Culture and Imperialism

Summary

Edward Said expands the argument of Orientalism (1978) from the Middle East to a general pattern of relationships between the modern metropolitan West and its overseas territories: a worldwide pattern of imperial culture, and the historical experience of resistance against empire that Orientalism left out, culminating in decolonization (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.10-11 / printed p.xi-xii). Culture in his usage means both the practices of description, communication and representation, in which the novel was immensely important to the formation of imperial attitudes, and the Arnoldian reservoir of the best that has been known and thought, which becomes a combative source of national identity (PDF p.11-13 / printed p.xii-xiv). His method is to read individual works first as great products of the creative or interpretative imagination and then as part of the relationship between culture and empire; cultural forms are hybrid, mixed and impure, and none is single and pure (PDF p.21, p.24 / printed p.xxii, p.xxv). Chapter One, I defines Imperialism and colonialism, sets out the nineteenth-century scale of Western territorial acquisition, and argues that the great European novel almost unnoticeably sustained society’s consent in overseas expansion (PDF p.31-41 / printed p.4-14). Chapter One, IV sets Discrepant experiences against essentialism and reads Fourier’s Description de l’Égypte introduction against ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti; Chapter One, V gives the fullest definition of contrapuntal reading and of Structure of attitude and reference; and Chapter Two, I argues that the novel and imperialism are unthinkable without each other (PDF p.58-98 / printed p.31-71). Chapter Two, I closes with the novel’s consolidated, departmental view of the globe and its four interpretative consequences (PDF p.99-107 / printed p.72-80); Chapter Two, II reads Mansfield Park in full as a novel whose domestic order is grounded in Sir Thomas Bertram’s Antigua slave plantation (PDF p.107-124 / printed p.80-97); Chapter Two, III sets the cultural integrity of empire out in a five-point synthesis, from the ontological distinction between West and rest to the creative power of imperial discourses (PDF p.124-138 / printed p.97-111); Chapter Two, IV completes the contrapuntal reading of Verdi’s Aida as an aesthetic of separation, an imperial spectacle embodying Europe’s version of Egypt (PDF p.142-159 / printed p.115-132); and Chapter Two, V opens the reading of Kipling’s Kim as a novel of pleasure in imperial service in which, for Kipling, there was no conflict between colonial service and loyalty to Indian companions (PDF p.159-183 / printed p.132-156). Chapter Two, V concludes that Kim’s optimism rests on British geographical possession of India, and VI, “The Native Under Control”, sets Conrad and Flaubert, Maine and Murchison, and the colonial discourse of the indolent native against the alternatives the consolidated vision offers the victim — serve or be destroyed (PDF p.184-195 / printed p.157-168). Chapter Two, VII reads Albert Camus as a very late imperial figure whose novels lay ontologically prior claims to Algeria’s geography, against the background of Bugeaud’s razzias, Tocqueville and Laroui (PDF p.196-213 / printed p.169-186); VIII argues that Modernism’s dislocations and irony respond to the imperium, to the contending native and the fact of other empires (PDF p.213-217 / printed p.186-190); and Chapter Three, I opens the account of resistance, through Gide’s L’Immoraliste, Fanon’s reversal — Europe is literally the creation of the Third World — and the post-1945 decolonization of the British and French empires, closing this part on Forster’s A Passage to India (PDF p.218-228 / printed p.191-201).

What the file is

First Vintage Books Edition (June 1994) of the book originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1993; ISBN 0-679-75054-1; Library of Congress classification PN761.S28 1994, 809’.894, CIP 93-43485 (PDF p.3). 407 PDF pages, about 182,043 words as supplied. The text copy is OCR, garbled throughout in small ways (letter substitutions, split words, mangled names and numerals, worst in the front matter); prose is continuous and readable in substance, and garbled passages affecting names, figures or quotations were checked against the original PDF (among them the copyright page, the Contents, the Conrad epigraph, the expansion figures at PDF p.35, the Algerian independence year at PDF p.38, the Algerian war dates at PDF p.43, and the Introduction’s closing date and acknowledgment names at PDF p.26-27). Portions of the work, in different versions, appeared in Field Day Pamphlets, Grand Street, London Review of Books, New Left Review, Raritan, the Penguin edition of Kim, Race and Class, and Raymond Williams: Critical Perspectives, edited by Terry Eagleton (PDF p.3). The book is dedicated to Eqbal Ahmad (PDF p.4), and its epigraph is from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “What redeems it is the idea only” (PDF p.6).

Section by section

• Front matter (PDF p.1-9): title page; copyright page (First Vintage Books Edition, June 1994; originally Knopf, 1993); dedication to Eqbal Ahmad; Conrad epigraph; Contents — Introduction xi; Chapter One, Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories (I Empire, Geography, and Culture 3; II Images of the Past, Pure and Impure 15; III Two Visions in Heart of Darkness 19; IV Discrepant Experiences 31; V Connecting Empire to Secular Interpretation 43); Chapter Two, Consolidated Vision (I Narrative and Social Space 62; II Jane Austen and Empire 80; III The Cultural Integrity of Empire 97; IV The Empire at Work: Verdi’s Aida 111; V The Pleasures of Imperialism 132; VI The Native Under Control 162; VII Camus and the French Imperial Experience 169; VIII A Note on Modernism 186); Chapter Three, Resistance and Opposition (I There Are Two Sides 191; II Themes of Resistance Culture 209; III Yeats and Decolonization 220; IV The Voyage In and the Emergence of Opposition 239; V Collaboration, Independence, and Liberation 262); Chapter Four, Freedom from Domination in the Future (I American Ascendancy: The Public Space at War 282; II Challenging Orthodoxy and Authority 303; III Movements and Migrations 326); Notes 337; Index 363.

• Introduction (PDF p.10-27 / printed p.xi-xxviii): About five years after Orientalism was published in 1978, Said began gathering ideas about the general relationship between culture and empire; lectures at universities in the United States, Canada and England in 1985 and 1986 form the core argument. The materials expand beyond the Middle East to European writing on Africa, India, parts of the Far East, Australia and the Caribbean, whose discourses share rhetorical figures — “the mysterious East”, the African, Indian, Irish, Jamaican or Chinese “mind”, bringing civilization to primitive or barbaric peoples, and the idea that “they” mainly understood force or violence best, were not like “us”, and for that reason deserved to be ruled (PDF p.10 / printed p.xi). What Orientalism left out was the response to Western dominance: armed resistance in nineteenth-century Algeria, Ireland and Indonesia, cultural resistance almost everywhere, and the parties and associations for self-determination and national independence; there was always some form of active resistance, and in the overwhelming majority of cases the resistance finally won out (PDF p.11 / printed p.xii).

• Introduction, culture and narrative (PDF p.11-13 / printed p.xii-xiv): In the first sense, culture means the practices of description, communication and representation, with relative autonomy from the economic, social and political realms, including popular lore and the learned disciplines of ethnography, historiography, philology, sociology and literary history. The focus is the modern Western empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and especially the novel, the aesthetic object whose connection to the expanding societies of Britain and France is particularly interesting to study; the prototypical modern realistic novel is Robinson Crusoe, about a European who creates a fiefdom for himself on a distant, non-European island. Stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions, and also become the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history; the main battle in imperialism is over land, but who owned it, who could settle and work on it, who kept it going, who won it back and who now plans its future were reflected, contested and even for a time decided in narrative. In the second sense, after Matthew Arnold in the 1860s, culture is each society’s reservoir of the best that has been known and thought; it comes to be associated, often aggressively, with the nation or the state, differentiating “us” from “them”, and becomes a theater, even a battleground, of political and ideological causes. The trouble with this idea is its supposed transcendence of the everyday world: most professional humanists cannot connect slavery, colonialist and racial oppression and imperial subjection with the poetry, fiction and philosophy of the society engaging in them, and very few of the British or French artists Said admires took issue with the notion of “subject” or “inferior” races prevalent among the officials who ruled India or Algeria. Said reads the works he considers first as estimable works of art and learning, and second as manifest participants in the imperial process.

• Introduction, Great Expectations (PDF p.13-16 / printed p.xiv-xvii): Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) is primarily a novel about self-delusion, but Said locates it in the wider history of England and Australia revealed by Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore and Paul Carter’s The Road to Botany Bay. Australia was established as a penal colony in the late eighteenth century for transporting an unwanted excess population of felons to a place originally charted by Captain Cook, also replacing the colonies lost in America; profit, empire-building and what Hughes calls social apartheid produced modern Australia. Magwitch, the transported convict who secretly funds Pip, knots the English perception of convicts in Australia at the end of transportation: they could succeed but hardly return, and were capable of redemption as long as they stayed in Australia. The prohibition on Magwitch’s return is not only penal but imperial; and after Pip acknowledges his debt, his new career as a hardworking trader in the East with Herbert Pocket shows another Structure of attitude and reference — Britain’s imperial intercourse through trade and travel with the Orient. A new generation of scholars and critics, the children of decolonization and beneficiaries of advances in human freedom at home, has taken up these connections.

• Introduction, Nostromo and Conrad’s limits (PDF p.16-19 / printed p.xvii-xx): Conrad’s Nostromo (1904), set in an independent Central American republic dominated by outside interests because of its immense silver mine, forecasts the unrest and “misrule” of the Latin American republics and North America’s decisive yet barely visible way of influencing them; Holroyd, the San Francisco financier backing the mine’s British owner Charles Gould, is quoted: “We shall run the world’s business whether the world likes it or not.” Much of the rhetoric of the “New World Order” promulgated by the American government since the end of the Cold War might have been scripted by Holroyd, and the rhetoric of power all too easily produces an illusion of benevolence in an imperial setting. Yet Conrad writes with a Western view so ingrained as to blind him to other histories, cultures and aspirations: he could not understand that India, Africa and South America had lives and cultures with integrities not totally controlled by the imperialists, nor believe anti-imperialist independence movements were not all corrupt and in the pay of puppet masters in London or Washington. Conrad was both anti-imperialist and imperialist — progressive on the self-deluding corruption of overseas domination, deeply reactionary on conceding an independent history or culture to Africa or South America. The newly independent state of Sulaco at the novel’s end is only a smaller, more tightly controlled and intolerant version of the larger state. Conrad’s heirs — Greene’s The Quiet American, Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, and films such as Salvador, Apocalypse Now and Missing — inherit his anti-imperialist irony but also his residual propensity to make the West the source of the world’s significant action and life, although, writing after decolonization and after Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, C. L. R. James, Walter Rodney, Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Soyinka, Rushdie and García Márquez, they scarcely have an excuse.

• Introduction, the book’s point and method (PDF p.19-22 / printed p.xx-xxiii): Metropolitan Europeans and Americans now confront large non-white immigrant populations in their midst and newly empowered voices asking for their narratives to be heard, but such populations and voices have been there for some time, thanks to the globalized process set in motion by modern imperialism; to ignore the overlapping experience of Westerners and Orientals and the interdependence of cultural terrains in which colonizer and colonized co-existed and battled each other through projections as well as rival geographies, narratives and histories, is to miss what is essential about the world in the past century. On Kipling’s Kim: few artists were more imperialist and reactionary, yet the novel depended on a long history of Anglo-Indian perspective and, in spite of itself, forecast the untenability of that perspective in its insistence that the Indian reality beseeched British tutelage more or less indefinitely. The method is to focus on individual works, read first as great products of the creative or interpretative imagination, then shown as part of the relationship between culture and empire; authors are not mechanically determined by ideology, class or economic history, but are very much in the history of their societies. Empires not discussed are the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, Ottoman, and Spanish and Portuguese — not as benign or less imperialist, but because the British, French and American experience has a unique coherence and special cultural centrality: England is in an imperial class by itself, France was for almost two centuries its direct competitor, and America, an empire from the nineteenth century, directly followed its two predecessors after decolonization in the second half of the twentieth. The idea of overseas rule — jumping beyond adjacent territories to very distant lands — has a privileged status in these three cultures, and the phrase “a structure of attitude and reference” names the systematic quality of their imperial culture. A second reason is personal: these are the three countries in whose orbits Said was born, grew up and now lives, and as a native from the Arab and Muslim world who also belongs to the other side, he has in a sense lived on both sides and tried to mediate between them. The book’s moment is the period after the Cold War, when the United States has emerged as the last superpower.

