I

THE RELATIONS BETWEEN imperial historiography and postcolonial studies have not always been cordial. Reviewing the historiography volume of The Oxford History of the British Empire (1999), Stephen Howe writes that many of the contributors express the anxiety “that a loose ensemble” of new approaches and theories

The old guard among imperial historians still wants to celebrate the achievements of the British Empire and/or to treat it objectively (whatever that means).³ The “invading hordes” are both more theoretical and more critical. Those historians who, like Catherine Hall and Ann Stoler, cross the divide productively strike me as more interesting than those who do not. Similarly, the postcolonial critics who, like Said himself, treat empiricist historiography respectfully while not kowtowing to it are also more persuasive than those who do not.

In Colonialism in Question, Africanist Frederick Cooper notes the importance of Said's work and postcolonial studies more generally for the historiography of European imperialism and its aftermaths (14–16). He indicates, however, that traditional historians of empire and decolonization often ignore or appear to be ignorant of postcolonial studies. His own insightful, theoretically sophisticated critique of both perspectives can be usefully supplemented by various recent surveys, including Robert Young's magisterial Postcolonialism. Young's is the most thorough study I have encountered of the voices of anti-colonialism and their transmutations into postcolonialism. Both Cooper and Young stress a key postcolonial and historiographic lesson: empires and colonialism always involve complex exchanges between peoples and cultures. If the metropole dominates the periphery, the periphery nevertheless influences the metropole. As Said put it in Culture and Imperialism: “Culture is never just a matter of ownership, of borrowing and lending with absolute debtors and creditors, but rather of appropriations, common experiences, and interdependencies of all kinds among different cultures. This is a universal norm” (217). Postcolonialism itself, Young declares, is “neither western nor non-western, but a dialectical product of interaction between the two” (Postcolonialism 68). Cooper likewise notes that, after Said's Orientalism (1978), scholarship “has rewritten French, British, Spanish, and American histories to show that Europe was reshaped in the colonies even as people in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas were confronting the categories of the colonizers” (31–32). Many of the works I mention here, while obviously aware that the colonizers affected the colonized through conquest, subjugation, extermination, and civilizing and Christianizing missions, explore the ways in which the colonized affected the colonizers. But that “dialectical” interplay–producing “hybridities” of many types and intensities–does not mean that empires are ever level playing fields or happy supports for civilizing benevolence. Most new studies of the British Empire are critical of at least some aspects of it, such as its ideological twin, racism, and its frequent accompaniment on colonial frontiers, genocide.⁴

But it is also the case that, despite decolonization and postcolonial critique, empire has been making quite a comeback recently, at least among political pundits, some of whom tout the British Empire as the model that the supposedly new American Empire (in Iraq and elsewhere) should imitate. To most of the pundits, it hardly matters (if they know) that Iraq was the bungled, tortured creation of the British in the first place, as was also, to a large extent, the equally tortured Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Two of the more prominent examples of neo-jingoist punditry are Niall Ferguson's Empire and Colossus. Both books, and the British televison show based on the former, seem to be scholarly enterprises, but I do not think they merit that recognition. Several reviewers have claimed that Ferguson's tomes are sound in terms of historical description, but that as prescription–teaching the new American imperialists how to proceed– they are less than persuasive, even “sophomoric” (Harootunian 107). As historical description also, however, his books fall short. Though aided and abetted by old-style imperial historiography, Ferguson pays little attention to anything postcolonial– that is, theoretical or critical. Indeed, he brings up decolonization mainly to suggest that many now independent nations would be better off if they had remained colonies (Empire 308–10). While he acknowledges many of the destructive features of the British Empire, he nevertheless believes that it grew increasingly benevolent, that it nurtured democracy in its colonies, and that it was a force for progress and civilization. “Just like the British Empire before it,” he writes, “the American Empire unfailingly acts in the name of liberty, even when its own self-interest is manifestly uppermost” (Empire 316). This will come as a surprise to readers knowledgable about many parts of the world, from Latin America to the Middle East.

One can catch a glimpse of Ferguson's ideological project by comparing what he has to say about famines in India during the Raj to Mike Davis's account in Late Victorian Holocausts. In Colossus, Ferguson has Davis in mind when he claims that “the famines that beset the Indian economy were far more environmental than political in origin” (195), but this completely misses the point. As Davis demonstrates, the British authorities, adhering strictly to “free trade” economics, failed to provide anything like adequate relief measures during the three major famines from the 1870s to the early 1900s, in which perhaps 30 million Indians perished. And the British were still in charge during the enormously devastating Bengal famine of 1943. Tracing crop failures to El Niño droughts, Davis shows precisely how they were “environmental…in origin.” The political issue concerns the relief measures that were not taken to prevent mass starvation, just as during the Irish Famine of 1845–50.

Davis's impressive book deals with droughts and famines in various parts of the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He tracks weather patterns, crop failures, and mass starvation in China, North Africa, and Brazil as well as in India. That famines occurred in all these places after lengthy periods of drought indicates a global pattern across the tropics induced by El Niño ocean currents and winds. Nature does not discriminate. But human beings do: Davis agrees with economist Amartya Sen that famines are not caused, in the final analysis, by food shortages. Though events like droughts or the potato blight that struck Ireland in the late 1840s cause crop failures, these–at least in modern times–can always be overcome by sensible relief measures. Starvation occurs because the starving millions are not seen as being entitled to food.

