From Salvation to Servanthood: A Study of the Colonial Legitimacy in Behn’s Oroonoko

Abstract

The seventeenth century is an age when many settlers in colonies managed their settlements in the first stage of the early modern British colonial expansion. Along with the development of social economy and the rise of British national consciousness in addition to cultural conflicts of multi-dimensional values, English people as pioneer colonizers in the early modern period started their expansions over large segments of the world. Oroonoko has provided a prerequisite and a necessary basis for later overseas expansion and hegemony of the British Empire. The English colonizers make a great contribution to the generation of colonial legitimacy in the New World, which also reveals the truth that the essence of the so-called salvation is in effect to enslave the other.