This considers the impact of systemic critiques of war, developed in the period of the American and French Revolutions, upon the work of two novelists. Samuel Jackson Pratts Emma Corbett, written during – and in opposition to – the American War of Independence, describes a young Engish heroines growing awareness of the role of property relations in supporting martial ideals and causing wars, and her conversion to a form of pacifism. Charlotte Smiths The Old Manor House, written in the early years of the French Revolution, describes a British soldier fighting in the American War of Independence, who comes to question the purpose and causes of the war, including the chivalric values of the ruling class. Both novels show how war exposes the selfish foundations of ordinary social life. While Jackson Pratts heroine escapes compromise through death, Smiths hero inherits the estate of the woman whose aristocratic values he despises.

The confrontation of the foreign was a key aspect of the theatrical culture of eighteenth-century British culture. The performances of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s comic opera The Duenna (1775) in Kingston, Jamaica, and his comedy The School for Scandal (1777) in Calcutta, Bengal, enabled residents to embrace both the love of alterity and the longing for home that were each endemic to colonial life, as the comic figures of the Jew and the nabob and the forlorn figure of the enslaved child suggested that Britishness and otherness were not far removed from each other, as theatrical performance in circulation began to sketch in more similarities than differences dividing us from them.