ABSTRACT
Charles Johnstone's Chrysal or, the Adventures of a Guinea merits consideration as a work whose geographical displacements suggest a preferred method for the interpretation of Britain's position in the history of the colonial Atlantic. This work of satire, whose prefatory matter instigates a wider reflection on the nature of international commerce, presents an object-narrator, an it-character, whose account of its origins and transformations, from Peruvian gold to British Guinea, refracts rather than reflects the existing political economy of the mid-eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Chrysal not only exemplifies the process of transformation from object to thing, but also from object to trope, and this tropology of the object immediately binds center and periphery in the novel's spatio-cultural logic. A concept drawn from nineteenth-century botanical literature, 'tropicopolitan' is a portmanteau, a synthesis of the words tropic and cosmopolitan, signifying a specimen of flora or fauna that inhabits the tropical regions of the globe.
