A NEW IMPERIAL HISTORY

Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840

This pioneering collection of essays charts, for the first time, the emergent terrain of an exciting new field in British studies, the “new imperial history.” Leading scholars from history, literature, and cultural studies take on the problems of identity, modernity, and difference in eighteenth-century Britain and the empire. They examine, from interdisciplinary perspectives, the reciprocal influences of empire and culture, the movements of peoples, practices, and ideas effected by slavery, diaspora and British dominance, and ways in which subaltern, non-western, and non-elite people shaped British power and knowledge. Creating a colorful and original colonial landscape, the essays move through Britain, America, India, Africa, and the South Pacific in testament to the networks of people, commodities, and entangled pasts forged by Britain’s imperial adventures.

   Highly readable and based on ground-breaking research, the analyses of the imperial dimensions of British culture and identities in global contexts will challenge the notion that empire was something that happened “out there” and demonstrate its far-reaching implications for British identity and everyday life in the eighteenth century, and perhaps even today. This cutting-edge collection displays the pleasures and potential enabled by thinking a new imperial history that investigates new kinds of evidence and subjects, and is not always written by imperial historians, or even by historians.

KATHLEEN WILSON is Professor of History at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Her first book, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in Britain, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), won the Royal Historical Society’s Whitbread Prize and the Jon Ben Snow Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies. Her most recent book, An Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century, was published in 2003.

A NEW IMPERIAL HISTORY

Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840

EDITED BY
KATHLEEN WILSON

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© Cambridge University Press 2004

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2004

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typeface Adobe Garamond 11/12.5 pt.   System LATEX 2_e   [TB]

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
A new imperial history: culture, identity, and modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 / edited by Kathleen Wilson.
p.   cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0 521 81027 2 – ISBN 0 521 00796 8 (pbk.)
1. Great Britain – Colonies – History – 18th century.   2. Great Britain – Colonies – History – 17th century.   3. Great Britain – Colonies – History – 19th century.   4. National characteristics, British – History.   5. Great Britain – Colonies – Civilization.   6. Great Britain – Civilization.   7. Imperialism – History.   I. Wilson, Kathleen.
DA16.N49   2004   909′.0917241 – dc22   2003049545

ISBN 0 521 81027 2 hardback
ISBN 0 521 00796 8 paperback

For Nick and Hannah

Contents

Illustrations

Contributors

EITAN BAR-YOSEF is a Lecturer in the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Exploring the effects of empire on metropolitan literature and culture, his work has appeared in Journal of Contemporary History, Dickens Quarterly and English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920. His book Images of the Holy Land in English Culture, 1799–1917 is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

MICHAEL H. FISHER is Danforth Professor of History at Oberlin College and has published widely on relations between Indians and Britons, both in India and Britain, during the early colonial period. He focuses his research on the circulation of people and ideas within the expanding arena of the British empire. His most recent books include The First Indian Author in English: Dean Mahomet in India, Ireland and England (2000) and Counterflows to Colonialism: Indians in Britain, c. 1600–1857 (2003).

DURBA GHOSH is Assistant Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College, and a former Mellon postdoctoral fellow in Women Studies at Wellesley College. She is working on a manuscript entitled Colonial Companions: Sexual Transgressions, Racial Mixing and Gendered Order in Early Colonial India, which examines conjugal relationships between native women and European men c. 1760–1840.

HARRIET GUEST is Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York. Her most recent book is Small Change: Women, Learning and Patriotism 1750–1810 (2000). Her next book will be a study of William Hodges and Captain James Cook.

MARGARET HUNT, Professor of History at Amherst College, is attached to the University of Massachusetts-Five College Ph.D. program in History. Her book The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and the Family in England 1680–1780 (1996) won the Morris D. Forkusch Award from the American Historical Association for the best book in British, British Imperial, and British Commonwealth History. She has written articles or book chapters on violence, women and the law, sexuality, marriage, and the military in the early modern period.

WALTER JOHNSON is Associate Professor of History and American Studies at New York University. The author of Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999) and editor of a forthcoming collection entitled The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas, 1808–1888, he is at work on a book about capitalism and slavery in the Mississippi Valley.

COLIN KIDD is Professor of History at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689–c. 1830 (Cambridge, 1993) and British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1999). Since 1999 he has co-edited the Scottish Historical Review. His current interests include the interactions of race and theology in the Protestant Atlantic world and the political theories of the Scots Presbyterian Covenanting tradition.