Like many other extollers of British imperialism, Ferguson emphasizes Britain's abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and of slavery in all of its colonies in 1833. From the early 1800s on, abolition has been offered as proof that the British Empire was or was becoming uniquely humane. There are several problems with this notion. First, abolition would not have been necessary if Britain and some of its colonies (including its former American colonies) had not been major players in slavery and the slave trade to begin with. Second, ever since Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery (1944), historians have wrestled with the question of the extent to which Britain's emergence as the world's leader in industrial capitalism and so-called “free trade,” coupled with the loss of its American colonies, rendered slavery economically obsolescent. And third, there were abolitionist movements elsewhere, including the United States, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and South America; Mexico outlawed slavery in 1829, four years prior to its abolition in British territory.

In Captives, Linda Colley notes that abolition became a source of self congratulation, allowing the British to think of themselves as benevolent imperialists (367). Colley turns the tables on the story of slavery and abolition by examining the many stories of white enslavement or captivity to dark others. Far from nostalgic or celebratory about the British Empire, Captives provides a rich investigation of its violent “underbelly” (4). Colley draws on “over a hundred printed and manuscript narratives written or dictated by Britons between 1600 and the mid-nineteenth century in response to captivity in the Mediterranean and North African region, in North America, and in South and Central Asia” (13). Although most of her materials are drawn from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Captives ends in the 1840s in Afghanistan, in the 1850s with the Indian “Mutiny,” and finally with some quite sensible reflections on “twenty-first-century issues” (374).

In all three sections of her study, Colley demonstrates from the inside out, so to speak, one of the main theses of postcolonial studies. Rather than invoking “hybridity” as a mantra, she shows its effects first and foremost on the captured colonizers. Everywhere imperial frontiers and cultural borders proved more “permeable” (195) than standard accounts have allowed. Between 1600 and the 1730s, as many as 18,000 “English subjects may have been captured” along the Barbary coast “and in most cases…enslaved for life in North Africa and elsewhere in the Ottoman empire” (44). If many versions of “going native,” both coerced and willing, emerge from these early narratives, that was also the case in North America. “During the Seven Years War…desertions from among the lower ranks of British regiments based in North America to various indigenous communities proved so numerous that any redcoat discovered living alongside Indians and claiming to have been captured, risked being court-martialled…” (195–96). Though Colley does not cite him, Hector St. John Crèvecoeur observed that “there must be in their social bond something singularly captivating and far superior to anything to be boasted of among us; for thousands of Europeans are Indians” (214).

The story of the disastrous first Afghan War of 1839–41, in which most of the British and sepoy forces died, but a handful of white officers and wives survived in captivity (some, such as Lady Florentia Sale, to publish their tales afterwards), is in part one of class privilege. Colley stresses that “white subalterns” in the service of the East India Company, many of them Irish, were themselves virtually captives of poverty and marginalization at home, and of military discipline abroad, and were often viewed by their officers as less reliable than the sepoys (356). Some deserted to live among the Afghanis. While the Afghan debacle points backward to the stories of defeat and captivity along the Barbary coast and in Mysore (on which, besides Colley, see Mukherjee 110–17), and ahead to the American “Iranian hostage” crisis of 1879–81, from the 1840s on “Britons no longer expected to fail, or to be seriously constrained on the global stage” (Colley 364). That confidence, however, contributed to the hysterical reaction of the British to the great Rebellion or “Mutiny” of 1857–58 (372–74).

Captivity was perhaps the most extreme version of how European selves might be transformed into something hybrid or alien. Often, however, “going native” was voluntary.⁵

The dustcover to the new biography of Lady Anne Blunt by H. V. F. Winstone reproduces a 1907 photograph of its subject in Arab garb. Traveling with her husband, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, this granddaughter of Lord Byron was apparently the first European woman to trek through the Arabian peninsula. She fell in love with Arabia and also with Arabian horses, a breed she is credited with saving from possible extinction. She authored two well-read travelogues, Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates (1878) and A Pilgrimage to Nejd (1879), as well as the posthumous The Authentic Arabian Horse. After she separated from her husband in 1896, she lived near Cairo until her death in 1917. Perhaps her adoption of an Arabic lifestyle was partly a response to her domineering, temperamental, philandering husband. She was, in a very real sense, his captive throughout their marriage.

Lady Blunt's story, well told by Winstone, is only one of thousands of examples of British men and women taking on–or wishing to take on– exotic behaviors, costumes and customs, in the far reaches of the world. In Imperial Bodies, E. M. Collingham surveys the transformations of “Anglo-Indian bodies” in the subcontinent, from the era of the white nabobs to independence. Many of these “bodily” transformations were pleasurable: shampooing, wearing pajamas, acquiring Indian mistresses, having servants attend to every physical need. But there were also the threats “of physical and moral corruption” (32). Collingham has rather less to say about women than about men, and less still about sexual practices than I expected; she also uses the words “body” and “bodily” so often that the effect is sometimes more repetitive than analytical. Bodily habits and practices, after all, such as what one wears, are matters of mind or attitude–not just material things.⁶

Nevertheless, there is much of interest in her study of the development of a distinctive Anglo-Indian culture.

“By the latter half of the nineteenth century,” Collingham writes, “doctors had reached the firm conclusion that Europeans were unable to acclimatize to the tropics” (177)–even though Anglo-Indians kept right on acclimatizing. I am not sure that a “firm conclusion” ever emerged in Australia, but acclimatization was a major concern there also. In The Cultivation of Whiteness, Warwick Anderson examines what dozens of ordinary medical practitioners had to say about how the Australian environment might alter British bodies and “the white race.” If the climate and terrain of southeastern Australia were not altogether threatening to the colonists, would the white race be able to thrive north of the Tropic of Capricorn? Most nineteenth-century commentators “never doubted that a change in environment would change the race” (67)–and probably not for the better. Perhaps the pathetic, supposedly doomed Aborigines represented what was in store for the white race.

