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

By 1762, victory in the long war with France was obvious to most literate Britons. Their nation had already won from their foe the most strategic regions of North America, India, Western Europe, and the Caribbean. The imminent peace treaty would go on to secure Britain’s place as the world’s most extensive empire. Many were overjoyed. Britain had been brought to a ‘height unknown before’, crowed the Gentleman’s Magazine, due to ‘our conquests in every Quarter of the Globe’. The Public Advertizer thought the empire now ‘not inferior to that of antient Rome’. Victory, however, didn’t please everyone. The Briton complained bitterly that ‘we have already made more conquests than it is our interest to retain … the public credit is drawn so fine as to threaten cracking at the very next stretch’. The Critical Review wondered if Britain’s rivals might not take ‘umbrage’ at the way that Britain’s ‘ambitious designs’ now threatened to undo the ‘political balance … which they have been endeavouring for a century to preserve’. It went on to remind readers that ‘the most prosperous wars have their boundaries, and the most useful conquests their limits’.¹

Most historians now agree that by the end of the Seven Years War, the image of the empire had well and truly entered British public discourse. The majority of these historians also agree that the public had conflicting, if not divisive opinions, on empire from the 1760s until at least the close of the American Revolution. Such consensus did not exist twenty years ago. In The Sense of the People (1995), Kathleen Wilson was one of the first to challenge the then long-held nineteenth-century conceit that the empire impinged little on Hanoverian minds – so little, in fact, that the empire grew, apparently, with no mind attending to it at all.² Wilson argued instead that empire mattered enormously to ordinary folk ‘at home’, and moreover that this domestic engagement could be charted in the popular press from as early as the 1730s.³ Wilson’s book was at the forefront of a charge that later became known as ‘new imperial history’. New imperial historians placed fresh emphasis on the role of culture in thinking about the making of the British past, and in so doing they uncovered an empire forged through discourse as much as it was ever built by arms, trade, or bureaucracy. Since they found constitutive discourse in the sources of both coloniser and colonised, and in sources that moved seamlessly between different sites of empire, new imperial historians also sought to reintegrate ‘domestic history’ and ‘overseas history’ into one interconnected field of analysis.⁴

Wilson’s argument about eighteenth-century imperial discourse has met with a surprisingly steady flow of responses ever since publication. As suggested, the chief reaction has been positive. A rich series of works now exists that takes Hanoverian imperial consciousness for granted.⁵ Some historians, however, resisted from the start. Over the decade following Wilson’s book, Bob Harris especially took issue with the ‘coherence’ that Wilson attributed to popular Georgian discussions of empire. ‘Bellicosity and expansionism do not represent the whole story’, he contested. Harris wanted both to underscore the ‘volatility, ambivalence, and often contradictory nature’ of the domestic press during the mid-century decades and, more importantly, to suggest that empire was not the best way of summarising its focus anyway. He argued that until at least the 1760s the popular press was focused rather on war with rival European nations than on empire, which in turn belied an anxiety about domestic society and politics rather than imperial actions or consequences.⁶ Thus Harris did not reinstate old nineteenth-century views about absent-minded imperialists but he cautioned against Wilson’s early dating of the emergence of imperial discourse. As a historian of the press, Harris was sympathetic to the cultural emphasis of new imperial historians, but he doubted that a British imperial culture – constitutive or otherwise – existed much before the Seven Years War. Other skeptics of Wilson’s thesis were more hostile to the whole approach of new imperial history: Marie Peters, like Harris, felt that imperial sentiments could only be detected from the 1760s onward, but she doubted that even these could be seen as having anything to do with the ‘processes … actually instrumental in ensuring Britain’s rise to imperial power’.⁷

Given what Harris conceded eventually to be the rise of Wilson’s thesis to the status of a ‘new orthodoxy’, readers might have expected the issue to melt away into the twenty-first century.⁸ Surprisingly, though, it was resurrected recently when Jack Greene published his Evaluating Empire and Confronting Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2013). Greene self-identifies with new imperial history and indeed has nothing but praise for Wilson’s ‘densely researched and thoroughly analyzed’ work. His book, however, claims to delve for the first time into one aspect of popular imperial consciousness that Wilson only touched on: namely, the forking among press pundits around 1760 into those who continued a pro-imperial stance and those who developed a ‘devastating’ anti-imperialism. Greene argues that this popular dialectic lasted for around a quarter-century. His contribution, then, is to shore up Wilson’s earlier start-date but at the same time to underscore an overlooked nuance. He sees the 1760s – so important to Harris and the other skeptics – not as a time of awakening but rather as a time of unprecedented internal conflict in a now well-established discourse on empire. The pay-off, for Greene, is to find ‘collectively, if not effectively’, in the critical voices from his short, defined period, ‘the forerunners of British and modern anti-colonialism’.⁹

