Conrad, Efficiency, and the Varieties of Imperialism Valerie Kennedy (bio) INTRODUCTION Joseph Conrad’s attitude to the issue of imperialism is complex and contradictory. In his political essays and his letters he excoriated Russian and German imperialism, identifying Russia with life-denying autocracy and repression, and Germany with a brutal sense of racial, technological, and commercial will to power. However, he was much more moderately and ambivalently critical of British imperialism since, as I shall argue, he identified with a particular vision of English imperialism and Englishness.1 He approved of what he saw as a particularly English tradition of service—the work ethic, duty, and efficiency—especially when it was embodied in the Royal Navy and the British Merchant Navy, but when efficiency took the form of German nationalism or imperialism his admiration turned to loathing. Moreover, his endorsement of the British maritime work ethic in his non-fictional writing largely disregards the commercial role of the Royal Navy and the British Merchant Navy in imperial global capitalism (my italics). His fiction, however, as Stephen Ross and others have argued, suggests that all types of imperialism are colored by the beginnings of the system of global capitalism (see pp. 168–169 and 184–185 below).2 I shall begin by discussing the vexed question of Conrad’s attitude to Englishness, the work ethic, and efficiency, before considering some recent critical analyses of Conrad’s fiction in relation to different conceptions of imperialism and capitalism, and then analyzing his representation of Russian and German imperialism in the political essays and the somewhat more nuanced but still stereotyped and generally negative depiction of Russian and German characters in his fiction. Finally, I shall suggest that Conrad’s fiction undermines the opposition in his non-fictional writings between different types of imperialism since it [End Page 163] shows British imperialism to be governed by the same commercial imperatives as the imperialism of other nations. CONRAD, ENGLISHNESS, AND EFFICIENCY Conrad’s self- description as a “Homo duplex” (CL 3: 89), a man with a “double life” (CL 3: 491) as he tells Robert Cunninghame Graham, or as Amar Acheraïou puts it, a “dual loyalty” to both Poland and England (56–57, and see 65, 67), has received a great deal of attention. In what follows I wish to focus on Conrad’s identification with a certain version of English efficiency and service, arguing that Conrad’s claim in the “Author’s Note” to A Personal Record to have been “adopted by the genius of the [English] language” was partly but not only a means of asserting his linguistic credentials as a British writer (vii). I shall also argue that Conrad’s continued descriptions of Poland as a fundamentally Western nation–like Great Britain—enabled him to reconcile fidelity to the idea of Poland with his idea of himself as a loyal citizen of Great Britain. Conrad’s repeated denials after 1905 that, as a Pole, he was a Slav serve to differentiate him as a Pole from the members of other Slavic nations such as Russia. Conrad had a dual allegiance to Poland and Great Britain. In 1883 he reassures Stefan Buszczyński that he has never forgotten and “never will forget” his words: “‘Remember […] wherever you may sail you are sailing towards Poland’” (Conrad, CL 1: 8). Yet two years later he can say to Spiridion Kliszczewski: “When speaking, writing or thinking in English, the word Home always means for me the hospitable shores of Great Britain” (Conrad, CL 1: 12). To his Polish correspondents, he consistently claims that he is a “compatriot, in spite of my writing in English” (Conrad, CL 3: 78). To his English or American correspondents, especially in later years, he insists that being a Pole does not mean being a Slav, since Poland is fundamentally Western, and that he is faithful to both Poland and (his vision of) England. In his letters to his English friends and acquaintances Conrad identifies himself with different aspects of Englishness by using the metaphor of adoption. In his 1919 “Author’s Note” to A Personal Record, Conrad claims “the right to be believed when [he] says that if [he] had...