The Empire, Nationhood and the Other Worlds
What we describe as the Romantic Movement coincided with the beginnings of a modern British imperialism which involved the governance and exploitation of increasingly large portions of the globe as the nineteenth century wore on. It also involved conflict with other imperial formations of the time, some expansive and others in decline: European empires such as the French and Russian, and non-European empires such as the Turkish Ottoman and the Qing Empire of China. Romantic writers were not themselves imperialists in the literal sense of the term, though some of them became implicated in the imperial process: Coleridge, for instance, acted as a civil servant for the governor of Malta, Sir Alexander Ball, and Charles Lamb and Thomas Love Peacock both worked for the British East Indian Company.
Many Romantic-period writers such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, De Quincey, and Jane Austen had family members who were involved in colonial trade or empire in one way or another, and it certainly impinged on their consciousness as a pressing fact of life. This was also the period in which historians, like Linda Colley, argue that the idea of the British nation was “forged”. Colley claims that Britishness was defined against the “others” of Catholic religion and the French nation. This could also be widened to include the various other peoples, races and religions that the British encountered in their imperial history.
The responsibility and accountability of the metropolitan government for the treatment of other cultures was becoming a cause of increasing concern and was an important issue in the trial of Warren Hastings for his administration of Bengal from 1786 onwards. The speeches of Edmund Burke, who prosecuted the case against Hastings, were among some of the manifestations of colonial guilt at the centre of British political life. Certainly there are many affirmations of the manifest destiny of Britons to civilize the world in Romantic writers. Wordsworth’s “Excursion” (1814) contains the Wanderer’s vision:
So the wide waters, open to the power,
The Will, the instinct, and appointed needs
Of Britain, do invite her to cast off
Her swarms, and in succession send them forth;
Bound to establish new communities
On every shore whose aspect favours hope
Of bold adventure…
Your country must complete
Her glorious destiny. Begin even now.
(Wordsworth, Excursion, PP. 295, 299).
The “Wanderer” predicts that the world will look to Britain for moral and cultural as well as political leadership, and that the country’s imperial future will be glorious, Coleridge, in later life, similarly argued that “colonization is not only a manifest expedient – but an imperative duty on Great Britain. God seems to hold out his finger to us over the sea”. Similarly, a political opponent of the Lake poets, Anna Laetitia Barbauld argues for the identical linkage between colonization, language and culture in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven:
Wide spread thy race from Ganges to the pole,
Over half the western world they accerts rool:
… Thy stores of knowledge the new states shall know,
And think thy thoughts, and with thy Fancy glow;
Thy lockes, thy paleys shall instruct their youth
Thy leading star direct their search for truth;
Beneath the spreading platan’s tent-like shade,
Or by Messouri’s rushing waters laid,
‘Old Father Thomas’ shall be the port’s theme,
Of Hagley’s woods the enamoured virgin dream,
And Milton’s tones the raptured ear enthrall,
Mixt with the roar of Niagara’s fall.
(11. 81- 96; Wu, Romanticism, P. 46)
Here Barbauld anticipates nineteenth–century British cultured imperialism, a process by which the colonized accept the hegemony of the culture of the colonizer.
CONCLUSION
We must not forget that the Romantic Movement stressed the importance of the emotions and feelings in human relationships. From around the 1740s onwards a number of thinkers argued that humans possessed an innate moral sense which manifested itself through the emotions in feelings of sympathy and benevolence for others. This movement has been linked to the rise of the middle classes in the eighteenth century and their growing concern with the reformation of manners.
In this article, we have been able to see the historical review, the literary overview and the state of empire and nationhood in Britain during Romanticism. We have been able to make you see what was in vogue during Romanticism and we also highlighted the major features of Romanticism.
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