The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730 by Robert Markley (review)

154 projecting utopian images of an imperial future following the Peace of Utrecht and the Tory ascendency under Queen Anne—should be made to stand for a kind of backward-looking idealization. When one reads, in an otherwise gratifying discussion of Goldsmith’s The Traveller and The Deserted Village, that earlier poems like Windsor-Forest ‘‘pretended , for decorum’s sake, not to deal directly’’ with present political issues, one senses that this poem has not yet received the full attention that it deserves. What kinds of evidence might be strong enough to round out the book’s main narrative? Mr. Santesso refers to Locke’s empiricism and Dryden’s Jacobitism , to various kinds of intellectual, cultural, and political contexts; but for the most part, he frames the history of nostalgia as a problem of poetic language : the concept of ‘‘tropic change’’ implies, intriguingly enough, that the dynamics of literary history inhere within the poems themselves. There is nothing wrong with this attempt to put texts ahead of contexts, but some of the texts deserve a more searching exploration, and some of the contexts finally matter. If nostalgia is indeed distinctly modern, I would want to know what exactly it is about modernity—its image of selfhood , its experience of time, its conception of history—that might provoke such a curious emotion. Mr. Santesso makes it possible to ask such questions, but he also leaves possible answers unexplored . Duane Coltharp Trinity University ROBERT MARKLEY. The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2006. Pp. viii ⫹ 316. $85. Seeking to counter what he considers a distorted postcolonial reading of European global dominance in the Early Modern period, Mr. Markley examines texts which deploy ‘‘compensatory strategies to deal with Europe’s marginalization in a global economy dominated by the empires of the Far East.’’ About halfway through this densely packed study (which, with two hundredsome primary sources and a twentyfour -page secondary bibliography, often tests a reader’s stamina), Mr. Markley offers a welcome summary of his argument . Speaking of Amboyna (1672) and Annus Mirabilis (1667), he says that Dryden, unlike some of his contemporaries , represses ‘‘the fears that profits will overwhelm considerations of national interest, legal obligation, and individual integrity; that European rivals are conspiring with Asians to monopolize trade; that national identities will be corrupted by foreign customs and foreign contacts; and that the riches of the Far East are not, as often advertised in the seventeenth century, inexhaustible but subject to a logic of scarcity that produces—inevitably—competition, insecurity , and violence.’’ Mr. Markley teases out these period fears through a complex negotiation of economic history, travel literature, official documents, and literary texts. Despite his disputable contention that modern postcolonial critics succumb to an anachronistic myth of European arrogance (anxiety of empire is now widely discussed), it would be foolhardy to argue against his aim of ‘‘resituating postcolonial critiques of European encounters with the Far East within the context of non-Eurocentric perceptions of global economic culture.’’ Mr. Markley amply develops his agenda through productive juxtapositions. Amboyna is read 155 in the context of the 1623 massacre of Englishmen by Dutch authorities in the Molucca Islands, pamphlet wars, and a complicated series of English/Dutch conflicts and treaties, and he makes a compelling case for the ideological work performed by this play. Dryden, confronting a humiliating and frightening instance of English vulnerability, constructs the figure of an heroic merchant martyred in the cause of national virtue: ‘‘Amboyna insistently turns complex economic and political rivalries into straightforward problems of morality : Dutch mercantile power in the Spice Islands is synonymous with greed and hypocrisy; British weakness becomes ‘honesty’ and ‘honour’. . . .’’ In revisiting a fifty-year-old national trauma, Dryden not only mystifies the event, but also provides propaganda for the imminent Third Dutch War. Mr. Markley suggests that the Amboyna episode haunts the second volume of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe trilogy because ‘‘it exposes the tenuousness and contingency of a British national identity that takes commercial success as a providential sign that England . . . is the true defender of the Protestant faith.’’ Crusoe, rejecting the colonial paradigm of the first novel and turning to seagoing trade, carries with him nightmare...