Rethinking British Fictions of Cultural Contact and Colonial Encounter

From Laura Brown’s ground-breaking Ends of Empire (1993) up to the present, the work of Behn, Defoe, and Swift have been central to a canon of texts that engage in issues of slavery, colonialism, and overseas encounter in eighteenth-century British fiction. The two books under review here point to the centrality these authors still have in these discussions, even as both add to this trio in unique and interesting ways and expand our sense of what constitutes colonial fiction, and its concerns, in the period. Christopher Loar deftly brings both Margaret Cavendish and Eliza Haywood into conversation with the work of Behn, Defoe, and Swift in his study, which aims to demonstrate how fictions of “cultural contact” from 1651 onward into the mid eighteenth century “redeploy tropes from histories of contact and exploration to explore the question of how sovereign powers might best harness violence and human irrationality as techniques of government” (1). Any reader of colonial fiction is familiar with scenarios in which Europeans present advanced technologies, especially guns, as “magical” objects to try to hold sway over less militarily sophisticated natives and force them into positions of civility through “technologically enhanced performances of simulated divinity or mysterious powers to kill at a distance” (3). What Loar wishes us to recognize is that “these fictional savages are not merely Britain’s Others; they are also figures for the pre-legal or pre-political subject or multitude who also appear in the form of the rogue, the vagabond, or the mob inside Britain’s own borders” (3). Thus, the authors that Loar investigates explore the question of whether or not unruly subjects, both in the colony and the metropolis, can be controlled through a “political magic” that enacts a politics of display, irrationality, and superstition along with threatening, if not always actually deploying, overwhelming violence.

The strength of Loar’s book lies in how he interrelates eighteenth-century studies with recent examinations of sovereignty. He demonstrates that, over and over, figures from many different political traditions run up against the problem of violence in maintaining political order. In the introduction, Loar shows us how even a staunch anti-monarchist republican like Algernon Sidney believes that a sovereign power may need to use excessive violence to subdue unruly citizens and subjects. For Loar, the struggle in Sidney’s work between liberty and this need for sovereign violence “illustrates the tension internal to these nascent forms of liberalism” (10), a tension that persists into the present and that has been so forcefully analyzed by Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and other contemporary theorists.

This exciting work in the introductory chapter sets the stage for the surprising and incisive analyses that follow. In the first chapter, Loar offers an extended examination of the work of Margaret Cavendish, especially “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity” and The Blazing World, both of which feature female lawgivers who resort to technological displays to inaugurate a new civil political order among savages, who superstitiously read these displays as part of a divine intervention in their political community. Along with Hobbes and Davenant, Cavendish forms, in Loar’s account, part of a larger circle of thinkers who are “strongly authoritarian” and, yet, who “offer programs that seek to amplify sovereign power through indirect and largely nonviolent means” (36). Such strategies include manipulating scientific understanding to impose superstitious beliefs upon a savage multitude (which is what Christopher Columbus did with the infamous lunar eclipse episode), demonstrating violent technologies like guns or cannons, or, as in the case of Davenant, creating spectacular theatrical displays made possible by new stagecraft techniques. Still, Cavendish’s Blazing World ends with scenes of fantastic violence and the idea “that technologically augmented violence combined with lawless sovereign power threatens apocalyptic consequences” (64), creating a fear that will arise with more urgency in...