Post on 08-Feb-2023
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Introduction
British Romanticism and Early Globalization: Developing theModern World Picture
Evan Gottlieb
Globalization is now well established as one of the twenty-first
century’s most-discussed subjects.1 Nevertheless, the connection
asserted in this collection’s title between globalization and
British Romanticism may strike some readers as counterintuitive;
the former, after all, is largely associated (especially in
popular accounts) with contemporaneity, and the latter continues
to be associated, politically speaking, with colonialism and
imperialism. This introduction will try to revise both of these
positions, first by reviewing how changes in Romantic literary
historical scholarship are facilitating new understanding of the
era’s socio-political investments, and then by considering some
working definitions and recent theories of globalization itself.
Finally, I will turn to a brief discussion of this volume’s
organization and thematic concerns. As readers will discover for
themselves, the essays in this collection make a convincing case
2
that the Romantics were alternately fascinated, frightened, and
inspired by their increasingly globalized world.
British Romanticism’s political commitments have long been
the subject of interest and contestation, from early nineteenth
century reviewers’ excoriation of Keats’ “cockney” pretensions,
through the Victorians’ whitewashing of Percy Shelley’s radical
commitments, to the New Critics’ willful exclusion of all
politics from the aesthetic project of Romantics. Although the
academic recovery of the political dimensions of Romanticism has
several modern starting points, Marilyn Butler’s Romantics, Rebels
and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background (1981) deserves
particular notice for marking a turning point. Although its
subtitle sounds vestigially New Critical, Butler’s approach is
remarkably forward thinking. Instead of claiming a clear
demarcation between a canonical set of literary texts and the
historical “background” from which it emerges like a timeless
butterfly shedding its chrysalis – the paradigm that M.H. Abrams,
Harold Bloom, and Northrop Frye each employed, with
characteristic variations, to bolster Romanticism’s critical
respectability a few years earlier – Butler makes the opposite
3
case. Asserting in her opening chapter that “Literature, like all
art, like language, is a collective activity, powerfully
conditioned by social forces,” she proceeds to demonstrate that
“authors are not the solitaries of the Romantic myth, but
citizens.”2 In doing so, Butler not only anticipates the
demystifying impetus of Jerome J. McGann’s equally influential
The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (1985), but also positions
Romantic studies to take full advantage of the sociologically
oriented, New Historical approaches that would dominate Anglo-
American literature departments during the coming decades.
Despite using the traditional modifier “English” in her subtitle
to describe the period’s literature, moreover, Butler takes a
broad approach in practice, paying welcome attention to Irish
contributions to Romanticism, as well as to Scottish and Welsh
inflections. She thus both takes seriously the political
ramifications of the Romantics’ aesthetic and generic choices –
from Cobbett’s pastoral radicalism to Keats’ liberal historicism
– and anticipates contemporary “four-nations” or archipelagic
understandings of Great Britain as internally heterogeneous.
4
Yet from today’s critical perspective it is hard not to
notice that, for all its virtues, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries
largely neglects the extra-national forces and dynamics with
which British authors and readers of the period consistently
negotiated. Beyond some commentary on the impacts of the American
and French Revolutions – the traditional, Eurocentric markers of
political modernity – there are almost no references (and only
the barest of nods in the appended Chronology) to the global
frameworks in which those revolutions, as well as the British
responses to them, took place. Haiti, Spanish America, China, and
India – each the site of major political upheaval during the era
covered by Butler’s subtitle – all fail to make an appearance.
Similarly, despite a brief chronological mention of Napoleon’s
invasion of Egypt, the only entries in the book’s index regarding
the Middle East are for “Jerusalem,” which references William
Blake’s poem of the same name, and “Egyptian mythology . . . (See
paganism) in the work of S.T. Coleridge.”3 Such Eurocentrism is
hardly a personal failing of Butler’s, who writes elsewhere and
at length about Eastern influences in the works of Byron,
Shelley, and Southey.4 Instead, as David Armitage and Sanjay
5
Subrahmanyam indicate in the introduction to their recent
collection, The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, it is a bias common
to many Anglo-American historians.5 Among other factors, Armitage
and Subrahmanyam point to G.W.F. Hegel’s late-Romantic lectures
on history – in which only the West (narrowed to Europe and then
Prussia) is found worthy of being deemed truly historical – as
exerting a long-standing influence on early modern
historiography.6
A truly robust sense of non-European influence did not
transform literary history in general, and Romantic-era studies
in particular, until the importation into English departments of
postcolonial theory and criticism. Influenced by earlier
theorists of colonization like Aimé Césaire and Franz Fanon, it
was Edward Said’s pathbreaking Orientalism (1978) that made the
greatest impact in this regard. Said was attuned not only to the
aggressive expansionism of the eighteenth-century European
powers, but also to the degree to which that aggression took
textual as well as territorial forms:
6
English writers on the whole had a more pronounced and
harder sense of what Oriental pilgrimages might entail than
the French. India was a valuably real constant in this
sense, and therefore all the territory between the
Mediterranean and India acquired a correspondingly weighty
importance. Romantic writers like Byron and Scott
consequently had a political vision of the Near Orient and a
very combative awareness of how relations between the Orient
and Europe would have to be conducted.7
The importance of passages like this cannot be underestimated.
