1

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.

32

Notes

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).