Joseph Conrad: The guy who saw it coming

Lews Beale,  Daily Beast - Konrad Korzeniowski was born a landlocked Pole and went to sea. He traveled throughout Southeast Asia in an era of multicultural, racial, and political change, when sail was giving way to the new technology of steam. Made his way up the Congo River at the height of racist imperialism. Settled in England as an immigrant with sketchy English-language skills, at a time when terrorists had London on edge.

Imperialism, colonialism, racism, capitalism, terrorism, nationalism, immigration, the rise of America as a world power. All these subjects became fodder for books written by Korzeniowski, whose nom de plume was Joseph Conrad. Writing at the tail end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, Conrad, who became one of the English language’s foremost authors, not only experienced many of the forces that still affect us today, but those influences made him the first novelist with a truly global perspective.

“Conrad’s experiences as an immigrant and working as a sailor give him an outlook different from his peers,” says Maya Jasanoff, author of The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad In A Global World, a new book tracing Conrad’s concerns from his time to the present day. “He’s writing about international connections of different kinds, routes of trade, migration, capital, which determine our life today.”

... “In all his writing, wherever it was set,” writes Jasanoff, “Conrad grappled with the ramifications of living in a global world: the moral and material impact of dislocation, the tension and opportunity of multiethnic societies, the disruption wrought by technological change.”

.... Conrad was also aware of the downside of technological change, and what he saw as the greed and hypocrisy of American capitalism. When he first went to sea at age 16, Conrad entered the world of sailing ships. But decades later, when he began his writing career, sail had given way to steam, which affected the employment opportunities for Conrad and his mates. Steamships needed sailors with different skills, and as ships became bigger, that cut down on the number of ships and job availability. This “made him very skeptical of the idea that technological change actually was the same as ‘progress’ as the boosters of industrialization and digitization have long held it to be,” says Jasanoff. “He knew that technological change had losers as well as winners. This was true in a narrow way for the sailors who were displaced by steamships. But for Conrad it came to be true in a broader sense, as he saw the coming of new technologies as displacing older, and to him preferable, ways of life.”

But it was his feelings about late 19th century capitalism, and the rise of American power, that brought out the best in Conrad. In Nostromo, easily his most prescient, and possibly his best, novel, Conrad wrote about the fight for a South American silver mining concession, which involved British, American, and local interests. The book takes a bleak view of U.S. capitalism and its ability to destroy everything in its path in the name of “progress.” It is also, in some ways, a response to the American political and economic machinations that led to the creation of the Panama Canal.