Mid-Victorian promoters of emigration claimed that Australia was “an anti-podean paradise for Britons,” writes Anderson, but “many doctors, after 1840, were suggesting that it might prove instead a colonial purgatory, no place for a white man, or woman” (19). It did not help that medical practitioners “on the goldfields observed puzzling diseases in themselves and among their patients,” Anderson notes; “changed circumstances had altered the character of old diseases like typhoid and ague, and given rise to new ailments such as colonial fever, nostalgia, sunstroke, gold fever and bush-mania” (22). With the increase and apparent good health of most of the white population, and with the emergence of contagionism or germ theory (45–57), such concerns waned, but did not vanish. Though by the 1970s “a white Australia policy could [no longer] be said to exist” (248), scientific investigations into racial questions, with the goal of creating and maintaining an all-white Australia, helped establish a regime of racial surveillance throughout the twentieth century, focused on hygiene, Aborigines, half-castes, and immigration.

From very different perspectives, Colley, Collingham, and Anderson demonstrate some of the ways that European selves could be threatened and at times transformed by nonwestern peoples, by alien places, or by both. This is also a theme in many of the new studies of missionaries. To convert the “heathen,” missionaries had to learn their languages, eat their food, understand and even emulate some of their customs, and–pre-or post-conversion–defend the humanity and redeemability of the peoples they hoped to save. Interfering fanatics bent on destroying “diabolical” customs, they nevertheless frequently–like Bartolomé de Las Casas in the 1500s–became defenders of “the natives” against the depredations of non-missionary invaders and colonizers. As Andrew Porter makes clear in his ambitious survey, Religion versus Empire?, missionaries were not straightforward servants of imperial expansion, though they often saw intervention by the British government as the best chance for protecting their flocks against frontier violence and exploitation. This was true, for example, of Dr. John Philip in Cape Colony and of Bishop Samuel Marsden in New Zealand (Porter 109–17, 141–42).

It was equally true, Catherine Hall demonstrates in Civilising Subjects, of the Baptist missionaries who lived and worked in Jamaica between the early 1800s and 1867. The slave-owning planters, Hall writes, “were for the most part extremely hostile to missionary activities” (88), and for good reason: unlike the Anglican clergy in the island who sided with the plantocracy, the Baptists worked for the spiritual salvation of the slaves and ex-slaves, and also–covertly or overtly–for emancipation. No wonder the planters saw the Baptist missionaries as at least partly to blame for the slave rebellion of 1831 and, more famously, for the Morant Bay uprising of 1865–the latter ending Governor Eyre's career as a colonial administrator. For the Baptists, who were often “artisans or lower middle-class men,” serving as missionaries in Jamaica “proved to be a great deal more exciting than working as a minister in England”; their expectant black congregations grew by leaps and bounds (89). In scrupulous detail, Hall portrays the lives of the missionaries, their effects on Jamaican blacks, abolition and its aftermath, Eyre's career from Australia to the West Indies and back to Britain, and the cultural and political milieu of Birmingham, from which most of the missionaries haled. Though “not an imperial city in any obvious sense” (272), Birmingham was saturated with the discourses of slavery and empire. In Jamaica, meanwhile, “the instabilities of a missionary identity, caught between two cultures, the interpreter of the one to the other, produced the dream of a third, where Africans and Englishmen would live harmoniously, in a missionary regime, a new Jamaica” (137). However, by the 1850s, Jamaica was not becoming the progressive, Christian community the missionaries hoped for. Racial thinking, expressed in mainstream British literature by Thomas Carlyle, Anthony Trollope, Charles Kingsley, and James Anthony Froude, was hardening, and by the 1860s “had become commonplace” (436). The Morant Bay rebellion and its brutal suppression by Eyre in 1865 was the crushing final blow to the ardent salvationism of the Baptists. Hall's is a superb work of historical reconstruction that illuminates numerous aspects of nineteenth-century imperial history, demonstrating the integration of metropole and colonies, Jamaica, Birmingham, England, Africa, Australia, even India.

As Jeffrey Cox says in Imperial Fault Lines, the missionary has been “marginalized” in most histories of western imperialism (8–9). Early accounts of missionary efforts, often written by missionaries or their admirers, were nearly as often celebratory, even triumphal: the true religion conquering paganism, evil, and sometimes slavery. But the relations among missionaries, nonwestern societies, and other colonizers were complex and frequently antagonistic. In the early going, missionaries were viewed with suspicion by the East India Company, which worried about reactions like the Vellore Mutiny of 1806. But the upsurge of British missionary activity around the globe from the 1790s on, coupled with the success of the antislavery movement and the hegemony of evangelical humanitarianism in the Colonial Office in the 1830s, opened the way to what Cox ably delineates as the growth of a distinctively “Indian Christian culture” (108): “Missionaries and Indian Christians were in many respects engaged in a common enterprise, creating something new that was neither European nor Indian but simultaneously indigenous, foreign, and hybrid” (15).

Given the number and high quality of new studies on the nineteenth-century missionary movement, the “marginalization” of this topic that Cox laments may be, so to speak, history. Besides Civilising Subjects, Imperial Fault Lines, and Religion versus Empire? there are Porter's anthology, The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions; Susan Thorne's Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture; Anna Johnston's excellent study of the London Missionary Society and its publications, Missionary Writing and Empire; and Rhonda Semple's equally fine Missionary Women. Missionaries also figure importantly in multiple chapters of Lata Mani's Contentious Traditions and of Ann Colley's book on Robert Louis Stevenson's “colonial imagination” and his entanglements in the politics of Samoa.

