Introduction

Summary

The chapter provides an overview situating the literatures produced or circulated in Britain and the racialized, classed, and gendered imaginaries of empire. English literature was informed by imperial concerns and anti-capitalist critique alike since the sixteenth century, even as England was a minor player among European imperial powers. Contemporary scholarship, while attending to marginalized authors, such as women, immigrants, minorities, and the working class, demonstrates that diverse literature, prose especially, but also drama and verse, were shaped by expanding trade, global markets, territorial appropriations, military conquests, human emigration, and cultural contact. A mix of ideologies spawned in the nineteenth century to rationalize British presence as not only inevitable but beneficial for the colonized; for colonized intellectuals, on the other hand, literature fostered alternative visions of resistance. Diasporic writers in twentieth-century Britain introduced readers to the vocabulary and memory of colonized lands. The chapter contends that many themes of contemporary culture are not unique to the present but variations of older, far-flung contests. Literature, in its ability to articulate shifts in perception, sensibilities, and relations before such changes are actualized, is an indispensable site of analysis and study.

Rethinking British Literature

The subject of the British Empire exerts an uncanny influence in contemporary Britain and elsewhere. Opinion polls, unreliable except perhaps as a vague measure of the times, suggest that many Britons continue to hold a positive view of the empire. Per surveys carried out in 2014 and 2020 by the data analytics company YouGov, 59 percent (2014) and 32 percent (2020) of respondents were “proud” of the empire, compared to 37 percent who felt neither pride nor shame (2020) and 19 percent who were “ashamed” (both 2014 and 2020). Of course, “empire” here evokes the image of a fictional past rather than a historical one, having to do more with feelings than facts. The longing for a vanished age and space of supposedly heroic values is hardly unique to Britain, after all, and common to nearly every modern nation. Which explains the stubborn persistence of these opinions despite the painstaking corrections done by scholars and activists, and the vocal condemnations from a significant minority within Britain and the vast majority in her former colonies. The nostalgia for the glories of empire is impossible to dislodge by highlighting the depredations committed in the name of the latter, or demonstrating how these may parallel the imperium of our own times. The key issue is how the bygone empire serves our decidedly pedestrian here and now.

Arguably, literature provides an indispensable site to explore the relation between the past and the present of empire. It illuminates the ordinary everyday within the epochal, the intimate realm of feelings amidst the rigid structures of social life. To argue for the special value of literary matters might appear paradoxical today. Surely, the study of literature faces a dire situation evidenced by the devaluation of humanistic knowledge in public discourse and in schools and universities, where learning outcomes are increasingly shaped by a gray vision of neoliberal, technocratic education and governance. However, as one of its objectives, The Cambridge Companion to British Literature and Empire demonstrates the value of literature when it comes to understanding Britain’s place in the modern world and situating the global present in relation to the past. Not in any straightforward sense, let us add; texts are not mere reflections of history or geography even if they are often erroneously treated as such. Nor is the field of literary studies devoid of aesthetic value, a pursuit reserved for the privileged yet increasingly precarious few. But then, to tweak the famous lines by Kipling, what do they know of English literature that only English literature know?

The term, “literature,” adapted from Latin, has at least a dual meaning: It refers to a range of texts providing discursive knowledge on a broad or narrow subject, for example, medical literature or literature on the feeding habits of ducks. Alternatively, in a more specific sense, a set of creative, subjective works that exist in writing in distinction to oral, plastic, visual, and other forms of cultural and aesthetic expression. Likewise, the title of the present volume, “British literature and empire” indicates another ambiguity: Does the proper adjective British qualify both nouns that follow it (literature and empire), so that one is describing literature and its relation to the British Empire specifically? Or does the phrase refer to British literature and empire separately, in which case the latter includes the entire system of modern empire including other European, American, and Asian competitors? Furthermore, how to understand the evolving relation between Britain and the various commonwealths, Crown- and trading company-administered territories, dominions, protectorates, semi-colonies, and informal dependencies that defined empire once, and that constitute diverse independent nation-states today?

