime (Elizabeth I). The English East India Company was incorporated by royal charter on 31 December 1600, and its monopolistic-trade-cum-imperial ambitions influenced the accounts of travel contained in widely circulated anthologies such as Hakluytus Posthumus. The East India Company began early to maintain its own private military—clearly a necessity for a free and fair trading company. On 22 December 1616, a direct contemporary of Milton’s from the Bay of Bengal region was baptized Peter Pope at the Church of St. Dionis in London at a well-publicized congregation attended by the Privy Council, the lord mayor, aldermen, and members of the East India Company and the Virginia Company (Habib, Black Lives 339; Copland and Pope; Smith). Nothing is known of this young person from before he came to be one of “towe black boyes” given to the East India Company captain Thomas Best by a Dutch merchant and then “handed over” to the company chaplain Patrick Copland (Standish and Croft 156; Neill 375). In March 1622, an attack by the Powhatan Confederacy on Virginia colonists made sensationalized news in England, and in response James I revoked the Virginia Company’s charter and made Virginia a crown colony under the direct control of the monarchy (Mohlmann). Aristotle’s theory of “natural” slaves and high-profile debates (between Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de las Casas in Spain in the mid-sixteenth century, for instance) about the precise demographic of so-called naturally slavish peoples penetrated intellectual, theological, and juristic circles across Europe.Footnote ³ Oliver Cromwell’s Western Design, aiming to challenge Spanish dominance in the Caribbean by advancing English imperial aspirations, unfolded in the years that Milton was an employee of the commonwealth government (Pestana). The year 1660 saw monarchical Restoration in England and the establishment of the Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading with Africa (incorporated by royal charter on 10 January 1663). This entity was reconstituted by a new charter in 1672 as the Royal African Company, which grew to be the largest trader in chattel slavery in the world. By the time of the publication of Paradise Lost in 1667, a significant portion of the company’s profits came from the slave trade. Milton would have had to be a grand fool—and an assiduously unread one—to not be provoked by these many strands of colonially interested political undertakings around him. And Milton was neither a fool nor unread.

Readers of Milton might hold that Paradise Lost has little to say explicitly about race except in terms of “some new race called Man” (bk. 2, line 348), the “race of mankind” (bk. 3, line 161), or the “new happy race of men” (bk. 3, line 679)—a purportedly unifying conception of race encompassing humankind at large. This has made race in Milton an apparently moot point for many scholars: vide the loud absence of glosses for race in these last three centuries of editions of Milton’s works.Footnote ⁴ But there are two points to mind here. The first is that the questions that are pertinent today are not solely about how Milton conceptualized race, or whether Milton supported England’s imperial ambitions, or whether Milton endorsed the colonization and enslavement of non-English and perhaps especially nonwhite peoples, or even whether race functioned fundamentally in biopolitical (physiognomic, for instance) or sociocultural (religious, say) terms for Milton or his time.

Even if the questions above were fully answerable, which they are not, in the present state of Milton scholarship, and even if the debates had a clear winning side, which they do not, for race did and continues to function across those parameters, a critical dependence on Milton’s uses of the word race would be intellectually lazy and socially irresponsible. As Heng writes, “Race is one of the primary names we have…that is attached to a repeating tendency…to demarcate human beings through differences among humans” (3). And Hall clarified several decades ago that “the absence of a term for race in the Renaissance and of a distinct and coherent racial ideology does not make early modern English culture…race-neutral” (Things 261). Considering race somehow absent in the early modern period (or not on the radar for early modern authors) only contributes, as scholars such as Olivette Otele, Ayanna Thompson, David Theo Goldberg, and Emily Weissbourd point out, to damaging conceptualizations of racelessness in Europe, whiteness as an unmarked category, and “pure” Europeanness as historically both white and Christian.