FELICITY A. NUSSBAUM is Professor of English at UCLA and the author most recently of The Limits of the Human: Anomaly, Race and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (2003) and editor of The Global Eighteenth Century (2003). Among her other publications are Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narrative (1995) and The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (1989), which won the Louis Gottschalk Prize from the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies. Her current work is on the material world of the eighteenth-century theatre.

NICHOLAS ROGERS is Professor of History at York University, Toronto, and co-editor, with James Epstein, of the Journal of British Studies. He is the author of two books on popular politics in the eighteenth century and of a textbook entitled Eighteenth-Century English Society (1999), co-authored by Douglas Hay. His most recent publication is Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night (2002). He is currently completing a book on naval impressment in the long eighteenth century.

GILLIAN RUSSELL is Senior Lecturer in English, School of Humanities, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia and author of The Theatres of War: Politics, Performance and Society, 1793–1815 (1995) and co-editor, with Clara Tuite, of Romantic Sensibility: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770–1840 (2003). She is currently working on a project on sociability, women, and the theatre in London, 1760–80.

SUDIPTA SEN is Associate Professor of History at Syracuse University. He publishes on British–Indian encounters on the subcontinent. He is the author of two books, Empire of Free Trade: The English East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (1998) and Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (2002).

PHILIP STERN is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Columbia University and a graduate fellow in history at the Columbia University Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy. His current project, “One Body Corporate and Politick: The English East India Company-State in the Later Seventeenth Century,” concerns the foundations and impact of Company state-building and claims to sovereignty in Asia and Europe. He is also developing a study of the African Association and British exploration in Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

KATE TELTSCHER is Senior Lecturer in the School of English and Modern Languages at the University of Surrey Roehampton. She writes on travel writing and colonial discourse on India, and is author of India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India, 1600–1800 (1995), as well as numerous articles. She is currently working on a biography of George Bogle, the first British envoy to Bhutan and Tibet.

HANS TURLEY is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut and editor of Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. He is author of Rum, Sodomy and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality and Masculine Identity (1999), as well as many articles about the eighteenth-century novel. He is currently working on a biography of Rochester.

KEVIN WHELAN is Professor of History and inaugural Michael J. Smurfit Director of the University of Notre Dame’s Keough Centre in Dublin. He has published fifteen books and almost a hundred articles on Irish history, and has lectured on Irish topics in a dozen countries. His most recent book is Fellowship of Freedom: The United Irishmen and the 1798 Rebellion (1998).

KATHLEEN WILSON is Professor of History at Stony Brook University. She publishes on culture, empire, and Englishness in global settings in the eighteenth century. Her book The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995) won prizes from the Royal Historical Society and the North American Conference on British Studies. Her most recent book is The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (2003). She is currently at work on a study of British theatre and empire, 1720–1840, in sites that range across the Atlantic and Pacific worlds.

Acknowledgments

The editor would like to thank the following people for offering advice, ideas, and encouragement for this project: Nicholas Mirzoeff (massively), John Brewer, Antoinette Burton, Linda Colley, Harriet Guest, Young-Sun Hong, Lawrence Klein, Ned Landsman, Philippa Levine, Iona Man-Cheong, Gary Marker, Felicity Nussbaum, Mrinalini Sinha, Dror Wahrman, anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press, and all of the contributors. I was given the usual warnings from various well-intentioned colleagues about the travails of editing collections, but it has to be said in this case the warnings were needless: the contributors have been prompt, enthusiastic, and patient, and the editor alone responsible for any delay and recalcitrance. Special thanks go to Roy Ritchie at the Henry E. Huntington Library, for inviting me to organize a conference on the “new imperial history,” and to the conference participants for sharpening my ideas and allowing me to survey the path-breaking grounds of a new field; to Iain McCalman and the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, for support and examples of cross-cultural scholarship at its most exciting; to Paul Armstrong, former Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and Gary Marker, former Chair of the History Department, at Stony Brook University (formerly the State University of New York at Stony Brook, back in the days when public education was esteemed) for research leave; and to William Davis at Cambridge University Press, for taking a risk. I am equally grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for funding that gave me the time off to pursue this and other projects. Warm thanks to Carol Fellingham Webb for careful copyediting, and to Jenise De Pinto and Alex Tolin-Schulz for help with the index. For health, happiness, and domestic felicity I am indebted, as always, to Nick and Hannah: sans les quelles, je ne puis pas être.