Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
BABEL. Copyright © 2022 by R. F. Kuang. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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FIRST EDITION
Digital Edition AUGUST 2022 ISBN: 978-0-06-302144-0
Version 06062022
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-302142-6
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* For example, I never heard anyone refer to High Street as ‘The High’ when I was at Oxford, but G.V. Cox tells us otherwise.
* In Book IV, Chapter VII of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argues against colonialism on the grounds that the defence of colonies is a drain on resources, and that the economic gains of the monopolistic colonial trade are an illusion. He writes: ‘Great Britain derives nothing but loss from the dominion which she assumes over her colonies.’ This view was not widely shared at the time.
* I killed Cock Robin.
Who saw him die?
* William Blake, ‘Jerusalem’, 1804.
* As Robin’s family had only recently migrated south, he had grown up speaking both Mandarin and Cantonese. But his Cantonese, Professor Lovell informed him, could now be forgotten. Mandarin was the language of the Qing imperial court in Peking, the language of officials and scholars, and therefore the only dialect that mattered.
This view is a side effect of the British Academy’s path dependency on scant previous Western research. Matteo Ricci’s Portuguese-Chinese dictionary was of the Mandarin dialect he learned at the Ming court; Francisco Varo, Joseph Prémare, and Robert Morrison’s Chinese dictionaries were also of Mandarin. Britain’s Sinologists of that era, then, were far more focused on Mandarin than on other dialects. And so Robin was asked to forget his preferred native tongue.
* ‘Robbery, butchery, and theft – they call these things empire, and where they create a desert, they call it peace.’
* Hampstead Heath rhymes with teeth. Example: ‘She’s still got all her baby hampsteads.’
* Dinner, sinner.
* A reasonable error. By rape, Pope meant ‘to snatch, to take by force’, which is an older meaning derived from the Latin rapere.
* Because he owned slaves.
* This was to be the last Marryat title Robin ever read. It was just as well. Frederick Marryat’s novels, though full of the high seas adventuring and valour that endeared them to young English boys, also portrayed Black people as happy, satisfied slaves and American Indians as either noble savages or dissolute drunks. Chinese and Indians he described as ‘races of inferior stature and effeminate in person’.
* As the weekly papers recorded the climbing death counts, Robin asked Mrs Piper why the doctors could not simply go around healing the sick with silver, as Professor Lovell had done to him. ‘Silver is expensive,’ responded Mrs Piper, and that was the last they ever spoke of it.
* Here Mr Hallows forgets that chattel slavery, wherein slaves were treated as property and not persons, is a wholly European invention.
* Indeed, in the wake of Haiti’s liberation, the British began toying with the idea of importing labourers of other races, such as the Chinese (‘a sober, patient, industrious people’), as a possible alternative to African slave labour. The Fortitude experiment of 1806 attempted to establish a colony of two hundred Chinese labourers in Trinidad to create a ‘barrier between us and the Negroes’. The colony failed, and most labourers soon returned to their native China. Still, the idea of replacing African labour with Chinese labour remained attractive to British entrepreneurs, and would be continually revived throughout the nineteenth century.
* Formerly known as Gropecunt Lane, Magpie Lane was originally, as the name suggests, a street of brothels. This was not mentioned in Robin’s guidebook.
* There had once been a boy named Henry Little who’d visited Hampstead with his father, one of Professor Lovell’s colleagues in the Royal Asiatic Society. Robin tried to engage him in conversation about scones, which he thought as good an opening salvo as any, but Henry Little merely reached out and stretched Robin’s eyelids out so hard that Robin, startled, kicked him in the shin. Robin was banished to his room, and Henry Little to the garden; Professor Lovell had not invited his colleagues to bring their children over since then.
* This was true. University College had produced, among others, a Chief Justice of Bengal (Sir Robert Chambers), a Chief Justice of Bombay (Sir Edward West), and a Chief Justice of Calcutta (Sir William Jones). All were white men.