In her influential work, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867 (Reference Hall2002), Catherine Hall argued that “a focus on national histories as constructed, rather than given, on the imagined community of the nation as created, rather than simply there, on national identities as brought into being through particular discursive work, requires transnational thinking” (9). Similarly, Antoinette Burton made a provocative case for de-centering Britain even in the narratives of its own history, arguing in her edited collection, After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (Reference Burton2003), that “we need to pay more attention to the question of who needs [the nation], who manufactures the ‘need’ for it, and whose interests it serves” (6). In the last two decades, those who have sought to reposition a study of nineteenth-century Britain in such a transnational framework have focused their attention on Britain's relationship to its imperial possessions. While some historians remain skeptical about the significance of empire in British culture, there is now a rich and authoritative historical literature that reveals the myriad ways in which metropole and empire were not only entangled, but also mutually constitutive. Literary scholars of the nineteenth-century have also been alert to the often covert traces of empire in the works of nineteenth-century writers, extending from pioneering discussions of the shadowy presence of slavery in the novels of Jane Austen to Jane Bownas's attempts to reclaim an imperial motif in the works of Thomas Hardy.

However, the emergence of the disciplines of World History and World Literature has opened up the possibility of an even broader re-conceptualization of Victorian culture which not only recognizes the centrality of Britain's formal empire, but also registers the importance of the world beyond it. Works that engage with the highly topical, if not possibly overused, motif of “globalization” have not emerged in the same numbers as works more discretely concerned with the cultural impact of Britain's imperial system. Nevertheless, there have recently been a number of extremely useful and suggestive works concerned with Britain's relationship with parts of the world that were not part of its formal overseas empire. While the agendas of these authors are often very different, collectively they raise the possibility of a new approach to globalizing the Victorians. Most of this work is by scholars who are extending an established interest in cultural engagement and negotiation that has already been widely deployed in discussions of Britain and its empire. Moreover, many of these authors are exploring territory that has long attracted the interest of economic and political historians. Studies of Victorian finance, for instance, have already drawn attention to the fact that British overseas investment in the nineteenth century was not confined to its imperial possessions.

North and South America were particularly lucrative sites of investment for Victorian speculators, not to mention adventurers, boosters, and confidence men. Paul Garner's British Lions and Mexican Eagles: Business, Politics, and Empire in the Career of Weetman Pearson in Mexico, 1889-1919 (Reference Garner2011) offers a case study of one British entrepreneur who constructed his business empire by setting up public works projects, notably the construction of the Grand Canal, and an oil business that became the Mexican Eagle Oil Company. Garner shows that Pearson's business interests neatly dovetailed with the strategy of national development pursued by the Mexican political elite, in the period between the collapse of the Maximilian episode and the growing hegemony of American economic and political power in the region. His main intention is to situate Pearson within a narrative of Mexican political development, highlighting the tension between the benefits brought by Mexico's embrace of foreign technology and investment and the concomitant risk of undermining its political and economic sovereignty. However, Garner's study has relevance for the historian of nineteenth-century Britain. At the most basic level, he reveals how structural change, external shocks, and the growth of economic nationalism had a long term impact (largely negative) on British trade and investment overseas, well into the twentieth century. More significantly, it offers an important reminder that Victorian overseas enterprise was not inherently tied to priorities and prerogatives of British imperialism. Pearson's career may usefully be compared with that of one of his more illustrious contemporaries, Cecil Rhodes, whose business interests were conveniently aligned with the ambitions of prominent figures in late nineteenth-century imperial governance, notably Joseph Chamberlain. Possibly Pearson may be a more representative figure than the great “Randlord,” embodying the almost unlimited capacity of Victorian enterprise to spread its presence and its achievements through the world, even in areas that were not colonial dependencies or dominions.

While Garner is a historian of Latin American economic and political development, Robert D. Aguirre recovers the neglected cultural significance of Latin America in Victorian metropolitan culture in Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture (Reference Aguirre2005). Reversing Alan Knight's discussion of dissemination of British ideologies and practices in the newly independent Latin American republics, Aguirre's book focuses on the collection, cataloguing, and displaying of objects of Mesoamerican culture in Britain in the nineteenth century, revealing that the British were as fascinated with Mexico and Central America as they were with Africa and Asia. He begins his study with the activities of showman and entrepreneur William Bullock whose collection of Aztec antiquities displayed at the Egyptian Hall (in yet another indication of the complexity of cultural exchange in this period) in the 1820s subsequently formed the core of the British Museum's permanent collection of pre-Columbian artifacts. This attempt at cultural domination of the non-European world through the sequestration and display of its antiquities is a theme also to be found in Shawn Malley's From Archaeology to Spectacle in Victorian Britain: The Case of Assyria, 1845-1854 (Reference Malley2012). In the case of Mesopotamia, of course, “symbolic conquest” was to culminate in formal territorial appropriation by Britain after 1918.

