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

There remains a dearth of critical material that approaches the role played by eighteenth-century theatrical culture in negotiating issues of race and empire, and in engaging with or contributing to competing prescriptions of both imperial and class identities. O'Quinn's book thus provides an important and much needed study. Beginning with the national trauma of Britain's loss of the thirteen American colonies, Staging Governance charts the way in which performances in the London playhouses and in parliament entered into a compensatory dialogue with contemporary debates on the administration of India and the regulation of the East India Company. The theatre, O'Quinn contends, functioned as an arena in which the national neuroses circling around Britain's imperial apparatus were by played out, scrutinised, and exorcised through the deployment of dramatic fantasies of class consolidation, political paternalism, and racial supremacy. This survey is underpinned, first, by the thesis that London theatre at the end of the eighteenth century was 'autoethnographic' – that is, it presented and interrogated the transformations of the very metropolitan society for which it catered – and, second, by O'Quinn's mobilisation and adept control of a Foucauldian theoretical framework for his discussions of governmentality, discipline, and sexuality.

The book is at once tightly focused on specific cultural responses to British colonial policy in India during a thirty year period, and, at the same time, committed to a conception of empire as an array of issues, anxieties, and processes. O'Quinn's introduction elicits a number of themes that he perceives to be crucial components of the imperial project from about 1770 onwards, including: the erosion of the aristocratic hegemony by the commercial classes; the increasing political impotency of the Whig oligarchy; pervasive fears that metropolitan society was in terminal decline; the (de)sexualisation of racial otherness, and gendering of colonial performance; the use of Orientalist spectacles to regulate the social body; and the racialisation of class. O'Quinn's study is, in many ways, and as he states himself, a history of the bourgeoisie, whose relative invisibility on the stage when set against habitual representations of the aristocracy or lower-classes, he understands to be indicative of their 'emerging normativity' (8) and their thorough immersion in the mechanisms driving the self-imaging of empire. One of the greatest achievements of Staging Governance is that it sustains this kaleidoscopic view of imperialism from start to finish; O'Quinn unfolds his concerns with sexuality, class, race, and parliamentary history synchronously, developing these different but overlapping strands into a coherent and challenging account of the neuroses and painful acts of self-definition at work in Britain's perception of its own imperial power at the dawn of the nineteenth century.

Equally impressive is O'Quinn's understanding of the inseparability of theatrical and print cultures. The book develops its survey through a series of detailed and carefully theorised readings in which paratextual materials such as newspapers and graphic satires are discussed with as much sensitivity as the performances to which they respond. Part One – 'Ethnographic Acts' – considers how anxieties generated by the transition in British polity from aristocratic paternalism to commercial enterprise and the culture of credit came to centre on the East India Company due to its 'hybrid nature' as both 'a commercial entity and the agent of sovereign governance' (45). O'Quinn is especially concerned with perceptions of both colonial capital and aristocratic excess as contagions against the degenerating effects of which the metropolis had it immunise itself – a theme which he elucidates through readings of Samuel Foote's play The Nabob, and Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg's and John O'Keefe's pantomine Omai; or, A Trip round the World. Where The Nabob's critique of metropolitan vice focuses on the libertinism of the gentry O'Quinn argues, Omai's new strategy of racialising the lower orders is indicative of a 'signal transition in middle-class politics' (114).

The long central section, 'Women...