Technologies of Empire: Writing, Imagination, and the Making of Imperial Networks, 1750–1820

By Dermot Ryan

Technologies of Empire looks at the ways in which writers of the long eighteenth century treat writing and imagination as technologies that can produce rather than merely portray empire. Authors ranging from Adam Smith to William Wordsworth consider writing not as part of a larger logic of orientalism that represents non-European subjects and spaces in fixed ways, but as a dynamic technology that organizes these subjects and transforms these spaces. Technologies of Empire reads the imagination as an instrument that works in tandem with writing, expanding and consolidating the networks of empire. Through readings across a variety of genres, ranging from Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France to Maria Edgeworth’s Irish fiction and Wordsworth’s epic poetry, this study offers a new account of writing’s role in empire-building and uncovers a genealogy of the romantic imagination that is shot through by the imperatives of imperialism.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: Dec 21, 2012
• ISBN: 9781644530801

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Technologies of Empire

Technologies of Empire

Writing, Imagination, and the Making of

Imperial Networks, 1750–1820

Dermot Ryan

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS

Newark

Published by University of Delaware Press

Co-published with The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

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Copyright © 2013 by Dermot Ryan

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

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ISBN 978-1-61149-448-8 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-61149-449-5 (electronic)

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Printed in the United States of America

For my mother

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful for the support of my colleagues in the Department of English at Loyola Marymount University. I want particularly to acknowledge the following members of the department’s faculty colloquium for their scrupulous feedback on my manuscript: Stuart H.D. Ching, Paul Harris, Holli Levitsky, Steve Mailloux, Judy Park, Casey Shoop, Lucy Wilson, and Kelly Younger. K.J. Peters was a wonderful resource on questions of genre and theory. Maria Jackson, the department’s administrative assistant, provided logistical support and encouragement. I benefited from a writing retreat organized by the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts at LMU. I also want to thank the College for its generous subvention assistance.

I would not have finished this book without the intellectual and practical guidance of Robin Miskolcze. Her insistent questions have immeasurably improved this book; her kindness, patience, and humor sustained me as I revised it.

This book grew out my graduate work at Columbia University and I want to thank those teachers and friends who sponsored it in its early stages. I will always be grateful to my dissertation director Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak for taking on the original project and for her support throughout its development. It is one of the privileges of my life to have worked with such a brilliant teacher and scholar. My thanks to Clifford Siskin whose insights into the work of writing continue to transform our understanding of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I owe him an enormous debt of gratitude for his advice as I have tried to navigate the professional world after graduate school and prepare this book for publication. His intellectual rigor and great generosity are a model of true collegiality in the profession. Jenny Davidson’s erudition, wit, and unflagging enthusiasm sustained me throughout my time at Columbia. Ursula Heise, Bruce Robbins, and Gauri Viswanathan were important intellectual mentors during my time there. Deborah Elise White inspired my return to romanticism. Many thanks to Marty Burke, Mary McGlynn, Coílín Parsons, and the other members of the University Seminar on Irish Studies, who offered incisive comments on an early draft of my Edgeworth chapter. Ben Conisbee Baer, Shannan Clark, Eric Glatt, Brian Lennon, Felicity Palmer, Nergis Urtürk, and Siona Wilson were invaluable interlocutors while I was in New York.

I was kindly invited to present portions of this work to the Department of English at the University of Oregon and to the UCLA Romantic Reading group. I want particularly to thank Forest Pyle, Liz Bohls, Sangita Gopal, Anne Mellor, and Saree Makdisi for their comments and suggestions on those occasions. A version of Chapter Two appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies and I am grateful to the publishers for permitting me to reprint this material here. I thank the Trustees of Boston University for permitting me to reprint a version of Chapter One, which appeared in Studies in Romanticism. I also want to thank the editors and anonymous readers of these two journals for their helpful questions and suggestions.

