Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770-1800 (review)

The evolution of British national identity in the last three decades of the eighteenth century was the result of a series of 'crises in governance' caused not only by the loss of the American colonies but also by the constantly fluctuating economic and administrative predicaments of the East India Company. There is no better way to study the crises, Daniel O'Quinn argues, than to locate the 'shifts in governmentality in the theatricalization of imperial affairs.' Economic instability, political turmoil, and the resultant social anxieties created the need towards the end of the century to re-examine the constitutionality of Empire and the contingencies of maintaining an imperial stance in the face of overwhelming evidence of corruption and chaos in the colonies. This is a conscientious – and commendable – attempt to understand the ways in which the task of nation-building relies upon orchestrated performances of national identity. By transcending disciplinary boundaries and asking the questions that involve radical realignment in several overlapping fields, O'Quinn has made a valuable contribution to eighteenth-century studies.

Divided into three parts – 'Ethnographic Acts,' 'Women and the Trials of Imperial Masculinity,' and 'A Theatre of Perpetual War' – this book does not claim to present a linear narrative that conjoins parliamentary, imperial, and theatrical history into one cohesive trajectory; but rather, it selectively points to specific moments in the British cultural imagination when the business of empire, the anxieties of financial strain, and the immediacy of intercultural engagements create ideal settings for self-reflexive dramatizations, both in the theatre and in Parliament, which becomes a battleground for rehearsing foreign policy, and the philosophy of empire.

The first part of Staging Governance is divided into two chapters, the first of which situates Samuel Foote's The Nabob not only in the context of anti-nabob discourse but also amid a complex web of sociopolitical anxieties linked to the East India Company's rapidly changing status – from a commercial enterprise to an imperial organ. The strength of this chapter lies in its strategic juxtaposition of several dramatic events that frame Foote's satire: the passing of the Regulating Act; Parliament's new role as guardian of the company; Robert Clive's frequently cited speech defending British actions in Bengal; and the volatile nature of Britain's economic reliance upon a company with dubious dealings with Indian rulers and Indian bankers, creating a system of credit that was perceived as being shaky at best. O'Quinn extends his analysis of 'ethnographic acts' with a careful consideration in the next chapter of Omai; or, a Trip round the World, the spectacular pantomime that celebrates the protoanthropological instincts of the time and explores the theatrics of sexual and racial clash when Britain's Pacific fantasies encounter the real Omai. As museological elements interact with pantomimical strategies in The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, the spectator witnesses 'the theatre as an exhibition space,' O'Quinn contends, where Britannia is variously represented.

The book's strongest arguments lie in 'The Theatre of Perpetual War' – the third part of Staging Governance. The purpose of the chapter in this segment titled 'Starke Reforms' is to present a reciprocal equivalence between Cornwallis's military reforms and Marianna Starke's The Sword of Peace in which the 'proliferation of "brown families" poses a threat to the stability of Britain's distant sovereignty.' The next chapter in the same segment, 'Tipu Sultan and the Allure of the Mechanical Display,' outlines the role of military spectacles at a time when Cornwallis's establishment of the Permanent Settlement in Bengal and his decisive victory over Tipu Sultan called for the mobilization of dramatic narratives that endorsed these significant steps towards consolidating the British empire in India.

O'Quinn has repeatedly and appropriately cited Foucault, but this study does not embrace the ferocity of Foucault's oppositional discourse, nor does it claim to address the incommensurability of the fundamentally disjunct performative instincts that define the colonizer and the colonized. Thus the tortured historiography of the...