Harriet Martineau's Writings on the British Empire (review)

In her general introduction to this collection, Deborah Logan writes of Harriet Martineau as embodying ‘the spirit of revolution, reform and imperialism that found expression in the literature of the period’(1: xv). Certainly this collection of Martineau’s writings is a most welcome aid to the understanding of mid-Victorian British imperialism, rightly focusing attention on Martineau’s continuous engagement with the British imperial role and with questions of racial, cultural and religious difference. It is now accompanied by the six-volume Harriet Martineau’s Writing on British History and Military Reform (2005) and will be followed in 2006 by The Collected Letters of Harriet Martineau, both also edited by Logan for Pickering and Chatto. Martineau fully deserves this major publishing initiative, and massive editorial work. She was one of the few major women writers of the nineteenth century whose work was clearly indebted to the legacies of Enlightenment historians and political economists. She was deeply concerned with the construction of a framework for the growth of a progressive liberal civilisation, one which would be carried to different parts of the world through the agencies of commerce, education, and, sometimes, good government. In the preface to her collection of didactic fiction, the Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–4), she acknowledged her debt to Adam Smith, and dedicated her work to ‘the total population of the empire’ (quoted 1: xxv).

These volumes are a valuable starting-point for any investigation of Martineau’s understanding of empire. Much of the material chosen is admirable for this purpose, and illustrates Martineau’s versatility across the different genres of the moral tale, the travel narrative, journalism and the writing of history. The editor provides a general introduction, with much useful biographical material, and a helpful separate introduction to each work. The volumes are fully annotated, with a bibliography, and both editor and publisher should be congratulated on the provision of a detailed index to the five volumes.

The first volume includes three of the most relevant tales from the Illustrations. These highly successful moral stories were intended to demonstrate the workings of the laws of political economy to male and female readers, and to encourage dissemination of their principles as widely as possible. In “Life in the Wilds”(1832), Martineau wrote of a small British settlement in southern Africa, attacked by Bushmen in an understandable response to colonial brutalities, and reduced “from a state of advanced civilization to a primitive condition” (1: 14). She emphasised the achievement of the settlers, both men and women, in using their intellectual capital to adapt to a suitable division of labour and generate the economic growth which could justify imperialism. In “Cinnamon and Pearls”(1833), set in Ceylon, the simple truths of political economy were set against the East India Company’s monopoly of cinnamon. And “Demerara” (1833) dramatised the economic failures of slavery and the advantages of free trade in sugar, while also denouncing the degrading and inhuman effects of slavery.

Volumes 4 and 5 of the anthology provide welcome access to Martineau’s journalism and historical writing on Ireland and India respectively. In volume 4, her Letters on Ireland (1852) and Endowed Schools of Ireland (1858) both originally series of articles for the Daily News, are preceded by the tale “Ireland” which Logan rightly describes as “one of the most compelling and affecting entries in the Illustrations of Political Economy” (4: 1). In this she relates the remarkable history of Dora Sullivan, and the exploitation of the Irish poor through the land system, though not by individual landlords, though also women’s domination by father, husband and priest. Ultimately evicted and charged with whiteboyism, she is convicted and transported. Martineau calls for economic growth to be brought about by agricultural improvement, the removal of political and religious grievances, the reduction of population through emigration and most permanently, through education. Implicitly, it is Dora who embodies the possibility of such changes. Martineau continues to reiterate these themes with “relentless optimism” (4...