Post-colonialism

In his book Tropicopolitans (1999), the post-colonial critic Srinivas Aravamudan captures the drift of current scholarship on 'the new eighteenth-century' by pointing to xenophobia, colonialism, orientalism, and racism as significant omissions from Linda Colley's influential account of the constitution of national identity in her book, Britons: Forging the NatiOll, 1707-1832 (1992).1 Generally speaking, post-colonial critics such as Aravamudan and Saree Makdisi, author of Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and ale Culture o(Modemity (1998), concern themselves with those areas identi fied as absent from Colley's work, areas which reflect a new interest in the cultural effects of colonization and imperialism in the late eighteenth century, as well as their various legacies today.Since the 1980s a large and diverse group of literary critics and historians of romanti cism, increasingly conscious of the intersection of their period of study with Britain's rapidly expanding empire, have begun to explore much more intensively the role of commerce, slavery, racial ideology, and overseas colonization in late eighteenth century literature and culture.So massive was the expansion of British dominion in the Romantic period-by 1820 Britain ruled 200 million people, over a quarter of the world's population-it was difficult for anyone in the late eighteenth century not to be involved in the imperial system, however remotely.For instance, many of the Romantic authors we study today were connected through family, friends, trade, or the profes sions to West Indian slavery.Jane Austen's father was trustee of an Antiguan sugar plantation belonging to a close friend from Oxford days.Matthew Lewis, author of the sensational Gothic novel The Monk (1796) was a slave holder, inheriting two large Jamaican sugar plantations.William Beckford, who wrote the oriental tale, \Tathek (1786), inherited enormous sugar wealth, while Thomas De Quincey's father grew rich as an importer of West Indian linen.Even William and Dorothy Wordsworth benefited indirectly from slavery's proceeds, enjoying a rent-free existence in the mid-1790s at Racedown, a house owned by the wealthy John Pinney, Bristol merchant and sugar plantation owner.Later, in 1801, suffering almost continuous poor health, Samuel Taylor Coleridge suggested to Robert Southey that they emigrate to Pinney's large mansion on St Nevis ('A heavenly climate, a heavenly country', he enthused) and get themselves appointed as 'sinecure negro-drivers' at 100 each a year.He seems to have been only half-joking.

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