Romanticism and Colonialism

edited by Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson

Chapter 2: Romanticism and colonialism: races, places, peoples, 1785-1800
by Peter J. Kitson

In the Romantic period, the processes of colonialism underwent significant

transformation, both at the material and ideological level. The rather rigid
Marxist distinction between colonialism and imperialism is complicated by
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The traditional, historical
periodization of the Romantic Age as one which coincided with the rise and
fall of the old colonial system prior to its supersession by the 'New
Imperialism' from around 1870 onwards, has been problematized by recent
writing. In fact, a new system of British imperialism appears to have been
emerging at roughly the same time as what we know as Romanticism began to
appear.[1] Gananath Obeyesekere has recently argued that it was in the late
eighteenth century that the concept of the 'colonialist' changed. Obeyesekere
regards the three voyages of Captain James Cook as crucial to this
transformation: 'the voyages that he led heralded a shift in the goals of
discovery from conquest, plunder, and imperial appropriation to scientific
exploration devoid of any explicit agenda for conquest of and for the
exploitation and terrorization of native peoples'.[2] Similarly, Mary Louise Pratt
noticed that, around this time, there occurred the end of the 'last great
navigational phase' of discovery and its replacement by a growing concern
with the exploration of the interiors of the continents. This was fuelled by the
concomitant emergence of a new 'planetary consciousness', altering the ways
in which Europeans perceived themselves and understood their place on the
planet. Pratt argues that this led to a kind of 'anti-colonialist' literature which
conceals an underlying colonial purpose.[3] Pratt's point about the movement to
interior exploration still needs qualifying. The sublime polar landscapes, the
last remote areas of the globe, remained unexplored. On his second voyage
Cook explored the Antarctic regions and his third and final voyage began, in
1776, as an attempt to discover the North West Passage, a navigable
waterway, which, it was believed, crossed North America from East to
West.[4]In 1818, the British government organized the first of several Arctic
explorations, and in 1845 the ill-fated Franklin expedition left in search of the
elusive passage. The sublime polar sea-scapes which haunt the Romantic
imagination are, in part, a response to this scientific endeavour. It was to seek
the North West Passage, as well as to discover the secrets of the magnet, that
Captain Robert Walton, one of the 'sons' of Captain Cook, left for the Arctic
Circle in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), where he encountered the dying
creator and his unnatural progeny in extremes of cold and ice. Coleridge's 'The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner' (1798) similarly uses the Antarctic as a means
to explore the metaphor of mental and maritime exploration, describing a
voyage bearing remarkable similarities with Cook's second expedition (1772-
1775).[5] Several commentators have pointed out that the guilt felt by the
mariner after shooting the albatross might be a displacement of a more general
guilt experienced by the Western maritime nations for their treatment of other
cultures.[6]

The treatment of other cultures became a central issue in British Romanticism

and in the new variety of British imperialism after 16 February 1788. On that
day, Edmund Burke rose to his feet in Westminster Hall and began the
impeachment of the Governor of Bengal, Warren Hastings. Burke's speeches,
and the impeachment which they launched, were the first powerful
manifestations of colonial guilt at the centre of British political life. An
audience of MPs and members of the public were confronted with a narrative
determined to expose the brutal and violent acts done in the interest of the
Company's profits. Burke's sensational narrative was not anti-colonialist.
Rather, it contained a reading of Indian society from which Burke argued for a
different, and, he believed, more effective colonialist policy than that executed
by Hastings. As Michael Franklin points out in his chapter in this volume,
Burke 'saw the politics of the subcontinent as the imperial and ethical
challenge of his time'. He represented Indian society, for the benefit of his
Westminster audience, as a complex civilization bound by traditional
institutions, social distinctions and laws. Hastings had violated this traditional
structure, humiliating Indians of power and wealth, reducing all to the level of
subjects equally vulnerable to the Company's arbitrary power. In a critique
that he was to develop in the 1790s in his attacks on the French Revolution,
Burke showed Hastings' colonialism to depend upon the destruction of pre-
colonial society and upon the construction in its place of an inherently
tyrannical (and unstable) despotism. The Company monopolized power:
Indian society was levelled, Indians of different ranks, castes, wealth all now
equally subject to its authority. Hastings, Burke claimed, was playing God: in
claiming 'arbitrary power' he was forgetting that he was 'bound by the external
laws of Him, that gave it, with which no human authority can dispense'.[7] But
playing God in the colonial space of India was a Satanic temptation prompted
by the culture's unending and complex difference, by the very variety that
enabled it so effectively to elude the colonialist's desire for control. The
colonialist seeking such control was led into an expansionary, but unavailing,
logic of terror, becoming bloodier and bloodier in his efforts to make India
assume a pattern over which he could have knowledge and authority.[8]

