The Island Race

Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century

Kathleen Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136208645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Rooted in a period of vigorous exploration and colonialism, The Island Race: Englishness, empire and gender in the eighteenth century is an innovative study of the issues of nation, gender and identity. Wilson bases her analysis on a wide range of case studies drawn both from Britain and across the Atlantic and Pacific worlds.

Creating a colourful and original colonial landscape, she considers topics such as:

* sodomy
* theatre
* masculinity
* the symbolism of Britannia
* the role of women in war.

Wilson shows the far-reaching implications that colonial power and expansion had upon the English people's sense of self, and argues that the vaunted singularity of English culture was in fact constituted by the bodies, practices and exchanges of peoples across the globe. Theoretically rigorous and highly readable, The Island Race will become a seminal text for understanding the pressing issues that it confronts.

1 CITIZENSHIP, EMPIRE AND MODERNITY IN THE ENGLISH PROVINCES

DOI: 10.4324/9781315005805-2

Now, by our country, considered in itself, we shall (I conceive) most rationally understand, not barely a certain tract of land, which makes up the external appearance of it; but chiefly, the collective body of its inhabitants, with their public and joint interests.

Rev, George Fothergill, The Duty, Objects and Offices of the Love of Country, Restoration Day sermon, 1758

In faith, my friend, the present time is rather comique — Ireland almost in as true a state of rebellion as America — Admirals quarrelling in the West-Indies — and at home Admirals that do not chuse to fight — The British Empire mouldering away in the West, annihilated in the North -… and England fast asleep … — for my part, it's nothing to me, as I am only a lodger, and hardly that,

Ignatius Sancho, Letters, 1779¹

Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the bead of a rosary, instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one.

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 1940²

Modernity and its discontents

The debates over “modernity” that have reverberated in European cultural theory and history since World War II have not unduly troubled most historians of eighteenth-century Britain. Suspicious of any species of “Whig” (that is, linear) history and confident that Continental theorizing bears little relevance to their inquiries, British historians have been content to fight less epochal battles over the appropriate characterization of their period. Hence whether England was an “aristocratic” or “bourgeois” society, an “ancien régime” or “commercialized” polity, marked predominantly by paternalism and deference or restiveness and resistance are the issues that have traditionally occupied many historians' attention.³ Although such dichotomous readings have often been geared towards advancing more academic careers than productive debate, the status of eighteenth-century England as a progenitor of modernity has only recently been taken seriously by historians of the Hanoverian period.⁴

Certainly there is cause for skepticism about the historical returns of investigations into the location and meanings of modernity, not least since the term is twisted and turned to serve a variety of scholarly constituencies. Among more positivistic social scientists and historians, for example, modernity has been conceived as the story of “modernization” — that is, of those objective, ineluctably unfolding processes that are believed to have generated the structures and texture of “modern” life: urbanization, industrialization, democratization; bureaucracy, scienticism and technology.⁵ But other historians and cultural critics, less interested in structural determinacies than in the meanings, ambiguities and significance of a period's configurations, have engaged more fruitfully with the notion of modernity as an unfolding set of relationships — cognitive, social and intellectual as well as economic and technological — which, however valued or construed, are seen as producing the modern self and its expectations of perfection or progress.⁶ The re-theorizing of modernity among the so-called “postmodernists,” for example — a disparate group of critics whose perceived unity rests on their intellectual debts to various French post-structuralisms as well as their shared belief in the discontinuity of the late twentieth-century present with the “modern” period that came before it — located in the discursive and institutional matrices or power and resistance shaping late eighteenth-century European societies the genealogies of their own age's discontents and transfigurations.⁷ More currently, scholars are examining the relations of power at home and abroad that underwrote and sustained Europeans' perceptions of modernity, demonstrating how the nation-state and imperialism stimulated forms of identification, exclusion and belonging that have refused to fade.⁸ In general, the most interesting work continues to focus on modernity as a discursive and cultural construct rather than a set of stereotypic processes or “forces,” and some of the most exciting work looks at ways in which emergent ideas about nationality, race, ethnicity and difference became central to the broader social and political transformations of the mid eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries.

