From Chaucer to Shakespeare, and Virginia Woolf to Bernadine Evaristo, London as a city has always instigated the literary imagination. By the nineteenth century, it had become not just the capital of the United Kingdom, but also of a sprawling world-wide empire. This also meant that the city became host to a diverse range of stories, storytellers, and writers that have responded to both its physical and imagined dimensions. Taking a cue from Pascale Casanova’sThe World Republic of Letters, but correcting it to account for the impact of empire, this essay tracks the ways in which London emerged as the global centre of literary and aesthetic production and as a universal arbiter of taste in the early decades of the twentieth century, through the decades of decolonization in the middle of the twentieth century, and leading up to the contemporary moment in which its status as a literary capital is subject to new uncertainties that are enmeshed in the political economy of contemporary world literature.The essay focalizes this discussion through two linked tropes—the city’s “exhibitionary complex” and its “circulatory network”.

Following active labour recruitment in the Caribbean, postwar Britain was not only unprepared, offering hastily equipped air raid shelters to her colonial citizens, but also quite unwilling to welcome its new arrivants. In the slew of novels from the 1950s and 1960s, dislocated men (predominantly) have relocated to the ‘mother country’ but find themselves in effect doubly displaced, halfway between their origins and their destination. Sam Selvon’s ‘boys’ are groping through thick London fog in search of the imperial romance that the metropolis had seemed to promise. The protagonists of his Moses trilogy struggle to survive by inhabiting enclosed spaces, leading a subterranean room-based existence. They represent this first migrant generation’s embattled quest, both literal and metaphorical, to be accommodated in Britain. This chapter focuses on how the works of various writers of different backgrounds and political persuasions – including Braithwaite, Desani, Lamming, Markandaya, Naipaul, Salkey, and Selvon – engage with Britain as an inhospitable nation, anticipating through their fictions later debates on the location of culture and the power of writing the centre from the margins.