The Cultural Work of Empire: The Seven Years’ War and the Imagining of the Shandean State (review)

The Cultural Work of Empire: The Seven Years’ War and the Imagining of the Shandean State is a complex and challenging book, densely written and hard to summarize, claiming to map hitherto unrecognized links between “the cultural work of empire” and the writing of Laurence Sterne. What, you might ask, is the cultural work of empire? Watts says, “ [I]t’s the general process of subject formation” and “a broader penetration of an instrumental rationality connecting governance and the flows of public culture” (13). If that sounds abstract, it is. Cultural work of empire is the idea of the imagined state conceived, performatively, as the political form of social life, at home as well as abroad: “It is my view [writes Watts] that the long process of abstraction of the modern state takes an intense cultural turn at the mid-point of the eighteenth century” (11). In particular, the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) brought about significant changes in the idea of the state and the subjectivity of the individual and consequently animated the literature of the day. The account here of the cultural work of empire uses a wide array of eighteenth-century writers, thinkers, and artists (the list is a long one), but Watts maintains, nevertheless, that “This is a book about the work of Laurence Sterne” (17) because Sterne’s proves to be a significant repository of political ideas, so much so that the publicly imagined idea of the state at the middle of the eighteenth century can even be said to be “Shandean.” Watts obviously enjoys suturing (one of her favourite words) such abstract ideas to literary texts, and following her is not always easy as we negotiate the book’s sixty-eight sections, 799 footnotes, and thirty-three pages of bibliography, and an argument that, to use Carol Watts’s own cinematic metaphor, one minute treats us to a close-up of a text and the next minute offers us a “crane shot” swooping down from above (19). It’s during the crane shots that a reader might well lose focus because Carol Watts has a love of difficult words. The question is if the struggle to understand her is worth the effort. I would say, on balance, it is.

Carol Watts wants to keep the horizon of Tristram Shandy’s modernity in view at all times by continually juxtaposing eighteenth-century sources and modern-day theoretical ones. Intellectually we are kept on our toes as Watts choreographs the many connections between the cultural work of empire and her chosen texts, chief among which is Tristram Shandy. In the first chapter, for example, we consider Candide and Rasselas (both appearing in the same year as the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy). Candide is shown to be an “uncompromisingly political” book while the attempt to read Rasselas as an allegory of imperial Britain revealing “dimensions of the cultural work of empire internal to Britain at this time” is less convincing. As Watts explains repeatedly, the cultural work of empire is as much about internal colonization as planting the flag and administering countries far from home, so Watts segues easily into the locally hewn Tristram Shandy.

It might surprise readers of Uncle Toby, though, to learn that “he is an agent for imperial violence, economic gain” (80), and it might provoke skepticism to learn that he is “an imaginary, and yet literal, configuration of the nature and cost of social labour in the crucible of empire” (98). But however extreme Watts’s conclusions (Marx is evoked in the final line of the chapter), her analysis of the figure of the military veteran as a sacrificial victim of the pursuit of empire defines Toby as part “critique,” yet part upholder, of the sublimity of war re-enacted with energy on his bowling green:

His effeminacy resembles on the one hand a kind of impotence, a weakness...