I contend that Milton discusses race wherever he writes of the processes of race making. In our world—which is the world in which Milton continues to be read and taught and marathoned and discussed—questions of race, colonialism, slavery, and geography are intimately and horrifically connected.Footnote ⁵ To absolve ourselves of the responsibility for discussing race in Milton—because Milton writes about the “human race,” say (bk. 4, line 475; bk. 6, line 896)—does us all, and especially early-career Miltonists, an immense disservice.Footnote ⁶ Thankfully, it is hard for a reader in “Bengala” not to notice, at the very beginning of Paradise Lost, that matters of “Eden” and “one greater man” pertain to a particular world order, a Christian one, and not to all humankind (bk. 1, line 4). With an understanding of Milton’s context, it is possible to read Milton seriously—that is, critically—in his claims of (poetic) invention of the human (race) and his examinations of the duties and prerogatives of humankind.

My second point is that even the few instances of race in Milton’s greatest epic beyond its discussion of the “human race” indicate its author’s awareness of different kinds of human beings in the world. In the epic’s mention of the “pygmean race,” for example, Milton reproduces the erroneous European understanding of an African people’s presence “Beyond the Indian mount” (bk. 1, lines 780, 781).Footnote ⁷ Perhaps most significantly, Milton’s description of the “vicious race” of “the irreverent son / Of him who built the ark” recirculates the harmful biblical myth of Ham (bk. 12, lines 104, 101–02). In the Bible, Noah curses his son Ham’s descendants to perpetual slavery after Ham violates Noah’s privacy (Bible, Gen. 9.24–25). The biblical denomination of a people cursed to be born into slavery came to be enthusiastically embraced by white European and European-descended proponents of chattel slavery of Black African peoples from the fifteenth century onward (Davis). On 21 August 1861, for instance, less than a century after the founding of the United States, Bishop Augustus Marie Martin of Louisiana wrote that slavery was “the manifest will of God” and that all Catholics had a duty to seize “from the barbarity of their ferocious customs thousands of children of the race of Canaan” (qtd. in Pasquier 337). Milton knew about race and was writing about race—because he couldn’t very well not be doing so as a responsible man of letters in seventeenth-century Europe.

In-depth studies of “Milton’s place in an imperial continuity extending from 1492 to the present” are still awaited in critical scholarship, despite the call for such studies in a groundbreaking volume edited by Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer a quarter century ago (3). The body of work engaging questions of race and empire in Milton is remarkably small in proportion to the total quantum of work in the fields of Milton studies, premodern critical race studies, and postcolonial studies generally. One reason for this relative neglect may be that Milton’s most significant work, Paradise Lost, is set in what is taken to be, like the Middle Ages, a “politically unintelligible time” (Heng 21). As Heng demonstrates, however, there is no time or culture that is not politically invested. A second reason might be that there remains among Miltonists a desire to protect a lofty Milton from so-called identity-politics debates and to avoid some of the messiest aspects of Milton’s life, times, works, and afterlives. There is an irony to this, of course; a reluctance to enter thorny discussions is profoundly un-Miltonic. For all his faults, a willful intellectual laziness is not something that can be attributed to Milton.

The modest body of scholarship on Milton, race, and empire that does exist has posed important critical questions: for instance, on Milton’s possible investments in English global dominance (Lim), on seventeenth-century prevarications about empire (Rajan), on the nature of the humanness allegedly necessary for a pursuit of human liberty (Jablonski), on tolerance and religious heterodoxy (Achinstein and Sauer), on poetic compositions of whiteness (Kim), on strategic poetic slipperiness that potentially endorses human enslavement (Nyquist 137–47), on the revolutionary and abolitionist uses of Milton (Wilburn, Preaching; Reade), on the avenues opened by reworkings of Milton in traditions vastly different from his own (Herron; Issa), and on the dangers of ignoring crucial matters of violence and inequity in the present in blithe advancements of happy Miltons (Shore). The rich engagements with Paradise Lost among abolitionists have less to do with any abolitionist tendency of the poem than with abolitionists themselves and their generous readings. Examples include the Igbo-born and English-enslaved eighteenth-century author Olaudah Equiano, who quoted repeatedly from the poem to depict the horrors of Caribbean slavery; the twentieth-century Trinidadian historian C. L. R. James, who used the poem at key junctures of The Black Jacobins; and the twentieth-century African American civil rights activist Malcolm X, who called Paradise Lost a critique of white supremacy (Malcolm X and Haley).Footnote ⁸