Aguirre moves on to consider views of Mexico in the popular panorama, and the British Foreign Office's ultimately unsuccessful attempt to loot artifacts from the lost Mayan cities of Honduras and Guatemala in the 1840s and 1850s. The book concludes with an investigation of the intersection between popular spectacle and ethnography in the display of the living curiosities, Máximo and Bartola, the so-called Aztec Lilliputians in the 1850s. Aguirre presents all these case studies as an example of a transatlantic network of culture that amounted to British “informal imperialism” in Mexico and Central America. The transatlantic traffic of objects, ideas, and even people was therefore not limited to the more well-known lines of transit between Britain and the United States. While not derived from Britain's formal colonial possessions, the circulation of pre-Columbian objects evoked the same “feelings of desire and envy, mastery and dispossession, pride and disgust” (xxix) that have featured in historical and literary scholarship on the Victorians’ relationship with their African and Indian empire. Even if some might have problems with the term “informal empire” (cultural historians certainly use it more permissively than economic historians who, in turn, often disagree about how widely the term might be best used), Aguirre's book is a compelling reminder that the Victorians’ engagement with the rest of the world, fuelled by an insatiable curiosity, was characterized by a desire for objects as much as for territory.

Another area of the world outside of the boundaries of the formal British empire of which the Victorians had a profound and extended relationship was China. Of course, unlike Latin America, China was an existing empire itself, not merely the site of a lost imperial civilization. The subtitle of Ross G. Forman's China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined (Reference Forman2013) is therefore highly apposite. Forman is keen to present the two empires as more than just interlinked, but mutually constitutive, although as he concedes himself, the book does not juxtapose British and Chinese texts, but rather focuses on British literature and culture. That said, he offers an imaginative way of establishing the necessity of pluralizing imperialisms by giving particular attention to literary production, not just in metropolitan Britain but in the colonial sphere. He recovers “the surprisingly vibrant publishing scene for books in English in East Asia” (6), which in turn, reveals that local literary production (and indeed the local nature of the operation of imperialism) often exhibited a remarkably uneven approach to issues such as miscegenation. The book explores both the obvious differences, and the significant and much less easily detected commonalities, between the nuanced works of writers who had direct contact with China (notably the treaty-port writers such as James Dalziel) and forms of metropolitan popular theatre and fiction that traded in hackneyed stereotypes of the pig-tailed “Chinee.”

Forman's study needs to be set alongside other recent works that have dealt with Britain's literary and cultural interactions with China, most notably by literary scholar Elizabeth Hope Chang and prominent historian of Asia Wang Gungwu. Forman makes a convincing case for identifying China as “a missing piece in the imperial jigsaw” (12). His appropriation of the concept of “Greater Britain” in order to comprehend China as part of a set of loosely imperial formations that were not implicated in the formal process of colonization, seems less secure. As works such as Duncan Bell's The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860-1900 (Reference Bell2007) show, this term was in the late-Victorian period increasingly associated with a more specific debate over a potential union of the United Kingdom with its so-called settler colonies (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa). However, in looking for cultural affiliation and affinity rather than institutional structures of power, Forman is highly successful in restoring “the necessary elasticity” to an imperial vision that encompassed a variety of often contradictory discourses about the non-European world.

Forman concludes his book with a study of fictional works concerned with the Chinese community in the East End of London. This small, but visible, population is also a key element in Sascha Auerbach's Race, Law, and “The Chinese Puzzle” in Imperial Britain (Reference Auerbach2009). Auerbach's essential argument is that the relatively insignificant size of the Chinese community in the imperial metropolis should not be allowed to obscure the salience of the Chinese in British understandings of the global economy, the international labour market, the drug trade, and interracial sex. While largely concerned with the period after 1910, Auerbach alerts us to the possibility that the Victorians would have confronted China, not only in the trade ports and Hong Kong or in the seedy opium dens of Limehouse, but in regard to the substantial Chinese diasporic populations in Britain's formal possessions in Asia and Africa. In so doing, his methodology suggests the rewards of taking a more globalized, even de-centered, approach to understanding late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain.

