Popular contests over empire in the eighteenth century: the extended version

Abstract

In the last 20 years, scholars have established that the Empire mattered more to ‘ordinary’ eighteenth-century Britons ‘at home’ than once assumed. They still disagree, however, about when popular imperial consciousness first arose and what it looked like. A study of the popular responses to various visits by indigenous people from the empire to Britain through the eighteenth century suggests that an imperial consciousness emerged as early as the 1710s. Moreover, this article contends that such a consciousness was always ambivalent, containing as much anxiety about empire as it did celebration. The article addresses work particularly by Kathleen Wilson, Bob Harris, Jack Greene, and J. G. A. Pocock.

This article has been peer reviewed.

Keywords:

• Britain
• eighteenth century
• imperialism
• press
• popular culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

About the author

Kate Fullagar is a Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Macquarie University. Her most recent books include The Savage Visit: New World Peoples and Popular Imperial Culture in Britain, 1710-1795 (Berkeley, 2012) and (as editor) The Atlantic World in the Antipodes: Effects and Transformations since the Eighteenth Century (Newcastle, 2012).

Notes

1 Gentleman’s Magazine 31 (1761): 462–3; Public Advertiser, 18 December 1762; The Briton, 3 July 1762; The Critical Review, or Annals of Literature 12 (1762): 263–4.

2 Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). The ‘absence of mind’ argument was sealed by John Seeley, The Expansion of England (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1883). Wilson built on then recent work by Gerard Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830 (New York: Palgrave, 1987), Nicholas Rogers, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), and Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

3 See ch. 3 of Wilson, The Sense of the People, especially 137–8, 157.

4 See Kathleen Wilson, A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For short overviews, see James Thompson, ‘Modern Britain and the New Imperial History’, History Compass 5, no. 2 (2007): 455–62 and, especially, Tillman Nechtman, ‘The New Imperial History: A Pedagogical Approach’, The Middle Ground Journal 5 (Fall, 2012): online at http://www2.css.edu/app/depts/his/historyjournal/index.cfm?cat =6&art=100.

5 See for examples, Frank O’Gorman, The Long Eighteenth Century: British Political and Social History 1688–1832 (London: Bloomsbury, 1997); Eliga Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Paul Mapp, ‘British Culture and the Changing Character of the Mid-Eighteenth-Century Empire’, in Cultures in Conflict: The Seven Years’ War in North America, ed. Warren R. Hofstra (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); Tillman Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

6 Bob Harris, ‘“American Idols”: Empire, War, and the Middling Ranks in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Past and Present 150 (1996): 149–50; Bob Harris, ‘War, Empire, and the “National Interest” in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Britain and America Go to War: The Impact of War and Warfare in Anglo-America, 1754–1815, ed. J. Flavell and S. Conway (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2004), 32. See also some scepticism expressed in Marie Peters, ‘Early Hanoverian Consciousness: Empire or Europe?’, English Historical Journal 122, no. 497 (2007): 632-68; Wilfrid Prest, Albion Ascendant: English History, 1660–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 212; Stephen Conway, War, State, and Society in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 228.

7 Peters, ‘Early Hanoverian Consciousness’, 666. Peters was quoting Jeremy Black.

8 Harris, ‘War, Empire, and the “National Interest,”’ 13.

9 Jack P. Greene, Evaluating Empire and Confronting Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), ix, xiii, 361.

10 Greene, Evaluating Empire, xii.

11 Harris, Politics, 106; Harris, ‘War, Empire, and the National Interest’, 32.

12 Greene, Evaluating Empire, xii.

13 J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 71, 33.

14 Ibid., 71, 32.

15 Ibid., 115.

16 Ibid., 32.

17 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Nature and History, Self and Other: European Perceptions of World History in the Age of Encounter’, in Voyages and Beaches: Pacific Encounters, 1769–1840 ed. A. J. Calder, J. Lamb and B. Orr (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999), 25.

18 Wilson, The Sense of the People, 138, fn 2.

19 Greene, Evaluating Empire, fronting blurb; Harris, ‘American Idols’, 149.

20 Marie Peters has criticised Wilson, and new imperial historians generally, for seeing empire conveniently in any source they choose: ‘… it sometimes seems that meanings of “empire” are so expanded as to encompass any contacts with or awareness of worlds beyond Europe, however fleeting, ill-defined or fragmentary. Necessary as it is to recognise the fluidity of contemporary meanings, historians must be precise in their own usage if their analyses are to be descriptively convincing, let alone to carry explanatory weight in tracing and defining change’. I have therefore tried to explain precisely why some topics (though surely not others) were imperial by another name in this era. See Peters, ‘Early Hanoverian Consciousness’, 666.