• Introduction, concerns and close (PDF p.22-27 / printed p.xxiii-xxviii): First concern: current American policy formulations repeat what each great metropolitan center aspiring to global dominance has said and done — the appeal to power and national interest over lesser peoples, destructive zeal when natives reject a compliant ruler kept in place by the imperial power, and the disclaimer that “we” are exceptional and not imperial, routinely followed by making the mistake, as witness the Vietnam and Gulf wars — with the often passive collaboration of intellectuals, artists and journalists progressive at home. Methodologically Said shows imperialism and resistance together, without exempting the colonized from criticism: there have always been alternatives to Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein, and culture is not monolithic nor the exclusive property of East or West. Second concern: a new intellectual and political conscience, instanced by the change in Middle East studies since Orientalism — Lila Abu-Lughod’s Veiled Sentiments, Leila Ahmed’s Women and Gender in Islam and Fedwa Malti-Douglas’s Woman’s Body, Woman’s World, feminist but not exclusivist works in dialogue with the political situation of women in the Middle East — and, with Sara Suleri’s The Rhetoric of English India and Lisa Lowe’s Critical Terrains, a breakup of binary oppositions and of the static notion of identity at the core of cultural thought during the era of imperialism. Against the contest over “our” tradition: as C. L. R. James used to say, Beethoven belongs as much to West Indians as he does to Germans, since his music is now part of the human heritage. American identity, as an immigrant settler society superimposed on the ruins of considerable native presence, is too varied to be unitary; of the two historiographies — one linear and subsuming, the other contrapuntal and often nomadic — only the second is fully sensitive to historical experience. The book is addressed as a corrective to defensive, reactive and paranoid nationalism woven into education, while availing itself of the utopian space still provided by the university. Finally, this is an exile’s book: Said grew up as an Arab with a Western education, belonging to both worlds without being completely of either; exile here does not mean something sad or deprived, since belonging to both sides of the imperial divide enables understanding them more easily, and New York, where the book was written, is the exilic city par excellence and contains the Manichean structure of the colonial city described by Frantz Fanon. The argument was first presented in lecture series in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada from 1985 to 1988, and the Introduction, signed New York, July 1992, closes with thanks to hosts, editors, friends, students, manuscript helpers and family, and records that many parts of the book are suffused with the ideas and the human and moral example of Raymond Williams.

• Chapter One, I “Empire, Geography, and Culture” (PDF p.30-41 / printed p.3-14): Chapter epigraphs are from Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, on the silences maintained by authors who lived within the policing strategies and the strategies for breaking them, and Basil Davidson’s Africa in Modern History, on history taking body in the multifarious responses of a people’s culture. Appeals to the past are among the commonest strategies in interpretations of the present, animated by uncertainty about whether the past really is past. T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is taken up: the historical sense involves a perception not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence (the copy garbles both nouns, so the phrase is given without quotation marks), and “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.” Said accepts Eliot’s central idea — how we formulate or represent the past shapes our understanding of the present — while noting that Eliot’s synthesis leaves out the combativeness with which individuals and institutions decide what is tradition and what is not. Example: in the Gulf War of 1990-91, Iraq’s Baath Party construed modern Arab history as the unfulfilled promise of Arab independence traduced by “the West”, Arab reaction and Zionism, justifying the occupation of Kuwait also as righting wrongs and wresting a prize from imperialism, while the American view cast the United States as not a classical imperial power but a righter of wrongs in defense of freedom. The debate over “imperialism” — Kautsky, Hilferding, Luxemburg, Hobson, Lenin, Schumpeter, Arendt, Magdoff, Paul Kennedy, and the revisionist history of William Appleman Williams, Gabriel Kolko, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and Walter LaFeber — debated largely political and economic questions; scarcely any attention has been paid to the privileged role of culture. Britain and France between them controlled Canada, Australia, New Zealand, colonies in the Americas and the Caribbean, large swathes of Africa, the Middle East, the Far East and the entire Indian subcontinent, and this pattern laid the groundwork for a fully global world first established by the modern empires. The empires were constantly expanding and inexorably integrative; debates among Patrick O’Brien, Davis and Huttenback, Robinson and Gallagher, and the dependency economists André Gunder Frank and Samir Amin compel cultural historians to ask what empire means for the Victorian novel, French historiography, Italian grand opera or German metaphysics.

• Chapter One, I, geography and definitions (PDF p.34-37 / printed p.7-10): Territory and possessions are at stake, geography and power; literary historians do not generally connect Spenser’s bloodthirsty plans for Ireland with his poetic achievement or with the history of British rule over Ireland, which continues today. The book’s inquiry is geographical: the earth is in effect one world, in which empty, uninhabited spaces virtually do not exist, and the struggle over geography is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, forms, images and imaginings. The scale: in 1800 Western powers claimed 55 percent but actually held approximately 35 percent of the earth’s surface; by 1878 the proportion was 67 percent, a rate of increase of 83,000 square miles per year; by 1914 the annual rate had risen to 240,000 square miles, and Europe held roughly 85 percent of the earth as colonies, protectorates, dependencies, dominions and commonwealths; as William McNeill says in The Pursuit of Power, “the world was united into a single interacting whole as never before.” The American experience, as Richard Van Alstyne makes clear in The Rising American Empire, was founded on the idea of an imperium that would expand in population and territory; yet the discourse of American specialness, altruism and opportunity has made “imperialism” rare in accounts of United States culture, although American attitudes to “greatness”, racial hierarchy and other revolutions have dictated and obscured the realities of empire — Graham Greene’s Pyle in The Quiet American embodies this formation. Definitions: “imperialism” means the practice, the theory and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory; “colonialism”, almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on distant territory; Michael Doyle is quoted defining empire as a relationship in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society. Neither is a simple act of accumulation: both are supported and perhaps impelled by ideological formations including the notion that certain territories and people require and beseech domination, and the classic vocabulary of “inferior” or “subject races”, “subordinate peoples”, “dependency”, “expansion” and “authority”. Seeley’s idea that some empires were acquired absentmindedly cannot account for their systematized acquisition and administration; David Landes in The Unbound Prometheus calls the decision to treat colonies as continuous enterprises a momentous innovation, and Said’s question is how the idea and practice of empire gained that consistency and density.

• Chapter One, I, commitment and consent (PDF p.37-41 / printed p.10-14): Russia acquired its territories almost exclusively by adjacence, while the sheer distance of the English and French cases summoned the projection of far-flung interests — Said’s focus, and the world he grew up in. Beyond profit, inertia and tradition, there was a commitment to empire in constant circulation and recirculation, which allowed decent men and women to accept that distant territories and native peoples should be subjugated, and let them think of the imperium as a protracted, almost metaphysical obligation to rule subordinate, inferior or less advanced peoples. In India by the 1930s, a mere 4,000 British civil servants, assisted by 60,000 soldiers and 90,000 civilians, had billeted themselves upon a country of 300 million persons. The enterprise of empire depends upon the idea of having an empire, and imperialism acquires coherence and a presence of ruler and ruled alike within the culture; D. K. Fieldhouse is quoted: “The basis of imperial authority was the mental attitude of the colonist.” An Algerian intellectual today remembers France’s military attacks on villages and the torture of prisoners during the war of liberation, and the exultation over independence in 1962; his French counterpart remembers chagrin at having “lost” Algeria and the colonizing mission’s schools and nicely planned cities. Fanon is quoted refusing the situation the Western countries wish to condemn the colonized to, since colonialism and imperialism have not paid their score when they withdraw their flags and police forces. There is a serious split in our critical consciousness, which elaborates Carlyle’s and Ruskin’s aesthetic theories without attending to the authority their ideas bestowed on subjugation; unless we comprehend how the great European realistic novel almost unnoticeably sustained the society’s consent in overseas expansion — in J. A. Hobson’s words, the selfish forces directing imperialism utilizing the protective colours of disinterested movements such as philanthropy, religion, science and art — we will misread the culture’s importance and its resonances. William Blake, in his annotations to Reynolds’s Discourses: “Empire follows Art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.” Against disciplinary specialization, which loses the whole, Said sets Dickens’s Dombey and Son: the earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and A. D. stood for anno Dombei — and Son; the passage mocks Dombey’s egoism yet depends on the discourses of imperial free trade and the British mercantile ethos, which create “structures of feeling” supporting, elaborating and consolidating the practice of empire. Raymond Williams describes the 1840s without reference to India, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, and feels English literature is mainly about England — a limitation Said notes while admiring him. Said abstains from a completely worked out theory of the connection; neither culture nor imperialism is inert, and his principal aim is not to separate but to connect, because cultural forms are hybrid, mixed and impure.

• Chapter One, II “Images of the Past, Pure and Impure” (PDF p.42-45 / printed p.15-18): As the twentieth century moves to a close, cultures are seen as humanly made structures of both authority and participation, benevolent in what they include and less benevolent in what they exclude and demote; in all nationally defined cultures there is an aspiration to sovereignty, sway and dominance, yet cultures actually assume more “foreign” elements, alterities and differences than they consciously exclude — no one in Britain or France can draw a clear circle around London or Paris excluding the impact of India and Algeria. Martin Bernal’s Black Athena and Hobsbawm and Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition show today’s anxieties shaping pure, purged images of a genealogically useful past: Greek civilization, originally known to have roots in Egyptian, Semitic and other southern and eastern cultures, was redesigned as “Aryan” in the nineteenth century, its Semitic and African roots purged or hidden, and European philologists passed over the embarrassing passages in the interests of Attic purity. Images of European authority were likewise manufactured as rituals and traditions: in 1876 Victoria was declared Empress of India and her Viceroy Lord Lytton was celebrated in “traditional” durbars and a great Imperial Assemblage in Delhi, as if her rule were age-old custom rather than power and unilateral edict. Insurgent “natives” made similar constructions of their pre-colonial past — Algeria during the War of Independence (1954-1962), Yeats’s Cuchulains and great houses for the Irish past — with mobilizing power, but in post-colonial states the liabilities of such essences as the Celtic spirit, negritude or Islam are clear, used by native manipulators to cover contemporary faults, corruptions and tyrannies. Jules Harmand, the French advocate of colonialism, in 1910 accepted as a principle “a hierarchy of races and civilizations” (quoted), grounding the right to direct the rest of humanity in moral superiority — a stunning prescience of today’s polemics by Allan Bloom, Japan-bashers and ideological Orientalists. The old divisions have re-emerged as the North-South relationship. Common ways of handling the legacy include English remorse and nostalgia for the good old days (volatile during the crisis over Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa), Third World groups who reckon colonialism delivered liberal ideas, national self-consciousness and technological goods, and the state persecution of intellectuals such as Eqbal Ahmad and Faiz Ahmad Faiz in Pakistan, Ngugi wa Thiongo in Kenya and Abdelrahman el Munif in the Arab world, listened to only partially in the West and by their own governments. The discrepant spheres overlap only partially, providing little more than a rhetoric of blame; against it Said proposes a comparative literature of imperialism and, looking at the different experiences contrapuntally as Intertwined and overlapping histories, an alternative to both a politics of blame and the politics of confrontation and hostility, in a more interesting type of secular interpretation.