Even these preliminary issues of description foreground the problem of literary language: the polyvalent connotations of words, their many possible relations among themselves and what they reference in the world outside the text, and the subtle connections between knowledge, writing, and power. The collection of essays presented here grapples with these issues and more, providing a synoptic overview of the literatures produced or otherwise circulated in Britain and the racialized, classed, and gendered imaginaries of empire over the last five hundred years. Together, the chapters survey a wide range of works from the sixteenth century to the present and how these articulate the consciousness of an imperialized world through creative language, literary perspective, and narrative form. Alongside, they revaluate literary genres such as typologies of fiction, poetry, and drama, and reconsider periodization emphasizing overlaps and recurrences rather than linear episodic development. In doing so, this collection traces transnational literary histories connecting the British Isles to Australasia, the Caribbean, the United States and Canada, South, Southeast, and West Asia, and North and sub-Saharan Africa.

The objective truth made available by any literary archive is complex. This is because literary works are produced at the intersection of many forces, personal and subjective factors for one but also ideological, economic, and political flows that extend beyond a single individual, group, or nation. Alongside, the reading of literature seldom reproduces an unchanging meaning, which itself changes over time as well as space, albeit unevenly, and is shaped by varying concerns. To take but one instance, students of Shakespeare would recall that for nearly three centuries The Tempest (first performed in 1611) held a minor place in the Shakespearean oeuvre limited to discussions of esoteric Renaissance knowledge represented by Prospero, the play’s aristocratic protagonist. But at the start of the last century, the text’s reputation and significance altered. From an outpost far from Britain, the Uruguayan intellectual José Enrique Rodó published his influential essay, “Ariel” in 1900, which claimed the play’s ethereal servant, Ariel, to be embodying a Latin American spiritual and artistic ethic, one that was distinct to, and superior from, his fellow serf Caliban’s vulgar materialism. Over the century’s course, successive intellectuals in the hemispheric Americas would turn to the defiant Caliban previously dismissed by Rodó and situate him as the classic victim of European colonial violence. Prominent figures in this latter tradition included Aimé Césaire, the Martiniquan bard of Négritude; Roberto Fernández Retamar, the Cuban communist poet; and Sylvia Wynter, the Jamaican author and critic. Writing in European languages, French, Spanish, and English, respectively, but guided by the anticolonial spirit, their works reilluminated The Tempest’s relationship to diasporic blackness and Indigenous Americanness, and the intersections of literary culture and global empire in Shakespeare’s times as much as in their own.

In other words, what is minor for or overlooked by one generation may be quite crucial for the next; a creed favoring empire may reveal a subversive manifesto, conversely, once-progressive texts can lose their auratic sheen. Crystal Bartolovich’s opening piece for this volume tracks the case of Thomas More’s Utopia (originally published in Latin in 1516), viewed by many recent scholars as a blueprint for European settler colonialism but whose radical call for abolishing private property and especially land ownership drew dismay through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Bartolovich highlights the emerging link between the loss of the commons, the subsequent consolidation of capitalist property relations in England, and the rise of settler colonialism in the New World. This intimate relation between early capitalism and empire is illuminated from another perspective by Ania Loomba, whose chapter on a popular English tale or legend of the London mayor, Dick Whittington, and his lucky cat charts evolving categories of race and racial capitalism through global trade networks in the early modern world. Mercantilism in the texts of Renaissance drama is the focus of Su Fang Ng, whose essay unveils a “peripheral heroics” that articulated the aspirational but marginal English bourgeoisie’s anxieties about intra-European rivalry especially against the Spanish and Dutch, as well as sexual and religious contamination and pollution, issues that continue to resonate today albeit in changed form and content. These critics maintain that English literature was informed by imperial concerns and anti-capitalist/colonial critique alike since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, even as England was a minor player among European imperial powers. However, what is termed the “first British Empire,” manifested by English expansion over the rest of the British Isles (Wales, Scotland, Ireland), goes back to the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