21 For a history of this visit specifically, see Eric Hinderaker, ‘“The Four Indian Kings” and the Imaginative Construction of the first British Empire’, William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 53 (July 1996): 487–526; Alden Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500–1776 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Kate Fullagar, The Savage Visit: New World Peoples and Popular Imperial Culture in Britain, 1710–1795 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), ch. 2.

22 Richard Steele, Tatler 171, 13 May 1710, ed. D. F. Bond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 440; Joseph Addison, Spectator 50, 27 April 1710, ed. D. F. Bond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), vol. 1, 211–15.

23 Anon., The Four Indian Kings’ Garland in Two Parts (London, 1710); Anon., Epilogue That Was Spoken Before the Four Indian Kings at the Playhouse (London, 1710); Elkanah Settle, A Pindaric Poem, on the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (London, 1711). Note here and in the following that these are mostly unpaginated broadsides with no clear publisher.

24 Anon., The Present State of Europe; Or, the Historical and Political Monthly Mercury 21 (1710): 158–9.

25 Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella (1711), ed. H. Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), vol. 1, 254.

26 Jonathan Swift, The Intelligencer 19 (1728), in H. Davis, ed., Irish Tracts 1728–1733 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 54–61. On Swift’s generally oppositional politics, see Ian Higgins, Swift’s Politics: A Study in Disaffection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

27 Anon., Royal Strangers’ Ramble (London, 1710).

28 Anon., A True and Faithful Account of the Last Distemper and Death of Tom Whigg, Esq. (London, 1710), part I, 31–33.

29 For the Cherokee of 1730, see Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters, 137–50. For the Creek of 1734, see J. A. Sweet, ‘Bearing Feathers of an Eagle: Tomochichi’s Trip to England’, Georgia Historical Quarterly 87 (2002): 339–71. On both together, see Fullagar, Savage Visit, ch. 3.

30 See Daily Courant, 7 August 1730; Universal Spectator, 15 August 1730; Daily Journal, 4 September 1730.

31 Gentleman’s Magazine (1734): 571; Monthly Intelligencer (1734): 447.

32 Fog’s Weekly Journal, 22 August 1730.

33 Anon., Georgia, a Poem. Tomo Cha Chi, An Ode. A Copy of Verses on Mr Oglethorpe’s Second Voyage to Georgia (London, 1756); reprinted in C. C. Jones, Historical Sketch of Tomo Cha Chi, Mico of the Yamacraws (Albany: Joel Munsell, 1868), 59–63.

34 See, for example, Public Register, 20 July 1762. For more on the 1762 visit, see J. Oliphant, ‘The Cherokee Embassy to London, 1762’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 27 (1999): 1–26.

35 London Chronicle, 24 August 1762.

36 Ibid., 31 August 1762.

37 E. McCormick, Omai: Pacific Envoy (Auckland: University of Auckland Press, 1977); Fullagar, Savage Visit, ch. 6.

38 Gentleman’s Magazine 45 (1775): 132.

39 London Magazine 46 (1775): 497.

40 Anon., An Historic Epistle, from Omiah, to the Queen of Otaheite: Being His Remarks on the English Nation (London: T. Evans, 1775), 3, 8.

41 Gerald Fitzgerald, The Injured Islanders; or, The Influence of Art upon the Happiness of Nature (London, 1779).

42 Anon., A Letter from Omai, to the Right Honourable the Earl of ******** (London, c. 1780).

43 Anna Seward, Elegy on Captain Cook, to which is added an ode to the sun (London, 1780), 4, 9, 15; William Cowper, The Task, A Poem (Boston, 1833[1785]), 23–24.

44 John O’Keeffee, Omai; Or, A Trip Around the World, in The Plays of John O’Keeffe, ed. F. M. Link (New York: Garland, 1981), 4, 23.

45 See Colley, Britons, 145 and C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 1780–1830 (London: Longman, 1982), 99.

46 Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, 32. He writes, indeed, of the critics of one of his works, that: ‘one suspects that their real complaint is that The Machiavellian Moment presents the rise of commercial ideology as contingent, whereas they want it to have been primordial’.

47 See Bayly, Imperial Meridian, 99, 127.

48 Colley, Britons, 145.

49 James Vernon in this issue, 19–34.

50 Wilson, Sense of the People, 22.