• Chapter One, III, Two Visions in Heart of Darkness (PDF p.46-54 / printed p.19-27; section continues past PDF p.54): Domination and inequities of power and wealth are perennial, but today’s politically independent nations of Asia, Latin America and Africa are in many ways as dominated and dependent as when ruled directly; against critics like V. S. Naipaul, for whom the natives are to blame for what they are, and against sweepingly blaming the Europeans, Said sets a network of interdependent histories. The triumphant natives found they needed the West, and total independence was a nationalist fiction designed mainly for what Fanon calls the “nationalist bourgeoisie”, who often ran the new countries with a tyranny reminiscent of the departed masters; the late twentieth century replicates the imperial cycle, but with no big empty spaces or expanding frontiers. A new and appalling tribalism fractures societies; little time is spent studying the map of interactions among states, societies, groups and identities. A preparation: the contemporary debate over how “natives” are represented in Western media. In 1984 Salman Rushdie diagnosed the spate of Raj films and articles, including The Jewel in the Crown and David Lean’s film of A Passage to India, noting that the nostalgia coincided with the Falklands War and that “the rise of Raj revisionism, exemplified by the huge success of these fictions, is the artistic counterpart to the rise of conservative ideologies in modern Britain.” Commentators took up instead whether the Third World had declined after emancipation — better a ruthlessly honest Naipaul than a posturing Rushdie — and, after Vietnam and Iran, rethought decolonization as misplaced trust that had led to Bokassas and Amins: “Why don’t they appreciate us, after what we did for them?” This discourse of unappreciated magnanimity dismisses the ravaged colonial peoples, the millions of Africans supplied to the slave trade, and the minute-by-minute traces of colonial intervention; its totalizing form transports us back to the late nineteenth century.

• Chapter One, III, the novella’s form (PDF p.49-54 / printed p.22-27): That imperial attitude is captured in the narrative form of Heart of Darkness, written between 1898 and 1899. Marlow acknowledges that “it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence” yet conveys the power of Kurtz’s African experience through his overmastering narrative of the voyage to Kurtz’s Inner Station; the digressions — the white-suited clerk, the harlequin-like Russian — are incorporated by the journey’s forward trajectory, and Kurtz’s looting adventure, Marlow’s journey and the narrative itself share the theme of Europeans performing acts of imperial mastery and will in (or about) Africa. Conrad, turned by colonialism from a Polish expatriate into an employee of the imperial system, was self-conscious about what he did: the tale is also a dramatization of Marlow telling his story to British listeners drawn largely from the business world, emphasizing that in the 1890s the business of empire had become the empire of business (at about the same time Halford Mackinder lectured on imperialism at the London Institute of Bankers). Marlow’s narrative leaves a sense that there is no way out of imperialism’s sovereign historical force, yet shows Marlow’s act as contingent, performed for like-minded British hearers on the deck of the Nellie; neither Conrad nor Marlow gives a full view of what lies outside that circle, because the novella’s politics and aesthetics are imperialist, then an apparently inevitable aesthetic, politics and epistemology, which eliminated non-imperialist alternatives and made them unthinkable — a circularity not only aesthetically but mentally unassailable. Yet situating the tale in a narrative moment lets us realize imperialism was circumscribed by a larger history just outside the circle; as yet no one seemed to inhabit that region, and Conrad left it empty. Conrad could imagine only a world carved into Western spheres of dominion, but his residual sense of his own exilic marginality qualified the narrative with provisionality; he was no imperialist entrepreneur like Cecil Rhodes or Frederick Lugard, and Arendt’s description of entering the maelstrom of an unending process of expansion is quoted for such men. Because imperialism, like narrative, had monopolized the entire system of representation in the novella — speaking for Africans as well as Kurtz — an outsider’s self-consciousness can comprehend how the machine works; never the wholly incorporated Englishman, Conrad preserved an ironic distance in each of his works.

• Chapter One, III, two visions (PDF p.52-54 / printed p.25-27): Conrad’s narrative form allows two arguments, two visions, in the post-colonial world. The first allows the old imperial enterprise full scope to render the world as official Western imperialism saw it and to consolidate itself after World War Two: Westerners left their colonies physically but retained them as markets and as locales on the ideological map over which they continued to rule morally and intellectually — “Show me the Zulu Tolstoy,” as one American intellectual has recently put it (the intellectual is not named on this page). This discourse argues the colonial world was ontologically lost to begin with, irredeemable and irrecusably inferior, focuses on what must never be shared — the authority and rectitude of greater power and development — and, in terms borrowed from Julien Benda’s critique of modern intellectuals, organizes political passions, leading inevitably to mass slaughter or at least rhetorical slaughter. The second argument sees itself as Conrad saw his narratives, local to a time and place, neither unconditionally true nor unqualifiedly certain: Conrad could not imagine a fully realized alternative, imagining European tutelage as a given, but since he dates imperialism, shows its contingency and records its illusions and tremendous violence and waste, he permits later readers to imagine something other than an Africa carved into dozens of European colonies. The first line persists in the discourse of resurgent empire and is overshadowed debate; an ideological shift of the 1970s and 1980s accompanied its contraction of horizons — the later Jean-François Lyotard and Michel Foucault, once apostles of radicalism, lost faith in the great legitimizing narratives of emancipation and enlightenment, turning to local issues, games and the micro-physics of power around the individual, after years of support for anti-colonial struggles in Algeria, Cuba, Vietnam, Palestine and Iran had reached a moment of exhaustion and disappointment. Then: “Enter now terrorism and barbarism”, ex-colonial experts urging re-invasion of Aden, Algeria, India and Indochina, experts on liberation movements, terrorism and the KGB, sympathy for what Jeane Kirkpatrick called authoritarian regimes, and Reaganism and Thatcherism. Against peremptorily withdrawing “the West” from its experiences in the “peripheral world”, Said quotes Rushdie on being outside the whale: politics-free fictional universes are as false as ones in which nobody needs to work or eat, and outside the whale objectivity becomes an unattainable goal to struggle for, in the world of Samuel Beckett’s formula: I can’t go on, I’ll go on. The second consequence, the second line leading out of Conrad’s narrative form, begins as the part ends (PDF p.54 / printed p.27).

• Chapter One, III, conclusion (PDF p.55-57 / printed p.28-30): The second vision is elaborated. Conrad’s self-consciously circular narrative forms draw attention to themselves as artificial constructions, encouraging a sense of a reality inaccessible to imperialism, just beyond its control, which only well after Conrad’s death in 1924 acquired a substantial presence. Through dislocations in the narrator’s language — Ian Watt’s “delayed decoding” — Marlow makes peculiar things more peculiar, so that a French warship fires “into a continent” and Kurtz’s eloquence is enlightening as well as fraudulent, and the discrepancy between the official “idea” of empire and the disorienting actuality of Africa unsettles reality itself. Kurtz and Marlow acknowledge that what they call “the darkness” has an autonomy of its own and can reinvade and reclaim what imperialism had taken, but they cannot recognize it as a non-European world resisting imperialism so as one day to regain sovereignty and independence. Against Conrad, a whole movement, literature and theory of resistance exists: Ali Shariati and Jalal Al-e-Ahmad prepared the way for the Islamic Revolution by asserting the absolute opposition of the native culture, while Ngugi and Tayeb Salih appropriated the quest and the voyage for post-colonial purposes, Salih’s hero in Season of Migration to the North doing and being the reverse of Kurtz. The formerly silent native now speaks and acts on territory taken back from the empire, in Rushdie, Derek Walcott, Aimé Césaire, Chinua Achebe, Pablo Neruda and Brian Friel.

• Chapter One, IV “Discrepant Experiences” (PDF p.58-64 / printed p.31-37): Experience has an irreducible subjective core but is also historical and secular, accessible to analysis and not exhausted by totalizing theories; with Gramsci, an intellectual vocation is socially possible, so analyses built on exclusions — only women, only Jews, only formerly colonial subjects can understand their experience — are inadmissible. Essentialism posits as essential what is historically created (Africanness, Jewishness, Germanness, Orientalism, Occidentalism) and defends the essence rather than promoting full knowledge of its entanglements. Discrepant experiences are to be thought through together, each with its agenda, internal formations and external relationships, as The Invention of Tradition’s local traditions can be read together for attempting “to establish continuity with a suitable historic past”. The notion does not circumvent ideology: juxtaposing closed experiences makes them concurrent and highlights ideology’s importance. The exemplary pair, both from the 1810s, is the twenty-four-volume Description de l’Égypte and ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti’s ‘Aja’ib al-Athar: Fourier’s introduction normalizes Napoleon’s 1798 invasion within great names and European cultural assumptions — no considerable power was ever amassed that did not turn toward Egypt, regarded in some measure as its natural lot — while Jabarti records devastation as a conquered Egyptian, a subjugated particle under French power. From Jabarti Said traces anti-Westernism, the seeds of Islamic reformism in Muhammad ‘Abduh and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, and an early moment of the national self-consciousness culminating in Egyptian independence and Nasserism, while noting historians have not so readily read French culture through the expedition, although Nerval and Flaubert worked in territory it charted. The asymmetry — colonial history as a function of imperial intervention, colonial undertakings as marginal to metropolitan culture — is reproduced in journalism on decolonization, in the reversion to tribal and religious sentiments, and, during the book’s writing, in the Gulf crisis over Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, where two held-over ideas governed: the great power’s right to safeguard distant interests even by invasion, and that lesser powers were also lesser peoples. Western representations of Arabs since the 1967 War remained crude and racialist despite Mahfouz’s 1988 Nobel Prize and the Arabic novel.

• Chapter One, IV, Lewis, Mazrui and two anecdotes (PDF p.64-70 / printed p.37-43): Bernard Lewis’s Wall Street Journal column of May 2, 1989, on the Stanford canon debate is taken as atavism: curricular modification equated with the demise of Western culture, the restoration of slavery, polygamy and child marriage ensuing (restated at PDF p.64-65 as slavery and bigamy returning). Ali Mazrui’s The Africans (BBC; NEH support withdrawn; run on PBS) proposed that an African was for the first time representing Africa before the audience whose societies had pillaged, colonized and enslaved it, and that African history comprises three concentric circles — native African experience, Islam, and imperialism; John Corry’s New York Times attacks of September 14, October 9 and 16, 1986, are read as reconstituted imperial ideology resisting a non-European representing European and American history. Two anecdotal illustrations follow: an Arab Christian clergyman whose Levantine Protestant communities, created since the 1860s by imperial missionary competition in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, were in the 1980s being told by their Western principals to return to the Greek Orthodox fold, erasing over a century of autonomous Arab Protestant partnership by a stroke of the pen in New York or London — a parable about the power to give or withhold attention; and the genealogy of disciplines, where Foucault and Williams alike treat the imperial experience as irrelevant, against Fabian, Asad and Turner, and where Gauri Viswanathan’s The Masks of Conquest shows English studies first created by early-nineteenth-century colonial administrators for the ideological pacification of a potentially rebellious Indian population, then imported into England. Comparative literature, whose purpose is to see cultures together contrapuntally, originated in the period of high European imperialism and is irrecusably linked to it.

