Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture

320 Pages·2014·1.574 MB·English

by  Saree Makdisi

making england western

making england western
Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture
saree makdisi
the university of chicago press
chicago and london
saree makdisi is professor of English and comparative literature at the University
of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of three books, including William
Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s, also published by the University
of Chicago Press.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2014 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2014.
Printed in the United States of America
23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5
isbn- 13: 978-0-226-92313-0 (cloth)
isbn-13: 978-0-226-92314-7 (paper)
isbn-13: 978-0-226-92315-4 (e- book)
doi: 10.7208/ chicago/ 9780226923154.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Makdisi, Saree.
Making England western : occidentalism, race, and imperial culture / Saree
Makdisi.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-226-92313-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-226-92314-7 (pbk. :
alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-226-92315-4 (e-book) 1. Great Britain—Colonies.
2. Civilization, Western. 3. Imperialism. 4. Great Britain—Foreign relations.
5. Great Britain—Ethnic relations. I. Title.
jv1035.m35 2014
303.48'241—dc23
2013014447
o This paper meets the requirements of ansi/ niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence
of Paper).
for samir and maissa,
my beautiful
children
Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads
without Improvement, are roads of Genius.
—William Blake
contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xxi
Introduction: Occidentalism, Race, Imperial Culture 1
Part One: Preparing the Way
1. Making London Western 39
2. Civilizing the Ballad 87
Part Two: Episodes of Occidentalism
3. Domineering over Others: Occidentalism, Empire,
Moral Virtue 133
4. Occidentalism and the Erotics of the Self 151
5. The Occidental Imperative 174
Part Three: Occidentalism in Crisis
6. “Irregular Modernization”: Charles Dickens and
the Crisis of Occidentalism 195
Conclusion 233
Notes 243
Index 283
vii

preface
England in the years around 1800 was not what would today be called a
Western country, nor was it possible to neatly and cleanly distinguish
it as a metropolitan space from the various colonial sites—both near and
far—over which it sought to project political, economic, and cultural power.
Those, at least, are the claims that mark this book’s point of departure, and
I’d like briefl y to elaborate on each of them before more fully articulating
my argument in the Introduction and in the chapters that follow.
To begin with, we too often take for granted just how settled the impe-
rial metropolis was in the moment of revolutionary crisis and transition
at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century,
and hence how sharply England and the English could, at that time, be con-
trasted with spaces and populations subject to British colonial violence in a
patchwork of territories stretching from Ireland and the Highlands of Scot-
land to the Caribbean, India, and southern Africa. For it’s not as though En-
gland (and I want to emphasize that this book is specifi cally interested in
England, rather than Britain more generally) were always already a metro-
politan center in the fullest sense of that term; that is, a center of empire
whose people and spaces could be uniformly distinguished as such from
those of its peripheries (distinguished, for example, by virtue of a claim to
greater civilization, advancement, progress, or to various forms of cultural,
civilizational, or racial superiority).
Indeed, the Romantic period constituting the decades straddling the
turn of the nineteenth century was the moment in which England really
started to become a metropolitan center in a broadly consolidated social,
economic, and cultural sense, on terms that would involve weaving together
more and more people, and ultimately the national population, into a pu-
tatively homogeneous “we,” a collectivity that could claim to possess—or
ix