Islands of Whiteness

Astonishingly, empire is still in question. For a few decades now, Antoinette Burton has been making subtle and compelling arguments about our need to make Victorian British history not only inclusive of empire, but to make the empire constitutive of Victorian Britain. Somehow, the nation is a construct we cannot and will not do without, but empire must be peripheral, partial, and deeply and always optional. About five years ago, I heard a respected scholar in my field say that she was "tired" of empire. Of course we all are: it generally produces some very ugly power relations, some ruinous extractions of natural resources, often very little in the way of useful infrastructure, and the invention of castes, ethnic groups, nations, and tribes that often produces disaster in the postcolonial phase. The British Empire is the name of an enterprise of domination that followed from principles of what is often referred to as the Enlightenment, and it is thus variously embarrassing and disappointing that the likes of John Locke and John Stuart Mill not only produced the philosophy of the liberal individual and then denied it theoretically to populations of people in well over half of the world, but that they also participated actively in empire and thus denied it practically as well: Locke as a shareholder in the Royal Africa Company and Mill as an administrator at India House. This is a sad and troubling legacy, and one that imperial and postcolonial studies makes impossible to separate from liberalism, the Enlightenment, and Anglo-American history and culture more broadly. The fact of empire complicates the narration of the nation and its fondest ideas about itself. The empire also generates the nation—that is, it generates the idea of a people whose geography lends them certain defining characteristics. If we don't want to know this, I will discuss below the extent to which Victorian theorists of nation and race not only knew it, but embraced this connection between empire and nation—making the most of the histories of other empires and invaders to forge a racial identity for themselves that could go the distance.

Antoinette Burton names the expectation of her students, which is also I think the hope of many scholars as well, that the study of Victorian Britain will provide reassuring "islands of whiteness," a respite from the demanding ethnic diversity of American Studies (2). The fantasy of a homogenous culture allows us (and I'm as guilty of this as anyone) to discuss "the Victorians" as a mass of largely undifferentiated white middle-class people. Britain, like the United States, is of course a nation of immigrants, an incredible mix of "races" and peoples from its inception, with the Anglo-Saxon invaders eventually and paradoxically chosen as the indigenes, edging the previously indigenous Celts, or "Britons," to a haunting and haunted periphery (see, for example, Conway). Britain thus has several postcolonial histories that have been variously internalized: the defeat of the Roman Empire by invaders; the assimilation of Anglo-Saxon "settlers" as natives; the long throwing off of the "Norman Yoke"; and then the British Empire, modeled on Rome, but aware of the various causes of the decline of that empire. England and Britain are complicatedly colonial, postcolonial, colonized, and colonizing, and in the Victorian period, they undergo a bout of identification with Anglo-Saxons that suggests how, precisely, empire constitutes the nation: not only because empires seem to inspire a need for national identity to fend off merging with all the Others with whom empire contends, but also because empires—in their motivated migrations and intensive interactions—produce cultural grist for identification and attachment. Anglo-Saxons produced the stuff of legend—literally. And in the Victorian period Anglo-Saxon studies became an industry, a cult, a matter of national destiny (see Melman).

In the meantime, colonial and racial others—Africans, gypsies, Asians, Jews—have been present in Britain long before the twentieth century, pace last summer's coverage of racial unrest—in cities, towns, and rural places. David Killingray, for example, arguing against the received wisdom that Britons of African descent were restricted to small communities...