Burke's case against Hastings was implicitly also a case for a colonialism
based on rule through the adaptation and manipulation, rather than the
destruction, of the existing Indian power-structures. As such it mirrored, as
Michael Franklin's chapter shows, the kind of colonial administration
practised by Burke's friend Sir William Jones (although Jones's detailed
knowledge of Indian culture eventually led him to perspectives rather different
from Burke's). But Burke's impeachment speeches were also important in
other, related, ways. They brought debate about Britain's colonial role in the
East to the heart of public life. Their rhetoric of horror vividly animated some
of the oppositions produced by colonialism - showing the subjection of those
who were colonized to be a process inherent in the attempt by the colonizing
power to construct itself in a position of exclusive authority. And they
suggested that this attempt was the more dangerous, for colonizer and
colonized, the greater the exclusivity claimed.

Both Jones and Burke shaped the discourse of Romanticism. 'All-

accomplished Jones', as Anna Letitia Barbauld described him, showed that
Oriental culture could be translated into terms familiar to Europeans without
the figurative excess of Burke. India became more easily read, more easily
grafted on to existing aesthetic modes, because his translations represented it
as different but not alien. Franklin shows too that Jones did not simply, as
Aijaz Ahmad and others have implied, conservatively identify Hindu culture
with the work of the Brahman élite at the expense of popular
movements.[9]Although concerned to remove aspects of popular Hinduism
likely to confirm European readers in their prejudices about Indian savagery,
Jones was appreciative, to a degree most Orientalists were not, of the
continuity between ancient Sanskrit devotional texts and contemporary
popular cults. And Franklin also shows, contra Said, that Jones's Orientalism
did not simplyimpose a colonialist discourse upon India, facilitating British
administration. It also partially fostered Indian nationalism by helping in the
process of liberating its writings from Brahman control.

Jones's neoplatonic translations made Hinduism available to the Romantic

poets - as the work of Southey, Shelley and Coleridge reveals. But Burke's
anti-Hastings language also left an enduring rhetorical legacy. Its figurative
power, its enthralling excess, its violent attack upon colonial violence
fascinated Cowper, Wordsworth, Coleridge and their radical mentors. All
admired Burke's rhetoric and echoed it in their own attacks upon the slave-
trade, even as they bemoaned Burke's later use of similar rhetoric to attack
 enthusiasts for the French Revolution. Historians of Romanticism have too
often read Wordsworth's and Coleridge's 1790s use of Burke as evidence of a
'reactionary' abandonment of pro-French radicalism. If, however, we trace
their Burkean rhetoric to their participation in the anti-slavery campaign, it
can be seen to derive from Burke's attack on the current forms of British
colonialism. Coleridge paid tribute to Burke as 'the bold Encomiast of the
American Rebellion' against Britain.[10] And in his lecture against the slave-
trade, he developed Burke's own rhetoric in a racist portrait of American
Indians as 'human Tygers' that was intended to make readers guilty about the
imperialism of the British government who employed them to attack white
settlers.[11] Guilt about British imperialism did not necessarily entail opposition
to all forms of colonialism: like other opponents of the slave-trade Coleridge
came to favour colonial expansion. Burke himself argued for more principled,
colonial government whilst opposing the trade:[12] in 1789 and 1791, he
supported Wilberforce's motions for total abolition, and in 1792, he sent
Henry Dundas his Sketch of a Negro Code which characteristically proposed
the expedient of regularization and humanization of the trade and of the
institution of slavery to accompany its gradual abolition.[13]
Current critical approaches to Romantic literature recognise the formative influence of historical
and political developments on its creation. This article contributes to this understanding by
focusing on British colonialism of the period from 1780 to 1830, in order to illustrate the
relationship between these events and the writing which emerged from that context. The texts
discussed include a wider variety of different forms of literary engagement with colonialism, and
therefore a broader interpretation of Romantic literature than it is conventionally accorded.
Travel narratives, missionary accounts, journalism and reports written to encourage settlement,
as well as novels and poetry are all considered. Suggestions for further reading, particularly
secondary works that discuss specific geographical regions in more detail, are provided in the
Works Cited.