The Victorians found their empire and its prospects entwined, not merely with empires of the present, but with empires of the past. Indeed, a truly holistic approach to the Victorians requires temporal, as well as geographic amplification. Scholars, for several decades now, have appreciated how the formalization and professionalization of the disciplines of history and archaeology in the nineteenth century can tell us a great deal about the immediate and contemporary concerns of the Victorians themselves. However, in light of the imperial turn, there is obviously some value in returning to the relationship of the Victorians to past imperial civilizations, notably Rome. Works in the burgeoning field of Classical Reception Studies such as Edmund Richardson's Classical Victorians: Scholars, Scoundrels and Generals in Pursuit of Antiquity (Reference Richardson2013) have revealed how Victorian Britain set out to make the ancient world its own, even if such scholarship debates the extent to which it succeeded in that task. Such works tend be concerned with the Victorians’ relationship to the world of antiquity in its broadest sense, in particular the classical literary canon and notions of aesthetics. More pertinent to our discussion here are specific studies of nineteenth-century attitudes towards the Roman Empire. Virginia Hoselitz's Imagining Roman Britain: Victorian Responses to a Roman Past (Reference Hoselitz2007) shows that the Victorians revised their understanding of the Roman occupation of Britain, when the meager references to the Roman's far-flung province in literary texts gave way to knowledge recovered from the excavation of former Roman settlements at Caerleon in South Wales, Cirencester, Colchester, and Chester. Hoselitz reveals how the archaeology of Roman Britain became in the Victorian era a site of contestation, between amateurs and professionals, antiquarians and scientists, traditionalists and modernists, and between local enthusiasts and national antiquarian societies.

Unfortunately, there is less attention given to the fact that evaluating the Roman past must have been informed by the fact that Britain itself had become by the nineteenth century an imperial power. This is a missed opportunity not least because the book itself references sites on which this common imperial rubric was undoubtedly problematic. For example, there is a brief treatment of the Victorians’ ambiguity towards ancient Britons such as Boudica and Caractacus. However much the Victorians might have wanted to celebrate these two figures as patriotic Britons fighting a foreign invader, they might just as easily be comprehended as the barbaric leaders of a savage revolt against a civilizing imperial power. This latter interpretation obviously recalled the 1857 Indian Rebellion and presumably made any incorporation of these native leaders into the pantheon of British national heroes not entirely straightforward, even at the same time as Thomas Thornycroft's statue of Boudica was installed opposite the Houses of Parliament. Clearly, there is much more to be said about how the Roman past informed the Victorian present, especially in terms of how nineteenth-century Britons related their own concerns about the ability to manage and secure a far-flung, multi-racial empire to their ancient predecessors. Hoselitz briefly raises the possibility that the Victorians had to negotiate the contradiction between its status as a subject nation under Roman rule and its current position as an imperial power. As she says herself, since it had become possible for a painted savage ultimately to evolve into an agent of imperial authority, “what was to stop the same switch in the balance of power between rulers and ruled in British India?” (40). However, her claim that the resolution to this dilemma came in the form of selecting the Saxons as the Victorians’ ancestors of choice seems somewhat glib. Even if correct, the establishment of this particular provenance would require us to investigate more fully the Victorians’ relationship to the European continent, past and present.

The convergence of the historical past and present-day concerns was also evident in Victorian understandings of what they termed the Holy Land. As Eitan Bar-Yosef's The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism (Reference Bar-Yosef2005) makes clear, while Palestine remained outside the formal British empire until 1918, it was incorporated into (albeit in ambivalent and contradictory ways) the tropes of Orientalism that accompanied the project of empire building. What made Palestine unique in the Victorian imaginary was that both contemporary political concerns and interest in the ancient world were overlaid by the profound engagement of the Victorians with the Bible. Bar-Yosef reveals that formal imperial designs on Palestine intersected with an understanding of the Holy Land that emerged from the British Protestant tradition of internalizing Biblical vocabulary (notably terms such as Promised Land, Chosen People, and Jerusalem) and applying it to visions of England and Englishness. Bar-Yosef utilizes a range of sources, from Sunday-school textbooks, penny magazines, travel literature, and popular exhibitions, to offer an arresting and provocative argument: that popular Orientalism in the metropole, rather than legitimizing the practices of colonial exploration, expansion, and (ultimately) possession, actually encouraged domestic and inward-looking fantasies. This exemplary model of interdisciplinarity, which draws on both postcolonial studies and history, is predominately concerned with critiquing Edward Said's classic account of Orientalism. Bar-Yosef draws attention to ambivalent figures and cultural formations, notably “the Jew” who simultaneously existed within and without the tropes of Orientalism, thereby confounding the stark binaries that characterized Said's analysis. He also emphasizes that much nineteenth-century popular culture had only superficial engagement with an imperially constructed understanding of Palestine. Instead, responses in metropolitan Britain to the Middle East were informed by a religious imaginary that sought, à la William Blake, to locate Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land. While critiquing Said's model for the impact of Orientalism on British metropolitan culture is far from novel, the particular form that Bar-Yosef's argument takes has broader significance for any future scholarship that attempts to globalize the Victorians. While he does not underestimate the role played by British colonialism in reshaping the geopolitics of the Middle East, he reminds us that the Victorians’ conceptualization of what they termed the Holy Land was “not so much geographical as emotional” (17). In other words, it is necessary not merely to extend our spatial and temporal frameworks, but also to understand the importance of the metaphorical in the way Victorians viewed the wider world.

