An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750–1850 by Siobhan Carroll (review)

Siobahn Carroll’s An Empire of Air and Water focuses on the representation of four kinds of atopic space in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts: the poles, the oceans, the atmosphere, and subterranean caves. According to Carroll, these spaces gained a tremendous grip on the British imagination because, as atopias, they were too inhospitable to be properly disciplined and brought within the physical and imaginative bounds of empire; they were always outside the bounds of the nation state and the capitalist trade system. Drawing on an impressive body of texts, including poems, novels, travel narratives, and explorers’ journals, she performs some perceptive and nuanced readings of these four kinds of space and, in the process, produces an engaging narrative that captures the spirit of an age in which imperialist expansion, technical expertise, and human will came together with the purpose of conquering some of the most remote and vexing regions on the globe.

Carroll’s book is a fine addition to the increasing collection of studies that demonstrate how vital eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature was to the British public’s conception of the nation as one space. As previous scholars have shown, the increased production of maps and travel narratives allowed Britons to possess a more complete picture of their geography and, in the process, allowed them to imagine the nation as a coherent space rather than a disjointed collection of disparate locales. At the same time the nation was being reimagined as a larger network, however, there remained liminal spaces that continued to operate as pockets of resistance, often containing romantic figures such as gypsies, vagabonds, and highwaymen. And, later in the nineteenth century, Britain developed a large-scale bureaucracy composed of scientific experts whose job it was to impose safety and security on the nation’s dangerous geography by, for example, cleaning up the water supply and eradicating airborne diseases.

As a reminder that many geographies and locales remained outside the control of the state apparatus, Carroll’s study is a necessary addition to the larger body of scholarly texts focused on the ideological control of space. In her chapter on polar exploration, Carroll argues that the poles presented a wealth of imaginative possibilities because they could not be colonized by mercantilism. She explores how the sea had the power to disrupt the space of the ship, producing a near societal breakdown and carnivalesque role reversals, and she reminds us that the empire’s control over its spaces is always tenuous and threatening to unravel. In her chapter on the atmosphere, she investigates how the rise of air ballooning engendered in the English fears that their skies were open to invasion from France and its more advanced aeronauts. And caves, she notes, were often home to outlaws, and thus represented a space wherein the social order could be challenged and reconceived. Her study then concludes with a clever reading of the space of London, a city whose size was, as Carroll indicates, both the result of the empire’s enormous mercantile activity and a threat to it, rendering it (for romantic writers at least) a space as inhospitable and atopic as the sea itself.

If there is anything to criticize about such a fine book, it might be that it shies away from making any bold claims for itself. Such humility is certainly to be commended, but I think that it needs a better statement of its thesis at the outset. My sense is that the book is about the precariousness of empire and the ways in which atopic spaces remind civilizations that the globe can never be completely colonized, a fact as frightening as it is inspiring to the human imagination. While the book is finely detailed and subtle in its interpretations, I found myself wanting something in the way of a grander statement...