To turn to the ascendant rather than merely aspirational British Empire, consider Percy Bysshe Shelley’s well-known poem, “Ozymandias,” first published in 1818, which traces the question of imperial decline in the embodied figure of the king. “I met a traveller from an antique land, / Who said – ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desert.… Near them, on the sand, / Half sunk a shattered visage lies.’” The opening riffs on the overused symbolism of monuments ravaged by the passage of time. The enigmatic “traveller” marks an aporia in the poem; likewise, the “two vast and trunkless legs of stone” that once might have marched to faraway lands, contrast with the hapless “half sunk … shattered visage”; what had been the “frown[ing], “sneer[ing]” face of conquest lies buried in “the sand.” It is the second part of the poem beginning with “on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings; / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’” that Shelley advances the strikingly poetic idea central to this volume – namely, that writing captures invisible contradictions and prophesies futures before those are realized in fact. Appearing to proclaim the glory of the “king of kings,” the epitaph articulates defeat instead of triumph and, moreover, threatens a similar fate like Ozymandias’ to all with imperial ambition. The epitaph persists while the statue crumbled, yet the former produces meaning by reference to the vanished latter.

Needless to add, for Shelley the symbol of imperial hubris and decline is a non-European other, an ancient Egyptian king, at the precise moment when the British Empire was beginning to overtake its competitors both in Europe and Asia. The inscription’s source is the Bibliotheca historica, a compendious history of the classical world by Diodorus Siculus in the first century bce, which describes the Egyptian Pharaoh, Ramses II, in these terms. Rather than overt citation, Shelley’s poem subsumes the reference in the form of intertextuality. The poem both observes and contravenes the Italianate sonnet meter of Petrarch (1304–74): In terms of its theme and form, “Ozymandias” reflects what might be called a general principle of literary reflections on empire, it is indebted to and freely borrows from works of the past but with an altered significance. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English musings on the rise and fall of other empires were shaped as much by the ancient and the premodern as the contemporary world, by events near home as well as distant shores that were often foreign as the past itself. James Mulholland’s chapter excavates the late eighteenth-century Anglophone epic poetry of ruins crafted by colonial administrator-authors that reconciled the East India Company’s (EIC’s) growing presence in South and Southeast Asia with the decline of Asian power. In another case, Arif Camoglu’s essay takes stock of Romantic attitudes toward the “Muslim” and “Hindu” regions of West and South Asia, where the cycles of failed political revolutions supposedly attested to their chronic instability and justified Western interventions. The English Orientalists’ and Romantics’ fascination with ruins and insurrections in the non-European and especially the Islamic world were symptomatic of deeper culturalist assumptions which carry to the present day – in 2003, a CNN reporter, moved no doubt by literary inspiration, would invoke Ozymandias to describe the fall of Saddam Hussein to invading US forces.

The corpus of what has been called British literature may be works written by, and even arguably primarily for, Britons, but it was not disconnected from global others – we’ll return to this point shortly. Another related issue is the changing foundations of studying British literature: Today, students are no longer restricted to the canonical figures of a Shakespeare or a Shelley, or even the protocols and assumptions of a once formidable Western humanist tradition. They can, if they choose to, turn their attention to previously marginalized authors: for instance, women, immigrants, minorities, and working-class, providing a broader range of perspectives and better reflecting the composite histories of Britain and an interconnected modern world. The connections between English-language literature and the world beyond Europe have also been made more explicit; scholars have persuasively demonstrated that diverse branches of literature, prose especially but also drama and verse genres, were shaped by expanding trade, global markets, territorial and resource appropriations, military conquests, human emigration/immigration, and the resulting cultural contact from all these forces. Jason Pearl’s contribution to this volume outlines a fresh understanding of the rise of the English novel, juxtaposing early fiction with seafaring and land voyage accounts and natural scientific explorations in the Atlantic New World as well as Pacific Australasia. On the other hand, Nicole N. Aljoe’s essay reframes the vital corpus of Black Atlantic slave narratives in terms of literary modes of voice, narrative form, and style, marking the vital agency and aesthetic-political impact of African-descended persons in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.

