ABSTRACT
In Francis Bacon's 1606 address to James I on the planting of Ireland, for instance, he formulates colonial transportation as 'a double commodity', a twin advantage and dual solution to the labor surpluses of England and Scotland and the characteristic labor shortages of the colonial plantations-a simple but cutting design that links the 'avoidance of people here' with the 'making use of them there'. If domestic servants in England occupy a tenuous position at the fringes of Western literature, then England's colonial servants dwell in a murky space of double exile, at home in the literature of neither the metropole nor its peripheries. While colonial servants mediate between masters and slaves in the colonial imaginary, the condition of servitude and its structural logics of indenture and debt figure as a mediating boundary that works to delimit mastery from slavery, signify sites of transculturation, and adumbrate emergent ideologies.
