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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Harriet Martineau's Writings on the British Empire Maria Frawley (bio) Deborah Logan , ed. Harriet Martineau's Writings on the British Empire (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004). Five volumes, c. 2000 pp., $675.00, cloth. This edition of Harriet Martineau's writings on the British empire could not have come at a more opportune time. Thanks in part to the influence of postcolonial criticism and theory in humanities programs, scholars of nineteenth-century literature, history, and culture have engaged for a decade or two in discussion of the origins, experience, and implications of British imperialism. For Victorianists working in English Departments, scholarship by Benedict Anderson, Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak has been particularly influential in creating awareness of how texts represent and deploy nationality, racial and ethnic difference, cultural authority, and how texts can be said to produce colonial knowledge. Yet given the reach and extent of the Empire by the end of the century, and the widespread assumption of British superiority that accompanied imperialism's more tangible manifestations, it is striking how relatively restricted is the canon of texts that literary scholars in particular have used to study its reverberations, particularly in the early and middle parts of the century. For this period, English students now routinely draw their evidence for an understanding of empire from a handful of novels, Austen's Mansfield Park, Brontë's Jane Eyre, and Gaskell's Cranford among them, and come to rather predictable conclusions about their orientalist assumptions. Only very recently have the limitations in our understanding of imperialism, and its presence in the literature of the period, surfaced for open and healthy discussion. Inspired in part by Bernard Porter's new book, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford, 2004) – both by his overarching argument against a pervasive, monolithic "imperial culture" and by his claim that not a single canonical novel of the nineteenth century features the Empire significantly – Victorianists have been prompted to reflect more critically not only on imperialism itself, but on imperial historiography. That Harriet Martineau had something to say about these matters will come as no surprise to Martineau scholars, long aware of the formidable range of her writing. What the Pickering Masters series has achieved, [End Page 69] though, is to group texts until now considered disparate into a unified whole that demonstrates the breadth and depth of Martineau's investment in the social, economic, and historic consequences of her country's imperial posture. Thus, Volume One includes a selection of texts originally published in Martineau's influential series Illustrations of Political Economy, as well as the 1845 tale Dawn Island. Volumes Two and Three comprise the long out-of-print travel volume and historical study, Eastern Life, Present and Past. Volume Four brings together Martineau's writings on Ireland, which stretch from Ireland, published in 1832, to Letters from Ireland (1852), to her study on the Endowed Schools of Ireland (1858). Finally, Volume 5 includes a selection of texts that address more wellknown dimensions of Britain's imperial presence: British Rule in India: A Historical Sketch (1857); Suggestions Toward the Future Government of India (1858); The East India Company Question (1857–58); and The China Question (1857–58). Although acknowledging the gaps between Martineau's stated ideals, which in many respects mimicked those of imperial administrators, and the realities of military might and economic exploitation, Patrick Brantlinger remarks in his preface to the series that "Martineau expresses 'liberal imperialism' at its best: conscientious, free of racism, clear about cultural differences, and with progress in civilization throughout the world as the ultimate goal" (1:x). Alike attuned to the fact that Martineau was "always eclectic" and "not without contradictions" in her ongoing attempt to reconcile imperialism with democratic principles (1:xlvi), Deborah Logan proves a steady and eminently capable guide through each of the five volumes in this series. Her general introduction stresses from the outset the connections between the spread of imperialism and the growth of the periodical press, which facilitated the circulation of travel writing, sociology, and political economy – genres that Martineau cultivated throughout her journalistic career. She emphasizes as well the importance of recognizing the many ways...