I am glad to have the opportunity to thank my former student Scott Meslow who did wonderful work for me on my Edmund Burke chapter. My warm thanks to Mimi Jacobie for her help with the final manuscript. If Stephanie Revy and Josie Colmenares do not pursue brilliant graduate careers, it will be a great loss for the discipline of English, but a huge opportunity for the world of publishing. They are incredibly hardworking, sensitive and conscientious copy editors.

I thank Julia Oestreich at the University of Delaware Press for all her help. I am grateful to the press’s reviewers for providing such encouraging feedback on the original manuscript. My thanks also to Brooke Bascietto, Chris Basso, and Jane Mara at the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group who helped see this book through to publication.

I owe my greatest debt to Alexandra Neel. She has championed this book when I wouldn’t and believed in it when I didn’t. She has been its best reader. I thank her with all my heart.

Introduction

Empire follows Art, and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose

—William Blake[1]

This book aims to reshape postcolonial studies of the long eighteenth century by recognizing that many post-enlightenment authors treat writing and imagination as technologies, capable of forging the networks essential to the consolidation of the empires of Britain and France. In the works that are the focus of this book, writing is not part of a larger logic of orientalism that represents non-European subjects and spaces in fixed ways, but a dynamic technology that organizes these subjects and transforms these spaces, assimilating them into imperial networks. The robust definition of technology employed here, encompassing as it does learned techniques and organizational forms as well as tools and machines, can also transform our understanding of the imagination during this period.[2] Following the example of writers as diverse as Adam Smith and William Wordsworth, I consider the imagination as an instrument that can be trained and adapted. In other words, I think about it as a technology and use this new lens to reconsider its role in the work of empire. Through readings across a variety of genres, ranging from Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) and Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1759) to Maria Edgeworth’s Irish fiction and Wordsworth’s poetry, this study invites a revision of how we conceive of writing’s role in empire-building and uncovers a genealogy of the romantic imagination that is shot through by the imperatives of imperialism.

One response to the rather bald claim implied by this book’s title is that it was not writing and imagination that forged the imperial networks of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but rather blood and treasure, to borrow Jonathan Swift’s phrase, or perhaps debt and taxes, to cite John Brewer’s neat summation of the mechanisms that drove Britain’s bellicose expansion in the eighteenth century.[3] The Sinews of Power, Brewer’s study of the emergence and consolidation of the British financial-military state, attributes the growth of the British Empire to a financial juggernaut, which in turn entailed a proportionate increase in national indebtedness and civil administrators.[4] In Brewer’s account, the deployment of financial expertise, not feats of imagination, builds empires and consequently scholars should consult ledgers, not works of imagination, to discover the secret of imperial expansion.[5]

In response, I simply propose that a number of prominent eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century authors saw things differently. If traditionally we think of imagination as the purview of the romantic artist or critic—we picture Samuel Taylor Coleridge parsing the faculty in Biographia—one of this book’s goals is to draw attention to the ways statesmen and economists as well as poets set the imagination to work. Smith, the father of modern economic theory, assigns a central role to the imagination in the construction of empire, arguing that the sympathetic imagination’s investment in and ability to construct complex systems explains why the British are building a global empire. According to Smith, the lack of this systematizing instrument in the members of the rude and barbarous nations accounts for their status as the victims rather than the subjects of imperial history.[6]

The other technology put to work by Smith to promote new forms of empire is writing. Specifically, Smith views political economy as an instrument that advocates rather than simply describes public policy. Smith justifies devoting the fourth part of The Wealth of Nations to an analysis of the different schools of political economy on the grounds that they have had a considerable influence…upon the public conduct of princes and sovereign states.[7] In doing so, Smith invites his readers to view his own economic writings as just such an agent of change. Of course, to argue that Smith sees political economy as intervening in public policy is to go against a tradition of reading Smith’s economic treatise as a first halting effort to transform political economy into an empirical science. Yet, if we are persuaded by Kurt Heinzelman’s argument that The Wealth of Nations is the last true georgic, such a reading does not run as deeply against the grain as it may at first appear.[8] As Clifford Siskin points out, the eighteenth-century georgic repeatedly draws attention to writing as something that can change a world.[9] In the georgic, descriptions of a world often turn out, on inspection, to be prescriptions.