• Chapter One, V “Connecting Empire to Secular Interpretation” (PDF p.70-80 / printed p.43-53): The older comparative literature, from long before World War Two until the early 1970s, was scholarship rather than criticism, formed by philological apprenticeship in the line of Auerbach and Spitzer and by the late-eighteenth-century secular anthropology of Vico, Herder, Rousseau and the Schlegels, for whom mankind formed a symphonic whole studied as secular history. Its alleged universalism was Eurocentric, counteracted by a catholic vision taking nationalism as transitory; from it came comparative literature as a trans-national perspective, Goethe’s Weltliteratur, and a hierarchy with Europe and its Latin Christian literatures — Romania — at center and top, a hierarchy Auerbach’s post-war “Philologie der Weltliteratur” already saw under threat. The first American department and journal of comparative literature were established at Columbia in 1891; its first chaired professor, George Edward Woodberry, celebrated a rising intellectual state “without frontiers or race or force” in a time of the greatest Western imperial hegemony in history. Mimesis, written in Istanbul exile, was an act of civilizational survival whose mission died in trivial academic uses; after Sputnik the National Defense Education Act recast the field as national security. The geographers of colonial empire — Mackinder, George Chisolm (as printed), Georges Hardy, Leroy-Beaulieu and Lucien Fevre (as printed), whose La Terre et l’évolution humaine (1922) matches Woodberry in scope — produced a parallel “world-empire” vision: both visions are elaborations of power, implying a Western observer surveying the world with sovereign detachment. Gramsci’s Some Aspects of the Southern Question supplies the geographical model: Lukács’s problematic is temporality, Gramsci’s is territory; Piero Gobetti linked northern proletariat and southern peasantry by organizing culture, an organic break of the kind a coral-like cultural formation needs. The universalizing discourses assume the silence of the non-European world; rereading the archive contrapuntally is therefore possible and required: we begin to reread it not univocally but contrapuntally, “with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts”. Cultural identities are contrapuntal ensembles, not essences, and Structure of attitude and reference names the cultural topography by which, in Spenser, Shakespeare, Defoe and Austen, empowered metropolitan space is connected to subordinate peripheral worlds — structures to which there was virtual unanimity of assent, the women’s and working-class movements included, that subject races should be ruled and the empire maintained.

• Chapter One, V, America, separation of spheres, and close (PDF p.80-88 / printed p.53-61): Such rereading was made possible by resistance in the peripheries; the caution is nationalism hijacking liberation into state nationalisms, against which oppositional, often exiled Third World intellectuals — inheritors of George Antonius and C. L. R. James — must keep community before coercion and criticism before solidarity. The United States, the last superpower, has replaced the earlier empires in Central and Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia; its interventions since World War Two, its support of the contras in Nicaragua and its Persian Gulf policies can only be described as imperialist, in William Appleman Williams’s phrase empire as a way of life, and there is no Archimedean point outside the relationships themselves from which to judge them. Anthropology’s contradiction — force-based political actuality against a humane desire to understand the Other, embodied in Kim’s Colonel Creighton, ethnographer and head of British intelligence — and theory’s timeless vacuum both occlude the imperial setting. The separation of an isolated cultural sphere from a debased political sphere is a radical falsification and an act of complicity. Every cultural form is radically, quintessentially hybrid; a coherent, fully mobilized system of ideas about overseas European hegemony can be located near the end of the eighteenth century, well before the “age of empire” formally beginning around 1878. Its perfect example is Mansfield Park, read with John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, where the West Indian colonies are hardly to be looked upon as countries but as outlying agricultural or manufacturing estates where England finds it convenient to produce sugar, coffee and a few other tropical commodities; the metropolis gets its authority from the devaluation as well as the exploitation of the colonial possession, and the non-European’s secondariness is paradoxically essential to the European’s primariness, the paradox explored by Césaire, Fanon and Memmi. The chapter closes with three tasks: read the canon with Fanon and Cabral and as a polyphonic accompaniment to Europe’s expansion; formulate the relationship between empire and culture, so far only at the stage of inventorying the interpellation of culture by empire; and keep the present as paradigm for the past, speaking of overlapping territories and intertwined histories common to whites and non-whites, metropolis and peripheries, past, present and future. Chapter One ends at PDF p.88 / printed p.61.

• Chapter Two, I “Narrative and Social Space” (PDF p.89-98 / printed p.62-71; section continues past PDF p.98): Chapter Two, “Consolidated Vision”, opens with an epigraph from T. E. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, on the “Intrusive” band meaning to build a new people in the East. Nearly everywhere in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British and French culture there are allusions to the facts of empire, nowhere more regularly than in the British novel, constituting a structure of attitude and reference: Mansfield Park’s Bertram possessions, Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, Joseph Sedley and Joseph Dobbin in Vanity Fair, Kingsley’s Westward Ho!, Magwitch, Disraeli’s Tancred, Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, Henry James’s Ralph Touchett in Algeria and Egypt, and, with Kipling, Conrad, Doyle, Haggard, Stevenson, Orwell, Cary, Forster and Lawrence, empire as a crucial setting. France’s imperial identity was less secure after the Revolution and Napoleon; American writing shows an acute imperial cast within its ferocious anti-colonialism — the Puritan errand, westward expansion and the destruction of Native American life in Cooper, Twain and Melville. Empire functions as a codified, marginally visible presence like servants in grand households — anonymous, profitable, in Eric Wolf’s phrase “people without History” — and the colonial territories, realms of possibility associated always with the realistic novel, are where disgraced sons, shabby relatives and enterprising travellers are sent. These realities are overlooked by criticism: Green, Mahood, McClure and Brantlinger are narrative and descriptive; Raskin, Gordon K. Lewis and Kiernan are theoretical but uninfluential; Trilling on Howards End never mentions imperialism although the Wilcoxes are colonial rubber growers, and Williams’s Culture and Society does not deal with the imperial experience at all. Contrapuntal reading is defined in practical terms: reading with an understanding of what is involved when a colonial sugar plantation maintains a style of life in England, extending the reading to what was forcibly excluded, opening each text to what went into it and what its author excluded, and connecting narrative structures to the ideas and experiences supporting them — Conrad’s Africa being not a reflection but a politicized, ideologically saturated Africa, an organic part of the scramble for Africa. Marlow’s Romans, who were “no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze and nothing more”, against modern efficiency and devotion to an idea, encapsulate imperialism’s territorial power and its justificatory regime of salvation and redemption. “Without empire, I would go so far as saying, there is no European novel as we know it”: the novel, inaugurated by Robinson Crusoe, tied to bourgeois society in Morazé’s phrase les bourgeois conquérants, is an incorporative, quasi-encyclopedic form whose heroes’ adventures reveal the limits of aspiration, ending in death or in accession to stability through marriage or confirmed identity. Britain, whose empire by World War One was unquestionably dominant and, as Seeley and Hobson argued, the central fact in British history, also sustained a novelistic institution with no European competitor; the section continues past PDF p.98 with the English novel’s eminence by the 1840s.

• Chapter Two, I, conclusion (PDF p.99-107 / printed p.72-80): By the 1840s the English novel had achieved eminence as the aesthetic form and as a major intellectual voice in English society; in projecting Williams’s “knowable community”, Austen, George Eliot and Mrs. Gaskell shaped the idea of England, in which England was surveyed and made known whereas “abroad” was only referred to briefly. Platt’s Finance, Trade and Politics in British Foreign Policy, 1815-1914 supplies the “departmental view” — a consensus about empire held by the whole range of people responsible for it; until about 1870 policy was to uphold and maintain the empire and protect it from disintegration, with India central, and after 1870 (Disraeli’s Crystal Palace speech, 1872) protecting India and defending against Russia necessitated expansion in Africa and the Middle and Far East. Robinson and Gallagher: “the British would expand by trade and influence if they could, but by imperial rule if they must”; the Indian army was used in China three times between 1829 and 1856, in Persia (1856), Ethiopia and Singapore (1867), Hong Kong (1868), Afghanistan (1878), Egypt (1882), Burma (1885), Ngasse (1893, as printed) and Sudan and Uganda (1896). A novel is neither a frigate nor a bank draft, and novels are not reducible to a sociological current nor products of lonely genius, yet the novel became a main element in the consolidated vision of the globe: nineteenth-century English novels stress England’s continuing existence, never advocate giving up colonies, and keep the empire more or less in place by mere reference — India in Vanity Fair and Jane Eyre, Australia in Great Expectations, Tom shipped to the colonies at the end of Hard Times. Four consequences: an organic continuity between earlier narratives and later explicitly imperial ones (Kipling and Conrad prepared for by Austen, Thackeray, Defoe, Scott and Dickens); power — never is the world beyond seen except as subordinate and dominated, the novelty of Aziz’s trial in A Passage to India being Forster’s admission that its court is a “fantasy” compromising British power (real) with impartial justice for Indians (unreal), where Kipling rendered even the “Mutiny” of 1857 as mere waywardness; illustration — Vanity Fair’s incidental India allusions within a globalised world-view tying domestic order to an English order abroad, as with Sir Thomas’s Antigua plantation and the Wilcox Nigerian rubber estate; and integrity — the structure connecting novels exists only in the individual novels, so critics must read works they may find objectionable, as Achebe both overrides Conrad’s formal limitations in his essay and rewrites Conrad in his own novels. The novel consolidates authority as normative and sovereign through the authorities of author, narrator and community; Lukács on Scott and history, Michelet and Macaulay, and social space — Kipling’s Kim crossing differently ordained spaces — lead to the primacy of geography: actual geographical possession of land is what empire in the final analysis is about, and the coincidence of real control, the idea of a place and an actual place launches the struggle for empire, for Westerners taking possession and for resisting natives reclaiming land alike. Three points follow: spatial differentiations derive in a continuum from earlier novels; conclusions confirm a hierarchy of family, property and nation with a spatial hereness (Lady Dedlock at the graveyard, the Jellybys’ ties to Africa, Ruskin’s 1870 Slade lecture mobilising “a sceptred isle” for colonial service); and narrative fiction and history are premised on the central authorising subject, whose capacity to represent is circumscribed and socially regulated, representation itself characterised as keeping the subordinate subordinate, the inferior inferior.