Orientalism and Ideology

Pioneering scholarship on the forms of knowledge and writing engendered by empire include works (in both cases, focused on British India) such as David Kopf’s British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization 1773–1835 (published in 1969) and Benita Parry’s Delusions and Discoveries: India in the British Imagination, 1880–1930 (appearing in 1972). The landmark text was Edward Said’s Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978), which offered a sweeping survey of British and French self-perpetuating representations of the “Middle East.” Said’s text not only marked the end of the hopeful, tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s, but also popularized the term “Orientalism” and its neglected imperial dimensions to broad readerships outside the academy. Few later scholars followed the epic scale of Said’s work, instead focusing on more narrowly defined periods and revising some of his formulations in view of their more specific findings. Since the 1980s, literary research has engaged in a range of conversations with other disciplines such as history, economics, sociology, geography, and anthropology, among others, and incorporated the theories and insights of world-system analysis, critical race, colonial discourse analysis, post-structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, and new historicism, to name a few. The overtly “political” focus of much of this scholarship derived from the events of the 1960s and 1970s: the rise and fall of liberation struggles in the Third World (and anti-imperialist trends within the New Left in the West) and, relatedly, the interventions of diasporic intellectuals and professors arrived in Britain and North America from the former colonies. This body of work eventually led to the institutionalization of “postcolonial studies” in various avatars in the 1990s and 2000s, with scholars continuing to excavate the histories of European empires but also the implications of the United States–led unipolar world order after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

Since the early 2000s, however, the postcolonial perspectives have been contested in academic circles. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s succinctly titled Empire (2000) argued for the obsolescence of imperialism in the twenty-first century from an avowedly “communist” perspective. Much more significant was the conservative backlash. The historian Niall Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003) rehearsed wearisome tropes of the British Empire’s modernizing influence, spawning a range of revisionist works that downplayed or simply denied the human (and environmental) costs of imperial modernization. Not only politicians and the mainstream media, but sections of Western academia too would be affected by colonial nostalgia, a case in point being the political scientist Bruce Gilley’s essay “The Case for Colonialism,” which advocated for twenty-first-century recolonization. To unravel such loathsome sentiments, which, contrary to appearances, are not unique to the present moment but often draw from older narratives, it would be useful to underline those texts and genres of literature that registered as well as articulated empire to varying degrees: Also, conversely, it would be useful to consider how literature played a crucial role in the consolidation – and eventual unraveling – of British imperial hegemony.

Over the long nineteenth century, a mix of ideologies spawned to rationalize British overseas presence as not only inevitable (such sentiments had been expressed even earlier) but indeed beneficial for the colonized, extending the eighteenth-century concept of bienfaisance (literally, good act) in new directions. These included Indo-Europeanism and Orientalism noted earlier in this chapter; the notion of “Greater Britain” from Charles Dilke’s 1868 book of the same name linking the English metropole to the rest of the British Isles and the Atlantic and Pacific settler colonies, all the way to the infamous “White Man’s burden,” in Rudyard Kipling’s phrasing (1899), passing the torch of colonial “improvement” from British to US hands. Such notions of empire normalized Anglo-British dominance, sidelining the murkier aspects of rapine and genocide, famine and war. Moreover, they would be endlessly reproduced and broadcast through cultural media – oratory, books, films, newspapers, TV shows – consolidating one of the foundational myths of the modern West.

