Bruce McLeod, The Geography of Empire in English Literature,
1580-1745 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 296pp.
ISBN: 0521660793
No one who has read in English literature of the seventeenth century can
have failed to remark the many, and mounting, references to new worlds: to
exploration, the exchange of commodities, and overseas empire. In recent
years literary scholars have begun persuasively to argue the centrality of the
experience, knowledge and imagining of colonisation to writers such as
Edmund Spenser and Aphra Behn. McLeod’s purpose is to survey a century
and a half of literary and colonial exchange. He seeks not only to map the
traces and spaces of empire in early modern texts, but also to interrogate
literary works as agents in, makers of, the colonial and imperial project.
Examining case studies from Spenser to Swift, McLeod, arguing that the
great literature of this period is ‘inconceivable’ without colonisation, takes
up writers’ negotiations with space to analyse their narration, validation and
interrogation of empire.
McLeod’s project is important, his ambition large and his
chronological range wide. This is perhaps the first survey of its kind of the
impact of colonies and empire on the cultural imaginary. McLeod writes
well about the gendering of the discourse of empire. He identifies the
tensions within, as well as celebrations of, conquest and colonisation; he is
interesting on the ways in which colonial spaces came to refigure English
relations and hierarchies (as well as the reverse) and on the emerging
Romantic critique of imperial spacial discourses and hegemonies.
But overall this is a highly problematic, at times worrying, book that
fails to deliver in particulars what it claims in lofty generalities. The largest of
many problems lies in the close readings - or not very close readings - of the
literary texts: readings which often simplify or, worse, distort. To take an
example, while it is quite reasonable to suggest that Spenser inhabited a
world divided between ‘feudal’ and more ‘capitalist’ systems and values, it is
surely crude to categorise him as a spokesman for a ‘new social and
economic order which consigns the “knightly” to the grave’ (p. 68). The
efforts to read country house poems as agents of colonisation and empire
are intensely strained and the argument is not aided by McLeod’s silence on
Ben Jonson’s and Thomas Carew’s apparent lack of interest in the imperial
project. Here, as often in this book, assertions are no effective substitute for
argument. Was ‘the great rebuilding’ of early Stuart England, as is asserted,
‘a knitting together of the nation state and fledgling empire’? Was the
English country estate, in so many poems an imagined haven or attempted
retreat from the outside world, ‘dependent on...expansion’? (p. 89). As he
turns to Milton’s Comus, many readers will begin to feel that, rather than
demonstrating contemporary colonial ambition, it is the text that is
plundered for McLeod’s purposes. Aphra Behn is presented, to my mind far
too simply, as ‘sell[ing] the myth of imperialism’; and, while there are some
good passages on both, Defoe and Swift are insufficiently differentiated in
their engagements with colonialisation. Indeed the distinctions of individual
writers, with very different faiths, perspectives and agendas, receive here
scant treatment.
McLeod’s method is to take (sometimes contentious) statements
from critics - he appears excessively dependent on secondary materials - and
then to try to read seventeenth-century authors in the light of them and of
his own overarching agenda: the denaturalising of the ‘principles and...
practices of imperialism’. At times we sense the author’s own discomfort at
resistant texts and the difficulties that result: Inigo Jones’s style is, he tells us,
‘urban...public...essentially suburban’, and then he adds rather randomly,
‘even colonial’ (my italics, p. 101). Similarly, citing William Dampier on the
civilising effects of colonising Ireland, he observes casually, ‘it could just as
easily be Swift’ (p. 186). This is not the most persuasive way to make an
argument.
Instead of somewhat tendentious readings and uncritical dependence
on a battery of critics, McLeod needed to be more familiar with the wider
and diverse discourses of exploration and empire: religious writings, travel
narratives, economic pamphlets and mercantilist polemics, geographical and
anthropological surveys; and he needed to investigate the exchange between
these and what we now categorise as ‘literary texts’. He also needed to pay
greater attention to change and to a closer historicizing of texts written over
a long period of turbulent change, not only in England’s colonial expansion,
but in the social shifts and political crises of a century of revolutions that are
inseparable from the imagining of colonial experience.
The Geography of Empire is, in fine, a book that fails to do justice to its
subject and to the broader interdisciplinary project of reading literature as,
and in, history. That is unfortunate because both are vital to our
understanding of early modernity.
Kevin Sharpe
University of Warwick