Macaulay's Nation

This essay focuses on the experiences of Thomas Babington Macaulay, both with his family and in India, and the ways in which these experiences contributed to the insular and assimilationist vision that he so memorably narrated in his great History of England. Exploring the split between his public exterior—successful and confident to the point of complacency—and the private man's tormented sense of loss, this essay argues that his heroic story of a homogenous people and a progressive nation was structured by its systematic exclusions and its strategies of distantiation and disavowal.