Both Missionary Women and Contentious Traditions are contributions as well, though from very different perspectives, to the study of gender and sexuality in colonial settings. In Religion versus Empire? Porter notes that “by the 1890s the majority of British mission workers in the field were women” (8). Semple demonstrates that, between 1865 and 1910, missions became increasingly professional, in part because of the women employed by them. In the activities of the China Inland Mission, the London Missionary Society in India, and missions sponsored by Scottish Presbyterians and the Free Church of Scotland, Semple documents a growing emphasis on education, health care, and social work that provided new opportunities for British women. Ordained, male missionaries continued to rule the gendered roosts, but there was a shift away from the single-minded goal of making converts to the provision of useful services.

Though her focus is not on missionaries, Mary Procida contends that Anglo-Indian women, between the late 1800s and independence in 1947, were not confined to the domestic sphere as the feminine adornments of male public enterprise and adventure. In Married to the Empire, Procida declares: “Rather than providing a haven from the heartless world of business and politics, the Anglo-Indian bungalow served as a crucial locus for the creation and maintenance of British imperialism in India and for the integration of Anglo-Indian women into the politics of the British Raj” (21). Anglo-Indian women were active participants even in such stereotypically male activities as hunting and “anti-terrorist strategies.” Through housekeeping and cookery manuals, novels, and journals, Anglo-Indian women such as Flora Annie Steel and Maud Diver “created a separate discourse of imperialism that allowed them to play an active, and even a violent part, in defence of the empire” (21). Because Procida is arguing that there was no rigid separation of gendered spheres in Anglo-India, I am not sure what “separate” means in that statement, but never mind; her study is generally illuminating. While the stereotypic view has been one of strictly separate spheres for British men and women in India, it is ironic that Anglo-Indians “believed that the general inequality of education between Indian men and Indian women foreclosed the professionally and intellectually egalitarian marital partnership characteristic of Anglo-Indians' own unions” (52).

Whether missionaries or not, Anglo-Indian women often sought to “better…the lives of their Indian sisters.” Procida writes:

This is Procida's one mention of sati, perhaps because its official outlawing occurred in 1829, much earlier than her starting point of 1883. In any event, the campaign against sati is the subject of Lata Mani's Contentious Traditions. She points out that that campaign, and others like it to reform “barbaric” customs and to “civilize” India, gave the British much cause for self-congratulation, just as did abolition. Sati “became an alibi for the colonial civilizing mission on the one hand, and on the other hand, a significant occasion for indigenous autocritique,” while at the same time “the women who burned were neither subjects nor even the primary objects of concern in the debate on its prohibition” (2). Although missionaries expressed “concern for the widow's plight,” their resort “to a discourse of horror…caricatured her suffering and dehumanized her existence” while seeming to demonstrate “the paramount necessity for evangelism” (191–92). Both British and Indian male voices have buried “the widows' valiant and persistent efforts at self-preservation and self-affirmation” (196). In Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues, an insightful account of various “discoveries” of India from the 1600s to the time of Nehru, Jyotsna Singh likewise declares that the “discourse on the abolition of sati was based on a construction of the native widow that did not record her voice, but rather required British and Indian men to speak for her” (99). And as Gayatri Spivak has famously noted, the outlawing of sati involved an imperialist rescue fantasy in which “white men are saving brown women from brown men” (Spivak 284–85).⁷

A rescue fantasy for both white and brown/black women might have helped during the Boer War, when the British established concentration camps into which they herded the wives and children of their adversaries, including black Africans identified as Boer sympathizers. Thousands died from harsh conditions and disease. At the end of his usually accurate study of the image of the soldier in late-Victorian culture, Steve Attridge declares that “the role of women in the Boer War has been largely neglected” (191). Perhaps so, but new work on Olive Schreiner, such as Laura Chrisman's Rereading the Imperial Romance (which deals also with H. Rider Haggard and Sol Plaatje), the chapter on Schreiner in Anne McLintock's Imperial Leather (subtitled “The Limits of Colonial Feminism”), and Carolyn Burdett's Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism, necessarily broaches that issue. A fierce critic of Boer backwardness in Story of an African Farm, Schreiner was also “a fierce critic of empire,” writes Burdett (171). During and after the Anglo-Boer War, Schreiner came to portray the Boers–and especially Boer women–as standing for “something like a (socialist) commitment to the values of unalienated labour” (Burdett 161). And there is also Paula Krebs's important Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire: Public Discourse and the Boer War. Krebs delves thoroughly into the treatment of Boer and black African women and children in the concentration camps, especially as their sufferings were revealed through the exposés of British feminists Millicent Fawcett and Emily Hobhouse.

McLintock's Imperial Leather is one of many recent works focused on sexuality and sexual practices in relation to empire. This has been a central issue for postcolonial studies, especially when combined with feminism and, more recently, queer theory. In Orientalism, Said recognized the identification of “the East” with “the freedom of licentious sex”; in fantasy but also often in practice, “the Orient was a place where one could look for sexual experience unobtainable in Europe” (190). In his pioneering Empire and Sexuality (1990), Ronald Hyam turned that sort of observation into hyperbole by arguing that western imperialism involved a “revenge of the repressed” (58), whereby male sexual release was the principal motive for overseas expansion. Of course, studies of imperialism and white masculinity are familiar; for an interesting variation on that old theme there is Mrinalini Sinha's Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effiminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (1995). The impact of queer theory is evident in several other noteworthy studies, including Christopher Lane's 1995 The Ruling Passion and, more recently, Robert Aldrich's Colonialism and Homosexuality, as well as the anthologies edited by Ruth Vanita (Queering India) and Philip Holden and Richard Ruppel (Imperial Desire).