This article addresses both the resistant narrative of Harris and the claims to a critical adjustment made by Greene. It does not exactly replicate or re-instantiate the thesis of Wilson’s The Sense of the People. Rather, by looking at the popular press through one particular prism – namely, the responses to various visits by indigenous people from the empire to Britain – it suggests that there was not only a consciousness about empire before the Seven Years War, but that we might see it emerge from as early as the 1710s. Moreover, this article contends that such a consciousness was always ambivalent in its attitude to empire: popular reactions to indigenous visitors throughout the century reveal as much anxiety about empire as they do ‘uncritical celebration’.¹⁰ In other words, it agrees in part with both Harris and Greene but questions some of their caveats. It agrees with Harris that public discourse was contradictory but argues that its subject was always empire. It agrees with Greene that imperial discourse was long-standing but refutes his point about a 1760s twist. Ultimately, this survey of the episodic British responses to indigenous visitors aligns with Wilson’s thesis but pushes it even further regarding both the timing and the nature of eighteenth-century imperial discussion. Its aim is to deepen rather than challenge the case made by New Imperial History: both earlier and more conflicted examples of discussion about empire show that British domestic and overseas histories are indeed intertwined, and that, as a controversial cultural phenomenon, they together played a key role in defining – perhaps even in creating – a fraught British identity for the whole eighteenth century. Discovering a fraught British identity in this era is significant for our understanding of later British attitudes to expansion: it shows that the more consistently jingoistic approach of the nineteenth century was not only unprecedented but in fact a deliberate reaction to earlier division.

Despite their overt differences, Harris and Greene share one common methodological tic: they both define their particular primary subjects according to somewhat retrospective precepts. Harris defines his topic, imperial discourse, as that which debates territorial colonisation. Greene defines his topic, anti-imperial discourse, as that which condemns slaving and native oppression. Using rather modern definitions, it is perhaps not surprising that each then argued as they did. Harris thought that the predominant topic for discussion in the British popular press before the 1760s was ‘war rather than empire’ or, as he amended this slightly elsewhere, that it had ‘less to do with empire per se than with Britain, its position as a great power, and the condition of society and politics’.¹¹ Greene saw a rupture in the discourse around the 1760s because only then did he discern an emergence of the ‘languages of humanity and justice’ sympathising with imperial victims.¹²

My reading of the eighteenth-century popular press takes a less modernist perspective. It follows not the current mavens of cultural history but the now rather elderly insights of the intellectual New Zealand historian J. G. A. Pocock. More than a generation ago, Pocock posited that eighteenth-century Britain, far from tracing a ‘unidirectional transformation’ towards modernity, was better described as ‘involved in a fermenting and ungovernable debate over itself’.¹³ Pocock figured that debate as a ‘bitter’ struggle between those who were for and those who were against the ‘imperial regime that came into being after 1688’.¹⁴ Because he saw the Revolution of 1688 as the most significant organising concept for the development of this ‘imperial regime’, Pocock understood most gestures to ‘Revolutionary issues’ through the eighteenth century as being also artefacts of the general debate. As such, he read spats over the status of the church or the position of the monarchy, say, as simply facets of the struggle over regime change. Equally, he read dissent over any issue arising from the 1688 marginalisation of both church and monarchy – such as the escalation in trade, war, or polite society – as also expressions of the emerging imperial state. Harris’s European wars, in such a reading, would then be seen as merely another symptom of this grand transformation rather than a separate issue. Likewise, Greene’s humanitarian critics of the 1770s would be seen as just the latest incarnations of a position that had been ongoing for decades.

For reasons peculiar to his subfield, Pocock called this debate not one over imperialismbut one over ‘commerce’; and he identified it as the ‘major key to eighteenth-century social thought’.¹⁵ Pocock thought its study was of supreme importance if historians were to understand the total significance of modern forms such as commerce, or the British Empire. To see that these forms were ‘hammered out with difficulty in the face of opposing paradigms’ (rather than as ‘straight success stories’), he suggested, is to appreciate truly their radical contingency.¹⁶ To see instead commerce, or the British Empire, emerge with either minimal or mostly favourable domestic attention is, conversely, to be a part of and in the end to endorse their own naturalising effects.