In the present volume, Ian Duncan’s chapter illustrates how nineteenth-century historical novels articulated the discourse of “progress” and scientific rationality while also registering the keen contestations arising from different colonial contexts: from British “internal colonialism” or the unions of Scotland and Ireland with England, through the settler colonies in Canada and the United States, to the administered colony in India. Christina Morin’s contribution discusses Irish Romantic gothic fiction and its fraught negotiation of Ireland’s subordinate position and colonial history on the one hand and Irish cultural nationalist participation in anti-blackness and racial hierarchies of the British Empire on the other hand. In other words, English but also Irish literature and the empire complemented and reinforced one another, albeit in different ways.

Alongside, the British literary canon took shape through the networks of empire, the latter enabling the dissemination of texts and the formation of global reading publics stratified by race, gender, class, and location. Often, this process involved a motley range of personnel, media, and institutions: administrators, adventurers, missionaries, and philanthropists; technologies of print, radio, and other media; reviews, periodicals, and publishing houses; training colleges, universities, and libraries; white-only clubs in the colonies; amateur and professional playhouses, and so on. Charting such networks might be one way of understanding the enduring reach, and appeal, of classic or “timeless” British authors in the hearts and minds of readers. Aided by the lingua franca of English, readers around the world read not merely about England but her “leading” role in widely disparate regions. In this collection, Aviva Briefel’s chapter highlights the genre of the industrial novel, where the localized tropes and motifs of worker resistance in the factories of Victorian Britain and the distant imagery of dehumanized and enslaved peoples of the colonial empire informed each other. Comparably, Sandeep Banerjee’s piece explores the influential body of Victorian imperial romance and their juxtaposition of British anxieties over anticolonial revolt (such as the Indian Uprising of 1857) and sexual miscegenation in India and Africa.

It is noteworthy that nineteenth-century English fiction incorporated a variety of imaginative landscapes as well as representational modes ranging from realism to fantasy. More than clear distinctions of highbrow and popular genres, what mattered was the distance traveled by fictional texts whether in the depths of the reader’s imagination or the actual geographical spread of the novels. Further, the extroversion through literature of British identity effected a reciprocal nationalist consolidation at home: With print culture and rising literacy, the lower social orders, that is, the working classes and not only the elite could be trained in the rudiments of imperial thinking, which proved to be useful given the omnipresent strands of dissent in Britain and threats to the status quo.

However, rather than suggest a homogeneous context of British literature, we should emphasize literature’s specific iterations in the different colonies. Providing a useful counterpoint to metropolitan Victorian texts, Philip Steer’s essay explores the corpus of nonfiction, novels, and short stories from Australia and New Zealand and their elaboration of “Greater Britain” liberalism, newfangled settler identity, and contact with the Indigenous populations; many of these texts traveled back to Britain through the same networks already described. Threading unevenly through varied geographies and cultures, and marked by distinct trajectories of negotiation and refraction, such exchanges between metropole and periphery accumulated more layers than any brief outline can suggest. Moreover, despite its top-down imposition as an aspect of the dominating culture, colonial receptions of British literature were neither passive nor uniform but highly divergent, attesting to the complex relation between texts and their interpretive communities. One noteworthy aspect in this context was the expansion of English both as literature and language to encompass the domain of the Anglophone. Here, an analogy from political economy would be useful to illuminate the issue.

At the most basic level, European colonialism, as it did with local systems of commodity production and property relations, baldly annihilated or modified native languages. In tandem with trade, the English language’s export to the Atlantic Empire and competition with Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, and French marked England’s ascent from a marginal European power. The spread of the English language fostered new forms of pidgin and creole, some of them developing into vital oral and literary traditions as in the Caribbean. By the middle third of the nineteenth century, English, along with French, another imperial language, had attained extraordinary circulation and eminence. English’s global status – or what is termed the Anglophone today – was made possible by a disparate range of British imperial activities in far-flung regions, persuasive and coercive in equal measure: in the 1830s in South Asia, the replacement of Persian by English as the official language; in Ireland around the same time, the erasure of indigenous language and place names; in the independent nations of United States and Canada starting in the 1870s, the forced assimilation of Native American children through the residential school system; the movement of masses of indentured and precarious labor from one corner of the world to another seeking recourse to a common idiom, and so on. However, it is important to emphasize that not despite but precisely because of its roots in imperial domination, English as a language of contact also enabled the formation of contrarian currents to empire, as discussed in the section “Lineages of the Present.”