Besides Empire and Sexuality and Imperial Leather, major contributions that deal with sexuality, race, and imperialism in the broadest terms have come from Robert Young (Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race) and Ann Stoler (Race and the Education of Desire). Stoler has followed up her brilliant reconsideration of Foucault's importance for studies of empire and race with Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Although her main area of research has been the Dutch East Indies, many of her observations fit, with some adjustments, other colonial contexts. Via Foucault's analyses of “biopower” in The History of Sexuality and elsewhere, Stoler demonstrates how the policing of sexual behavior and the construction of racial hierarchies were at once inseparable and basic to the construction of bourgeois, white identities in colonial spaces. Antoinette Burton's studies, including her anthology Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities, are important contributions as well, as is also Philippa Levine's Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire. Levine brings up to date and extends to much of the Empire earlier work such as Kenneth Ballhatchet's 1980 Race, Sex and Class under the British Raj. The story of the suppression of sati may have been about “white men rescuing brown women from brown men,” but the story that Levine tells is one of white men policing and medically inspecting brown women for the sexual exploitation of white men.

II

IF THE SUPPRESSION of sati was a cause for self-congratulation among the British, so too was the detection and supposed elimination of Thuggee by Colonel William Sleeman and his forces in the 1830s and early 40s. The two “reforms” occurred almost simultaneously, both giving rise to dramatic rescue fantasies. In the case of Thuggee, all of India was supposedly being saved from the murder and mayhem of a “savage” secret cult whose followers worshipped Kali, goddess of destruction, and in her name practiced highway robbery and murder. But as Martine van Woerkens contends in The Strangled Traveler, both the extent and the conspiratorial organization of the Thugs may have been exaggerated, as may also have been the thoroughness of its eradication. It was often impossible, van Woerkens points out, to tell whether a robbery and homicide had been committed by Thugs or by ordinary dacoits or bandits. Besides Sleeman, a key figure in The Strangled Traveler is Philip Meadows Taylor, the greatest Anglo-Indian novelist before Kipling. Taylor wrote the most influential fictional account of India published in the nineteenth century, his 1839 bestseller, Confessions of a Thug. Serving as a police superintendant in the princely state of Hyderabad, Taylor had a hand in detecting and catching Thugs; he based his novel on interviews he conducted with some of those arrested. His confessing Thug, Ameer Ali, proudly acknowledges strangling hundreds of people; he boasts that if he had not been caught, his personal total would have exceeded one thousand.

A work of documentary realism, Confessions is nevertheless profoundly unrealistic if the reader infers from it that Thuggee was typical of Indian culture. As Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee argues in his insightful, well-researched Crime and Empire, the British campaigns against both sati and Thuggee were part of a more general reformist approach to India that at once mirrored the rise of the “new police” in Britain and had the effect of criminalizing Indian culture as a whole. And if secular, utilitarian reformism worked to criminalize India, that was just as true of evangelicalism, as Jeffrey Cox points out: “For evangelicals…something was very wrong with India, and the source of the evil was crystal clear: it was religion. Hinduism was obscene and cruel and bloody and lascivious, and so forth, and because of Hinduism, Indians were liars, thieves, widow-burners, murderers of infants, and so forth” (24). From the time of the Black Hole of Calcutta in 1757, Mukherjee contends, to that of the Indian Rebellion or Mutiny of 1857–58 and beyond, imperial discourse about India was mainly a “rhetoric of crime” and policing (15). And among the writers of crime fiction whom he analyzes, none is more significant than policeman Taylor.

The criminalization and policing of Indian culture is also a main theme in Gautam Chakravarty's The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination, which offers a thorough study of the literary representations of that traumatic event. Chakravarty writes: “the seventy-odd novels on the rebellion from 1859 to the present day show how more than any other event in the British career in India the rebellion was the single favourite subject for metropolitan and Anglo-Indian novelists” (3). Until independence in 1947, these novels “represent the recurring obsessions of the colonial state: surveillance, knowledge and cooptation, which, hardly a surprise, are also the salient concerns of those two canonical Anglo-Indian novels, Taylor's Confessions of a Thug and Rudyard Kipling's Kim” (7). Among Victorian novels dealing with the Rebellion, moreover, Taylor's Seeta (1872) is the most memorable, in part because of its sympathetic portrayal of an interracial love-affair and marriage.

Whether the 1857–58 Rebellion was only a “Mutiny” among sepoys–native troops of the East India Company–or was instead India's “first war of independence” expressing an emergent nationalism may never be settled. There is no doubt, however, that the Rebellion caused a seismic shift in British attitudes, hardening negative racist assumptions and behaviors while problematizing, among much else, that earlier, more positive variety of racial thinking, Aryanism. Arising through the study of Sanskrit and ancient Hindu texts by such Company intellectuals as William Jones, Aryanism was reinforced by the comparative linguistics of Max Müller and others. It is tempting to call this early version of Aryanism “liberal,” although the politics of its advocates were quite various. In any case, unlike the later fascist variety, early Aryanism posited a common racial origin of Europeans, many Indians, and even, as Tony Ballantyne demonstrates in his major new study, Orientalism and Race, the Maori and other Pacific islanders. Ballantyne extends and improves on Thomas Trautman's 1997 Aryans and British India in a number of ways, including his rich analysis of the Aryan theory's Polynesian applications. The ethnographic work of missionaries in both India and the South Pacific began from the assumption that all mankind had one origin in Eden–somewhere in the Middle East. Though the missionaries viewed the Hindus and the Maori as having degenerated, losing touch with the true religion the farther these peoples had migrated from the center of the creation (128), they nevertheless affirmed the ultimate unity of all races and cultures.

