Primitive Inventions: Rob Roy , Nation, and World System

Primitive Inventions: Rob Roy, Nation, and World System Ian Duncan Topologies of Modernization Over the last few years, something like a critical consensus has emerged regarding the function of the novel in the symbolic formation of national identity in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Great Britain, and, in particular, the influential role played in that formation by Walter Scott's Waverley novels. The consensus takes its cue from Benedict Anderson's account of the novel as one of the major cultural institutions that produces the "imagined community" of the modern nation. According to Anderson , the novel synchronizes the subjectivity ofits readers with secular history and a calendrical order of "homogeneous, empty time," by representing a temporal simultaneity across the diverse spaces and populations of the national territory.1 This imaginary standardization marches with the projects of political, legal, and economic rationalization that constitute modernization in other domains. The ideological power of Scott's novels, following this account, lies in their explicit representation of modernization as a complex, overdetermined historical process, in which a set of political, legal, economic , and cultural transformations bear together on an inevitable outcome: here and now, the only real world, the commerce-based 1 See BenedictAnderson, Imagined Communities: Reflectionson the Origin andSpreadofNationalism (London: Verso, 1983), pp. 30-37. Anderson derives the phrase "homogeneous, empty time" from Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History. For a recent, lucid summary of the "consensus" on the novel and modern national identity see Franco Moretti, Atlasofthe European Novel 1800-1900 (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 16-17. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 15, Number 1, October 2002 82EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION civil society of the post-1707 United Kingdom. Scott, the "father of die historical novel," fully realizes the novel's historical agenda by making it die novel's theme. The strongest analyses ofnationalist representation in late Enlightenment and Romantic writing have situated it within an imperial , globalizing domain of modernization, Immanuel Wallerstein's "world system," which assumes its discursive formation in this very epoch of the invention of nationalist ideologies.2 The nation takes shape, in Katie Trumpener's commanding account, through synchronous processes of internal and external colonialism, acting across the different regional peripheries that fall within the reach of empire. The Romande novel reflects upon the assimilation of Ireland and Scotland into the British Union as both condition and consequence of imperial projects overseas. Saree Makdisi analyses British Romanticism itself, which is characterized by its "fascination ... with the pre- or anti-modern (Nature, the colonial realm, the Orient)," as a cultural expression of the immanence of world empire . The "convergence of capitalist and imperialist practices within the process of modernization" produces the "virtual form" of a unified global political economy together with the antithetical representation of "fractured, disjointed, and disruptive temporalities," properties of the natural and cultural spaces drawn under empire's shadow.' These poles of representation, "universal empire" and intensively particular, geographically and temporallydifferentiated settings at the margins and interstices of modernity, organize the discursive field of Romantic nationalism. The "tidal wave of modernization " (to use Ernest Gellner's term) reveals chronotopic unevenness, the sense that different spaces also constitute different time-zones, as the very condition it submerges.4 Along with other recent critics, Trumpener and Makdisi read the Waverley novels as the instrument of an imperialist and modernizing ideology of "official nationalism," devoted to the assimilation of 2 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730-184Os(SiTi Diego and New York: Academic Press, 1989). 3 Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: UniversalEmpire and the Culture ofModernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 10, 2, 9. 4 Cited in Tom Nairn, The Break-Up ofBritain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (London: New Left Books, 1981), p. 96. ROB ROY, NATION, AND WORLD SYSTEM 83 political-economic and cultural differences through the logic of internal colonialism. In Franco Moretti's summary, the nation-forming project of the historical novel is "to represent internal unevenness, no doubt; and then, to abolish it."5 To narrate this abolition, Scott deploys a key trope...

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