The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730 (review)

The modest-sounding conjunction “and” in the title of Robert Markley’s book belies its sweeping ambition, which is nothing less than to rewrite “the history of English literature in an Asian-dominated world” and to link English literary history firmly to a revisionist economic history centred not on Europe but China and the Far East (2). This project entails a theoretical as well as imaginative reorientation away from “the fundamental assumptions, values, and interpretations of a Eurocentric modernity” towards a new Sinocentric historiography (2). In literary terms, this means that the achievements of the canonical “greats” of this period, such as Milton, Dryden, Defoe, and Swift, must be assessed along with the largely unsuccessful English commercial ventures in China as well as Southeast Asia and Japan. If this seems to be unfamiliar territory, Markley suggests, it is because we have not achieved sufficient “interdisciplinary accountability” in our literary studies (17). The implications of this study are therefore grave, almost paralyzingly so. Markley broadens the field of literary investigation to encompass travelogues, atlases, economic tracts, as well as economic theory, historical ecology, and Asian history, while turning progressivist, western Europe-centred historiography on its head. If there is anybody who has doubted the difficulty of doing literary history, he will not be consoled by this tremendously researched, paradigm-changing book.

The reader whose interests lie chiefly in English literary history rather than in world history is likely to find the chapters on the canonical writers most engaging. Of the seven chapters, which are organized roughly chronologically, several deal with texts that are unlikely to figure in undergraduate surveys of this period. For these readers, the first chapter on early travellers in Southeast Asia (James Lancaster, Thomas Mun, John Saris) and the early geographies of Heylyn and Purchas, or the third chapter on the narratives of the seventeenth-century Dutch and Russian embassies to the Imperial Court in Beijing (the accounts of Jan Nieuhoff and Ysbrants Ides), though both extraordinarily informative and suggestive, will work largely as “link” chapters to the chapters on writers with whom we are more familiar. By linking literary history to this material, however, Markley offers transformative readings of familiar authors. The second chapter on Milton, for instance, which reads as a massive footnote to six lines from book 11 of Paradise Lost that in all probability few readers have bothered to read carefully (“the destin’d Walls / Of Cambalu, seat of Cathaian Can, / Samarchand by Oxus, Temir’s Throne, / To Paquin of Sinean Kings, and thence / To Agra and Lahor of great Mogul / Down to the golden Chersonese”), illuminates an unfamiliar Milton who was interested more in trading with China than in reading the Chinese annals. Chapter 4, which discusses Dryden’s Amboyna in light of the English trade rivalry with Dutch merchants over the spice trade in Southeast Asia, reads the play ironically as a work about English “national abjection” (145), “social confusion,” and “status anxiety” (170).

Read against the background of a national English consciousness that is supremely invested in the idea of an endlessly profitable trade with the bounties of the Far East, yet unable to hide the cracks in this imaginary construction of an unconquered Other, the writers Markley analyzes turn out to be ideologically troubled and rather belligerent figures. Milton’s attitude towards China is both sceptical and self-interested, and Dryden represses English disappointments in Southeast Asia to serve the English people a heroic dish of propaganda. The final chapter of the book on Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels notes that it contains “Swift’s critique of England’s imperial ambitions” and goes on to sum it up as “his anti-Dutch agitprop” (265) and “satiric revenge fantasy for a century of indignities” (264). But the star of Markley’s book is without doubt Defoe, whose Robinson Crusoe turns out not to be the economically self-sufficient, labour-driven, puritanically self-searching, representative “modern” man we...