Oriental Debts and Occidental Avatars in Robert Southey's The Curse of Kehama

Abstract

Abstract: To better grasp the significance of the curse in Robert Southey's The Curse of Kehama (1810), we should begin by asking why, nearly twenty years after the poem was first published, Southey found occasion to return to his "Hindoo romance" in his sweeping commentary on nineteenth-century British society, Sir Thomas More: or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829). Despite the long gap, the intertextuality of these works shows the inextricability of Southey's political, economic, and religious thought. In this article, I argue that Kehama 's investment in the conversion of colonial subjects, in fact, extends to the underlying global economy of debt driving the early British empire. As the poem reveals, maintaining the convertibility of paper currencies in circulation to a single gold standard was, for Southey, essential to the preservation of spiritual standards as Britain's economy went global and increasingly faced the curse of debt. Drawing on the new imperial history, this article makes explicit the economic relations behind Romantic literature and imperial culture by exposing the connections between economic debt and literature within the circuits of empire.