The field of Milton studies is growing in unprecedented ways as I write, and an increasing number of scholars find in Milton a generative place in which to discuss abiding issues including the privileges and exclusions of nationality and citizenship and the accommodations and violences of the English language (Wilburn, “Causing”); overt and insidious fabrications of human disqualification on the bases of gender, race, sexuality, and disability (Chakravarty; Dhar, “Toward Blind Language”; Gordon; Sanchez; Duran and Toscano); some of the key impulses of science fiction (Greenberg); the uses of poetry in our warming-flooding-drowning-changing planet (Guthrie); the uses of poetry for standing witness (Jess); the slow and volcanic mechanisms through which transformations happen in large and complex polities (Crawforth); and, following Milton’s example, the obligations of producing accessible scholarship in the service of society.

Milton, who affirms the immense positive power of “[h]is dark materials” and condemns the “excremental whiteness” of studied innocence, is hard to pin down on questions of race and empire (Paradise Lost, bk. 2, line 916; Areopagitica 111). The longtime admirer of the virulent colonist Edmund Spenser—whose View of the Present State of Ireland (1596) is a prospectus of English military colonization—is also the author of Paradise Regained (1671), one of the world’s most significant poems of resistance to the idea that might equals right. Other contradictions abound in Milton. For instance, the poet who wrote the hypocritical Dalila in Samson Agonistes (1671) also composed Eve, one of the most fiercely intelligent characters of world literature. I submit that the contradictions and attendant critical debates are all to the good: scholars should question what is questionable, refuse to excuse what is not excusable, and thus make live anew what is worth renewing from the literary canon.

I do not make any claims about Milton’s positions on race or empire in this tiny essay. I simply assert that in order to have a Milton that is “usable for the next 400 years” (Hall, “Othello”), scholars today must grant Milton at least a fraction of the multivalence that they thankfully no longer withhold from Shakespeare: that Milton, although the person rides his works like a colossus, is now also very much beside the author and his works in their immediate context. That is, Milton now also means the superb reception that Milton and his works have had in the world across languages, borders, media, and movements of liberation, and it also means the various conversations that Milton makes possible in the world, especially among the poet’s most politically marginalized readers.Footnote ⁹ In our current inheritance of Milton scholarship, in which postcolonial studies, literary histories of empire, and critical race studies have received little engagement, we do not know what it may even mean for a deep interaction between these fields of study and one of the centrally canonical and influential authors in world literature and culture. What, exactly, is Milton’s invention of the human? What informs that invention? How fixed or capable of growth are the humans? How do they interact with one another? What planet do they live in? How responsible are they for the world they inherit? It is time that we probed for answers, for they have much to tell us about our own inhabitation in the long line stretched from past to present.

If the last several issues of the MLA Newsletter are any indication, the overwhelming majority of the current PMLA readership is rightly distressed by the unfolding attack on higher education, on the humanities, and on critical thinking in the United States.Footnote ¹⁰ In our anger and exhaustion, it is easy to become cynical. In our very traditions of criticality, it is easy to wear our cynicism like a comforting armor: nothing should jostle us from our outrage at the state of the world. But I remain Milton’s reader from “Bengala” even as I now research, write, and teach far from home. Just as I have never had the luxury of not having race or empire squarely present in my North American and European Renaissance classrooms, I do not have the luxury of cynically and as silently as possible going about my business or staying in my lane.Footnote ¹¹ I thus end this piece with a return to Milton—specifically, to an aspect of the poet that is to me as valuable as the poetry that changed the course of my life. This is also a return to Heng, and a recognition of the work that accessible and clear scholarship does in the world. I propose that critics and scholars today would do well—not unlike the Milton of Areopagitica (1644), The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), and The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660)—to remember that we too might write for all who wish to read and engage and that we too may seek, as it were, to write with both hands. In doing so, we too may find that our words are not absolutely dead things in our pendant world.