• Chapter Two, II “Jane Austen and Empire” (PDF p.107-124 / printed p.80-97): Kiernan: “empires must have a mould of ideas or conditioned reflexes to flow into” — the quotation continues, in wording checked against the original, to youthful nations dreaming of a great place in the world as young men dream of fame and fortunes. Mill, liberal though he was, held that the sacred duties civilised nations owe to each other’s independence are not binding towards those to whom nationality and independence are certain evil or at best a questionable good; such ideas were current in the sixteenth-century English subjugation of Ireland and, as Nicholas Canny demonstrates, in the ideology of English colonisation in the Americas, and almost all colonial schemes begin with an assumption of native backwardness. Said is not arguing simple causality or blame: European culture often characterised itself so as simultaneously to validate its own preferences while advocating them in conjunction with distant imperial rule, and the counterpoint’s mode is not temporal but spatial. Williams’s The Country and the City is taken up: Williams volunteers that from at least the mid-nineteenth century the relationship between England and the colonies was a larger context within which every idea and every image was affected, citing emigration in Dickens, the Brontës and Gaskell and the “dramatic extension of landscape and social relations” after 1880; Said ventures that an imperial map in English literature turns up well before the mid-nineteenth century, with established offshore interests from the sixteenth century on (Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters), nation-making contested with France abroad (India, the Nile delta, the Western Hemisphere) and at home, and Wilberforce’s abolitionist posture developing partly to make life harder for French hegemony in the Antilles. Mansfield Park (1814), the most explicit in its ideological and moral affirmations of Austen’s novels, is then read spatially: a series of dislocations and relocations before Fanny Price becomes spiritual mistress of a place located at the centre of an arc spanning the hemisphere, two major seas and four continents, its central group based on affiliation rather than blood alone. Fanny, like Kim, is device and instrument as well as character, requiring patronage and outside authority; the material sustenance is the Bertram estate in Antigua, which is not doing well, and Austen works through geographical clarification — Fanny unable to put the map of Europe together (Austen’s phrase, checked against the original; the copy garbles “Europe”), rooms, fires, estate improvement and chapels, the Crawfords’ Lovers’ Vows preparations and feminine “lawlessness” while Sir Thomas tends his colonial garden, and his return, quoted, reinstating himself in all the wonted concerns of his Mansfield life and burning every unbound copy of the play. Nothing contradicts assuming Sir Thomas does exactly the same, on a larger scale, in his Antigua “plantations”, where Warren Roberts’s internal evidence suggests economic depression, slavery and competition with France were at issue; to hold and rule Mansfield Park is to hold and rule an imperial estate, and what assures the domestic tranquility of one is the productivity and regulated discipline of the other. The second part — the failure of the Edmund-Mary Crawford romance, the disgraceful profligacy of Lydia (as printed) and Henry Crawford, Fanny’s rejection of Portsmouth, Tom’s incapacitation, William’s naval career, Edmund’s marriage to Fanny and Susan’s substitution — shows Fanny’s enlarged sense of home, quoted at Portsmouth (“She was at home. But alas! it was not such a home”), and the correspondence between her small-scale movement in space, as a kind of transported commodity, and Sir Thomas’s openly colonial movements. Antigua’s historical valences are calibrated: a sugar plantation maintained by slave labour, not abolished until the 1830s, in the Caribbean theatre of Anglo-French competition, slave rebellions in and out of Haiti, declining British profits and later competition from Brazil, Mauritius and European beet sugar; Mill’s passage is quoted in full — the West Indian colonies as outlying agricultural or manufacturing estates where England finds it convenient to produce sugar, coffee and a few other tropical commodities, their trade resembling the traffic between town and country. What was wanting within the Bertrams was supplied by the wealth of a West Indian plantation and a poor provincial relative together, with executive disposition; Mrs. Norris is dislodged, and Williams’s separable morality is refused: Austen affirms to the last sentence the geographical process of expansion that predates, underlies and guarantees the morality, and Gallagher notes there were few domestic constraints upon expansion. Lady Bertram’s India is for shawls (“‘that I may have a shawl. I think I will have two shawls.’”); the Bertrams’ usable colony points forward to Gould’s San Tomé mine, the Wilcoxes’ rubber company, Wide Sargasso Sea and Heart of Darkness. The planter class’s decline (Ragatz, The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763-1833, 1928, whose “Negro race” characterisation is quoted) gave way to the revisionary Caribbean historians Eric Williams and C. L. R. James and Blackburn’s The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848; Williams in Capitalism and Slavery (1961, as printed) is quoted on ideas built on interests continuing long after the interests have been destroyed. The section closes on the unresolved paradox: “There was such a dead silence” after Fanny asked Sir Thomas about the slave trade, yet Austen is not to be jettisoned under a rhetoric of blame; Mansfield Park encodes experiences rather than repeating them, and the task is to lose neither a true historical sense of Antigua nor a full enjoyment of Mansfield Park, while seeing both together.

• Chapter Two, III “The Cultural Integrity of Empire” (PDF p.124-138 / printed p.97-111): Until after the mid-nineteenth century the easy, sustained commerce between Mansfield Park and an overseas territory has little equivalent in French culture: French writing on the non-European world was specialised (Raynal) or moral debate (the Encyclopedists, Rousseau), Chateaubriand too eccentric to found an institution, and before taking Algeria in 1830 France had no India (Poiret’s Lettres de Barbarie); Girardet specifies arms dealers, economists, the military and missionary circles as keeping French imperial institutions alive between 1815 and 1870, with no French “departmental view”. Two specialised French vehicles: Napoleon as iconic mask (Hugo’s “Lui”; Julien Sorel dominated by the St. Helena memoirs, with the novel’s only outside reference a voyage to Algeria in the very year, 1830, France secures its major imperial province), and the glamorous sciences enabled by Napoleonic adventures — archaeology, linguistics, historiography, Orientalism, experimental biology — whose academic prestige shapes every French utterance, unlike England’s casual observation (Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to the Webbs) and Macaulay’s 1835 Minute. Representations depend on Europe’s power to bring the non-European world into representation the better to see, master and hold it, premised on the silence of the native; Basil Davidson, in a long quotation, finds the literature of African exploration and conquest built uniquely to a single domination attitude, its observers convinced they faced “primeval man”. Kipling, Conrad, Gérôme and Flaubert animate territories using attitudes provided by Max Müller, Renan, Charles Temple, Darwin, Benjamin Kidd and Emerich de Vattel; Gould and Stepan show no significant dissent from theories of Black inferiority, and Stocking’s ethnography and the Indian education system taught the inherent superiority of the English race. Carlyle’s “Quashee” passage is quoted in full: the gods wish spices grown in their West Indies, and Quashee, if he will not help, will be made a slave again and with beneficent whip compelled to work; neither Austen nor Mill offers a non-white Caribbean any status other than sugar producer in permanent subordination, and Carlyle speaks the lingua franca of metropolitan Britain. Ruskin’s 1870 Slade lecture is quoted at length — “Reign or Die”, colonies founded “as fast and as far as she is able”, England mistress of half the earth — a passage most discussions avoid, in which art and culture depend on enforced imperialism. Kiernan’s list of British campaigns contemporaneous with Ruskin’s life runs from the 1839-42 opium wars in China to the 1882 conquest of Egypt; the roster of significant Victorian writers saw British power virtually unchecked and identified with it. A circular tautology — we are dominant because we have the power, they are inferior because they are not dominant — extends from sixteenth-century views of Ireland to practically the whole world, its one constant the hierarchy between metropole and overseas, European-Western-white-Christian-male and the peoples beyond. Culture participates in imperialism yet is excused for its role: Hobson disparages Giddings’s “retrospective consent” without asking where the idea arose; Seeley and Leroy-Beaulieu deploy a language already matured in fiction, political science, racial theory and travel writing; Leroy-Beaulieu’s colonisation as education and virility is quoted in French with translation; imperialism was considered essential to British fertility and motherhood, and Baden-Powell’s Boy Scout movement traces to the connection between empire and the nation’s health. A five-point synthesis follows: (1) no disagreement on the fundamental ontological distinction between West and rest, with Fabian’s denial of “coevalness”; (2) codification of difference in ethnography, linguistics, racial theory and historical classification (Gobineau, Maine, Renan, Humboldt); (3) active domination, global in scope (Panikkar; Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men), converging with universalising cultural discourses, producing a “duty” to natives and the rhetoric of la mission civilisatrice; (4) domination informs metropolitan cultures — Viswanathan on British education in India and Trevelyan’s Platonic Guardians, Crosby’s “ecological imperialism”, colonial cities (Algiers, Delhi, Saigon), Fabian’s Language and Colonial Power, Guha and Cohn on the daily imposition of power, and a field of passages based on the Westerner/native distinction, against which Fanon’s Manicheanism and the need for violence are set; (5) the creative power of imperial attitudes — Orientalist, Africanist and Americanist discourses, Bernal’s purged classical philology, Inden’s Imagining India, an imperial personality in Conrad, Kipling, Lawrence and Malraux with ancestors from Clive to Rhodes, and the haunting images of Gordon at Khartoum, Kurtz, Lawrence of Arabia, Rhodes, Bugeaud and Gérôme’s odalisques.

• Chapter Two, IV “The Empire at Work: Verdi’s Aida” (PDF p.138-141 / printed p.111-114; section continues past PDF p.141): The section opens by demonstrating how far this material affects realms not associated with imperial exploitation: Mitchell’s Colonising Egypt on the aesthetic component of surveying and administering Egypt, Kinney and Çelik on belly-dancing and European expositions, T. J. Clark on Manet and Alloula’s The Colonial Harem. Two features of the contrapuntal method are stated: works are seen in terms of their own past and later interpretations rather than in a consecutive sequence, and the structure of attitude and reference is prevalent in all sorts of forms and places, culture hybrid and partaking of racial superiority as much as artistic brilliance. Aida confirms the Orient as an essentially exotic, distant and antique place in which Europeans can mount shows of force, concurrent with universal expositions exhibiting colonial villages as microcosms of the imperial domain. Theories of Aida’s grandeur: Lindenberger ties it with Boris Godunov and Götterdämmerung as operas of 1870 to archaeology; Wieland Wagner treats it as “an African mystery” with an irreducible conflict between Ethos and Bios. Verdi’s career to Aida — the last public and political opera before Otello and Falstaff — and Kerman’s finding of “a curious falsity about Aida”, correct but unexplained, lead through Robinson’s Opera and Ideas (Verdi’s loudness harnessed to parades, rallies and speeches; Attila among the earlier operas stimulating participatory frenzies) to the difference of Aida: Egypt and Egyptians of early antiquity addressed, no participatory enthusiasm recorded, despite the Triumphal scene being the biggest thing Verdi wrote for the stage. Its circumstances between early 1870 and late 1871 — Italy, imperial Europe and viceregal Egypt, technically Ottoman but gradually established as a dependent part of Europe — make it a hybrid, radically impure work, not so much about but of imperial domination; the section continues past PDF p.141.

• Chapter Two, IV, Verdi, Mariette and Egyptology (PDF p.142-152 / printed p.115-125): Verdi accepted Khedive Ismail’s offer for money — 150,000 francs in gold, checked against the original — for flattery (choice number one, ahead of Wagner and Gounod), and above all for the story offered by Camille du Locle from Auguste Mariette’s sketch; his letters insist on a unified work of which he is the “only one creator”, and Said argues he fatally confused a collaborative capacity to bring a distant fable to life with the Romantic ideal of a seamless work by a single creator, so that an imperial notion of the artist dovetailed with an imperial notion of a non-European world whose claims were minimal or non-existent (PDF p.142-144 / printed p.115-117). Egyptology is Egyptology and not Egypt: Mariette was made possible by the Description de l’Égypte and by Champollion’s decipherment (1822, 1824), in a French, imperial, reconstructive and presentational process, running roughly from 1798 to the 1860s, in which ancient Egypt was staged for a European audience, made to speak, and finally dislodged and transported to Europe — Mariette’s contribution, across archaeology, grand opera and the universal expositions, excavating some thirty-five sites and emptying them as the Louvre grew (PDF p.144-147 / printed p.117-120). The result was an Orientalized Egypt: Verdi converts priests into priestesses, following the European practice of making Oriental women central to exotic practice, and Ramfis is informed by his Risorgimento anti-clericalism and by the despotic Oriental potentate; Fétis supplies the exotic music; and the Nile scene of Act III is the imaginative collaboration’s most successful atmospherics, after a Description plate (PDF p.147-149 / printed p.120-122). Aida is peculiar for what it excludes — little of what modern Egyptians thought found its way into the record — and its plot ends in deadlock and literal entombment; three modern productions (Cincinnati, March 1986, with 11 animals and a body count of 261 in total, both figures as printed and checked against the original; Wieland Wagner’s ethnographic Act II; Mexico 1952, Callas’s high E-flat one octave above the written note) exploit the one aperture Verdi allowed, on astringent terms: come in as exotica or as captives, then leave (PDF p.149-152 / printed p.122-125).

• Chapter Two, IV, Cairo, Ismail and the close (PDF p.152-159 / printed p.125-132): Aida embodies the authority of Europe’s version of Egypt, and its Egyptian-Ethiopian story acquires resonance against Anglo-Egyptian rivalry in East Africa from the 1840s to the 1860s and Ismail’s southward expansion; Ismail’s reign (1863-1879) drew Egypt ever more deeply into the loose agglomeration of European financiers, merchant bankers and loan corporations — the cotton boom of the American Civil War years, foreign loans costing somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of their face value, foreign resident communities grown to 90,000 by the early 1880s — leading ineluctably to the British occupation of 1882 and, just as ineluctably, to Nasser’s reclamation of the Suez Canal in July 1956 (PDF p.152-154 / printed p.125-127). Ismail modernized Cairo by dividing it: Abu-Lughod’s two cities, native and colonial, miles apart socially and centuries apart technologically, with the Opera House at the center of the north-south axis facing the European city; Ali Pasha Mobarak’s Khittat Tawfikiya records the ferment without mentioning the Opera; the wooden Opera House burned down in 1971 and was never rebuilt there (PDF p.154-156 / printed p.127-129). Aida is an aesthetic of separation, an imperial article de luxe purchased by credit for a tiny clientele, a curatorial art designed to alienate and impress an almost exclusively European audience; the section closes with the Eyre massacre debate of 1865, Arnold’s approval of tough policies, a parenthesis on Operation Desert Storm and the two million Vietnamese killed, and the five options offered the late-nineteenth-century European, all premised on the subordination of the native — delight in power, reconstituting the native to be ruled, the civilizing mission, the security of not looking into the violence, and the rewriting of native history as a function of the imperial one (PDF p.156-159 / printed p.129-132).

