An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750–1850 by Siobhan Carroll (review)

Erudite yet lively, Siobhan Carroll’s An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750–1850 represents a significant contribution to scholarship on the literature of British globalism, real and imaginary. Carroll begins by developing a definition of “atopias” that includes a range of spaces “hostile to permanent occupation” (206n13): the poles, the ocean, the air, and the “underworlds” of caves. While distinguishing these atopias from “the placeless locations created by late capitalism,” Carroll ultimately addresses the apparently unknowable space of modern London as it evokes “the delocalizing forces of emergent globalization” (203). The argument of her conclusion thus contributes to our understanding of the mythologies informing British “localist” sentiment.

Along the way, Carroll provides illuminating rereadings of familiar texts. The chapter entitled “Polar Speculations” juxtaposes accounts of nineteenth-century exploratory voyages with fictions by Margaret Cavendish and Mary Shelley. Carroll’s reading of Frankenstein provides a good counterpoint to interpretations that privilege the personal and Gothic aspects of the novel; Shelley, she writes, took “the historical opportunity offered by the state’s renewed interest in polar space to impose limits on the literary imagination’s involvement in imperial projects” (21). Arguing that literature both participates in and resists the politics of expansionism, Carroll repeatedly demonstrates how closely imaginative fiction reflects contemporary realities.

If the poles in Carroll’s reading represent the dangers and pleasures of impenetrable place, “the geo-imaginary ocean” serves “as a paramount space of atypicality” (78) that law and language struggle to delimit. Shipboard discipline, maritime law, and narratives of shipwreck thus all figure in her second chapter, “Languages of the Sea.” These are represented not only by the eighteenth-century narrative poem “The Shipwreck” and the nineteenth-century sea fiction of Frederick Marryat, but also by a 1797 board game, “The Bulwark of Britannia.” Carroll’s inclusion of this game, meant to instruct children in “nautical patriotism” (95), together with her detailed reading of Marryat’s professional experience, exemplify the breadth of her scholarship. Less theoretically informed than her first chapter, this section of the book shows Carroll equally at home with material history. She concludes the chapter by briefly discussing Joseph Conrad’s use of material culture in Heart of Darkness, explicating Marlowe’s encounter with a nineteenth-century book on seamanship that is the property of “Kurtz’s devoted follower, the young Russian.” Marlowe’s inability to read the comments “scrawled across the book’s pages” by its owner represents in microcosm Conrad’s critique: “the language of the sea” is “superseded and interpreted” by the depraved forces of imperialism (113).

Carroll then turns to the “Regions of the Air,” as her third chapter explores the possibilities and threats of “this newly traversable atopia of global connection” (118) following the late-eighteenth-century development of the hot-air balloon. Acknowledging prior scholarship on the fantasies of power afforded by flight, Carroll also notes that the French origins of balloon technology were a source of anxiety in British politics and fiction. Along the way, she argues, the term “atmosphere” undergoes a transformation from indicating an “unseen background” to denoting an invisible ocean, now open to new technologies. Letters from Horace Walpole and Thomas Jefferson demonstrate the degree to which the French invention, while mocked in the press, was privately the subject of official concern over its implications for domestic security. This “new era of global politics” also informs the 1785 novel The Aerostatic Spy, which in Carroll’s reading endorses with enthusiasm the powers of flight and fiction to transcend national and cultural boundaries (128–31). Carroll then traces the decline in British anxiety as a French navy of the skies failed to materialize, followed by renewed interest in aeronautics in the context of early-nineteenth-century “climatic crisis.” This in turn gives way to disenchantment with the limits of atmospheric (as opposed to polar) exploration...