Despite its immense impact in intellectual history, Pocock’s central idea about eighteenth-century Britain has not been well absorbed by cultural historians of the period. Unfortunately, Pocock has rarely delved into sources beyond what he himself admitted were the ‘unrepresentative elite’, and few of his readers have wandered where he has declined to go.¹⁷ As such, he has had a narrower audience than his ideas deserved. Ironically, though, twenty years ago, Kathleen Wilson had been reading Pocock and remarked as much in a footnote. In The Sense of the People, Wilson acknowledged that for the early eighteenth century ‘anti-imperialist attitudes have been ably documented’. She pointed first and foremost to J. G. A. Pocock.¹⁸ Her book, then, was meant to provide the counterpart tale of pro-imperial sentiment in eighteenth-century Britain. Although in parts Wilson did use strong language to push her case, the footnote suggests that she never intended to show that the early Hanoverian populace was ‘largely uncritical’ about empire or that it was dominated by ‘bellicosity and expansionism’.¹⁹ Her work was instead a corrective to (and a first foray into the popular realms of) a then still very thin historiography.

A study of popular responses to indigenous visitors to eighteenth-century Britain finds that Pocock’s ‘major key’ ran through ephemeral street literature just as much as it did through elite philosophical texts – though with these sources the better summarising word for its subject might be ‘expansionism’ rather than ‘commerce’ or ‘imperialism’. Popular urban opinion used the visitors as a way to enter into, and amplify, concerns about the expansion of Britain ever since the Glorious Revolution. These concerns included the changing role of religion, monarchy, and parliament as well as the rampant increase in war, trade, and social sophistication.²⁰ The connectedness of all these topics to expansionism was also, of course, underscored by the cultural associations attached to the visitors: each registered in Britain not as singular foreign tourists but specifically as envoys from critical arenas of the empire. The conflicted nature of the reception to indigenous envoys all the way through the eighteenth century suggests a very broad and very fractious discourse on empire characterised the whole era.

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Although Native Americans had turned up periodically in Britain from as early as 1501, the first truly popular envoy arrived in 1710. This included four supposed representatives of the Iroquois League, come to Britain to persuade the monarch to redeploy forces against French Canada.²¹ Artists depicted their appearance in a host of ways while mobs attended their every move to theatres, churches, coffeehouses, docks, and hospitals. Their popularity in written texts can be discerned in the way they inspired both celebratory and critical reflections on the primary mechanism by which they were known to Britons – that is, the expanding empire. They were popular, in other words, because they simultaneously enabled and fed controversy about general imperial growth rather than any agreement about such growth.

The journalists Richard Steele and Joseph Addison were among the first to see the Iroquois as opportunities for self-congratulation. Steele understood them as ‘just and generous princes’ who matched in every way the ‘great merits’ and ‘civilities’ of their hosts. Conversely, Addison saw them as ‘very odd’ and ‘wild’, though unlike Steele, he thought them, in consequence, the opposite of sophisticated Londoners. But importantly, both journalists used the Iroquois to focus on the general issue of contemporary British manners; their explicit reference to people from Britain’s imperial territories can be read as an acknowledgement of the connection between imperial growth and changing mores back home. Steele and Addison used figures from the empire, therefore, to comment specifically on the social effects of empire; they were thus clearly engaging in imperial discourse.²²

Other examples of British commentary on the Iroquois that celebrated empire are evident in many of the cheap squibs of the era. These mostly took the Addisonian line of snubbing the visitors in order to highlight the various achievements of the hosts. The bestselling ballad The Four Indian Kings’ Garland emphasised the heathen humility of the Iroquois in contrast to the ‘mild and kind’ Christianity of the British. Their ‘sad condition’ contrasted with ‘bold Britain’s … glory’. The broadside titled Epilogue (which claimed to be the Iroquois’ speech to Queen Anne) underscored instead the wondrousness of Britain’s monarch. The Iroquois were said to be ‘struck with wonder’ at the sight of Anne, who was ‘so Good, so Gracious, and so Great a Queen’ because she offered assurance ‘against the threats of France and Rome’. Finally, Elkanah Settle’s ponderous Pindaric Poem focused on the ‘benign’ nature of Britannia herself, a force in the world at large that makes ‘ignorance retreat’ and ‘savage worship fly’. Settle compared Britannia frankly to the sun, which forces through gloominess, because this was how his nation penetrated ‘barbarism’.²³

