Conrad on the American Century

Having now almost completed Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904), I wanted to excerpt a short passage from Chapter 6, one I find particularly sublime and far-reaching in its combination of dialogue and description. In this chapter, the book’s protagonist, Charles Gould, meets with an unnamed American businessman who seeks to finance Gould’s silver mine, located in a fictional, unstable Latin American backwater.

Thus spoke the considerable personage, the millionaire endower of churches on a scale befitting the greatness of his native land—the same whom doctors used the language horrid and veiled menaces. He was a big-limbed, deliberate man, whose quiet burliness lent to an ample silk-faced frock-coat a superfine dignity. His hair was iron grey, his eyebrows were still black, and his massive profile was the profile of a Caesar’s head on an old Roman coin. But his parentage was German and Scotch and English, with remote strains of Danish and French blood, giving him the temperament of a Puritan and an insatiable imagination of conquest. He was completely unbending to his visitor, because of the warm introduction the visitor had brought from Europe, and because of an irrational liking for earnestness and determination wherever he met, to whatever end directed.

“The Costaguana Government shall play its hand for all it’s worth—and don’t you forget it, Mr. Gould. Now, what is Costaguana? It is the bottomless pit of ten-per-cent loans and other fool investments. European capital has been flung into it with both hands for years. Not ours, though. We in this country know just about enough to keep indoors when it rains. We can sit and watch. Of course, some day we shall step in. We are bound to. But there’s no hurry. Time itself has got to wait on the greatest country in the whole of God’s Universe. We shall be giving the word for everything: industry, trade, law, journalism, art, politics, and religion, from Cape Horn clear over to Smith’s Sound, and beyond, too, if anything worth taking hold of turns up at the North Pole. And then we shall have the leisure to take in hand the outlying islands and continents of the earth. We shall run the world’s business whether the world likes it or not. The world can’t help it—and neither can we, I guess.”

On a related note, I once came upon, while picking through the introduction of A. J. P. Taylor’s The Struggle for Mastery in Europe: 1848-1918 (1954), a set of ten tables that summarized—in the manner of historians—what Conrad far more artfully captured above (not to mention beating Taylor to the point by half a century). The tables compared various national measures of the European powers concerning things like population, arms expenditures, and the like over each ten year period between 1850 and 1910 to demonstrate the changing strategic situation in Europe during that time; the final few tables concern raw materials and include, for comparison’s sake, the United States. Here are a few highlights:

• In 1870, Britain led the world in the production of coal, producing 112 million tons; Germany was second with 34 million tons, and the U.S. produced a meager 10 million tons. By 1900, the U.S. led the world with 244 million tons produced.

• In 1870, Britain led the world in the production of pig-iron, producing 6 million tons. By 1890, the U.S. caught and passed the U.K. by a 9.4-to-8 million ton margin.

• At the dawn of the steel age, the U.S. was already the world leader in 1880, virtually tied with the U.K., each producing about 1.3 million tons per annum. By 1914, U.S. steel production (32 million tons) exceeded that of the next five producers combined.

That Conrad could see the world’s center of gravity shifting almost as it happened speaks highly of his engagement with the world—no navel gazer was he.