• Chapter Two, V “The Pleasures of Imperialism” (PDF p.159-183 / printed p.132-156; section continues past PDF p.183): Kim (1901), published twelve years after Kipling left India, is Kipling’s only successfully sustained and mature piece of long fiction, and pleasure — boyish enjoyment of the Great Game as an extended prank, Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts “fortifying the wall of empire” in 1907-8 — is an undeniable component of it that does not contradict but serves the political purpose of British control (PDF p.159-165 / printed p.132-138). Kipling writes from a massive colonial system taken as a virtual fact of nature: the white/non-white division was absolute, a Sahib is a Sahib, and India, dominated for three hundred years, was only then beginning the unrest that culminated in independence — the Indian National Congress was established in 1885 and attitudes had changed after the 1857 Rebellion (PDF p.161-163 / printed p.134-136). The lama is placed firmly within the protective orbit of British rule: he depends on Kim, regards him as his savior, and his encyclopedic vision of freedom strikingly resembles Creighton’s Indian Survey, become redemptive; Kim’s healing, read through Victor Turner’s liminal, is a ceremony of reappropriation — Britain, through a loyal Irish subject, taking hold once again of India — unlike the reawakenings of Dorothea Brooke and Isabel Archer, who retake no sovereignty (PDF p.165-172 / printed p.138-145). Against Kinkead-Weekes and Edmund Wilson, Said argues the conflict between Kim’s service and his Indian loyalties is unresolved not because Kipling could not face it but because for Kipling there was no conflict: it was India’s best destiny to be ruled by England (PDF p.172-173 / printed p.145-146). Two episodes prove the elimination of conflict: the loyalist old soldier’s account of the Mutiny of 1857 — “A madness ate into all the Army” — puts the extreme British view in an Indian mouth, and the Widow of Kulu’s praise of the police superintendent — these be the sort to oversee justice, in her words as checked against the original — makes natives assent to the right kind of colonial rule; Kim’s editorial asides on the immutable Oriental, Hutchins’s Orientalized India of the imagination, MacKenzie’s Propaganda and Empire, and the unquestioned axiom of white superiority complete the picture (PDF p.173-178 / printed p.146-151). Creighton, the ethnographer-scholar-soldier, is the culmination of generations of British power in India from Clive and Hastings through Munro, Elphinstone and the scholar-administrators to Bentinck: the union of power and knowledge, government by whether it works in ruling the alien entity, and the Babu as the ontologically funny native who can never be a Creighton because he is not white (PDF p.178-182 / printed p.151-155). The Great Game is analogous to the novel itself — Kipling, holding Kim at the center, can have and enjoy India as even imperialism never dreamed — and Kim is set against the late-nineteenth-century novel of disillusion, above all Jude the Obscure (1894): Jude is ensnared and ends neglected, Kim graduates from one brilliant success to another; the comparison continues past PDF p.183.

• Chapter Two, V, conclusion (PDF p.184-189 / printed p.157-162): The comparison with Jude the Obscure completes: Jude’s identity is implicated in his unsuccessful dream, what he wishes for is exactly what he cannot have, while Kim gets beyond the paralyzing impasse — his actions result in victories, he restores India to health as the foreign agents are apprehended and expelled, and his Sahib difference is affirmed even by the saintly guru. Kipling was not an introspective writer; his transparent language gives Kim the blend of adventure and wistfulness Stendhal called espagnolisme (checked against the original). The idyllic Grand Trunk Road scene with the old soldier (Chapter 3 of Kim) is quoted, and Kim’s gift for disguise and languages — Urdu, English, Eurasian, Hindi, Bengali, Pashtu, the lama’s Chinese Tibetan — lets him move through India’s Babel unscarred, an absence of resistance due to the novel’s imperialist vision: what one cannot do in one’s own Western environment, one can do abroad. Kim’s voyages meander within the Punjab around Lahore and Umballa, along the Grand Trunk Road built by Sher Shan (as printed, checked against the original), with only the lama’s elastic Search and the expulsion of the foreign agents as temporal pressure; against Lukács, time is on Kim’s side because the geography is Britain’s. The confluence of Creighton’s Great Game (surveillance and control) with Kim’s disguise fantasy (everything is possible) could not have occurred without British imperialism, at the moment before Indian independence when it had lost sight of the truth that India existed before the Europeans and that resistance would inevitably struggle out; Kipling does not truly succeed in his obfuscation, Kim is not a political tract, and the section closes on the novel as an aesthetic milestone along the way to midnight August 14-15, 1947.

• Chapter Two, VI “The Native Under Control” (PDF p.189-195 / printed p.162-168): Fanon is quoted: for the native, such a European value as “objectivity is always directed against him”. Discriminations must be made — Mill on India was more complex than Carlyle or Ruskin, Conrad and Kipling more than Buchan or Haggard — yet the objection that culture is not part of imperialism can become a tactic preventing the connection, and European culture was no less rich for having supported most aspects of empire. Conrad and Flaubert both emphasize solitary figures (Heyst, St. Antoine, Almayer, Kurtz, Jim, Gould) whose self-created structures take the colonizer’s form and are doomed to interruption; Marlow repeats and confirms Kurtz’s action, restoring Africa to European hegemony by historicizing and narrating its strangeness. Maine’s Ancient Law (1861), its status-to-contract theory tested in India as a laboratory (two hundred pieces of Indian legislation), and Murchison, the soldier-geologist whose work, in Stafford’s account, was empire, are Marlow’s historical equivalents. Achebe’s criticism of Conrad does not go far enough: Nostromo and Victory extend the same contempt and exoticism beyond Africa, and Conrad’s fiction confirmed its European audience. European opposition existed (Abolitionists, Trollope, Goldwin Smith; missionaries curbing excesses, in Neill’s account) but Froude, Dilke and Seeley represented the more powerful pro-imperial culture; Kurtz’s seventeen-page report makes civilizing antithetical and logically equivalent to exterminating the brutes. The natives could not be made to disappear: schemes separated and reconstituted them as requiring a European presence — Kipling’s tutelage, repeating James and John Stuart Mill at India House, and colonial capitalism’s indolent native (Bowring quoted; Clive Day on the Javanese, 1904) — commodifying native labor and eliding the observer’s power, as Thapar shows for Indian historiography. Marx and Engels were no less capable of such pronouncements (Engels on the Moors of Algeria, September 17, 1847). The consolidated vision’s object is always a victim or a highly constrained character; for the victim, imperialism offers these alternatives: serve or be destroyed.

• Chapter Two, VII “Camus and the French Imperial Experience” (PDF p.196-213 / printed p.169-186): France’s empire, no less interested in profit, plantations and slaves, was energized by “prestige” and its “vocation supérieure”, in Delavigne and Charles-André Julien’s Les Constructeurs de la France d’outre-mer (Champlain, Richelieu, Bugeaud, Brazza, Gallieni, Lyautey); there is little equivalent of the British departmental view. After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 geographical societies rose, Eugène Étienne founded the Groupe Coloniale in 1892, and between 1880 and 1895 French possessions went from 1.0 to 9.5 million square kilometers and from five to fifty million native inhabitants; La Roncière-Le Noury’s 1875 congress address makes geography the philosophy of the earth. Assimilation collapsed into racial-type theories (Le Bon, Seillière, Sarraut, Leroy-Beaulieu, Harmand) and a science of ruling inferiors; at best the relationship was association through “hierarchic partnership” (Maunier), but, Betts notes, imperialism did not occur by invitation but by force. In Algeria from 1830 the land was taken, settlers gained the cork oak forests and minerals, and, Prochaska notes for Annaba (formerly Bône), the Algerians were displaced and Bône peopled with Europeans; a dual economy arose, Arnaud praised the French task in a place previously deserted (a village of scarcely 1,500 people, figure checked against the original), and Derdour’s chapter on 1954-1962 is titled for Algeria bursting colonialism asunder. Mondovi, eighteen miles away, founded in 1849 on expropriated land, is where Camus was born in 1913.

• Chapter Two, VII, Camus (PDF p.199-213 / printed p.172-186): Albert Camus is the one author of French Algeria of world status, a very late imperial figure surviving as a universalist with roots in a forgotten colonialism; the parallel with Orwell is drawn (Barthes’s écriture blanche; Podhoretz against Hitchens on Orwell), and Conor Cruise O’Brien’s demystification is taken up and then resisted: O’Brien lets Camus off the hook as belonging to “the frontier of Europe” and representing “Western consciousness”, where the tie is colonial dominance, specific practices — slavery, land expropriation, murderous armed force — not consciousness in relation to a non-Western world. Three methodological points follow: deconstruct the Algerian setting of L’Étranger (1942, checked against the original), La Peste (1947) and L’Exil et le royaume (1957); take the Algerian, not the European, optic — to an Algerian 1962 (checked against the original; the copy reads 1961) is the end of an epoch begun in 1830, and Camus’s work is affiliated both with the colonial venture and with outright opposition to Algerian independence; and insist on detail, since Meursault’s Arab is unnamed and Arabs dying of plague in Oran are unnamed while Rieux and Tarrou are pushed forward. “La Femme adultère” is read as locus classicus: Janine’s pantheistic, sexual communion with sky and desert gives the pied-noir woman direct access to that earth, her specific history not mattering; in “Le Renégat” going native can only result from mutilation. The stories (1957) stand months from the Chroniques algériennes (1958), after the Sétif massacres of May 1945 and the Revolution launched November 1, 1954, and beside Mitterrand’s Présence française et abandon (1957); Camus’s severe statement is quoted in French with translation — there has never yet been an Algerian nation, the French of Algeria are also natives in the strong sense of the word, and a purely Arab Algeria could not achieve economic independence. Semidei’s survey of French schoolbooks, Bugeaud’s razzia and Abdel Kader, Lacheraf on the officers’ exhilaration and on the military effort attaining the status of an ideal, Tocqueville’s approval of desolating the tribes and his silence in 1846 over Arabs smoked to death, Laroui on the pretenses of 1830-1870, Sarraut’s solidarité humaine and Hardy’s La Politique coloniale (1937) supply the discourse Camus distills; the section closes on Meursault’s vindication passage, quoted in French with translation, and on Camus’s narratives’ negative vitality beside Tillion, Kateb Yacine, Fanon and Genet.

• Chapter Two, VIII “A Note on Modernism” (PDF p.213-217 / printed p.186-190): No vision has total hegemony; the account speaks of largely, not completely, unopposed dominion, and expansion, as Seeley recognized, is the great fact of modern English history (Seeley’s words, checked against the original; the copy reads “modem” for “modern”, so they are given without quotation marks). Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests is extended to imperialism: once imperialism became the settled norm, the allure of its opponents and the resistance of its subjugated were clarified and heightened, as Seeley’s confident statement itself incorporates and dismisses the contending native and other empires. Against the realistic novel’s disenchantment and the triumphalist colonial adventure alike, Conrad’s narratives radiate unsettling anxiety and, with Forster, Malraux and T. E. Lawrence, take narrative into modernist self-consciousness, discontinuity, self-referentiality and corrosive irony; the impingements of empire register in Yeats and Joyce (Ireland) and Eliot and Pound (American expatriates), in Mann’s Asiatic plague in Death in Venice and in Bloom’s exoticism. Modernist form’s three features are circularity of structure, novelty from reformulated old fragments, and the irony of art substituting for the once-possible synthesis of world empires; spatiality becomes an aesthetic characteristic rather than one of political domination. Chapter Two ends at PDF p.217 / printed p.190.