According to Heinzelman, the georgic, a form traditionally devoted to farming, gravitated over the course of the eighteenth century towards economic discourse.[10] This development occurs while the georgic more generally is displacing the pastoral as the appropriate mode to address life in the English countryside. John Murdoch notes that, from an English perspective increasingly inflected by the ideology of an emergent agrarian capitalism and its attendent rhetoric of improvement, the pastoral could seem, frankly, backward, while the georgic could appear an ideal template for an industrious nation.[11] As The Wealth of Nations hammers home: the downside of pastoral leisure is poverty, while the upside of georgic labor is wealth.

The georgic extends this celebration of industry to its own labors. Whereas the shepherd’s song of the pastoral can be subsumed under the rubric of rustic ease, georgic writing insistently draws attention to its status as a product of labor. In other words, the georgic analogizes between the work of the fields and the work on paper: Just as plows, the first implement of the mapmaker’s craft, define cities, writes Heinzelman, so is the georgic differentiated from pastoral because of its inscriptive character.[12] Elaborating on this analogy, we might say that in the georgic mode, writing breaks new ground.

Critics have also noted how deeply entwined eighteenth-century georgic is with the discourse of empire. Karen O’ Brien traces the imperial georgic as far back as Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s Georgics, which created a vogue for poems tracing the roots of the nation’s imperial expansion and happiness to the daily grind of the countryside.[13] In this sense, the very structure of The Wealth of Nations—its narrative trajectory from the domestic shop-floor to a great empire on the west side of the Atlantic[14] —follows the georgic convention of linking work at home to empire abroad, an articulation brilliantly achieved at the beginning of the century in Alexander Pope’s Windsor Forest (1713):

Thy Trees, fair Windsor! now shall leave their Woods,

And half thy forests rush into my Floods,

Bear Britain’s Thunder, and her Cross display,

To the bright Regions of the rising Day;

Tempt Icy Seas, where scarce the Waters roll,

Where Clearer Flames glow round the frozen Pole;

Or under Southern Skies exalt their Sails,

Led by new Stars, and born by spicy Gales!

For me the Balm shall bleed, and Amber flow,

The Coral redden, and the Ruby glow,

The Pearly Shell its lucid Globe infold,

And Phoebus warm the ripening Ore to Gold,

The Time shall come, when free as Seas or Wind

Unbounded Thames shall flow for all Mankind,

Whole Nations enter with each swelling Tyde,

And Seas but join the regions they divide;[15]

Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814), the focus of my final chapter, which telescopes out from the work of cultivation in England’s unambitious schools to the civilizing work of empire, repeats this topos of the imperial georgic.

Technologies of Empire grew out of a growing sense of certain methodological limitations with postcolonial work on British literature and empire between 1750 and 1820. This study challenges the passive role played by writing and imagination within so much postcolonial scholarship. Still largely indebted to Edward Said’s Orientalism, postcolonial studies of the long eighteenth century tend to concentrate on writing as just one of a number of modes of representation. For instance, Kate Teltscher’s study of European and British writing on India between 1600 and 1800, India Inscribed, charts the transition of Britain from trading partner to ruling power through a detailed analysis of a large number of textual (and some visual) representations of empire.[16] Likewise, Saree Makdisi, who has written extensively on romantic imperialism, suggests that British rule relied upon the minute documentation of the endless activities of the Company in India, so that what was being judged . . . were not the material activities themselves, but rather the documents produced alongside them—not, in other words, the ‘realities’ but the ‘representations.’[17] Focused on the content of writing (the representations), so much postcolonial work remains blind to the transformative powers of the technology itself.[18] In contrast to Teltscher and Makdisi, this study approaches writing itself as a set of material activities not merely as a body of textual representations and documents. I depart from scholars like Makdisi and Teltscher insofar as I do not treat writing as a transparent medium of representations, but as a complex web of social and material practices outlined by Raymond Williams in The Sociology of Culture:

