BEYOND EMPIRE: GLOBALIZING THE VICTORIANS

Extract

In her influential work, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867 (2002), Catherine Hall argued that “a focus on national histories as constructed, rather than given, on the imagined community of the nation as created, rather than simply there, on national identities as brought into being through particular discursive work, requires transnational thinking” (9). Similarly, Antoinette Burton made a provocative case for de-centering Britain even in the narratives of its own history, arguing in her edited collection, After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (2003), that “we need to pay more attention to the question of who needs [the nation], who manufactures the ‘need’ for it, and whose interests it serves” (6). In the last two decades, those who have sought to reposition a study of nineteenth-century Britain in such a transnational framework have focused their attention on Britain's relationship to its imperial possessions. While some historians remain skeptical about the significance of empire in British culture, there is now a rich and authoritative historical literature that reveals the myriad ways in which metropole and empire were not only entangled, but also mutually constitutive. Literary scholars of the nineteenth-century have also been alert to the often covert traces of empire in the works of nineteenth-century writers, extending from pioneering discussions of the shadowy presence of slavery in the novels of Jane Austen to Jane Bownas's attempts to reclaim an imperial motif in the works of Thomas Hardy.