Aryanism, Ballantyne contends, allowed “not only Britons but also South Asians with a stake in the maintenance of British authority…to reconfigure British imperialism from being…fundamentally” exploitive “into a ‘family reunion’ between long lost Aryan cousins” (4). At the same time, speculations about the origins of cultures and societies through massive migrations from elsewhere helped to naturalize and justify the latest versions of them, including the British conquests of India and New Zealand. The 1857–58 Rebellion, however, put an end to “family reunion” racial cosiness; the advent of social Darwinism also helped to move the stress of race-based thinking away from comparative linguistics to biology. This is not to say that an Aryanism relying upon linguistics disappeared; among many other contributors to it, there was Edward Tregear, for example, whose influential The Aryan Maori appeared in 1885 (74). Besides its fascist revival, moreover, Aryanism has exhibited a remarkable staying-power in some other ways. Ballantyne ends his study on an ironic note by observing how Aryanism was appropriated by Indian nationalists and is still used by “Hindu ideologues” today (179–87).

Mukherjee persuasively argues that liberal reformism and the rhetorical criminalization of Indian culture formed a single project. So, too, in Liberalism and Empire, Uday Singh Mehta contends that Enlightenment rationality and universalism, main tenets of Bentham, the Mills, and Macaulay, led them to view Indian culture as barbaric and benighted. In his massive (six-volume) History of India, James Mill had no hesitation in pronouncing the “Hindoos” both uncivilized and marked by “a general disposition to deceit and perfidy” (qtd. in Mukherjee 36). The Hindus were better off under the Muslim domination of the Mogul emperors, Mill claimed, and of course both the Hindus and the Muslims were infinitely better off under the British. Mehta contends that the brand of liberalism which understands its own primary values as rational and universal was less tolerant of cultural differences than the intelligent conservatism of an Edmund Burke which valorized organic community and tradition. Quite apart from what Indians themselves thought about these matters, the attempts to eradicate both sati and Thuggee were viewed by the British as major triumphs of reformist, liberal imperialism, and they are still viewed that way by contemporary boosters of the British Empire such as Ferguson (Empire 116–17).

In Dickens and Empire, Grace Moore points to Dickens's renewed interest in the 1860s in Taylor's Confessions of a Thug as part of the context of Edwin Drood. But that interest contradicts her contention that Dickens got over his shock and rage after the Indian “Mutiny,” so that he was able at last to sort out “class and race issues” in a rational manner (177). Why should he have turned to the supposedly extinct cult of Thuggee unless he was still troubled by the “Mutiny”? In general, Moore recognizes that Dickens was changeable and often contradictory in his opinions about race and empire, so that her attempt, especially toward the end of her study, to construct an increasingly coherent Dickens on the subjects of empire and race is not very convincing. That reservation aside, Moore's work is a valuable addition to Dickens studies. She usefully reminds us that the author of American Notes did not always echo Carlyle's racist, pro-slavery opinions, but was instead a fairly consistent abolitionist. Perhaps she is right that Dickens's racist diatribe in his Household Words article “The Noble Savage” had more to do with his failure to see any good reason for Britain's meddling in West Africa than with any seriously genocidal inclination (63–70). As she acknowledges, however, Dickens thought of Africans and African-Americans in stereotypic terms. And he sided with Carlyle in the Governor Eyre controversy.

Dickens's ambivalence–against slavery but also convinced of the radical inequality of the races–was shared by many Victorians, including many of Catherine Hall's Baptist abolitionists (as she makes clear). A very different sort of ambivalence or ambiguity is central to Marcus Wood's analysis of abolitionist discourse in Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography. Wood emphasizes the ideological nexus of the cult of sensibility with evangelical guilt and conversion in, for example, the poetry of William Cowper. He also notes that abolition became a major source of self-congratulation for the British. That they continued the good work by taunting the Americans with hypocrisy (land of liberty, home of the slaves), by patrolling the African coastline with naval squadrons on the look-out for slave ships, and by bringing the anti-slavery crusade to the “dark continent” in the name of civilization and Christianity should not mislead anyone into thinking that benevolence had taken charge in the British Empire.⁸

Wood's analysis of the performative gyrations of John Newton, slave-ship captain turned evangelist, and of Newton's friend and collaborator Cowper is first-rate (Newton is remembered today as the author of “Amazing Grace”). Just as its very involvement in slavery allowed the British to find a sort of national salvation in abolition, so for Newton his great sinfulness made his redemption all the more “amazing.” According to Wood, “human kind requires sin in order to be saved. Newton as one of the chief sinners could provide more light than the ordinary sinner. He was privileged through sin” to become “an Evangelical witch-doctor of sin” (35). Cowper in turn is central to Wood's study, at least in the early going, of “how the memory of slavery led to a series of cultural pathologies across the whole range of British cultural production” (65).