Whatever might be asserted regarding Orientalism’s overestimations
of Western dominance and homogeneity, oversights with regard
especially to questions of gender, or misapplications of
Foucaultian theory – and Said’s work has been criticized on all
these counts – by emphasizing how Western culture has repeatedly
defined itself against Eastern “others,” Said ensured that
scholars and historians could no longer rely on sui generis models
of cultural development when considering the literature and
culture of the past or, for the matter, the present). His
critical follow-up, Culture and Imperialism (1993), extended this
7
trailblazing by drawing attention to the ways in which Western
texts, and perhaps the Western imagination writ large, depend on
this uneven relationship even when it is merely implied.
Particularly impactful – indeed, inflammatory to some – in this
regard was Said’s assertion that Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is
culpably silent on the Bertram family’s reliance on Caribbean
slave labor for its wealth.8
Tellingly, Said’s insight regarding the global context of
Austen’s novel is facilitated by a corresponding blindness to the
possibility that Austen’s silence with regard to plantation
slavery might be strategic, underscoring the givenness of foreign
profits and slave labor for the early nineteenth century-British
economy and psyche. His neglect of this possibility –
interrogated again by Katie Trumpener in her Afterword to this
collection – may simply reflect Said’s underestimation of
Austen’s worldliness. But alongside his depiction of the British
Romantics primarily as forerunners of their overtly imperialistic
Victorian successors, it exercised a significant influence on
subsequent critical studies that would continue to apply the
insights and methods of postcolonialism to Romantic-era
8
literature and culture. Chief among these is Saree Makdisi’s
provocative Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity
(1998), which repeatedly argues that, with few exceptions, the
British Romantics can and should be viewed as unabashed
proponents of an imperialist worldview. In his preface, however,
Makdisi also acknowledges the limitations of trying to impose
this constraining framework on what was in fact a dynamic world-
historical situation:
When all is said and done, romanticism will turn out to be
not only worldly, but also global, and to have been so all
along – marking the beginning of a process that has only in
recent years come to be recognized as “globalization.” Our
contemporary experience of globalization will certainly make
more sense to us if we understand it as part of a broader
historical process . . . [T]his book is an attempt to map
out the origins of that process in the cultural politics of
imperial modernization during the romantic period.9
Makdisi is surely correct to insist that British Romanticism must
be understood as “worldly” and not merely a product of inspired
9
imaginations, as earlier scholars frequently insisted; moreover,
his call for the historicization of globalization and global
processes is critical. His final sentence’s slide from back to
the language of imperialism, however, undercuts his prior call
for a more rigorously historicized understanding of globalization
– one that does not read Romanticism as always already imperial.
Like Said’s texts, despite or perhaps because of its strong
readings, Makdisi’s Romantic Imperialism remains an important
touchstone for studies of the macropolitics of Romantic-era
literature. Published the prior year, however, Katie Trumpener’s
Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire represents an
equally important and arguably more sustainable model of how to
trace the closely bound relations between authors, genres, and
national identities in the Age of Revolutions. In
contradistinction to Said’s and Makdisi’s relatively
unidirectional visions of how cultural influences operate,
Trumpener – drawing on the “four-nations” approach to British
history developed by Linda Colley, Howard Weinbrot, and others10
– argues that hegemonic English authors did not simply ignore or
erase the Celtic and Indian voices on the peripheries of the
10
developing British Empire, but strategically coopted and
assimilated their voices to further their own nation-building
agendas. Trumpener occasionally mobilizes the colonizer-colonized
dualism central to much postcolonial theory, but she is also
aware that both within the so-called Celtic fringe and between
the farther-flung networks of British colonial outposts,
different kinds of relations and new forms of subjectivity were
developing. Not only those who participated in imperial projects
out of a sense of British pride, says Trumpener, but also those
who became colonial settlers and administrators in order to take
advantage of the opportunities they afforded frequently shared
[an] awareness of the transcolonial consciousness and
transperipheral circuits of influence to which empire gives
rise, as disparate cultures find themselves connected not
only by their parallel models of subordination within the
empire but also by a constant flow of people –
administrators, soldiers, merchants, colonists, and
travelers – back and forth between different imperial
holdings.11
11
Like Said and Makdisi, Trumpener has been sometimes criticized
for underestimating the multi-directional nature of cultural and
literary influences in the Romantic era.12 (Makdisi has recently
gone some way toward redressing this oversight in his just-
published Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture,
which retains the imperial frame of his former work but
acknowledges the degree to which English Romantic-era identity
was both internally multiple and shaped by its interactions with
the East.13) Equally important, however, is the clear-sightedness
with which Trumpener diagnoses how disparate social bonds and
multi-national identities could be formed in the interstices of
imperial networks. Notably, several of the present volume’s
contributors take up the same authors – Ossian, Walter Scott,
John Galt – on whom Bardic Nationalism influentially focuses.