[T]he technology of writing is not only the series of inventions—a script, an alphabet, and materials for its production—which initiate the process, but the mode of distribution of the work thus produced. And this mode of distribution is itself not only technical—manuscript copying and then printing—but depends on a wider technology, primarily determined by social relations, in which the ability to read, which is the true substance of distribution, is itself produced.[19]

According to Williams’s definition, the technology of writing not only denotes the mass production and dissemination of printed texts, but also includes the institutions and practices that produce and shape the readers of those materials. This study asks how authors engage with these practices and institutions. Drawing on recent scholarship on Irish literacy and reading audiences before and after the Act of Union (1800), for instance, my third chapter looks at how Edgeworth’s deft navigation of Irish and English reading publics in the newly expanded United Kingdom and her role as mediator between these reading audiences aim to establish the imperial networks that she presents in her fictions.

This book was written with the conviction that a true understanding of the role of writing in the work of empire entails exploring writing as a set of practices embedded in and facilitating other social and material activities. In this sense, my project builds on the recent reexamination of the Enlightenment undertaken by scholars like Siskin, William Warner, Adrian Johns, and Darrin McMahon.[20] Rather than approach the Enlightenment as a set of principles, scientific methodologies, or a particular orientation toward the world, the scholarship of these critics draws attention to the institutional and material conditions of enlightenment—conditions which include the emergence of what Peter Clark calls an associational world of clubs and societies, the growth and extension of the postal system, but, most importantly, the consolidation of a print culture and those social and political networks that print enables and encourages.[21]

Reflecting on This is Enlightenment, Christina Lupton sees Siskin and Warner’s introduction to this collection of essays as offering a unique definition of the Enlightenment as the point in history at which the transmission of ideas overwhelms and reshapes the esssential nature of those ideas.[22] We can think of the Enlightenment as the moment when the communication technologies that transmit ideas became as socially transformative as the ideas themselves. Insofar as we can think about the Enlightenment as an event in the history of mediation in which print took center stage, my own work asks how the practices, institutions, and networks enabled by print were harnessed to consolidate imperial power.[23] At the same time, this book reinserts the work of the imagination back into its rightful place at the heart of the Enlightenment. After all, if system is the master print genre of the Enlightenment, as Siskin argues, this study notes that it is imagination and not reason that Smith identifies as the instrument we use to build systems in the first place.

Therefore, while I believe that we must restore a historical awareness of the institutions and practices of writing to any analysis of literature’s role in empire-building during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this study also thinks historically about the imagination. In assessing the role of this faculty in the work of empire, I am sensitive to the risk that the imagination itself becomes a begged question. James Engell’s The Creative Imagination shows how a study can take the imagination for granted at the very moment it purports to take the faculty as its object of analysis. In Engell’s survey, the imagination functions as the means of explaining the Enlightenment’s invention of romanticism: The last thirty or forty years of the century constitute that time when the Enlightenment was creating Romanticism, primarily by developing the idea of the imagination.[24] While this problematic narrative at least holds out the possibility that the imagination is a historical category—after all, the Enlightenment is described as developing the idea of imagination—Engell is not entirely consistent on this matter. In Engell’s narrative, the eighteeenth-century artist, faced with fundamental epistemological and ontological problems bequeathed by Descartes, finds the imagination ready-at-hand to address the chasm between mind and matter: [M]any gifted individuals saw in the imagination a power that could bridge the gulf between man and nature and knit the two together again.[25] Caught in a post-Cartesian bind, this gifted individual conveniently discovers the imagination fully formed. In short, Engell assumes what his study promises to analyze.