Cowper was the most important eighteenth-century poet to take up the issues of slavery and abolition. He was motivated by evangelical “empathy,” and that empathy in turn, Wood suggests, both fueled and was motivated by his desire to put himself in the place of the victim, to allow Newton to dominate him and “to see himself enslaved” (67). Wood further notes the closeness between Cowper's evangelical, manic-depressive bondage to sin, to despair, and to God and pornographic fantasies of sado-masochistic mastery and enslavement. He contends that this is not an accidental similarity, but rather has a specificity that previous scholars have overlooked. The era of evangelical revivalism and abolition was also the era of the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror, the Marquis de Sade, and the emergence of pornography as an “industry.” In the case of John Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796) and the illustrations to it, Wood offers a fascinating analysis of the relations among “slavery, empathy, and pornography,” including white fetishization of black bodies. The illustrations are etchings by William Blake and Francesco Bartolozzi, and these, Wood says, “raise tricky questions relating to the trans-historical nature of aesthetics, torture, the fetish, and pornography” (94). His interpretations of both Stedman's text and the etchings are compelling, although they leave the trickiest questions unanswered.⁹

After his analysis of Blake, Wood moves away from the links between empathy, bondage, fetishism, and pornography to a quite conventional survey of what both Romantic and Victorian writers, from Wordsworth through Ruskin, had to say about slavery. While his analysis of Harriet Martineau's career as an abolitionist is especially welcome, the rest will seem familiar to most Victorianists, in part because the problematic of pornography vanishes. Following the 1790s, did portrayals of slavery and torture cease to be pornographic? Certainly William Cobbett's and Thomas Carlyle's smiling, pumpkin-eating “Quashees” are at a far remove from Stedman's beautiful mulatta mistress Joanna (127–31) or the (nearly) naked, dismembered, crucified Neptune, mocking analyst of his white torturers' fetishization of his body parts (106–14). However, there are many instances in slave narratives themselves that can be compared to Stedman's text, including the primal scene in which the young Frederick Douglass witnesses his Aunt Hester, stripped half-naked, being whipped, and Harriet Jacobs's account of her master's attempts to seduce or rape her.

“The spectacle of extreme physical suffering is the ultimate test for the capacities of the sentimental imagination,” writes Wood, “but also shades very easily into pornographic fantasy” (103).¹⁰

For Wood's “sentimental imagination” substitute liberalism, and one begins to discern an anxious contradiction–or the suspicion of such a contradiction, at least–that shadows many of these studies. If “empathy” thrives on the suffering of others, and even in some sense demands its “pornographic” display, then to what extent does liberalism thrive on its apparent antitheses–domination, slavery, and empire? This is the extreme version of the question raised by Mehta. The view that liberalism was simply contradicted by gender, race, and class exclusions collides with the possibility that it was forged in and through those very exclusions (Stoler, Race 131). Perhaps Foucault was right: “Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination” (151). On this gloomy account liberalism is a ruse, the story the ruling classes tell themselves and their subjects. And if this is so, then renewed notions of a “liberal imperialism” floated these days by pundits such as Ferguson exemplify that ruse, as do also the opinions of many Victorian liberals such as Macaulay, Mill, Dickens, Trollope, and Kingsley. And yet liberalism, especially of the evangelical variety helped free the slaves. The complicated story of modern liberalism is neither entirely about domination in disguise nor straightforwardly about freedom and democracy.

Liberalism in relation to empire is a central theme as well in Matthew Reynolds's The Realms of Verse: English Poetry in a Time of Nation Building. Of course, liberalism and “nation building” present a somewhat different set of problems from liberalism and empire. The role of Enlightenment, liberal ideals in the independence movements leading to decolonization was immense, as it was also in the nationalist struggles within Europe during the nineteenth century. Reynolds offers perceptive readings of the Brownings, Arthur Hugh Clough, and Tennyson in relation to the unification of Italy and the continuing drama, or political struggle, to unify both Great Britain and “Greater Britain,” or the Empire. He explores these issues particularly through the poets' negotiations of “three types of unity–marital, aesthetic, and political” (72). Much has, of course, been written about the Brownings and Italy, but Reynolds's account is excellent; and his analysis of Clough's Amours de Voyage is equally illuminating. The connections between Italian nation-building and British imperialism are complex, given that Italian nationalists were doing battle with the Austro-Hungarian and French versions of empire. Still, according to Reynolds, “the English cultural formation ‘Italy’ may be understood as a variant of orientalism or colonial discourse” (81), at least for many English writers and travelers such as Dickens. The issues of race and imperialism come more directly into play with Tennyson, who “wished the Empire to grow ever more cohesive, even to the point of becoming a single nation” (203). Like many Victorian writers, Tennyson “was attracted to the language of race” (214), but used it to signify various ideas at various moments.¹¹

Perhaps of all major Victorian intellectuals, including J. S. Mill, George Eliot developed the most original, thoughtful version of liberalism in regard to gender, race, empire, and national identity. Three recent monographs deal with these issues in her writings. Nancy Henry's George Eliot and the British Empire is excellent on biographical details, including Eliot's investments in colonial enterprises and George Henry Lewes's sons' careers in South Africa. Brenda McKay's book usefully covers an enormous amount of material, indicated by her encyclopedic subtitle, including Victorian anthropology and “scientific” racism, slavery, gypsies, the Indian “Mutiny,” the Jamaica rebellion of 1865, and Zionism. Alicia Carroll's slighter Dark Smiles offers readings of the novels and The Spanish Gypsy in terms of “desire” and racial and foreign “others.” While her interpretations sometimes strike me as fresh and insightful, they sometimes also seem forced. Thus, Carroll wants to take on the postcolonial establishment (Said and Spivak, at least), but I do not think she disagrees with them as much as she supposes (26–27). And while it is true that Eliot's “identification with” Felix Holt, for example, “ought not to be…a given,” that hardly means she sympathizes more with Harold Transome's “political vision” than with Felix's (69). If that were the case, why did she separately publish “Felix Holt's Address to the Working Men”? In any event, as has often been noted, though Eliot did not directly address issues of contemporary imperial politics such as the Indian “Mutiny” in her fiction, she nevertheless devised characters and wrote in ways to counteract stereotypes, whether of race, gender, social class, or religion. An evolutionary thinker deeply influenced by Darwin and Herbert Spencer, she rejected simplistic versions of social Darwinism, so-called scientific racism, and jingoism.