Reading such sources with Harris’s eyes, the Garland and the Epilogue, at the least, might appear to be more centrally about Anglicanism, monarchism, and European war than about empire. But when placed alongside Settle’s more explicitly imperial paean, these squibs can be seen to slot together as part of the larger ‘Pocockian’ debate on Britain’s imperial regime. Each of these issues was arguably understood at the time to be connected to national aggrandisement.

Importantly, imperial jingoism was not the only inflection to be found in responses to the Four Iroquois. There were in fact as many commentaries that took a critical stance towards imperial Britain as there were celebratory reactions. The popular monthly Present State of Europe included a sly reference to the Iroquois in its May issue for 1710, comparing the noble austerity of the visitors to the ‘august’ nature of the Queens’ Life Guards. Since most readers would have seen the Life Guards at the time as explicit symbols of the Restoration era (when monarchs dominated parliaments), this was no casual allusion.²⁴ Once again, the indigenous visitors were implicated in a bigger contest about the changes wrought by 1688. In this case, the view was censorious of the parliament-led move to more extensive empire.

As well, and in direct opposition to Steele and Addison, the rival journalist Jonathan Swift conjured the Four Iroquois as vehicles to critique rather than congratulate the British polity. Swift later claimed to have given Addison the idea of using the Iroquois ventriloquially as a way of discussing contemporary issues.²⁵ In a pique that Addison had published before him, Swift waited some years before using the trick himself. When he did, however, his views were very far from those of the genial Spectator crowd. Swift thought the British economy was becoming increasingly as he imagined a Native American economy to be – a system based on ‘trucking and bartering’ rather than on the stability of land. Such a system, Swift foretold, would end not only in poverty but also in dependence on trading with ‘our too powerful Neighbours’.²⁶ Where Steele and Addison had seen the Iroquois as a way to discuss new social mores, Swift saw them as windows onto economic futures. Both subjects, though, were assumed by each to be equally the effects of imperial expansion.

Critical popular opinion via the Iroquois also existed in lowlier publications. The satiric broadside squib Royal Strangers’ Ramble saw the visit by indigenes from an imperial region as the perfect opportunity to show up the new hollowness of British society:

Since no one brought less

Of Wealth, Knowledge, or Dress

Than those who from India are come,

And no one before

Return’d from our Shore

With so little advantages Home.²⁷

The ballad saw little of interest in American indigenous society but, importantly, found no particular redress in British society either. That it used figures from the empire made a clear connection between domestic society and its overseas expansionism. Critique was also present in the vitriol of another cheap pamphlet of the time, A True and Faithful Account of … Tom Whigg. This overt attack on whiggish rule used the visiting Iroquois as a means to criticise the present government’s ‘ridicule of all Distinctions’ – especially its ‘lessening [of] the Honour due to the Majesty of Kings’.²⁸ Again, this supposed defence of monarchical rights acquired an imperial edge because of the device chosen for its exposition.

The same kind of conflicted, empire-centred discourse appeared in response to the visits by some Cherokee in 1730 and some Creeks in 1734.²⁹ Like the Four Iroquois, these envoys garnered many reports that worked to congratulate the British hosts (who in both cases were sealing beneficial treaties with the indigenous parties). The 1730 Cherokee often appeared in newspaper reports as ways of shining light onto recent national accomplishments. These reports traced the Cherokee’s movement around London and lingered notably on the visitors’ admiration for the arsenal at Greenwich, the impressiveness of Parliament, the energy of Exchange Alley, and the ‘Decency and good Manners’ of the people.³⁰ Likewise, the 1734 Creek were said by numerous pundits to be amazed at ‘the Power and Greatness of the King and Nation’. They were especially taken with Britain’s armament stockpiles and ‘English politeness’.³¹ Following Pocock’s insight, we can see that these reports were not isolated instances of nationalism or mercantilism or militarism or chauvinism. Together, they implied approval of Britain’s overall move to become an expansionist state.