The literary critic Aamir Mufti has argued that Orientalist and Anglicist philology, seeking to analyze non-Western literary traditions and fine-tune administrative policy in colonial India, was instrumental in developing the methods of a global comparative literature. It was English’s function as a “vanishing mediator,” Mufti suggests, more than the German theories of Weltliteratur espoused by Goethe, Marx, et al., that provided the conceptual basis for the modern and Eurocentric discipline of world literature as a hierarchical space of literary exchange among unequal nations. For Western-educated colonized intellectuals, on the other hand, literature and culture more broadly became the preferred vehicles (in the absence of real economic and political power) for asserting and elaborating alternative visions of national pasts that selectively borrowed and departed from the confines of colonial discourse. Unsurprisingly, Britain itself did not remain inured to the rising chorus of anti-imperial voices from the colonies and upheavals within Europe for long.

Lineages of the Present

Like our contemporary moment when the idea of literature is undergoing profound transformation, at the beginning of the twentieth century too the most profound changes of British literary style were wrought through (and in turn mediated) demotic challenges within and outside Britain. Dominic Davies’ chapter examines what he usefully terms the “modernist compressions” in post–First World War British adventure fiction, which unlike their flamboyant Victorian predecessors anxiously articulated intra-European conflict, especially rival German nationalism and the decline of British influence in South Africa and India, through formal techniques of fragmentation and nonlinearity as well as textual silences and aporias. In even more tangible ways, interimperial warfare and anti-imperial dissent were foregrounded in modernism thanks to the presence of diverse intellectuals in London.

As the principal city of the British Empire, London attracted immigrants and visitors from all over the world but especially the colonies. Between the 1900s and the 1940s, a nonexhaustive list of writers and activists from the latter might include illustrious names such as Mulk Raj Anand, Roy Campbell, T. S. Eliot, Miles Franklin, C. L. R James, James Joyce, Dorothy Livesay, Katherine Mansfield, Una Marson, Ezra Pound, F. R. Scott, A. J. M Smith, Christina Stead, and W. B. Yeats. Paul Stasi’s contribution reads influential male and female modernist poets arrived in Britain from the Caribbean, India, and the United States, and how their ebullient conceptions of poetic autonomy stood at odds with dehistoricized approaches of “art-for-art’s-sake” canonized in metropolitan modernism. Considering the same milieu, Sonita Sarker complicates modernist fiction’s much-discussed estrangement of narrative form and artistic persona by drawing attention to the subtexts of empire and whiteness, unpacking the combination of race, gender, and nationalism in “New Women” authors from Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and South Africa relocating to the “mother country” of England.

Colonial writers also fraternized with England-born members of the avant-garde in London (such as the famed Bloomsbury Group): Like the Romantics’ circles a century earlier, modernism came to be defined by the cosmopolitan exchange of ideas as well as loosely anchored artistic groups and factions. The reception of foreign intellectuals was of course filtered through identity categories alongside their overt or assumed political sympathies: Predictably, Asians, Africans, women, and the indigent found themselves at the margins of both the avant-garde and the mainstream cultural world far more frequently than their Euro-American male counterparts. Nonetheless, these itinerant figures profoundly shaped the course of modernism and more generally intellectual and political life in Britain. As Joe Cleary’s chapter on Irish revivalism and Irish modernism demonstrates through a discussion of James Joyce, not only Joyce but many writers in and from the peripheries of the British Empire surpassed their English counterparts as the major innovators of modernist prose, poetry, and drama. In parallel, English-language literature’s center of gravity started to shift from a once-dominant, now-shrinking England to an increasingly globally influential United States in the first half of the twentieth century. Admittedly, these large-scale transformations were protracted in scope and neither immediate nor restricted to literature but also covered other arts such as painting, theater, and cinema.