There were, of course, other important postcolonial and
four-nations studies of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century
British literature published during the mid-1990s through 2000,
among them, monographs by Srinivas Aravamudan, John Barrell, Alan
Bewell, Moira Ferguson, Nigel Leask, and Janet Sorensen; and
collections edited by Bewell and Sonia Hofkosh, and Tim Fulford
12
and Peter J. Kitson.14 Together, these texts helped set the tone
for the subsequent decade of Romantic-era scholarship, which drew
with increasing frequency on concepts like ambivalence,
hybridity, melancholy, mimicry, and voice pioneered by
postcolonial literary theorists like Homi Bhabha, Paul Gilroy,
Mary Louise Pratt, and Gayatri Spivak,15 in order to analyze the
complex literary relations between England, Britain, and the
wider world with increasing nuance and sophistication. The
continued flourishing of four-nations or British archipelagic
scholarship is well exemplified in works from the 2000s by
scholars like Ian Duncan (on Walter Scott’s unparalleled
influence), Luke Gibbons (on Edmund Burke’s Irish inheritances),
and Yoon Sun Lee (on ironic modes of British nationalism);16
farther afield, geographically speaking, Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee,
and Peter J. Kitson’s Literature, Science, and Exploration in the Romantic Era
set its investigations into the writings of British travelers
within “the context of empire” without assuming that such
writings were always already themselves irredeemably imperially
minded.17 They were joined in this endeavor by a number of other
critics who sought to move beyond (while certainly not
13
forgetting) the by-now well-established dualisms of Said’s
earlier work when discussing Britain’s literary and cultural
negotiations, both internally and abroad. The explicit use of
Bruno Latour’s network theory (which I discuss in more detail
below) to inform their methodology, moreover, makes Fulford, Lee,
and Kitson’s study especially relevant to our current scholarly
moment, in which dynamic concepts like network and system have
begun to replace the more static, dualistic models of colonizer/
colonized and metropole/ periphery that previously held sway. The
presence of these concepts, and a corresponding willingness to
think about Romantic-era literature’s negotiations with and
representations of “the expanding world” of long-durational
globalization18 – without assuming in advance that imperialism
represents the only possible outcome of this historico-aesthetic
conjunction – characterize some of the most recent and forward-
thinking studies in the field, including several by contributors
to this volume.19
In terms of form as well as intention, Global Romanticism’s
closest predecessor is probably Felicity Nussbaum’s 2003 edited
collection, The Global Eighteenth Century. Like that earlier study, the
14
present collection contributes to what Nussbaum names “critical
global studies,” insofar as it likewise seeks “to problematize
ahistorical discussion of globalization, to contextualize debates
about globalism, and thus to provide genealogical clues to our
current understandings.”20 Beyond obvious differences in
historical focus and periodization, however, Global Romanticism
differs from The Global Eighteenth Century in at least two additional
ways. Methodologically, it does not attempt to survey or even to
account for the vast literary materials produced by Britons
abroad during the Romantic era; instead, although a diversity of
international subjects appears in a number of the following
chapters, the focus for the most part is on the ways in which a
worldwide consciousness – in Manfred Steger’s helpful phrase, a
global imaginary21 – can be discovered and analyzed in British
Romantic-era literature, regardless of whether the content of a
given text is explicitly global. Theoretically, moreover, the
majority of essays in Global Romanticism are closely attuned to the
frameworks and insights of current developments in globalization
studies and related fields, many of which have only recently
become available in English.
15
Doubtless, new additions to the field of globalization
studies will continue to reshape our sense of what constitutes
globality and global history.22 In the meantime, however, there
is already consensus that globalization – especially when
considered culturally as well as economically – has a significant
history; indeed, depending on how long and broad a view one
takes, it can be traced back to the first global movements of
human groups.23 In order to give the term some more definite
historical contours, however, this collection generally follows
Fredric Jameson’s assertion that contemporary globalization
“reflects the sense of an enlargement of world communication, as
well as of the horizon of a world market, both of which seem far
more tangible and immediate than in earlier stages of
modernity.”24 Jameson’s definition is representative of most
current thinking on the subject even by those whose politics are
farther to the right: Roland Robertson, for example, calls
globalization a concept that “refers both to the compression of
the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world
as a whole,” and Anthony Giddens likewise sees it indexing “the
intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant
16
localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by
events occurring many miles away and vice versa.”
Despite the modernist bias of these overlapping definitions,
they are essential for thinking through the possible global
dynamics of earlier stages of modernity. In this light, the
Romantic era in particular offers a number of intriguing socio-
historical convergences that suggest themselves as catalysts or
facilitators of the spatio-temporal transformations that
characterize global processes. The political, agricultural, and
industrial upheavals and transformations of this era have been
well covered by Marilyn Butler, Marilyn Gaull, and many others;
as an “Age of Revolutions,” the period 1780-1830 may well be
unrivalled.25 Equally important, however, are two massive but
frequently overlooked socio-political transformations of the
time, which James Belich calls the “Demographic” and “Settler
revolutions.” With regard to the former, Belich writes that with
the help of agricultural reform, and in spite of warnings by the
likes of Thomas Malthus, “In the second half of the eighteenth
century, [the population of Britain] grew almost 50 per cent to
close on 11 million. In the first half of the nineteenth century,
17
despite increasing emigration, it grew almost 100 per cent to 21
million in 1850.”26 Such unprecedented population growth was a
necessary albeit not a sufficient cause, Belich points out, for
the era’s other notable “revolution,” in which millions of
Britons emigrated abroad to establish homeland-like settlements
in every habitable continent. Although some of them eventually
broke with Britain and formed their own countries (most famously
in the case of the thirteen original American colonies), these
permanent migrations may ultimately have been more significant
for shaping modern world order than the British Empire proper:
With all due respect to the rich scholarship on European
imperialism, in the very long view most of these European
empires in Asia and Africa were a flash in the pan.
