ABSTRACT
While living in Edinburgh in 1707, promoting union between England and Scotland and acting as a spy for Robert Harley, Daniel Defoe, like many of his wealthy Lowland cohorts, attended meetings of the burgeoning Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK). Identifying linguistic conversion of Gaelic-speaking Highlanders to English as the fulcrum upon which the SSPCK could rest their hopes for a larger cultural and political Highland conversion, the Society argued, “Nothing can be more effectual for reducing these countries to order, and making them usefull [sic] to the Commonwealth than teaching them their duty to God, their King and country and rooting out their Irish language” (SSPCK 1716). While a separate linguistic community existing within the newly consolidated British nation might problematize the political and cultural identity necessary for successful union, the exchange of Gaelic for English, they hoped, would eradicate such troubling difference. Aiming to sublimate linguistic and cultural difference through seamless translation, the Society deployed a universal grammar, exchanging words as neutral counters for ideas. Further, their vision of linguistic exchange-in which difference initiates a translation or substitution, whereby it is made the same-parallels the rising form of commodity exchange. Both commodity exchange and linguistic exchange in this imperial context share a dehistoricizing and universalizing movement. The English language, in turn, functions, like money, as a universal equivalent, constructing and abstracting difference in its circulation.