A study of globalizing the Victorians does not need to be written on a broad canvas. While the works discussed so far often explore discursive formations that were created in multiple sites, spread across space and sometimes even time, in one case, the scale and complexity of Britain's engagement with the wider world is explored through the study of a single British town, one moreover at some distance from the more self-consciously cosmopolitan milieu of nineteenth-century London. Laura Tabili's Global Migrants, Local Culture: Natives and Newcomers in Provincial England, 1841-1939 (Reference Tabili2011) focuses on the industrializing port of South Shields near Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The book is not exclusively concerned with the Victorians, its chronological coverage extending to the outbreak of the Second World War and its historiographical implications for understanding British national identity ranging well beyond that. Tabili's exhaustive, but almost at times forensic, investigation of census reports for South Shields reveals that, long before the arrival of postcolonial migrants to Britain after 1948 supposedly shattered the cohesion of a culturally and racially homogeneous society, there was already a considerable overseas migrant population present, especially in industrial port towns. Moreover, Tabili claims to provide the first reconstruction of the entire overseas migrant population of any British town. Overseas born residents in South Shields between 1851 and 1901 had birthplaces as diverse as France, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Russia, Turkey, the West Indies, the United States, Australia, China, the East Indies, and what the census officials rather unhelpfully listed as “Africa.” There were even individuals born in Madagascar, Aden, and Afghanistan.

Tabili not merely reminds us of the extraordinary ethnic, national, and racial heterogeneity of nineteenth-century Britain, she also makes a powerful case for understanding the relationship between migrants and local cultures as being characterized by accommodation and heterogeneity, rather than by exclusion and hostility. Far from being parochial and nativist, the British working class (or at least the residents of South Shields) adopted practices of inclusion and integration in their encounters with these global migrants. She argues that a de-contextualised focus on episodes of violence and intolerance has not merely stereotyped migrants as victims, but has allowed the more xenophobic and racist of historical actors “to stand for all Britons”(7). By focusing on the more quotidian and commonplace aspects of the migrant experience, she recovers what might be thought of as everyday cosmopolitanism, in particular the existence of a high degree of residential and marital integration with the native population. Far from migrants and natives being discreet and endogamous populations, numerous overseas born householders married, fathered (rather than mothered: most of these migrants were male), housed, and employed native Britons. There are some structural weaknesses in Tabili's analysis. While she acknowledges that internal migration had a long history in Britain, she possibly (and undoubtedly unintentionally) presents an image of late nineteenth-century migrants encountering a host population that was, prior to their arrival, relatively static and homogeneous, thereby downplaying the presence of non-Britons in metropolitan Britain prior to the 1840s.

Minor quibbles aside, this is an important work. In this medium size provincial town in the North East of England, Tabili shows how the intimate realms of private life evolved in structural contexts shaped by South Shields’ communication with the Baltic, Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Indian Ocean. She concludes the introduction to her book by characterizing “British society and culture as plural, protean, contested, and changeable, embedded in circuits of people, goods, ideas, power and interest, local and global as well as national and imperial” (12). This is clearly an argument for finding the global in the local that has implications for the study of Victorian Britain and the world that go well beyond the histories of immigration and settlement.

Recent historiographical debates (for example the forum, “How Size Matters: The Question of Scale in History” in the American Historical Review) about the question of “scale” in history have drawn a distinction between works of global history that make sweeping reflections about the whole world (or as much of it as they can encompass in a single study) and a more regularly used methodology in which the focus remains on the local experience, but placed in a larger global context. The works discussed above suggest the benefits of framing national environments (in this case, Victorian Britain) in such a global perspective. While these studies are focused on a particular place, individual, artifact, text, performance, or exhibition, they all are informed by an understanding that the Victorian reach was extensive, encompassing not merely the Victorians’ own empire but the empires of others (in the present and the historical past) and parts of the world that were only informally tied to the British imperial system. In transcending established scholarly demarcations, these studies help to remind us of the extraordinary magnitude of the Victorian worldview. The implication of Laura Tabili's study of how racial and cultural difference was negotiated in nineteenth-century Britain is that we need to give more recognition to open hearts, among both established working class communities and those that settled among them. While this congenial reading of Victorian Britain may be open to qualification or dispute, her work, and that of many of the scholars discussed in this review, suggest the significant rewards of approaching the study of the Victorians and the wider world with an open mind.