In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Victorian Studies 45.4 (2003) 699-707



[Access article in PDF]

In this forum, we invited Antoinette Burton and Peter Hulme to explore issues raised in:
Civillising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-1867, by Catherine Hall; pp. xviii + 556. Cambridge: Polity; Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000, £60.00, £19.99 paper; $79.00, $29.00 paper.
Catherine Hall was then asked to respond.


In his endorsement of the paperback edition of Catherine Hall's book the late historian of science and medicine, Roy Porter, announces that

Civilising Subjects does for colonial history what E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class did for social history. It triumphantly achieves what many have hoped to show: how the empire impacted on [the] metropolis while the home culture shaped colonial development. This is a work of great scholarship but also of passion and imagination.

This is high praise indeed, especially given the reverence with which Thompson's work is still treated on both sides of the pond—not to mention the kinds of arguments Hall herself has had with Marxist labor histories in her previous work.1 And yet Hall's achievements cannot be gainsaid. Civilising Subjects does do for Victorian Britain what no one has managed so far by demonstrating the constitutive impact of empire on metropolitan culture at a variety of levels. Keeping the narrative of high politics very much alive, Hall demonstrates the interdependence of "home" and "empire" in this period of classic liberal reform. And she does so for the Caribbean rather than for India, thus shifting the terrain of recent research in the so-called new imperial history and underscoring the long history of interaction between "blacks" and Britons [End Page 699] which predates the twentieth-century story of "black Britain." The centrality of missionaries to her story also redresses a real gap in British social and cultural history, which has been accused, with some reason, of neglecting religion in favor of secular politics, language, identity, representation, spectacle, and popular culture.2 Civilising Subjects refocuses our attention on religiosity and evangelism, situating them at the heart of early- to mid-Victorian political culture and arguing for their indispensability to the English imagination and its postcolonial legacies. That gender, race, and class are also attended to, not as a revered triumvirate but as operational forces—in both discursive and material realms—is equally significant, if unsurprising. In keeping with much of her writing from the 1980s and 1990s, Hall is especially interested in the work of middling and middle-class masculinity in "the war of representation" (9) over imperial and metropolitan politics. Her determination to dissolve the artificial boundary between metropole and colony together with her emphasis on region and town as well as nation and empire make this a model of British history in a genuinely transnational frame. Hall's book is, in short, exemplary for scholars interested in historicizing the ways in which empire helped to shape conventionally core "English values" in the early Victorian period.

Those who have followed Hall's scholarship over the past ten years might expect to find her earlier work simply repackaged in monographic form here. This is, refreshingly, not the case. To be sure, many of her themes, her arguments, and even some of her historical subjects will be familiar. Among these are the role of discourses of race and gender in shaping key moments of new political formation (such as 1832 and 1867); the figures of Edward Eyre and Anthony Trollope as epitomes of imperial masculinity on the move across a variety of imperial terrains; and, of course, the "entwined histories" (85) of Jamaica and Britain, of humanitarian narratives with abolitionist convictions, of native agency and evangelical conviction. But Hall has used the occasion of the monograph to fashion an interpretive analysis which makes the title, "civilising subjects," doubly intelligible. Framing the recognizable narratives of antislavery, political reform, and Victorian social relations is a version of Partha Chatterjee's "rule of colonial difference" (9), grounded in the kind of feminist historiographical conviction of...

pdf

Share