ABSTRACT

This chapter, on Benjamin Silliman’s Letters of Shahcoolen (1802), explores the oriental-observer vision of an author who would go on to become one of the U.S.’ pioneering early scientists. Silliman, the first professor of chemistry and geology at Princeton, engages in the genre of the oriental observer as a pastime before his appointment, participating in a discourse that would mark him as a sophisticated and cosmopolitan young man. In his series of letters, written ostensibly by a “Hindoo philosopher,” Silliman imagines the course of a universal history as it might play out through a natural world abounding with resources, which seem almost magically to develop themselves under his gaze. These resources, in turn, promise to bring America almost effortlessly, for the polite observer, into an enriched and dynamic modernity. This characterization is read in the chapter as an emerging “resource aesthetic” of the period’s energy-resource exploitation, expressing its true interest not in the actual historical circumstances of another, distant people, but in what seemed the emerging historical destiny of the American, inheriting an energy-resource bonanza that has always been difficult for its beneficiaries to notice and accurately identify but which seemed, during the period, something akin to magic.