Elinor Taylor’s contribution in the volume focalizes another type of transnational collective: the gathering of antifascist writers in Britain under the Popular Front banner of the 1930s. Considering a wide range of left-wing journals, nonfiction, poetry, and novels, Taylor illuminates the complex role of English, Australian, Caribbean, Indian, and Welsh activists negotiating the relationship between British working-class radicalism, resistance to capitalist imposition, and anticolonial movements in the British Empire. Collectives such as the Popular Front and similar organizations of the 1930s and 40s afforded opportunities for socialist, feminist, and anticolonial activists to cross-fertilize their ideas. Consequently, in contrast to dominant assumptions, these activist circles would eloquently articulate the parallels between empire and fascism. Undermining the British elite self-image of enlightenment and democracy, the ideologies and practices of not only British but Euro-American imperialism as a whole marked uncanny continuities with those of the contemporary fascist regimes in Germany, Italy, and Spain: To mention a few, the idea of “Aryan race”-based right to rule; nationalist-masculinist mobilizations of the lower classes; labor camps, mass internment, dispossession, and resettlement of “suspect” colonized populations; racialized science and eugenics; endless war; collective punishment of entire populations including women, children, and the infirm; the coordination between transnational corporations, financial institutions, and the state. These represented interlinked aspects of imperial expansion and systemic responses to recurrent capitalist crisis, whether by the English EIC or Nazi Germany, rather than aberrant, exceptional moments in the development of the modern West.

Particularly, interwar and postwar Marxists in Britain, both “natives” and “outsiders,” such as C. L. R James, Eric Williams, Claudia Jones, Agnes Smedley, Sylvia Pankhurst, George Thompson, Nancy Cunard, Rajani Palme Dutt, Eric Hobsbawm, Joseph Needham, Victor Kiernan, Ruth First, Raymond Williams, Ambalavaner Sivanandan, and Stuart Hall among others provided outstanding insights on the relation between capitalism, empire, and mass resistance. Aimed at broad audiences, their ideas circulated through innovative channels: speeches, pamphlets, adult education, and community-based organizations in addition to books and articles. These developments need to be juxtaposed with the global ferment of decolonization especially the national liberation movements after 1945. Thus, the ideas of “Black self-determination” that C. L. R James had traced in the Haitian Revolution (1790–1804) found renewed expression in the contemporary struggles of the peasantry in Africa and urban underclasses in North America. Northern Irish nationalists made common cause with anti-Zionist and anti-Apartheid movements in Palestine and South Africa respectively. English models of “history from below” traveled to India, where Subaltern historians would refashion it to undermine the then-dominant “Cambridge School” historiography. Finally, the theory and field of cultural materialism and cultural studies, respectively, initiated new methodologies for exploring social contestations in Thatcherite Britain and beyond.

At the same time, as Andrew Hammond demonstrates in his chapter, the long shadow of the Cold War, associated with the Soviet Union and United States–led blocs’ contest for hegemony, especially in the Third World, had a decisive impact on British literary production. Hammond’s wide-ranging study of Anglo-British “mainstream” and diasporic “postcolonial” writing reveals antithetical attitudes to England’s loss of its former colonies. The former group manifested a retrograde nostalgia for English prestige and benevolence, while demonizing both anticolonial insurgents abroad and communities of color in Britain in crudely racist, stereotypical terms. On the other hand, for diasporic postcolonial authors, literature and especially fiction became one of the key means of negotiating marginalization and asserting citizenship. This latter group included the famed “Windrush Generation” of early Caribbean writers and successive cohorts of Caribbean-, South Asian-, and African-origin authors in Britain in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.