The writers discussed in the following chapters draw attention to the social and historical conditions that enable the kind of imagination they are examining. For instance, Smith considers the sympathetic imagination as conditioned by an exchange economy. While the members of Smith’s rude and barbarous nations occupy a recognizable social order with many of the attendant institutions of a partiarchal culture (arranged marriages, etc.), they are not tied by bonds of sympathy. Although Smith recognizes that savages have some kind of creative faculty (he notes their artistic productions), their subsistence economy has not fostered a faculty capable of allowing them to imagine themselves in the place of another. Smith is generating a taxonomy of imaginations, each determined by social, economic, and historical conditions. To read Smith’s work on the imagination is to be reminded of the extent to which we have naturalized and privatized the social and institutional aspects of practices like imagining.

The work of writing and imagination that this study concentrates on is the forging of imperial networks. In employing a term, network, that does not appear in any of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century texts I discuss in the following pages, I am indulging in what Warner terms strategic anachronism: the retroactive application of concepts from the networked computer to early epochs in the history of communication media.[26] Jon Saklofske offers an eloquent defense of this practice, specifically in relation to networks: Networks are not new—however, our networked technologies as well as the increasing prevalence of decentralizing network structures that resist hierarchical distributions now put us in a position to better comprehend their existence and effects in relation to traditional spheres of mediation, subjectivity, and meaning in the Romantic period.[27] In other words, our present conjuncture helps us see things in the Romantic period that may have been less apparent to us in the past.

While I am happy to risk allegations of presentism in employing the concept of network in my discussions of these texts, I would point out that one of our contemporary definitions of network emerges within the chronological range of this book. If the dates that frame this study mark the moment of Smith’s application of the enlightenment genre of system to the question of empire (1750) and Wordsworth’s combination of writing and imagination in the interest of an imperial pedagogy (1820), then the understanding of network as an interconnected and interdependent system of elements actually begins circulating during this time period.

In his Lay Sermon, Blessed are Ye That Sow, Coleridge both depicts and accounts for the interdependence of the British in 1817:

The administration of the laws; the almost continual preaching of moral prudence; the number and respectability of our sects; the pressure of our ranks on each other, with the consequent reserve and watchfulness of demeanor in the superior ranks, and the emulation in the subordinate; the vast depth, expansion, and systematic movements of our trade; and the consequent inter-dependence, the arterial or nerve-like, net-work of property, which make every deviation from outward integrity a calculable loss to the offending individual himself from its effects, as obstruction and irregularity; and lastly, the naturalness of doing as others do:—these and the like influences, peculiar, some in the kind and all in the degree, to this privileged island, are buttresses, on which our foundationless well-doing is upheld, even as a house of cards, the architecture of our infancy, in which each is supported by all.[28]

In Coleridge’s evocation of the arterial or nerve-like, net-work of property, we have that sense of a system of interconnected and interdependent elements that form the basis of the two types of network—structural configurations and social networks—that this study will emphasize and on which I will elaborate below. The sentence comprises a list of features peculiar to British life, which Coleridge, employing an architectural metaphor, calls the buttresses of Britain’s foundationless well-doing. For Coleridge, each element (the administration of the laws, the almost continual preaching of moral prudence, etc.) represents a means by which the members of the society are brought into interconnection. As the list proceeds, the focus shifts from elements of cohesion which we might encounter in a more traditional face-to-face community—evoked most particularly in the image of the reserve and watchfulness of demeanor in the superior ranks answered by the emulation of their subordinates—to more emergent conditions of interdependence that derive from and are mapped out by the systematic movements of…trade. These movements trace a lattice-like structure that is at once expans[ive] and has depth. This vast space is not static, however, but dynamic, mapped out by these commercial routes and producing an inter-dependent, arterial or nerve-like net-work of property. We have moved from a geometric to an organic body. Indeed, the architectural metaphors employed at the end of the sentence (the buttresses, the house of cards) are introduced merely to highlight the network’s difference from traditional architectonic structures. The evocation of buttresses stresses that we are not dealing with a superstructure that is supported by a base (after all Britain’s well-doing is foundationless), but a structure