Clearly, the analysis of modernity has borne rich scholarly fruit as well as some conceptual vacuities, and it is a rash (not to say naive) historian who would dismiss all efforts to interrogate and theorize modernity as ahistorical, dangerous or irrelevant. For modernity need not be seen as one particular moment, whose “origins” and characteristics can be identified with certainty and mapped onto a specific temporality between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. Rather, “modernity,” the latest point on the continuum of historical change, should be understood as an emphatically historical condition that can be recovered, in Walter Benjamin's resonant phrase, only in “time filled by the presence of the now.”⁹ Modernity in this sense is not one moment or age, but a set of relations that are constantly being made and unmade, contested and reconfigured, that nonetheless produces among its contemporaneous witnesses the conviction of historical difference. Such a conceptualization opens up whole new grounds for theorizing and understanding our histories which do not deny the specificity of a period's configurations or reduce the eighteenth century to the status of the great primordial swamp of a more “modern” world. As an epistemological strategy, the historicization of differential modernities can also disrupt the comforting belief in the dissimilarity of past and present and productively subvert our sense of historical progress.¹⁰

This chapter will propose that such a reading of modernity can greatly enrich our understanding of English culture and politics in the Georgian decades. In doing so, it is indebted to a number of recent studies that have challenged dominant narratives and periodization of Western history by stressing the complexity, heterogeneity and hybridity of modernity at the moments of its various historical articulations. From this perspective, modernity refers to the cultural practices and representations that produced certain kinds of subjects and objects of knowledge, upheld widely shared notions of space and time or facilitated the formation of cultural identities that resulted in contradictions as well as coherences. The discontinuous and plural nature of the eighteenth-century experience — marked as closely by slavery as liberty, racial, class and gender exclusions as universality, and fractured and “double” as unitary identities — requires nothing less than a modification of the boundaries by which “modernity” and “postmodernity” are demarcated and understood. What follows hopes to contribute to this rethinking of eighteenth-century modernity by focusing on some or the forms of English identity and belonging produced by the British nation-state in the age of its first empire. For not only did the ideological legacies of eighteenth-century war, state and empire building shape the ways in which nationality was understood for two centuries or more to come; they also made possible the naturalization of certain kinds of identities — social, sexual, political, racial and national — whose traces refuse to disappear.¹¹ In the continual re-inventions of “the nation” — always a constructed, mythic and contested rather than stable or self-evident unit of meaning and coherence — and the ideological significations of its activities at home and abroad may be found a place where, in Paul Gilroy's phrase, a modernity begins in the “constitutive relationships with outsiders that both found and temper a self-conscious sense of western civilization.”¹²

Whose Imagined Community? Citizenship in a National Imaginary

In an immensely influential formulation, Benedict Anderson theorized in 1983 that the “print-capitalism” of the eighteenth century produced one of the founding practices of modernity, namely, the ability and propensity to imagine the “community” of the nation. The commodified production of print in books, novels and especially newspapers, Anderson argued, made possible the dissemination of a national consciousness, not only by stabilizing a vernacular language but also, and most importantly, by organizing distant and proximate events according to a calendrical simultaneity — of “empty, homogeneous time” — that enabled their readers to coordinate social time and space, and thus to think relations to others across countries and continents.¹³ Anderson has since been rightly criticized for his unitary notion of the “nation” and its unproblematic transpositioning to the colonial and postcolonial worlds.¹⁴ But his attention to the newspaper press in constructing forms of national belonging is salutary, not least because it reminds historians of the inseparability of any society's historical “reality” from its forms of cultural representation. “The ‘lived reality’ of national identity,” John Tomlinson has noted, “is a reality lived in representations — not in direct communal solidarity.” The viability of an imagined community of the nation depends upon the ability of its members to “[project] individual existence into the weft of a collective narrative,” as Etienne Balibar has cogently argued, constructed through traditions “lived as the trace of an immemorial past (even when they have been fabricated and inculcated in the recent past).”¹⁵ In this respect, the newspaper press, a strategic part of the print culture of eighteenth-century England that encompassed both the spread of the artifacts of the press and the institutions and forms of sociability that subsidized it, was clearly of great importance in disseminating particularized interpretations of the state, nation and polity. In conjunction with a range of other printed materials that were read in similar ways and social settings in towns throughout the kingdom, the newspaper press was instrumental in structuring national and political consciousness, binding ordinary men and women throughout the localities in particular ways to the processes of state and empire building.

