Deirdre Coleman

Janet Schaw and the complexions of empire

This essay considers the development of racial ideology in the eighteenth century in the context of a comparative colonial cultural history of the British West Indies and of North America. It focuses on the racialization of whiteness in the 1760s and 1770s and on the way in which this racialization of skin color relates to issues of gender. Janet Schaws Journal of a Lady of Quality(1774-6) is the principal text for this enquiry. The concluding section of the paper argues that mid-eighteenth-century discourses of whitening and whiteness form an important cultural context for understanding later abolitionist texts.

Minds, bodies, machines, 1770-1930

Book synopsis: It is during the nineteenth century, the age of machinery, that we begin to witness a sustained exploration of the literal and discursive entanglements of minds, bodies, machines. This book opens with Ann Radcliffes The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and ends in the trenches of the First World War. The overall orientation of the essays is literary and historical but they also touch on philosophy, mathematics, natural history, the history of medicine and psychiatry, computer science, and virtual reality. Tracking the cultural impact of new technologies in the long nineteenth century, the book explores how the machine shifts our conceptions of language, consciousness, human cognition, man/machine boundaries, and the boundaries between materialist and esoteric sciences. Taken together, the essays expand our understanding of what it means to be human.

Claire clairmont and Mary Shelley: identification and rivalry within the “tribe of the otaheite philosopher's”

Abstract The relationship between Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont is usually looked at and analysed from Marys point of view. This article reopens the debate on their relationship by demonstrating the importance of Rousseaus Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloise (1761) for both women. For Claire it offered a way of imaginatively refiguring the triangle of herself, Percy and Mary; for Mary, Rousseaus novel proved to be an important influence on the writing of Frankenstein (1818). The principal aim throughout this article is to put Claire centre stage, where she always wished to be. Through emphasising her “horrors” and her histrionics, and her extraordinary passion for living out literary plots and characters, it is argued that she was more than just a thorn in the side of her stepsister, and that her monstering of herself as the “third” was part of a serious attempt to rethink monogamous, heterosexual arrangements. The article forms part of the ongoing discussion of female friendship and Sapphism in the eigh...

Alfred Deakin’s ‘Austral-Asia’ and the Making of ‘History for the Future’

ABSTRACT In 1893 Alfred Deakin coined the term ‘Austral-Asia’ and argued, in Irrigated India and Temple and Tomb in India, that India and its citizens were central to Australia’s future. By 1901, he was furiously defending the White Australia policy, warning Australian citizens of the threat of non-Europeans to the future of the new nation. This dramatic shift – from perceiving India as an opportunity to perceiving it as a threat – is attributable to the influence of Charles Pearsons National Life and Character (1894) which warned of the end of white hegemony if white men began mixing with the Chinese, ‘Hindoo’ and ‘Negro’ races. Pearson’s work questioned the assumption that white men were born to rule, advocating the preservation of ‘white men’s countries’ to maintain white supremacy for as long as possible. The emergence of a transnational community of white men, in response to Pearson’s call to action, provided Deakin with the language and connections to resituate Australia in the world on terms that were racial rather than regional.

The Cultural Afterlives of Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution

In his Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti (1805), Marcus Rainsford, a British captain in the Third West India Regiment, described Saint-Domingue as ‘France’s most splendid possession’, astonishing the traveller with its ‘private luxury, and its public grandeur’.1 The richest and most productive of the eighteenth-century West Indian islands, Saint-Domingue produced half the world’s coffee and sugar. But while European politicians ‘sighed for her possession … they sighed in vain; she was reserved for the foundation of a republic as extraordinary as it is terrible, whether it ultimately tend only, to the ascertainment of abstract opinions, or unfold a new and august empire to the world’.2 In August 1791, the beginnings of this republic were laid when the island’s plantation slaves rose up against the white planters. By September 1791 rebellious slaves had set alight the erstwhile capital of Le Cap, and for the next dozen years Saint-Domingue became a byword for civil war, racial hatred, and horrific violence. While the initial uprisings of 1791 obliged the revolutionary French Republic to abolish slavery in the colonies in 1794, Napoleon revoked the decree in 1802, sending a large force under his brother-in-law General Leclerc to crush the uprisings and reintroduce slavery. The Francophobe Rainsford captured the horror of this blood-soaked war with some graphic engravings of the viciousness of the French in their dealings with the rebel blacks.

Women Writers and Abolition

The years 1787–88 mark the high tide of popular abolitionism. What had begun as a small-scale protest, with Quakers submitting their first public petition to Parliament in 1783, was soon to culminate in a sudden and widespread outburst of humanitarian revulsion against the ‘abominable’ and ‘indefensible’ trade. There have been many attempts to explain the speed and breadth of the national mobilization against the slave trade. In a recent contribution Seymour Drescher dismisses arguments that attribute the new popularity to ‘chastened anxiety or national humiliation’ at the loss of the North American colonies. Nor does Drescher see abolitionism’s coming of age as a response to heightened internal class conflict, or to an economic decline in the value of the British slave trade. Without offering much explanation himself, apart from the great expansion of print media in this period, what Drescher does note is that popular abolitionism emerged at one of the most shining moments in British history, when the nation revelled in its ‘prosperity, security and power’.1 This means that, while abolitionists might express strong sentiments of outrage, the underlying premise of their protest involved a degree of complacency. As Drescher puts it, ‘how could the world’s most secure, free, religious, just, prosperous and moral nation allow itself to remain the premier perpetrator of the world’s most deadly, brutal, unjust and immoral offences to humanity? How could its people, once fully informed of its inhumanity, hope to continue to be blessed with peace, prosperity and power?’2

Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (review)

focus on male canonical writers also raises the question of whether or not the imaginative interest in China was reflected in other textual productions by more “minor” writers in this period. There are lingering questions, too, about Markley’s insistence on the importance of China for the economic imagination. David Porter’s Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (2001) shows that China was important not only to economic discourse but also linguistic, religious, and aesthetic discourse in western Europe at this time. Markley’s focus on the economic dimensions of the English engagement with China greatly expands on Porter’s discussion of the China trade in this period, but leaves the reader wondering why the economic interest in China in England prevailed over these other kinds of interests. Notably, the political meaning of China receives less treatment in Porter’s and Markley’s books. This is one direction, at least, in which future scholars interested in China’s impact on English literature may build on these pioneering works. In the epilogue to this book, Markley signals to an “outpouring of literature from the 1740s on,” noting that the second half of the eighteenth century marks a “watershed” in European attitudes towards China (271). That story, Markley implies, is necessarily tied to the story of how England was able to move from the peripheries of economic history to becoming its surprising new centre. Readers like me who agree with Markley’s statement that “the heirs of Heylyn, Martini, and Defoe require a study of their own” (271) will eagerly look forward to the sequel to this book. In the meantime, we may want to reread the global histories of Andre Gunder Frank, Jack Goldstone, and Kenneth Pomeranz whose provocative analyses are changing the way we look at the rise of not a western but a global modernity.

‘Aetherial Journies, Submarine Exploits’: The Debatable Worlds of Natural History in the Late Eighteenth Century

The eye-catching conjunction of ‘Aetherial journies, submarine exploits’ occurs in William Cowper’s ‘The Winter Evening’, where the poet describes the arrival in his secluded village of newspapers from the great Babel of London — that ‘wilderness of strange / But gay confusion’. Amidst advertisements for ‘Teeth for the toothless, ringlets for the bald’, Cowper lists, Aetherial journies, submarine exploits, And Katterfelto with his hair on end At his own wonders, wond’ring for his bread.1