Harriet Martineau, Victorian Imperialism, and the Civilizing Mission by Deborah A. Logan (review)

In Harriet Martineau, Victorian Imperialism, and the Civilizing Mission, Deborah A. Logan provides readers with a comprehensive overview of Harriet Martineau’s writings on British imperialism in the nineteenth century. Logan examines over thirty years of Martineau’s published writing, including her didactic novellas (Illustrations of Political Economy [1832–34]), journalism, and non-fiction sociological, economic, and political writings. Pointing out that Martineau’s authorial career paralleled England’s emergence as the dominant global imperial power, as well as the rise of literacy and the popular press within England, Logan makes a claim for the cultural and historical significance of Martineau’s imperial writings. She argues that Martineau “played a prominent role as a respected and authoritative commentator in the periodical press” as well as a writer of influential historical texts which have long been “seriously under-evaluated and under-appreciated” (4–5, 5). Logan’s goal, then, is to increase scholarly appreciation of Martineau’s texts by providing her own scholarly evaluation of those texts. She seeks to establish Martineau’s intellectual authority as both a historian and contemporary political and economic commentator of nineteenth-century British imperialism. Her hope, she writes, is that her analysis will “place Martineau on a more level playing field with the canonical authorities of Victorian culture, and that it will inspire new interdisciplinary studies on the syntheses and disjunctions between her work and that of her contemporaries” (5). In short, Logan’s book gives Martineau’s writing the attention she believes it deserves and she hopes that this will lead others to do so as well.

The organization of Logan’s book is simple and effective. Rather than organizing Martineau’s writings and the developments and shift in her thinking chronologically, Logan structures her book primarily in terms of the global geopolitical areas in which England was economically, politically, and militarily engaged. Her first chapter is the exception to this rule. In “The Empire Question: War and Peace,” Logan uses a range of Martineau’s writings, particularly her The History of the Thirty Years’ Peace (1849–51), to establish the framework for her later, more geopolitically specific analyses. She begins by focusing on the relationship and tensions between Martineau’s dual commitments to what she viewed as the science of political economy and the project of the “Civilizing Mission,” which includes “Britain’s moral obligation to prepare its colonies for independence and autonomy in the modern world” (11). For Logan, one of the things that distinguishes Martineau’s deployment of political economy as a framework through which to view England’s imperial project is her commitment to balancing and integrating ethical imperatives, including human rights and civil liberties, with political and economic concerns. In the latter portions of this chapter, Logan examines the ways these imperatives interact with Martineau’s own cultural biases as well as her political and economic beliefs with regards to three aspects of England’s imperial project in the nineteenth century, categories Logan names “Explorers, Missionaries, and Rogue Adventurers,” “The ‘White’ Colonies: Transportation and Emigration,” and “The Second Empire and Modern Racism.” Each of these categories of imperial projects presents Martineau, along with the British public more generally, with a distinct set of tensions and contradictions within the imperialist ideology that draws on nationalism, political economy, and the idea of the civilizing mission. Logan examines the ways in which Martineau registers and places herself in relation to the networks of contradictions generated at each of these areas.

The six remaining chapters of Harriet Martineau, Victorian Imperialism, and the Civilizing Mission focus on different imperial sites: Ireland, the East and West Indies and the South Sea Islands, India, the Far East (Eastern Archipelago, China, and Japan), the Near East (especially Egypt), and Africa. Within each chapter, Logan organizes her analyses according to the issues that fueled Martineau’s engagement with each of these geopolitical sites. In her chapter on the East and West Indies...