Significantly, and also as for the Iroquois, there ran many critical reflections alongside this general approval. These critical reflections, indeed, may help to explain the overtness of the celebratory pieces – each knew it was engaged in a fierce contest and so each spoke in particularly strident terms. A key example from 1730 appeared in the generally oppositional Fog’s Weekly Journal. The piece likened the Cherokee envoy’s leader to Britain’s pre-1688 monarchy. Not for him, therefore, any ‘fawning Courtiers to secrete Aims from the Publick’; not for him any ‘cringing Sycophants to tickle his Ears with Flatteries whilst they pick’d his pockets’. These ‘nut-brown majesties’ enjoyed ‘good old English food’ and an ‘abstemious way of living’. In all, they reminded the journalist of ‘the early days of Government … those untax’d Ages’.³² Fog’s target here of a kingdom turned over increasingly to the court, to special interests, to state bureaucracies, and to an ever-complicating global culture – namely, to expansionism – could not have been clearer.

In 1734, an even more strident voice emerged in relation to the Creek envoy. That year an anonymous ode called Tomo-Cha-Chi circulated in quarto form. The ode was flattering of the Creek leader, Tomochichi, but utterly damning, in contrast, of his hosts. The poet believed that Britain was ‘sunk down from its Meridian Height’ as a direct result of its exploits overseas.

Wealth without End, from such Exploits as These,

Crown’d our large Commerce, and extended Sway;

And here dissolv’d in soft luxurious Ease,

Our ancient Virtue vanish’d soon away.³³

The ode made explicit what some earlier commentaries had only implied: that economies and manners were of course intimately bound up with expansionist behaviour. Such connections were more than obvious to the ode’s contemporary readers.

In contrast to Harris’s claim, then, that early eighteenth-century Britons were more concerned with domestic or continental matters, these examples suggest a fairly consistent preoccupation with Britain’s overall imperial character. In contrast to Greene’s position that dissent only emerges later, they also suggest that imperial discourse was from the very start a conflicted phenomenon.

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Indigenous envoys continued to visit Britain during the second half of the eighteenth century, and the popular press continued to use them as vehicles for contemporary comment – both positive and negative – until at least the end of the American Revolution. This continuation challenges Harris’s further claim that popular imperialism only began in the 1760s. It also suggests that Greene’s primary contention – which sought to counter Harris but at the same time underscore the novelty of dissent from this era – is overstated. Metropolitan commentary on indigenous visitors shared a coherence over the whole seventy years between the 1710s and the 1780s far more than it revealed a significant rupture.

When a second Cherokee envoy arrived in Britain during the summer of 1762, the Seven Years War was edging towards its now inevitable close. Unsurprisingly, the envoy solicited several reactions that connected its visit to a sense of imminent imperial glory. Just like the 1730s envoys, this later group was regularly reported to be ‘utterly astonished’ and ‘highly delighted’ with the ‘number of ships in the river … [and] the many ports and arsenals round the Kingdom’.³⁴

But also like the 1730s envoys, and perhaps more surprisingly, the 1762 party provoked some damning comments, too. The London Chronicle was one of the most pointed critics. Its reporter was alerted especially to what the Cherokee revealed about Britain when they were nearly crushed by the curiosity of a mob one evening in Vauxhall Gardens. ‘What can apologise’, the reporter cried, ‘for people running in such shoals … to see the savage chiefs that are come among us?’ The reporter believed the answer was the same impulse that drove Britons now always to be ‘running after fights; a folly that foreign nations reproach us with but too justly and which undoubtedly is pernicious as well as ridiculous’.³⁵ The London Chronicle was in no doubt that the imperial forces that brought indigenous Americans to London were also those that instigated wars (and mobs) – and with them a general sense of horror and shame.

One week later, another writer published in the same journal his belief that the recent agreement with the Cherokee (a peace to seal the end of the vicious Anglo-Cherokee War) represented a push for further trading links with America. Far from an admirable achievement, the writer felt that ‘too much’ trade resulted in ‘dangerous … luxury’. The Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and Flemish had all been too fond of trade, the writer goes on, ‘and they were all ruined’. Moreover, ‘if we were not by commerce in pursuit of trifles round the globe, we should not need to station fleets in every part of it’.³⁶ This oppositional organ was adamant, then, about the interconnections between indigenes, war, trade, and luxury: they were all of a piece in its consideration, and that piece could be neatly summarised as expansionism.