Provincial newspapers, 244 of which sprouted up in fifty-five different towns over the century, offer one intriguing example of the operations of a “national” political imaginary as constructed and supported in the press. The importance of provincial urban life to negotiating the stability of the Hanoverian state at home and abroad has long been underplayed in accounts of the national becoming.¹⁶ Yet catering to provincial urban publics whose interests in the processes of state were galvanized by decades of war and imperial expansion, provincial newspapers coaxed and confirmed their readers' involvement in national and international affairs in ways that gave form to contemporary conceptualizations of power and market relations, at home and abroad. For example, the newspapers of commercial and trading centers such as Newcastle, Norwich, Liverpool, Birmingham and Bristol in the middle decades of the century produced in their structure and content a mercantilist world view in which trade and the accumulation of wealth appeared as the highest national and individual good. The progress or wars in Europe, America, Africa and Asia, the coming and going or merchant and slaving ships and the lists of the contents of their laden bottoms; prices, stocks and bullion values; and advertisements for luxury goods culled from mercantile and military adventures abroad were consistent features of newspapers in the outports.¹⁷

In addition to an obsession with the moveable products of empire and commerce, newspapers and provincial periodicals also evinced a widespread fascination with the mechanics of colonial acquisition and possession. By the 1740s and 1750s, provincial papers frequently included sections on “American affairs” or “British Plantations” that provided current news on politics and trade, while periodicals crowded their pages with the histories and settlement patterns of individual colonies and beautifully produced maps of British and rival European colonial territories. Such texts did more than literally and figuratively map imperial aspirations and accumulationist desire; they also organized time and space in ways that welded the national and imperial interest, while effacing the crueller aspects of empire, colonialism and “trade” (the horrors of the Middle Passage or the brutalities of plantation slavery, for example) and the subjectivities of the growing numbers of peoples under British rule.¹⁸ Instead, the newspaper and periodical press produced a commercial, sanitized and “patriotic” vision or the British empire and its apparent destiny of spreading profits throughout the nation while disseminating British goods, rights and liberties across the globe.¹⁹ “Leonard Herd's African Coffeehouse” in Liverpool, which boasted of its “genteel accommodation” and current subscriptions to ten London and provincial newspapers and Votes of the House of Commons in the Liverpool General Advertiser, participated in this conjunction of empire, trade, politics and male sociability at the heart of much of urban print culture.²⁰

Other items in the papers integrated the imperial project and Britain's performance and standing abroad with the prosperity, mores and class hierarchies of everyday life at home. Local and national politics, Court gossip, the notable rites de passage of the local gentry and bourgeoisie, philanthropic and economic initiatives and the “quaint” customs or “insensible” behaviors of the common people: such content endowed readers with the power of possession (our colonies, ships, MPs and gentry) and with the sense of entitlement to be on the right side of the vast social and cultural chasms between those who profited from the processes of imperial expansion and those who did not. In these and other ways, newspapers chronicled the bids of the urban commercial and middling classes to social authority and sketched out the structures of economic, political and discursive power in the society, of market-relations and forms of social, political and sexual commerce, within England, Britain and abroad. Above all, they made manifest the impact of state actions and politics on daily life and regional and national prosperity and standing, and allowed individuals to participate imaginatively as well as materially in the processes of domestic and imperial government.

Newspapers were thus central instruments in the social production of information: representing and verifying local experience and refracting world events into socially meaningful categories and hierarchies of importance, they helped produce, in Anderson's felicitous phrase, an “imagined community” of producers, distributors and consumers on both sides of the Atlantic who shared an avid interest in the fate of the “empire of goods” that linked them together in prosperity and adversity.²¹ However, the ascription of “imagined community” to the world of goods and information constructed by newspapers begs a number of questions, not least, whose community? who was imagining it, and what was it imagined to consist of? Clearly newspapers (or other forms of print) did not produce homogeneous cultural identities, but a highly mediated “national” belonging that was constructed through and in tandem with other (local, regional, social) identities. Nevertheless, as the above analysis suggests, we can discern the social, sexual and racial contours of the national community constructed by the newspaper and periodical press. It was imagined to consist of free, flourishing and largely, though not exclusively, white male British subjects within the locality, nation and empire; its boundaries were defined and guarded by gender, race, productivity and profits. Hence despite the participation in the processes of state and imperial expansion by other citizens in the metropolis and provincial towns — women, slave and free Africans, jews, servants, Catholics, laborers and so on — who worked in urban economies as victuallers, retailers, artisans, carriers and peddlers, supported the state through taxes or otherwise played roles in financing, transporting, distributing, manufacturing or consuming the artifacts of colonial and international commerce, their status as a part of the public appealed to in the newsp...