The three books on Eliot and Grace Moore's study of Dickens represent a growing number of monographs on individual writers' treatments of imperialism and race. Whether the authors of these monographs consider themselves postcolonialists or not, the proliferation of such texts is one obvious outcome of postcolonial studies. Of course, monographs on writers who focused on empire and race such as Haggard and Kipling have also multiplied, but Eliot and Dickens did not foreground those issues. I have chosen not to comment on new monographs about writers for whom empire and race were central. I have, however, already mentioned Laura Chrisman's Rereading the Imperial Romance in relation to South Africa and gender issues, and Ann Colley's study of Stevenson, mainly because of its emphasis on that author's complicated dealings with missionaries. And this brings me back to one of the main trends in recent work on empire and race, involving a growing recognition of the significance of missionaries and religion in numerous colonial contexts.

Recognizing that significance is one thing; generalizing about it is another. Thus, for example, what was the relationship between the work of, say, the London Missionary Society and political liberalism? To academic, secular humanists such as myself, it seems hard to square evangelicalism with liberalism, and yet that was the main equation behind the abolitionist movement and also behind much nineteenth-century criticism of uncontrolled colonial expansion. Missionary attempts to destroy “heathen” cultures are usually viewed as anathema by postcolonialists; the 1948 U.N. Convention on Genocide, after all, treats attempts to eradicate cultures (by child removal, for instance) as one form of genocide. Yet there may have been many reasons for nonwestern individuals, societies, and cultures to welcome missionaries into their midst and frequently to undergo conversion. This is the obverse side of Europeans voluntarily going native, and it is also one of the lessons of Gauri Viswanathan's Oustide the Fold. Viswanathan contends that conversion to a new religion is often a means of political or social resistance–in the Indian context, for example, it can be a way to reject and try to escape the caste system. In Civilising Subjects, Hall also demonstrates the enthusiasm of Jamaican slaves and ex-slaves for the message of the missionaries; they identified Christianity–at least, the Baptist version of it–with freedom.

Suggesting that “religious minorities in England often shared the position of colonized subjects” (39), Viswanathan first analyzes novels by Maria Edgeworth, Sidney Owenson, Dickens, Disraeli, and George Eliot to illustrate some of the political meanings of religious exclusion and conversion that operate as well in the Indian context. John Henry Newman's conversion also figures importantly in her analysis. For Indians “assimilation into the colonizer's religion often meant legal excommunication from Hinduism or Islam for converts from either religion” (87). Such “excommunication,” however, might be exactly what the convert seeks. And conversion could support nationalism. Thus, for example, Indian nationalist Narayan Viman Tilak “conceived of Christianity as embodying a necessary vision of the future, with the power to purge Hinduism of its most hated caste features … But at the same time, Tilak wanted Indian Christians to be more truly Indian, claiming that the British missionary project had denationalized Christianity and made the West the exclusive reference point of Indian Christianity” (40). Tilak sought to develop “a hybrid entity like ‘Hindu Christianity,’” which would help to overcome religious and caste differences and thereby also help the nationalist cause (41).

From almost the opposite direction, Annie Besant abandoned orthodox Christianity, took up radical atheism and socialism, and then moved on to Theosophy, itself a “hybrid” East-West “entity.” This in turn led her to India where, in one of her incarnations, she became President of the Indian National Congress. Viswanathan contends that there was a coherence in all of Besant's conversions, based on a utopian vision of human harmony. Theosophy, which in Besant's view posited the evolutionary emergence of a “sixth race” and the overcoming of national rivalries, war, and the exploitive version of empire (as opposed to an ideal commonwealth), came to express that vision for her (177–207). Viswanathan's reading of Besant's career is an astute, sympathetic one, persuasive in part because of her comparison of Besant's ideas with those of James Cousins. Although Organizing Empire, Purnima Bose's engaging analysis of different types of individualism and resistance in India and Ireland, does not deal with Besant, it offers a matching account of the career and ideas of Cousins's wife Mary, Irish feminist and advocate of independence for both emerging nations (74–127). Mary Cousins's “feminist activism in Ireland,” writes Bose, “uniquely prepared her to develop a politics of feminist solidarity with South Asian women” (74).¹²

For Viswanathan, Besant offers an interesting contrast not only to Tilak, but also to B. R. Ambedkar, the Dalit leader, the story of whose long-deferred conversion to Buddhism concludes the book (211–39).

Like Hall's Civilising Subjects, Outside the Fold is exemplary for its comparative, interdisciplinary approach to the intersections between religion and imperial history. Both Hall and Viswanathan are exemplary also as cultural and intellectual historians who make use of some of the tools provided by postcolonial theory without making a big fuss about it. They and the other scholars whose books I have commented on are advancing our understanding of the interchanges between (former) British colonies and the metropole in ways undreamt of both by an older imperial-historiographic orthodoxy and by the current punditry that upholds the good old British Empire as the model of all that the new American Empire should aspire to become. “Empire was an ordinary fact of political life as recently as 1935, much as slavery had been in the eighteenth century,” writes Cooper; “by 1955, the legitimacy of any colonial empire was very much in question. By 1965, the colonial game was over” (232). But the effects of imperialism live on, which is the chief reason for the rise and significance of postcolonial studies. Another reason is that, although the legitimacy of imperialism ended with decolonization, various western politicians and their cheerleaders seem not to have heard that news–or history.