A similarly split reaction could be seen in local commentaries on the first Pacific Islander visit to Britain. Mai from Raiatea followed in the footsteps of earlier Native American envoys: in itinerary, protocol, expectation, and popular commentary, Mai repeated patterns set down by previous indigenous travellers. Come aboard Cook’s second voyage to the Pacific, Mai arrived in Britain in July 1774, just as the American revolutionary war was appearing over the political horizon. He stayed until roughly the Declaration of Independence.³⁷

During the intervening two years, Mai offered an opportunity for innumerable discussions about British imperial life. Interestingly, the commentaries on Mai threw up for the first time more vitriol about British expansionism than celebration. The attack began soon after Mai’s disembarkation. The lead journal was, again, the London Chronicle. On 19 July 1774, it pretended that Mai had read about himself described as a savage. But ‘we practice those virtues you only teach’, Mai is imagined to have replied. We ‘are enemies to luxury [and] never go to war but from a principle of self-preservation’. Mai is said to have concluded: ‘never [therefore] call us barbarous, you deserve the appellation yourself’. Later, the Gentleman’s Magazine followed suit. Mai’s arrival in Britain reminded its writer that Britain’s exploration of the Pacific had ‘cost the lives of many Indians’. It went on to wonder at the British practice of parading indigenes like Mai around the metropolis, ‘to debase him into a spectacle and a macaroni, and to invigorate the seeds of corrupted nature by a course of improved debauchery’.³⁸ At the same time, the London Magazine took Mai’s presence as a cue to realise that in the Pacific ‘we have established a disease which will prove ever fatal to [the] unhappy innocents’. It hammered home its message: ‘we, a more refined race of monsters, contaminated all their bliss by an introduction of our vices’.³⁹

Angry pamphlets picked up where the critical journals left off. One of the harshest was An Historical Epistle from Omiah [Mai] to the Queen of Otaheite. This verse squib pretended to write home Mai’s impressions of London: ‘Where’er I turn, confusion meets my eyes/New scenes of pomp, new luxuries surprise’. Mai is said then to discover that all these riches are the result of ‘pilfer’d wealth’, which in turn is the result of war, by which Britons ‘in cool blood premeditatedly go/To murder wretches whom they cannot know’. The pamphlet pulled no punches:

Urg’d by no injury, prompted by no ill,

In forms they butcher, and by systems kill;

Cross o’er the seas, to ravage distant realms,

And ruin thousands worthier than themselves.⁴⁰

This writer had no difficulty connecting the dots back from imperialism, to war, to Britain’s domestic plenitude – all prompted by a visiting indigene.

A slightly softer popular verse was the Injured Islanders. It focused on Mai’s homeland, which the author believed was now ravaged with ‘Discord’. The author claimed that the British lust for ‘Lux’ry’ had ‘taught Ambition to be Great’. And so ‘Lust of Power to Deeds oppressive led’, and ‘Europe’s Crimes with Europe’s Commerce spread’. Now all one heard in Tahiti, apparently, were ‘Widow’s wailings’ and ‘Orphan’s cries’.⁴¹ The sarcastic Letter from Omai was more blunt. Written after Britons heard news of James Cook’s death in Hawaii, the memory of Mai prompted its writer to think again about Britain’s expansionist behaviour. Mai is imagined to feel very much for ‘poor Captain Cook, who was certainly very cruelly and inhumanly butchered, for nothing more than ordering his crew to fire on a banditti of naked savages, who seemed to look as if they had a right to the country in which he found them’.⁴²

Though unusually virulent, the critical commentary did run parallel to some more placatory observations. One popular poem reversed the thrust of A Letter from Omai and found that Mai could occasion lamentation for Cook (and all he stood for) as much as he could inspire accusation. Anna Seward’s tear-jerking Elegy on Captain Cook bid Mai to ‘bring his choicest stores’ to honour the fallen British explorer, who had ‘quit … gorgeous… imperial London’ to ‘pour new wonders on th’uncultured shore’. Seward’s Elegy was certainly read at the time, and later, as a jingoistic text. Another contemporary poem, William Cowper’s The Task, switched the common critical association of luxury with Britons and suggested that it was rather Mai himself who, as a savage, rotted in ‘luxurious ease’. Cowper insisted that Mai, newly returned to Tahiti, must pine for the ‘sweets’ once ‘tasted’ in London.⁴³