Settlement, the third form of European expansion [after
trade networks and empires], emphasized the creation of new
societies, not the control of old ones. It had no moral
superiority over empire. . . . But it did reach further and
last longer than empire. . . . European empire dominated one
and a half continents for a century or so. European
settlement came to dominate three-and-a-half continents,
18
including Siberia. It still does. It was settlement, not
empire, that had the spread and staying power in the history
of European expansion, and it is time that historians of
that expansion turned their attention to it.27
Along with recent arguments by other historians that even at its
late-nineteenth-century zenith the British Empire was neither
especially coherent nor made a particularly strong impression on
the minds and lives of most British citizens, Belich’s “Settler
revolution” provides further evidence that Romantic-era
scholarship’s previous focus on the literature’s supposed
imperialist dynamics may have been somewhat off-base. Especially
in the years 1780-1830, so-called “empire-building” was neither
the most solidified nor even necessarily the most consequential
phase of long-durational globalization – especially when we try
to recover what the period looked and felt like to its literary
participants.28
This is not to claim that imperialism played no part in some
Romantics’ thinking about Britain’s relations to the rest of the
world. As Ian Baucom demonstrates throughout Specters of the Atlantic:
19
Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History, for example,
dehumanizing attitudes and colonial prerogatives were all too
common in the period.29 Instead, it represents an attempt to reap
the interpretive benefits of following C.A. Bayly’s advice, given
near the end of his magisterial study The Birth of the Modern World,
1780-1914, that “We need not so much to reorient world history as
to decentralize it.”30 To do so certainly does not mean
jettisoning postcolonial theory altogether, much less endorsing
the rehabilitated version of empire floated by some neoliberal
historians and politicians in recent years.31 Instead, it more
closely resembles what Fernando Coronil calls the production of
worldly knowledges that “illuminate connections: the ensembles of
relations linking parts and wholes, human creations and the
conditions of their creation.”32 This call for or acknowledgment
of “the end” of postcolonial theory as a separate or distinct
methodology has of course been met with resistance, not least by
some of its original practitioners;33 but as the passage quoted
above from Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism already demonstrates, the
distinction has been blurred for some time now between
postcolonial and global theoretical approaches.34 By tipping the
20
balance toward the latter, Global Romanticism explores the many
advantages to be derived from taking into account the global
concerns, interests, anxieties, and dynamics that inform British
Romantic texts, but that have been overlooked or undervalued when
those texts have been viewed predominantly or exclusively through
postcolonial lenses.
Among the various paradigms currently available for
understanding globalization, probably the best-known critical
framework is Immanuel Wallerstein’s World-Systems Analysis. Since
the 1970s, Wallerstein has been using the globe, rather than the
nation, as his primary unit of socio-economic analysis. To
account for the long-durational evolution of relations between
peoples and (later) national entities, Wallerstein and his fellow
WSA practitioners analyze how these geo-political entities form
groups, or “worlds,” which in turn are comprised of zones of
relative power.35 Their approach thereby avoids the anachronistic
or reifying tendencies of applying “imperial” or “colonial”
labels to historical relations that pre-date, exceed, or
otherwise fail to conform to those conditions, while nevertheless
highlighting the structural realities of “unequal exchange”
21
between stronger (core) and weaker (peripheral and semi-
peripheral) regions. This pattern, Wallerstein has repeatedly
demonstrated, reaches its historical zenith in the capitalist
world-system, which has steadily expanded from its sixteenth-
century Mediterranean origins to its current embrace of the
planet as a whole. David Palumbo-Liu, Bruce Robbins, and Nirvana
Tanoukhi have recently pointed out that WSA often wavers between
writing a history of the development of global capitalism, and
presenting a system of how global capitalism operates.36 This
oscillation between description and prescription, however, is
precisely what makes WSA useful for scholars and critics in the
Humanities and social sciences WSA has also been criticized for
depending too heavily on a Marxian base-superstructure model of
influence that underestimates the socio-cultural norms and
institutions on economic development; in response, Wallerstein
has recently redoubled his efforts to account for the cultural
factors involved in the formation and replication of “a
geoculture for the modern world-system . . . largely fashioned
around and dominated by what I am calling centrist liberalism.”37
22
WSA is not the only paradigm available to today’s analysts
of globalization, and some newer approaches move even farther
away from the metropole-colony opposition of postcolonial theory
that Wallerstein’s “core-periphery” axis sometimes replicates. In
his well-known work on the sociology of globalization, for
example, Manuel Castells describes a paradigm shift between what
he calls the “linked society” of the early modern period and the
“networked society” we inhabit today. The differences between the
two are largely due to the increased speed and intensity of
information and capital movement in the latter; places that were
once distinct have now, thanks to the near-simultaneity of
electronic transmission, come to seem proximate. Yet as Castell
himself notes, in practice today’s “spaces of flows” are
inhabited by people whose mental lives are frequently still
dominated by attachments formed by the localities which they
physically inhabit.38 Far from being distinct historical
phenomena, in other words, spaces of flows and places continue to
coexist not only on the level of subjective or social experience,
but also on that of objective, institutional embeddedness, as
Saskia Sassen has demonstrated in her work on “global cities.”39
23
This phenomenon of the interpenetration of the local and the
global – the “glocal,” as some theorists have awkwardly albeit
accurately surmised – is, of course, historically driven. Not
surprisingly, several contributors to this volume find their
Romantic subjects in various acts of negotiating these two
dynamics. Along these lines, several also draw on the ideas of
Latour, who – from his early work in science studies to his more
recent development of Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) – has long been
committed to revealing the presence of hybridity both human and
worldly action. As opposed to what Latour calls “the modern
critical stance” that attempts artificially to separate (in the
first instance) natural and cultural factors wherever it looks,
Latour promotes ANT as the most productive method of “tracing new
associations” and “designing . . . their assemblages,” in the
process accepting nature-culture hybrids as inevitable rather
than regrettable.40 Although Latour is not a theorist of
globalization as such, his network theory provides one of the
most promising ways to think globality along lines that assume
neither its hierarchical nature nor its mutual exclusion from
highly localized sites and phenomena.