• Chapter Three, I “There Are Two Sides” (PDF p.218-228 / printed p.191-201; section continues past PDF p.228): Chapter Three, “Resistance and Opposition”, opens with an epigraph from Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, in French, checked against the original and given without quotation marks because the copy garbles the line: lie moi de tes vastes bras à l’argile lumineuse. The chapter returns to influence: studying the West and its dominated others is an entry into Western cultural practices themselves, and supposedly neutral departments of culture disguise the power situation and conceal how much the stronger party depends on the weaker. Gide’s L’Immoraliste (1902) is the instance: Michel’s self-discovery in French Algeria, through Ménalque, a colonial official, and Moktir, a native boy in Biskra, whose thoughts matter far less than what the Europeans make of them; Michel’s aperçus on the Arabs living their art are quoted, and the narrative’s structure of attitude and reference refuses the territory autonomy. Gide belongs to the formation producing Africanism (Frobenius, Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy, Mudimbe’s The Invention of Africa, 1988). Said places himself between post-imperialism’s discourse of suspicion and metropolitan theoretical avoidance, proceeding contrapuntally, and identifies an almost Copernican change in the early twentieth century, comparable to the Renaissance rediscovery of Greece and Schwab’s Oriental Renaissance, except that cultural exchange under inequality makes people suffer, and the subordinate now challenge what the West says about them. Fanon is quoted reversing the paradigm: Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. Earlier uprisings (San Domingo, Abdel Kader, 1857, Orabi, the Boxer Rebellion) are set against the new systematic resistance: interwar militants (Macaulay, Senghor, Casely Hayford, Ahuma; Zaghloul, Nuri as-Said, al-Khoury; Ho Chi Minh) at first worked partly with the West, and Sartre’s preface to The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Davidson on post-1945 African responses are quoted. Ranger shows the battle over the continuity of resistance (the FLN tracing its ancestry to Abdel Kader; Samory and Hajji Omar in Guinea and Mali; the Ndebele-Shona rising of 1896-97 and Orabi’s of 1882) is of urgent political moment. Decolonization after 1945 is inventoried — the British and French empires at their height (Cromer quoted: “We do not govern Egypt, we only govern the governors of Egypt”), Indonesia free by 1950, India handed over in 1947 and Pakistan splitting off, forty-nine new African states by 1990, the struggle universalized by churches, the United Nations, Marxism, the Soviet Union and the United States — yet imperialism and its opponents fought over the same terrain and contested the same history, on common cultural ground. The section closes this part on A Passage to India: Forster uses India for what the novel form cannot represent, Fielding returns to familiar humanism, the domestic resolution is imported, and Fielding and Aziz ride together and remain apart — “No, not yet” and “No, not here” — while Aziz’s trial displays a visible Indian resistance; the quotation from the approach to the Marabar Caves continues onto PDF p.229.

Key passages

• “The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them.” (PDF p.12 / printed p.xiii)
• “The great cultural archive, I argue, is where the intellectual and aesthetic investments in overseas dominion are made.” (PDF p.21 / printed p.xxii)
• “My argument is that only the second perspective is fully sensitive to the reality of historical experience. Partly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogenous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic.” (PDF p.24 / printed p.xxv; the two perspectives are the linear, subsuming historiography and the contrapuntal, often nomadic one)
• “At some very basic level, imperialism means thinking about, settling on, controlling land that you do not possess, that is distant, that is lived on and owned by others.” (PDF p.34 / printed p.7)
• “Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography.” (PDF p.34 / printed p.7)
• “My principal aim is not to separate but to connect, and I am interested in this for the main philosophical and methodological reason that cultural forms are hybrid, mixed, impure, and the time has come in cultural analysis to reconnect their analysis with their actuality.” (PDF p.41 / printed p.14)
• Conrad’s tragic limitation, in Said’s summary of the passage at PDF p.57 / printed p.30 (wording checked against the original; the copy garbles several words, so it is given without quotation marks): Conrad could see clearly that on one level imperialism was essentially pure dominance and land-grabbing, yet could not then conclude that imperialism had to end so that natives could lead lives free from European domination.
• “with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts” (PDF p.78 / printed p.51; from the definition of contrapuntal rereading, whose opening words the copy garbles)
• “imperialism and the novel fortified each other to such a degree that it is impossible, I would argue, to read one without in some way dealing with the other.” (PDF p.98 / printed p.71)
• Ruskin, quoted by Said from the 1870 Slade lecture: “she must found colonies as fast and as far as she is able” (PDF p.130-131 / printed p.103-104)
• Fanny Price’s report in Mansfield Park, quoted by Said: “There was such a dead silence” (PDF p.123 / printed p.96; on asking Sir Thomas about the slave trade)
• “For the victim, imperialism offers these alternatives: serve or be destroyed.” (PDF p.195 / printed p.168)
• Camus on Algeria, in Said’s translation of the statement quoted in French: “There has never yet been an Algerian nation.” (PDF p.206 / printed p.179)
• Fanon, quoted by Said in Chapter Three, I (PDF p.224 / printed p.197; wording checked against the original and given without quotation marks, because the copy garbles the phrase as the creation of the Third ‘World): Europe is literally the creation of the Third World.

Evidence the work relies on

• The novels and other cultural works read in this part, as Said presents them: Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) and Dombey and Son, Conrad’s Nostromo (1904) and Heart of Darkness (written 1898-1899), Kipling’s Kim, Greene’s The Quiet American (and its character Pyle), Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, and the films Salvador, Apocalypse Now and Missing (PDF p.13-20, p.46-54).

• Scholarship and criticism cited in this part, as Said presents it: T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”; Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore and Paul Carter’s The Road to Botany Bay on Australia; Martin Bernal’s Black Athena; Hobsbawm and Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition; Raymond Williams on the 1840s and “structures of feeling”; Michael Doyle’s definition of empire; David Landes’s The Unbound Prometheus; William McNeill’s The Pursuit of Power; Richard Van Alstyne’s The Rising American Empire; D. K. Fieldhouse on the mental attitude of the colonist; J. A. Hobson on imperialism’s protective colours; the imperialism debate of Kautsky, Hilferding, Luxemburg, Hobson, Lenin, Schumpeter, Arendt, Magdoff and Kennedy, and the historians O’Brien, Davis and Huttenback, Robinson and Gallagher, Frank and Amin (PDF p.31-41).

• Figures given in this part: Western powers claimed 55 percent but held approximately 35 percent of the earth’s surface in 1800; 67 percent by 1878, at a rate of increase of 83,000 square miles per year; by 1914 a rate of 240,000 square miles per year and roughly 85 percent held by Europe (PDF p.35 / printed p.8); in India by the 1930s, 4,000 British civil servants, 60,000 soldiers and 90,000 civilians upon a country of 300 million persons (PDF p.38 / printed p.11, quoted by Said).

• Contemporary materials in this part: the Gulf War of 1990-91 and the opposed Iraqi Baath and American versions of the past (PDF p.31-32); the “New World Order” rhetoric after the Cold War (PDF p.16); the 1984 Raj-revival debate around The Jewel in the Crown and Lean’s A Passage to India and Rushdie’s diagnosis of Raj revisionism (PDF p.48); the Satanic Verses crisis (PDF p.44); Arthur Schlesinger’s The Disuniting of America and the multiculturalism debates (PDF p.25).

• Works and materials cited in part 2, as Said presents them: Fourier’s general introduction to the Description de l’Égypte and Jabarti’s ‘Aja’ib al-Athar (PDF p.60-61); Bernard Lewis’s Wall Street Journal column of May 2, 1989 (PDF p.64-65); Ali Mazrui’s The Africans and John Corry’s New York Times articles of September 14, October 9 and 16, 1986 (PDF p.65-66); Gauri Viswanathan’s The Masks of Conquest (PDF p.69); Auerbach’s Mimesis and “Philologie der Weltliteratur”, Woodberry on comparative literature, and the geographers Mackinder, Chisolm (as printed), Hardy, Leroy-Beaulieu and Fevre (as printed) (PDF p.70-75); Gramsci’s Some Aspects of the Southern Question (PDF p.75-77); John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy on the West Indian colonies (PDF p.86, note 51); the culture-and-empire critics Green, Mahood, McClure, Brantlinger, Raskin, Gordon K. Lewis and Kiernan, and the omissions in Trilling on Forster and Williams’s Culture and Society (PDF p.91-92).

• Works and materials cited in part 4, as Said presents them: Verdi’s letters to du Locle, de Giosa and Ricordi of 1868-1871 and the 150,000 francs in gold for Aida (PDF p.142-144); Schwab’s The Oriental Renaissance, Bernal on Egypt’s eighteenth-century prestige, and Vitet in the Revue des Deux-Mondes, June 1868 (PDF p.145-146); Jean Humbert on Mariette’s libretto contribution, the 1867 Paris exhibition catalogue, and Brian Fagan on Mariette’s excavations at some thirty-five sites (PDF p.146-147); Fétis’s Résumé philosophique de l’histoire de la musique (1835) and Histoire générale de la musique (1869-76) (PDF p.148-149); the Cincinnati Opera press release of March 1986 (11 animals; body count 261 in total) (PDF p.151); Egyptian nationalist historians Sabry, Rafi’ and Ghorbal, Owen on the Delta as an export sector and on foreign imports, Landes’s Bankers and Pashas, and Douin’s Histoire du règne du Khedive Ismail, vol. 2 (PDF p.153-154); Janet Abu-Lughod’s Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious on the divided city and the Azbakiyah Gardens (PDF p.155-156); Ali Pasha Mobarak’s Khittat Tawfikiya and Jacques Berque on the confusion of production (PDF p.156); the Eyre debate of 1865 (PDF p.157); Hodgkin’s Nationalism in Colonial Africa and Adas on the civilizing mission (PDF p.158-159); Kipling biography — born in India in 1865, Departmental Ditties (1886), Nobel Prize 1907, died 1936 — and Something of Myself (PDF p.160-161); Victor Turner on the liminal (PDF p.168); the Kim passages quoted at PDF p.169-170, Eliot’s Middlemarch and James’s The Portrait of a Lady (PDF p.170-171); Kinkead-Weekes and Edmund Wilson on Kim (PDF p.171-173); Edward Thompson’s The Other Side of the Medal (1925) and Christopher Hibbert’s The Great Mutiny on 1857 (PDF p.173-174); Hutchins’s The Illusion of Permanence, MacKenzie’s Propaganda and Empire, and Angus Wilson on Kipling’s school-debate motion at sixteen (PDF p.176-178); Edwardes’s The Sahibs and the Lotus, Talal Asad (ed.), Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973), and Robert Stone’s A Flag for Sunrise (1981) (PDF p.179-180); Noel Annan’s “Kipling’s Place in the History of Ideas”, Cromer’s Ancient and Modern Imperialism, and Moorhouse on the Warrant of Precedence — fourteen levels of status expanded to sixty-one (PDF p.181-182).