The most popular text on Mai was the blockbuster pantomime named after him that ran sell-out shows from 1786 through to the end of the 1788 season. Omai; Or, A Trip Around the World sealed Mai’s memory for many as a trigger not just for the adoration of Cook but indeed for his very deification. The pantomime used the figure of Mai to consolidate the late-1780s turn away from Atlantic disasters and towards new imperial potential in the Pacific. It knew for sure that under ‘George’s command’ and via Cook’s benevolent outreach, not only would Britain be redeemed but mankind itself would learn ‘how to live’.⁴⁴

The popular response to the 1762 Cherokee and to Mai resonates with the arguments of Harris and Greene regarding general British public opinion after the Seven Years War. It was empire-focused and remarkably divided. However, when considered alongside earlier responses to similar indigenous visitors, this reaction looks far less novel on both accounts. It used similar language, imagery, and tone to the earlier responses. It also split along a similar polemical fault-line. The overall eighteenth-century British commentary on indigenous visitors implies a consistently contested imperial discourse ever since 1710.

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As many scholars have observed, an increasingly sentimental, pro-imperial stance began to dominate popular British culture into the 1790s.⁴⁵ Though indigenous visitors continued to turn up in Britain periodically through this era, even they gradually garnered less diverse reactions. Indeed, so monotone became the response that their popularity as a whole waned from around 1790 – suggesting once again that their earlier appeal had lain in their ability to speak not just to one view but to a variety of voices. What is perhaps less appreciated is the newness of this sentimental turn. It was not a recently narrowed version of a discourse that was itself only of recent origin, as Harris would have it. Nor was it a throwback to an earlier simple jingoism, as Greene’s account would infer. After nearly eighty years of vehement conflict about the propriety of empire, British public discussion into the 1790s took on an unprecedented level of conformity and complicity with empire. There may have been debate about best imperial practice from this decade, but far less fundamental critique about the principle of expansionism appeared in popular domestic culture from the time of the French Revolutionary wars.

Such a result may seem to make the earlier, Hanoverian tumult inconsequential. But as Pocock has written in a different context, ‘it is hard to see’ how the fact of victory for one side makes the history of a prior contest irrelevant.⁴⁶ It matters to our understanding of the nineteenth-century British Empire if we see it arise out of internal conflict or out of internal support. To see it born from support alone would obscure from view the special efforts that Britons went to during the proceeding ‘imperial meridian’ to forge a more ‘vigorous’ – some even say ‘despotic’ – position in the world.⁴⁷ It would dull the specifics of the ‘sharp move to the Right’ that Linda Colley identified as critical in Britain after the loss of revolutionary America.⁴⁸ Alternately, to see instead that Britons had long fought over the outcome of expansion is to grasp the deeper meaning of this move. It was not a switch fashioned out of a continuing, brash over-confidence, but it was instead one built over the dead body of dispute. Uniform jingoism was not a simple, positive production but a complex, reactive construct.

A bitterly dialogic eighteenth-century Britain makes the proceeding nineteenth-century Britain look much less assured than still often assumed – much more dynamic, much more ambivalent, and thus ultimately much more contingent. Such a Britain also speaks very much to James Vernon’s recent claim that modern Britain was made by the world – or at least by internal reflections on its relationship to the world – as much as the modern world was made by Britain.⁴⁹ A study of popular discussions about one aspect of the outside world suggests that in the eighteenth century this phenomenon was also dialogical rather than monological in nature.

Twenty years ago Kathleen Wilson complained that the utterances left by ‘ordinary people’ of the eighteenth century were still too often dismissed as ‘subpolitical’.⁵⁰ In her attempt to recover popular discourse on empire, she concentrated on the then remarkable find of engaged, pro-imperial pundits, dating from at least the 1730s. She went on, in ‘new imperial history’ manner, to suggest that this discourse was more formative of British identity in the era than commonly recognised. Applying a Pocockian understanding of what counts as imperial discourse reveals the opposing voices that also existed in popular ephemera and thus brings the conflicted, discordant aspects of everyday culture into clearer view. Pocock was pretty much the historian least likely to wade through the scrappiness of low-brow sources. His insights into the texture of eighteenth-century thinking, however, help to deepen current work on modern British consciousness. A kind of ‘Pocock-from-below’ approach reveals a British culture that was both imperialist and anxious, over an extended stretch of time, and all the way through.

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).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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.