24
Yet globalization, whether past or present, is not simply
about the formation and proliferation of objective networks.
Instead, as reflected in some of the definitions cited above, as
well as in most of the essays that follow, it also concerns the
subjective-psychological alterations that accompany these
characteristic changes. For Jameson, globalization may be a
communicational concept above all, but this does not tell the
whole story: “one always finds other dimensions smuggled in.”41
The affective dimensions of globalization are diverse; depending
on one’s ideological perspective and geo-political situation,
globalization evokes feelings running the gamut from enthusiasm
to anxiety. The public rise of these particular emotions has been
traced back in various ways to Romantic-era theorizations and
disseminations.42 In the present context, moreover, literary and
other media attempts to shape the socio-cultural distribution of
these affects can be understood via the insight – influentially
delineated at the end of the 1990s by Arjun Appadurai – that
globalization both calls for and creates “a new role for the
imagination in social life.”43 Across their differences of
approach and intent, the essays in this volume serve as forceful
25
reminders that the Romantics’ well-documented fascination with
the powers of human imagination has important global dimensions,
as well as more familiar personal and national ones.
The following chapters are divided into three sections on
the origins, orientations, and engagements of British
Romanticism’s various relations to and representations of
globalization. Rather than introduce them individually and in
depth, I will conclude this introduction by offering some general
observations. The focus on globalization has produced a somewhat
different set of British Romantic texts and authors than the
canonical norm. Among poets, Byron, Coleridge, William
Wordsworth, and Percy Shelley are well accounted for in chapters
by Samuel Baker, Robert Mitchell, and Michael Wiley; by contrast
– albeit not by design – William Blake and John Keats are
entirely absent, their places occupied instead by Ossian (whose
worldwide impact is charted by Ian Duncan), Robert Burns (whose
lesser-known song contributions and global readership are
investigated by Steve Newman), and Felicia Hemans (whose
representations of far-flung families are interpreted by Stuart
Peterfreund). Furthermore, as befits the rising critical stock of
26
Romantic-era novels, contributors pay almost as much attention to
prose as they do to poems. In addition to chapters on the global
interests and concerns of canonical writers like Mary Shelley and
Walter Scott (by Miranda Burgess and Anthony Jarrells,
respectively), there are also chapters on Charlotte Smith (by
Yoon Sun Lee) and John Galt (by Matthew Wickman) – two novelists
whose professional success in their lifetimes has only recently
translated into sustained critical attention.44 Again, the
absence of other significant Romantic-era novelists should not
necessarily be taken as evidence that they had nothing to say or
contribute with regard to globalization; instead, I hope that the
non-appearance in this collection of authors such as Frances
Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and William Godwin will stimulate others
to consider the potential relevance of their writings with regard
to long-durational globalization. The same may be said of the
selection of non-fiction prose writers discussed in this volume:
Edmund Burke (in Peterfreund’s chapter) and Olaudah Equiano (in
Debbie Lee and Louis Kirk McAuley’s chapter) are present, but
other Romantic-era prose writers whose writings could lend
themselves to globally oriented analyses – for example, Thomas de
27
Quincey, Elizabeth Hamilton, William Hazlitt, and Charles Lamb –
are not. Furthermore, several contributors use globality to
illuminate the significance of Romantic-era writers, like Erasmus
Darwin (in Mitchell’s chapter) and petitioners from Sierra Leone
(in Lee and McAuley’s piece), who do not otherwise frequently
share critical space with the likes of William Wordsworth or the
Shelleys. Although most contributors focus primarily on textual
representations and formal strategies that reflect and negotiate
the Romantics’ incipiently global era, a few chapters focus
explicitly on the literally global circulations of texts in the
era, thus building implicitly on the recent wealth of book
history scholarship that has established the highly global nature
of the book market in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries.45
Readers will notice that within the disparate global
concerns illuminated in the following chapters, environmental
themes recur. Of course, scholars have been thinking about
Romanticism in terms of eco-criticism, and vice versa, for some
time now.46 This is clearly a reflection, at least in part, of
contemporary concerns; among the various phenomena whose
28
globality has become increasingly apparent in the previous
decades, none has imposed the nature and consequences of its
planetary scope with more power or urgency than our changing
weather patterns. (The less neutral term for climate change,
“global warming,” makes the extra-national profile of these
patterns explicit.) Moreover, like globalization, climate change
only appears be a purely contemporary phenomenon; in fact, as
several of this volume’s contributors demonstrate, climatic and
weather-related phenomena were of significant interest to the
Romantics not only because it provided them with similar
experiences of inter-national, metastatic unpredictability, but
also because – not unlike the opportunities apprehended by
today’s techno-visionaries, who dream of carbon sequestration and
oceanic de-salination – it offered potential platforms for
economic as well as socio-political intervention. Today, as we
enter “the Anthropocene” (the proposed name for our geological
era of human-influenced climate change), the effects of the past
two centuries of industrialization on our shared planet appear
increasingly dire. The Romantics cannot help us foresee our
ecological future, of course, but recognizing how they
29
conceptualized and responded to weather patterns and climatic
disruptions can at least put our own actions (or lack thereof)
into a longer historical perspective.