• Works and materials cited in part 3, as Said presents them: Platt’s Finance, Trade and Politics in British Foreign Policy, 1815-1914 and Robinson and Gallagher on the departmental view (PDF p.99-100); Jameson’s The Political Unconscious and Miller’s The Novel and the Police (PDF p.100); Williams’s The Country and the City and Hulme’s Colonial Encounters (PDF p.109-110); the Mansfield Park quotations and Warren Roberts on Antigua, with Mill’s Principles of Political Economy quoted in full (PDF p.113-118); Ragatz’s The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763-1833 (1928), Blackburn’s The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 and Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1961, as printed) (PDF p.121-122); Todorov’s Nous et les autres, Girardet on French imperialism, Davidson on African exploration writing, Gould and Stepan on racial science and Stocking on ethnography (PDF p.124-128); Carlyle’s Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question (title checked against the original; the copy garbles it) and Ruskin’s 1870 Slade lecture (PDF p.128-131); Kiernan’s campaign list, 1839-42 to 1882 (PDF p.132); Leroy-Beaulieu on colonisation in French with translation (PDF p.134); the five-point synthesis’s authorities — Fabian, Gobineau, Maine, Renan, Humboldt, Panikkar, Adas, Viswanathan and Trevelyan, Crosby, Guha, Cohn and Inden (PDF p.135-137); Mitchell’s Colonising Egypt, Kinney and Çelik on belly-dancing, Clark’s The Painting of Modern Life and Alloula’s The Colonial Harem (PDF p.138); Lindenberger’s Opera: The Extravagant Art, Wieland Wagner on Aida, Kerman’s Opera as Drama and Robinson’s Opera and Ideas (PDF p.139-140).

• Works and materials cited in part 5, as Said presents them: the Kim Grand Trunk Road passage and the old soldier’s river speech (PDF p.185); Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel on time as ironist (PDF p.186); Fanon on objectivity directed against the native (PDF p.189); Conrad’s Victory, Lord Jim, Nostromo and Flaubert’s La Tentation and Madame Bovary (PDF p.190-193); Maine’s Ancient Law (1861) and Village Communities (1871), Stafford on Murchison, and Leopold’s International Congo Association as described by an admirer in 1885 (PDF p.191-192); Thornton, Porter and Hobson on European opposition, Neill’s Colonialism and Christian Missions (PDF p.193); Bowring and Clive Day (1904) on the indolent native, Thapar on Indian historiography, and Engels on the Moors of Algeria, September 17, 1847 (PDF p.194-195); Delavigne and Julien’s Les Constructeurs de la France d’outre-mer, Murphy on French geographical societies, Girardet on the doctrine after 1872, the 1875 geographical congress, Betts and Maunier’s The Sociology of Colonies, Ferry, and Prochaska on Annaba/Bône and Mondovi, with Arnaud and Derdour (PDF p.196-199); Barthes’s Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953), Lottman’s Camus biography, and Conor Cruise O’Brien’s Camus study (PDF p.199-201); Camus’s L’Étranger (1942), La Peste (1947), La Chute, L’Exil et le royaume (1957) including “La Femme adultère” and “Le Renégat”, Noces and the Chroniques algériennes (1958), with his statement on Algeria quoted in French with translation (PDF p.201-206, p.211-212); Semidei on French schoolbooks, Bugeaud’s letters and Lacheraf, Chodkiewicz’s edition of Abdel Kader, Tocqueville with Richter’s comment, Laroui, Alloula, Colonna and Brahimi, Sarraut’s Grandeur et servitude coloniales and Hardy’s La Politique coloniale (1937) (PDF p.207-211); Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests, Seeley, Livingstone, Haggard, Loti and Verne, Mann’s Death in Venice, Joyce, Proust, Picasso and Le Sacre du printemps, Benita Parry on the Anglo-Indian encounter, and Loti’s L’Inde (sans les Anglais) (PDF p.213-216); Gide’s L’Immoraliste (1902) and Michel’s aperçus, Frobenius, Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy and Mudimbe’s The Invention of Africa (1988) (PDF p.218-220); Schwab’s Oriental Renaissance, Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Sartre’s preface to it, Davidson on post-1945 African responses, Adas’s prophets of rebellion and Ranger on resistance, Grimal and Strachey’s The End of Empire (1959), and Cromer on governing the governors of Egypt (PDF p.221-226); Forster’s A Passage to India, with Parry’s Delusions and Discoveries (PDF p.227-228).

Analysis

Said’s method in this part is avowedly connective rather than theoretic: he abstains from a completely worked out theory of the connection between literature and imperialism, reads works first as art and only then as participants in the imperial process, and insists that understanding a work’s worldly affiliations enhances rather than diminishes it (PDF p.13, p.40-41). The delimitation is also avowed: the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, Ottoman, Spanish and Portuguese empires are omitted, and the British, French and American focus rests both on their claimed unique coherence and cultural centrality and on Said’s own formation in their orbits (PDF p.21-22). The argument proceeds by exemplary readings (Dickens, Conrad) and by quotation of the authorities it engages (Eliot, Doyle, Fieldhouse, Hobson, Blake, Fanon, Rushdie), with its statistics credited to a single endnote whose text is in the Notes, a later part (PDF p.35). Critiques by others appear in later parts only if at all; none is taken up in this part. In part 3 the method is worked through single works at length — Mansfield Park read spatially rather than temporally, its casual Antigua references calibrated against Caribbean history and Mill — and the refusal of simple causality and of the rhetoric of blame is stated expressly: the reading completes or complements other readings, and the paradox of Austen and slavery is left unresolved rather than resolved (PDF p.108, p.122-124). The Aida reading states the contrapuntal method’s eccentricity directly: no consecutive sequence is attempted, and each work is seen in terms of its own past and later interpretations (PDF p.138). In part 4 the Aida reading is grounded in the commission’s documents — Verdi’s and Mariette’s letters, quoted at length — and in the economic and urban history of Ismail’s Egypt (Owen, Landes, Abu-Lughod, the Egyptian nationalist historians), so that the opera’s exclusions, not only its contents, carry the argument; and the Kim reading proceeds by plot summary and by two chosen episodes (the Mutiny veteran, the Widow of Kulu) read against the nationalist account the novel eliminates, with Kipling’s contemporaries (Hardy, James, Eliot) used as the control case for Kim’s reappropriation scene (PDF p.170-171, p.183). In part 5 the Kim reading is completed by structure rather than episode — geography against Lukácsian time, disguise against surveillance — the Camus reading is built from the Algerian archive (Prochaska, Lacheraf, Laroui, Semidei) set against O’Brien’s demystification, which Said both uses and corrects, and the modernism note is offered expressly as a suggestion, its evidence a roster of works and the two factors Seeley names (PDF p.215-216). Chapter Three, I proceeds by the same contrapuntal alternation of general statement with a specific reading (Gide, then Forster), with Fanon, Sartre, Davidson and Ranger quoted for the resistance side.

People, organizations, places and events

Edward Said, Albert Camus, L’Étranger, E. M. Forster, A Passage to India, André Gide, Emir Abdel Kader, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Eric Williams, Giuseppe Verdi, Aida, Auguste Mariette, Rudyard Kipling, Kim, T. S. Eliot, Raymond Williams, Salman Rushdie, Eqbal Ahmad, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Rudyard Kipling, Bernard Lewis, Ali Mazrui, Gauri Viswanathan, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, Erich Auerbach, Antonio Gramsci, Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, Description de l’Égypte, Heart of Darkness

Concepts

Imperialism, Modernism, Contrapuntalism, Structure of attitude and reference, Intertwined and overlapping histories, Exile, Orientalism, Discrepant experiences, Weltliteratur

How it relates to other sources

• The book is Said’s own expansion of Orientalism (1978) beyond the Middle East, supplying in this wiki the fuller statement of the Contrapuntalism that A Shadow over Palestine elaborates across Culture and Imperialism and Said’s Palestine writing, including the formula of intertwined and overlapping histories.
• Its definitions of imperialism and colonialism stand beside the different definition in The Question of Palestine, where imperialism is the theory and colonialism the practice of changing unoccupied territories into versions of the metropolitan society; both are now recorded on Imperialism with attribution.
• Lockman’s Chapter 1 notes already cite this work, with The Question of Palestine, for Said’s extension of “European” to settler states overseas (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 602-789).

Open questions

• The endnotes for this part (notes 1-35 of the Introduction and Chapter One) are in the Notes at printed p.337 onward, a later part; attributions Said leaves to the notes cannot be settled from this part — among them the critic who suggested that nations themselves are narrations (PDF p.12), the “acute modern student of imperialism” quoted at PDF p.38, the American intellectual who said “Show me the Zulu Tolstoy” (PDF p.52), and the source of the expansion figures at PDF p.35.

• The passage on Magwitch and the English perception of convicts in Australia (PDF p.14-15) is set in the copy amid the Hughes and Carter discussion with its quotation marks and attribution garbled; whether it is Said’s summary or a quotation from Hughes or Carter is not settled from this part’s copy and is held here rather than quoted on any page.

• The dedication of Orientalism and other biographical details are unaffected; no internal contradiction in this part’s figures was found — the 1800, 1878 and 1914 percentages and rates are as printed and were checked against the original (PDF p.35).

• The endnotes for part 2 (Chapter One notes 36-51 and Chapter Two notes 1-14, in the Notes at printed p.337 onward) are in a later part; attributions Said leaves to the notes cannot be settled from this part.

• The Description de l’Égypte is given as twenty-four volumes in this part (PDF p.60 / printed p.33), while the Orientalism page in this wiki records twenty-three volumes published between 1809 and 1828, as that work gives it; both figures are held as their sources give them, not reconciled.

• Lewis’s subjects are listed at PDF p.64 / printed p.37 as the restoration of slavery, polygamy and child marriage, and restated across PDF p.64-65 / printed p.37-38 as slavery and bigamy returning (both forms checked against the original); the two lists are held as printed, not reconciled.

• Spellings as printed in this part, checked against the original where the copy garbles them: George “Chisolm” and Lucien “Fevre” (PDF p.74-75 / printed p.47-48), the geographer and the author of La Terre et l’évolution humaine (1922).

• The endnotes for part 3 (Chapter Two notes 15-85, in the Notes at printed p.337 onward) are in a later part; attributions Said leaves to the notes cannot be settled from this part.

• At PDF p.114 / printed p.87 the novel’s second part is said to contain the disgraceful profligacy of Lydia and Henry Crawford (wording checked against the original; the copy garbles the name); the name is held as printed, not corrected.

• Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery is given in this part with the year 1961 (PDF p.122 / printed p.95, checked against the original); the year is held as printed.

• Kiernan’s campaign list at PDF p.132 / printed p.105 is set in two columns and scrambled in the text copy; it is recorded in the reading notes reassembled into printed order, checked against the original.

• “Ngasse” in the Indian-army list (PDF p.100 / printed p.73) is held as printed, checked against the original.

• The endnotes for part 4 (Chapter Two notes 86-150, in the Notes at printed p.337 onward) are in a later part; attributions Said leaves to the notes cannot be settled from this part — among them the historian quoted on Great Britain maintaining the distinction between domestic liberty and imperial authority (PDF p.157, note 123).

• Chapter Two, V, cut off mid-sentence at PDF p.183 / printed p.156 in part 4, is completed in this part at PDF p.189 / printed p.162.

• The endnotes for part 5 (Chapter Two notes 151-227 and Chapter Three notes 1-21, in the Notes at printed p.337 onward) are in a later part; attributions Said leaves to the notes cannot be settled from this part.

• “Sher Shan” as the builder of the Grand Trunk Road (PDF p.186 / printed p.159) is held as printed, checked against the original.

• Chapter Three, I is unfinished in this part: the Forster quotation on the approach to the Marabar Caves is cut off mid-sentence at PDF p.228 / printed p.201, and the section’s remaining pages are in part 6.

Coverage

PDF p.1-228 of 407, read in full (partial). Parts remaining: part 6, PDF p.229-273; part 7, PDF p.274-318; part 8, PDF p.319-361; part 9, PDF p.362-403; part 10, PDF p.404-407.