Reforming Empire: Protestant Colonialism and Conscience in British Literature""The strength of Empire," wrote Ben Jonson, "is in religion." In Reforming Empire, Christopher Hodgkins takes Jonson's dictum as his point of departure, showing how for more than four centuries the Protestant imagination gave the British Empire its main paradigms for dominion and also, ironically, its chief languages of anti-imperial dissent. From Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene to Rudyard Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King," English literature about empire has turned with strange constancy to themes of worship and idolatry, atrocity and deliverance, slavery and service, conversion, prophecy, apostasy, and doom." "Focusing on the work of the Protestant imagination from the Renaissance origins of English overseas colonization through the modern end of England's colonial enterprise, Hodgkins organizes his study around three kinds of religious binding - unification, subjugation, and self-restraint. He shows how early modern Protestants like Hakluyt and Spenser reformed the Arthurian chronicles and claimed to inherit Rome's empire from the Caesars: how Ralegh and later Cromwell imagined a counterconquest of Spanish America, and how Milton's Satan came to resemble Cortes; how Drake and the fictional Crusoe established their status as worthy colonial masters by refusing to be worshiped as gods; and how seventeenth-century preachers, poets, and colonists moved haltingly toward a racist metaphysics - as Virginia began by celebrating the mixed marriage of Pocahontas but soon imposed the draconian separation of the Color Line." "Yet Hodgkins reveals that Tudor-Stuart times also saw the revival of Augustinian anti-expansionism and the genesis of Protestant imperial guilt. From the start, British Protestant colonialism contained its own opposite: a religion of self-restraint. Though this conscience often was co-opted or conscripted to legitimize conquests and pacify the conquered, it frequently found memorable and even fierce literary expression in writers such as |
From inside the book
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Page iv
... origins: Millais represents the young expansionist having his imagination fired by an exotically dressed sailor (perhaps Iberian) telling far-flung tales to the earnest English boys. Note also the subtle and ironic memento mori: the ...
... origins: Millais represents the young expansionist having his imagination fired by an exotically dressed sailor (perhaps Iberian) telling far-flung tales to the earnest English boys. Note also the subtle and ironic memento mori: the ...
Page 2
... origins of the British Empire ” ; he concludes that , apart from “ a common anti - Catholicism ” and John Locke's “ agriculturalist argument ” for possession , Protestantism con- tributed no such thing . British imperial ideology , he ...
... origins of the British Empire ” ; he concludes that , apart from “ a common anti - Catholicism ” and John Locke's “ agriculturalist argument ” for possession , Protestantism con- tributed no such thing . British imperial ideology , he ...
Page 5
... origins of empire as well.9 If this book modifies the methodology of some colonial and postcolonial stud- ies, it modifies the chronology of others. Many scholars of the empire have, like Shakespeare's Gonzalo, made the latter end of ...
... origins of empire as well.9 If this book modifies the methodology of some colonial and postcolonial stud- ies, it modifies the chronology of others. Many scholars of the empire have, like Shakespeare's Gonzalo, made the latter end of ...
Page 6
... origins of England's myth of imperial destiny and its sense of exceptionalist reforming righteousness ; the second about religion - based ratio- nales for colonizing native peoples ; and the third about the bad conscience that 12. Suvir ...
... origins of England's myth of imperial destiny and its sense of exceptionalist reforming righteousness ; the second about religion - based ratio- nales for colonizing native peoples ; and the third about the bad conscience that 12. Suvir ...
Page 19
... origin as well as nomenclature irreducibly British . Celtic titles of men and women , of specific rivers and mountains , coasts and regions , castles and towns — these words anchor the chronicles in a recognizable geography ; they give ...
... origin as well as nomenclature irreducibly British . Celtic titles of men and women , of specific rivers and mountains , coasts and regions , castles and towns — these words anchor the chronicles in a recognizable geography ; they give ...
Contents
10 | |
Two The Uses of Atrocity | 54 |
Three Stooping to Conquer | 77 |
Four The Nubile Savage and the Soulless Slave | 113 |
Five Prophets against Empire | 137 |
Six Hollow All Delight | 191 |
Moravians in the Moon | 241 |
Index | 267 |
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Common terms and phrases
American anti-imperial Artegall Arthur Arthurian Aziz Black Legend Blake blood Britain British Empire British imperial Burke C. S. Lewis Caliban called Casas century chapter Christian humanist chronicle civility claim colonial conquered conquest Conrad Cortés countertradition cultural Cymbeline Dee's divine E. M. Forster early Elizabethan England English Protestant epic Evelyn Waugh expansionist Faerie Queene Ferrar further citations Geoffrey Hakluyt Heart of Darkness Henry History Houyhnhnm Howards End human Ibid imperial imagination imperialist Indian island John Dee King kingdom land literary London Lord Matter of Britain Milton modern moral myth native Paradise parenthetically Pocahontas poem political possession Prince Principal Navigations Protestant imperial Purchas Ralegh Reformation religion religious restored revival Richard Robert Rolfe Roman Samuel Johnson Satan savage Shakespeare Significantly Sir Francis Drake Sir Thomas slave Spain Spaniards Spanish Spenser spiritual Swift Tennyson translatio imperii Tudor University Press Victorian Virginia voyage Waugh William worship writes Yahoo