Scanning Global Romanticism’s table of contents, readers may
also note the significant number of Scottish subjects in their
titles. This apparent over-representation is easily explained by
keeping in mind the Scots’ importance not only to British
Romanticism but also to the global expansion of Britain’s
overseas activities. The idea that Scottish contributions to
British Romanticism should be seen as somehow less authentic than
those of their English or Irish counterparts is well past its
sell-by date.47 Furthermore, Scotland’s contributions to
Britain’s colonial operations were in fact not only
disproportionate to their relatively small population, but also
highly influential conceptually; as Michael Gardiner observes,
“It could be argued, indeed, that on an epistemological level,
the Scottish contribution was the essence of empire: the
practical and spatial attitude to the observation and
organization of the world, the ideal of franchised universalism,
the culture of the work ethic, and the necessity of free markets
30
to a nationless state.”48 From the foundational anthropological
and historical theories of the Scottish Enlightenment to the
incomparably influential fictional strategies of Walter Scott,
the Scottish involvement in the British experience of
“worldwideification” was sustained, multi-faceted, and
essential.49
Might we already be entering a post-global moment? Using a
somewhat truncated definition of globalization as “an ideological
project,” for example, Eric Cazdyn and Imre Szeman argue that,
given its manifest failure to deliver on its promise of marking
“the arrival of the world’s various constituencies into an accord
over the governing principles of political economy,” we must
begin learning to thinking past the “perpetual present” of
globalization in order to imagine a different, more egalitarian
future.50 Likewise, Michael Cronin promotes what he calls “a
politics of microspection” that would “conceive of the local not
as . . . the parachute drop for global forces, but as a point of
departure “: “a way of re-enchanting a world grown weary of . . .
the orthodoxies of global macro-modernity.”51 Regardless of
whether these pronouncements are correct – and it seems to me
31
they are more valuable as provocations than as predictions – they
serve as welcome reminders that, whatever we think of
globalization, we will be better equipped to navigate its present
and future if we can effectively recover its past. If “the age
of the world picture,” as Heidegger characterized modernity, is
coming to a close – either because the picture has become too
fragmented to be clearly viewed, or because as Rey Chow suggests,
it has morphed into “the age of the world target” – then we would
do well to comprehend how it looked and felt to some of its first
modern developers.52 If, by contrast, globalization turns out to
be with us for the foreseeable future, then this task in fact
becomes even more important. The expanding world of our present
moment is not identical to the one experienced by the Romantic-
era authors examined in this volume, nor does it resemble what
many of them hoped to help produce. Nevertheless, in their most
optimistic moments the British Romantics vividly, passionately
anticipated what globalization might become. Recovered and
renewed, their visions might yet be our reality.
1. Entering “globalization” as a keyword into the Academic Search
Premiere database, which extends back to 1975, currently (Dec. 2013)
turns up over 33,000 hits – a number sure to increase in the coming
years.
2. Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and
its Background, 1760-1830 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 9.
3. Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, 209, 207.
4. See, e.g., Butler, “The Orientalism of Byron’s Giaour,” in
Byron and the Limits of Fiction, eds. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988), 78-96; Butler,
“Shelley and the Empire in the East,” in Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the
World, eds. Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (Baltimore and London:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 158-66; Butler,
“Repossessing the Past: the Case for an Open Literary History,” in
Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History, eds. Butler, Marjorie
Levinson, Jerome McGann, and Paul Hamilton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989),
64-84.
5. David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Introduction: The
Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760-1840 – Global
Causation, Connection, and Comparison,” in The Age of Revolutions in Global
Context, c. 1760-1840, eds. Armitage and Subrahmanyam (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010), xvi-xviii. The two most important earlier histories
they discuss, R.R. Palmer’s two-volume The Age of the Democratic Revolution
(1959-64) and Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (1962), are
described as “now appear[ing] strikingly Eurotropic, if not quite
Eurocentric” (xviii).
6. Cf. Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), esp. 21-75; Armitage and
Subrahmanyam, “Introduction,” xviii.
7. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 192-93.
8. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), 84-97.
9. Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of
Modernity (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
xii.
10. See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 1992); Howard Weinbrot, Britannia’s
Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993).
11. Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British
Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), xiii-xiv.
12. See, e.g., James Mulholland, Sounding Imperial: Poetic Voice and the
Politics of Empire, 1730-1820 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2013), esp. 33-92, in which he re-interprets both Thomas
Gray’s “The Bard” and the Welsh response to it.
13. Makdisi, Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). See also Makdisi,
William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003); “Romantic cultural imperialism,” The Cambridge
History of English Romantic Literature, ed. James Chandler (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), 601-620; and “Worldly
Romanticism,” Introduction to special issue of Nineteenth-Century Literature
65.4 (March 2011): 429-32.
14. Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804
(Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1999); John Barrell,
The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1993); Alan Bewell, Romanticism and
Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Leith
Davis, Acts of Union: Scotland and Literary Negotiation of the British Nation, 1707-1830
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Moira Ferguson,
Colonialism and Gender from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994); Suvir Kaul, Poems of Nation, Anthems of
Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville and London:
University of Virginia Press, 2000); Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers
and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993); Janet Sorensen, The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). See also Bewell and
Sonia Hofkosh, eds. Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834
(Bloomington, IN; Indiana University Press; 1996); Tim Fulford and
Peter J. Kitson, eds., Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
15. See, e.g., Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New
York: Routledge, 1994); Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2005); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel
Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge,
2008); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics
(London and New York: Routledge, 1998).
16. Ian Duncan, Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton
and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007); Luke Gibbons, Edmund
Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Colonial Sublime (Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Yoon Sun Lee, Nationalism and
Irony: Burke, Scott, Carlyle (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
2004). For additional Romantic-era four-nations scholarship of the
2000s, see, e.g., Ina Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of
Ireland (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
Evan Gottlieb, Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English
Writing, 1707-1832 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007);
Susan Manning, Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American
Writing (Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002);
Kenneth McNeil, Scotland, Britain, Empire: Writing the Highlands, 1760-1860
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007); Matthew Wickman, The
Ruins of Experience: Scotland’s ‘Romantick’ Highlands and the Birth of the Modern Witness
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Louis Kirk
McAuley’s Print Technology in Scotland and America, 1740-1800 (Lewisburg, PA:
Bucknell University Press, 2013) continues this line of inquiry by
extending Susan Manning’s transatlantic/ four-nations approach.
17. Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee, and Peter J. Kitson, Literature, Science
and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004). The quotation comes from the title of their
book’s second section, “Literature and Science in the Context of
Empire.”
18. The quotation comes from Michael Cronin’s The Expanding World:
Towards a Politics of Microspection (Winchester, UK and Washington: Zero
Books, 2012).
19. See, e.g., Joselyn M. Almeida, Reimagining the Transatlantic, 1780-
1890 (Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011); Srinivas
Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Elizabeth A. Bohls,
Romantic Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2013); Samuel Baker, Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the
Maritime Empire of Culture (Charlottesville and London: University of
Virginia Press, 2010); Mary Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the
Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University
Press, 2010); Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011); Evan Gottlieb, Romantic
Globalism: British Literature and Modern World Order, 1750-1830 (Columbus: The Ohio
State University Press, 2014); Rebecca Cole Heinowitz, Spanish America
and British Romanticism, 1777-1826: Rewriting Conquest (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2010); Mulholland, Sounding Imperial; Susan Oliver,
Scott, Byron, and the Poetics of Cultural Encounter (Houndmills, Basingstoke and
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Dermot Ryan, Technologies of Empire:
Writing, Imagination, and the Making of Imperial Networks (Newark: University
Delaware Press, 2013); Tara Ghoshal Wallace, Imperial Characters: Home and
Periphery in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University
Press, 2010); Michael Wiley, Romantic Migrations: Local, National, and
Transnational Dispositions (Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008); Esther Wohlgemut, Romantic Cosmopolitanism
(Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
20. Felicity A. Nussbaum, “Introduction,” in The Global Eighteenth
Century, ed. Nussbaum (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2003), 3.
21. Manfred Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from
the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008). Steger’s phraseology builds on the work of
Charles Taylor, especially his Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2004).
22. Although translated too recently to have influenced the
essays in this collection, Peter Sloterdijk heralds the return of
“grand narratives” as the only viable way to study the history of
globalization in his 2005 book, In the World Interior of Capital, trans.
Wieland Hoban (Malden, MA and Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 3.
23. See Steger, Globalization: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 20-26.
24. The definitions here and below by Jameson, Robertson, and
Giddens are quoted in Steger, Globalization, 10.
25. See Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries, esp. Chapter 1;
Marilynn Gaull, English Romanticism: The Human Context (New York: Norton,
1988). On the particular relation between the Romantic era’s cultural
and literary “revolutions,” and the previous century’s Glorious
Revolution, see Anthony Jarrells, Britain’s Bloodless Revolutions: 1688 and the
Romantic Reform of Literature, 2nd ed. (Houndmills, Basingstoke and New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
26. James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of
the Anglo-World, 1783-1939 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press:
2009), 51.
27. Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 23.
28. See, e.g., John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British
World-System, 1830-1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009);
Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Culture, and Society in Britain
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Makdisi
critiques Porter’s approach in Making England Western, 5-8.
29. Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the
Philosophy of History (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press,
2005).
30. C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections
and Comparisons (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 470.
31. See, e.g., Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British
World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2004).
Cf. Kaul’s thoroughgoing critique of Ferguson and his fellow
travelers in his “Coda: How to Write Postcolonial Histories of
Empire?,” in The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and
Postcolonial Theory, eds. Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 305-27.
32. Fernando Coronil, quoted in Patricia Yeager, “Editor’s
Column: The End of Postcolonial Theory? A Roundtable with Sunil
Agnani, Fernando Coronil, Gaurav Desai, Mamadou Diouf, Simon Gikandi,
Susie Tharu, and Jennifer Wenzel,” PMLA 122.3 (May 2007): 637.
33. For a defense of more traditional postcolonial approaches,
see, e.g., Robert J.C. Young, “Postcolonial Remains,” New Literary History
43 (2012): 19-42. A recent critique of the assumptions of the
influential Subaltern School of postcolonialism is provided by Vivek
Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (New York and London:
Verso, 2013).
34. In addition to titles cited previously, see, e.g., Sunil M.
Agnani, Hating Empire Properly: The Two Indies and the Limits of Enlightenment
Anticolonialism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013); Tony C.
Brown, The Primitive, the Aesthetic and the Savage: An Enlightenment Problematic
(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012);
Elizabeth Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-
Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010); Laura Doyle,
Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640-1940
(Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2008); Eugenia Zuroski
Jenkins, A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Nigel Leask,
Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770-1840: ‘From an Antique Land’
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Rajani Sudan, Fair
Exotics: Xenophobic Subjects in English Literature, 1720-1850 (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).
35. For WSA’s debt to Fernand Braudel and the annales school, see,
e.g., Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham,
NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005), esp. 18-19.
36. David Palumbo-Liu, Bruce Robbins, and Nirvana Tanoukhi,
“Introduction: The Most Important Thing Happening,” in Immanuel
Wallerstein and the Problem of the World: System, Scale, Culture, eds. Palumbo-Liu,
Robbins, and Tanoukhi (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press,
2011), 11.
37. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant,
1789-1914 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California
Press, 2011), xiii.
38. See, e.g., Manuel Castells and Martin Ince, Conversations with
Manuel Castells (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), 56-57.
39. As Saskia Sassen explains, “accounts centered on the
hypermobility of capital and the power of transnationals” tend to
ignore or underestimate “the fact that many of the resources
necessary for global economic activities are not hypermobile and are
indeed deeply embedded in places such as global cities and export-
processing zones, and so are many global work-processes”: Sassen, A
Sociology of Globalization (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2007), 98.
40. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 11; Latour,
Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2005), 7.
41. Fredric Jameson, “Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” in
The Cultures of Globalization, eds. Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham, NC
and London: Duke University Press, 1998), 56.
42. See, e.g., Miranda Burgess, “Transport, Anxiety, and the
Romantic Poetics of Feeling,” Studies in Romanticism 49.2 (Summer 2010):
229-60; Thomas Pfau, Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790-1840
(Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
43. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 31.
More recently, Peter Sloterdijk’s multivolume Spheres project seeks to
deepen and extend our understanding of the history of humanity’s
efforts to shape its environment, psychically as well as physically.
See Spheres Vol. 1: Bubbles: Microsphereology, trans. Wieland Hoban (Los
Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2011). For more period-specific studies of
literary mediality, see, e.g., Maureen N. McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy,
and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008); Steve Newman, Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the
Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
44. See, e.g., Regina Hewitt, ed., John Galt: Observations and Conjectures
on Literature, History, and Society (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press,
2012); Jacqueline Labbe, Writing Romanticism: Charlotte Smith and William
Wordsworth, 1784-1807 (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2011).
45. See, e.g., Mary Helen McMurran, The Spread of Novels: Translation and
Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, NJ and London: Princeton
University Press, 2010); Andrew; Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment and
the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and
America (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
46. See, e.g., James McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology
(New York: St. Martin’s, 2000); Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology:
Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991); Kate
Castellano, The Ecology of British Romantic Conservatism, 1790-1837 (Houndmills:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013);
47. See Ian Duncan, with Leith Davis and Janet Sorensen,
“Introduction,” Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, eds. Davis, Duncan,
and Sorensen (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 1-19.
48. Michael Gardiner, “Introduction,” Scottish Literature and Postcolonial
Literature: Comparative Texts and Critical Perspectives, eds. Gardiner, Graeme
Macdonald and Niall O’Gallagher (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2011), 3.
49. “Mondialisation” – literally, “worldwideification” – is the
term preferred to globalization by both Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc
Nancy in their writings on the subject. See, e.g., Derrida,
“Globalization, Peace, and Cosmopolitanism,” in Negotiations: Interventions
and Interviews, 1971-2001, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2002), 374-75; Nancy, The Creation of the World
or Globalization, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press, 2007), 28.
50. Eric Cazdyn and Imre Szeman, After Globalization (Malden, MA and
Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 226.
51. Cronin, Expanding World, 7.
52. See Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The
Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New
York: Harper and Row, 1982), 115-54; Rey Chow, The Age of the World Target:
Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (Durham, NC and London:
Duke University Press, 2006).