Reforming Empire: Protestant Colonialism and Conscience in British Literature (review)

Christopher Hodgkins' generally excellent Reforming Empire has two overlapping purposes. His first aim is to give a straightforward account of English Protestantism's contributions to the thinking behind English imperialism, to analyze how "the Protestant imagination . . . gave the [English] empire its main paradigms for dominion and possession" (2). The second goal might be more controversial. The Protestant imagination, he argues, not only sanctioned imperialism, it also supplied the "chief languages of anti-imperial dissent" (2). That is to say, Protestantism sought to reform empire as much as it sanctioned a reformed empire. However, Hodgkins' argument goes beyond illuminating the past, for he also wants to correct the unfortunate tendency in theoretically inflected criticism, in particular Post-Colonial criticism, to assume that the West can do no right. Too often, the reigning assumption among New Historicist and Post-Colonial critics is that while canonical and non-canonical texts may reveal, when subjected to an appropriate degree of pressure, anxieties about such matters as gender, class, and colonialism, these tensions reflect contradictions within the ideology, not a conscious effort by the author. That, Hodgkins convincingly argues, is just not the case. Real cultural dissent arises from "within" the dominant culture, and the great strength of this intelligent, supremely well-written book lies in the author's demonstration of how Protestantism lies at the root of both imperialism and the critique of imperialism. Post-Colonial thought, in other words, begins, at least in part, with the English Reformation.

The first half of Reforming Empire focuses on "religion's power to bind together" (7). Hodgkins begins by showing how "late Tudor and early Stuart nationalism reimagined the political implications of being fully and finally post-Roman" (7), and he provides short yet pointed readings of such Renaissance texts as Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Shakespeare's Cymbeline. Hodgkins goal in these chapters is to show Protestantism benignly shaped imperialism. For example, in deliberate contrast to the rapacity of the Spanish, Hodgkins argues that in Drake's encounter with the "adoring natives of northern California," we can see how "pious English self-restraint merits possession" (78). Milton uses the obverse in Paradise Lost by casting Satan as a conquistador. The benignity of Protestantism also extends to the explosive issue of race. For example, Hodgkins argues that in Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness (1605), the literal demonization of color is superseded by the masque's Platonism: "the main important of Jonson's masque is to discredit notions of racial fixity and to subordinate matters of pigment to matters of spirit" (119).

The second part of Reforming Empire shows how the same Protestantism that supported Drake et al. also fueled a sense of outrage against imperialism. The great strength of this part of the book lies in how Hodgkins demonstrates how authors one does not usually think of in terms of colonialism, in particular the religious poet, George Herbert, as well as Nicholas Ferrar, once deputy treasurer of the Virginia Company and founder of the religious community, Little Gidding, use Protestantism as a basis for criticizing empire building. For example, in the Socratic dialogue produced by the members of Little Gidding and edited by Ferrar, "On the Retirement of Charles V," Ferrar includes a trenchant critique "condemnation of imperial folly for being as ephemeral and infernal as smoke" (158).

While Hodgkins, a Renaissance critic by training, devotes a significant portion of his book to early modern texts, he also includes analyses of eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century authors as well, and his treatment of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park is emblematic of both his purposes. Not content to demonstrate that this seemingly innocuous novel continues the anti-imperialist themes of the Renaissance (as filtered through the anti-imperialism of Samuel Johnson) by showing how "Sir Thomas's Antiguan Plantations prove to not the substance but rather the near-ruin...