Postcolonial writers introduced readers to the vocabulary and grammar as well as the rhythm and memory of colonized lands, foregrounding the perspectives of the formerly colonized peoples and adding yet another layer to the historical contestations around standard written English. The Guyanese-origin British author, John Agard, pithily described the latter process in his poem, “Listen Mr. Oxford Don” (1967), as “mugging de Queen’s English,” which parodied the racialized and gendered discourse of Black male criminality (“mugging”) and elite nationalist anxieties about linguistic and cultural purity (“Queen’s English”). Lisa Tomlinson’s contribution in this volume foregrounds a vital corpus of formally and linguistically subversive writing: namely, the dub poetry and fiction of Black British writers in the 1980s and 1990s. Tomlinson signals both the continuities and the departures in post–Windrush generations of Afro-Caribbean diasporic writers, as they staked claim to a multicultural Britishness in aesthetic as well as political terms.

The volume’s final two pieces consider twenty-first-century British fiction’s engagement with the contradictions of liberal multiculturalism and revanchist nationalism, as fiction writers and poets articulate oppressed Arab and Muslim identities – in the face of institutional and cultural censure – while refashioning the tropes and techniques of mainstream narrative. Nadia Atia’s chapter explores contemporary Arab British historical novels that focus on the Great War (First World War) in the Middle East and the war’s less-discussed aftermath in the 1920s, namely, Arab nationalist independence movements in Mesopotamia and the European–Zionist colonial project in Palestine. Similarly, the negotiations between Britishness and Islam (the latter doubly mediated by post–9/11 US discourse on the “War on Terror” and aggressive English nationalism after Brexit) inform Amina Yaqin’s essay, which situates new directions in British Muslim writing and how these deploy ideas of English landscape and modes of the pastoral to present imaginative alternatives to dominant notions of Britain and her relationship to the world beyond.

To conclude, the Companion provides an accessible yet nuanced introduction to the vast colonial interactions that shaped Britain, propelling the rise of English-language literature as a global phenomenon. Taken together, the essays carefully map the developing genres of literary texts – fiction and nonfiction prose, poetry, and their different typologies – over multiple periods and several locations, connecting these texts to transnational contexts. Not every key area of British literature could be engaged with, for reasons of space and practicality. Altogether, the volume covers a period of over five hundred years, with more focus on the last century given its proximity and greater relevance to the present (the earliest work considered, Thomas More’s Utopia, was published in 1516; the latest, Ayisha Malik’s This Green and Pleasant Land, appeared in 2019 – both, not incidentally, focus on lived and imagined relationships to an island). The capacious geographical coverage of the anthology will benefit the reader, especially nonspecialists, in discovering often-unexpected patterns and continuities in literary and imperial space and networks of circulation. The Companion underscores that many themes of contemporary cultural politics (racial hierarchies, for one, or settler colonialism, for another) are neither unique to the present nor limited to the regions of Britain or even the West, but iterations and variations of contests spread across far-flung corners of the world. In terms of methodology, the compendium charts both the classical concerns of literary studies, that is, aesthetic and humanistic considerations, and critical trends of the past decades that insist on literature’s imbrication in, and inseparability from, material and ideological practices of world making. Accordingly, the survey and the close readings of the selected literary texts – both canonical and little-discussed – are grounded in, and in turn illuminate, the cultural implications of domination, resistance, and negotiation in a world shaped unevenly by Western capitalism and colonialism. Put another way, literature, in its ability to articulate important shifts in perception, sensibilities, and social relations before such changes are actualized, provides an indispensable index to comprehending “the human condition.”

Meanwhile, the violence of empire continues: The grim double standards of the Western ruling classes when it comes to their contrasting attitude to the victims in Gaza and Ukraine, respectively, are on plain display for the world to watch. Unfortunately, across the West, media houses, universities, arts and culture organizations have been complicit in this regard, censoring protesting voices and opinions. Surely, there is no greater proof of the dehumanizing impact of empire? The selective indifference to lives and suffering and the resulting shrinking of open, democratic culture? The study of literature or history cannot change this present situation. But certainly, it can equip students with the resources, narratives, and capacities to strive for a shared vision, a world to come after empire.