Abstract
Although a large body of new work on early modern empire and nation formation has emerged in recent years, the field still lacks an effective theoretical vocabulary for this project. When discussing early modern imperialism, the temptation is to turn to postcolonial criticism, yet it clearly behooves critics working on earlier periods both to develop theoretical concepts better suited to our field, and to historicize postcolonial concepts in order to expose the early modern foundations of later imperialist representations. This essay is an attempt to theorize the rich contributions of the past decade while emphasizing the connections among disparate investigations. I propose the category of imperium studies as a way to address the links between metropolitan sovereignty and expansion abroad, and the cultural productions that sustain them both. Imperium studies enables the critical recognition of the centrality of empire in Old World texts that are not explicitly engaged with colonial ventures, and reveals the transatlantic or international dimension of texts previously read within narrow national traditions. This essay provides an overview of the possibilities and suggests how this approach might change our reading of both canonical and non-canonical texts. My focus is on early modern Spain and England—two cases for which the connections between imperial competition, internal consolidation, and external expansion are particularly relevant—but it is my hope that imperium studies can offer broad applications beyond these imperial rivals.
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Notes
I take my discussion of the history of the term from Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500–c.1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 11–28.
See Marie Tanner, The Last Descendant of Aeneas: The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1993), and my Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 15.
Ian Baucom, “Globalit, Inc.; or, The Cultural Logic of Global Literary Studies,” PMLA 116 (2001): 158–72.
Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ:Transaction Publishers, 1999), 65.
Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change 950–1350 (London: Penguin, 1993), 2–3.
Bill Ashcroft, “Modernity’s First-Born: Latin America and Post-Colonial Transformation,” in El debate de la postcolonialidad en Latinoamérica, ed. Alfonso de Toro and Fernando de Toro (Madrid: Iberoamerica, 1999), 14. Ashcroft here repeats the claim for a broad understanding of “postcolonial” first made in
The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1989). Although this claim has proved quite controversial, it seems to me perfectly justified by the texts that emerge in the immediate aftermath of European colonization in the New World.
For queer studies and the nation, see Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). For New Historicist investigations of the nation, see Richard Helgerson’s hugely influential Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), and, more recently,
Timothy Hampton, Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).
Etienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (London:Verso, 1991), 86.
David Baker’s Between Nations: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell, and the Question of Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), is a fascinating investigation of early modern Britain along these lines.
Patricia Seed, “Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse,” Latin American Research Review, 26.3 (1991): 181–200, at 199.
The early modern historian and colonial official Francisco López de Gómara argued that “The conquest of the Indians began after that of the Moors was completed, so that Spaniards would ever fight the infidels” (Historia general de las Indias [1552], ed. Jorge Gurria Lacroix [Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1979], I, 8, my translation). Pagden suggests that “ideologically the struggle against Islam offered a descriptive language which allowed the generally shabby ventures in America to be vested with a seemingly eschatological significance” (Lords of All the World, 74). See also Antonio Garrido Aranda, Organización de la Iglesia en el Reino de Granada y su proyección en Indias (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1979) and
Mercedes García Arenal, “Moriscos e indios: Para un estudio comparado de métodos de conquista y evangelización,” Chronica Nova, 20 (1992): 153–75.
The central texts in the debate on the application of postcolonial theory to Latin America are Patricia Seed’s review article, “Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse;” the “Commentary and Debate” in response to her article (Latin American Research Review, 28.3 [1993]); The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America, ed. John Beverley and José Oviedo, special issue of boundary 2, 20.3 (1993); and El debate de la postcolonialidad en latinoamérica.
Walter D. Mignolo, “Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse: Cultural Critique or Academic Colonialism?” Latin American Research Review, 28.3 (1993): 122. Mignolo discusses O’Gorman’s La idea del descubrimiento de América (1952) and La invención de América (1958).
For a consideration of the relation between “postmodern” and “postcolonial” in an African context, see Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial,” Critical Inquiry, 17 (1991): 336–57.
Jorge Klor de Alva, “Colonialism and Postcolonialism as (Latin) American Mirages,” Colonial Latin American Review, 1 (1992): 3–23.
Ashcroft, “Modernity’s First-Born,” 17. For a critique of Klor de Alva’s “American exceptionalism,” see Peter Hulme, “Including America,” Ariel 26, (1995): 117–23.
Klor de Alva, “Colonialism and Postcolonialism,” 19. The sources he alludes to in this passage are Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, eds. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988);
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 1991), and
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979) and Power/Knowledge, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon, 1980).
Klor de Alva retracts and softens some of his claims in a later version of the same piece: “The Postcolonization of the (Latin) American Experience: A Reconsideration of ‘Colonialism,’ Postcolonialism,’ and ‘Mestizaje,’” in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 241–75.
For example Diana de Armas Wilson, Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, “La española inglesa,” in Novelas ejemplares, ed. Harry Sieber (Madrid: Cátedra, 1980), 1: 241–83.
See Carroll Johnson, “‘La española inglesa’ and the Practice of Literary Production,” Viator, 19 (1988): 377–416, and his larger study, Cervantes and the Material World (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
Ginés Pérez de Hita, Guerras civiles de Granada, ed. Paula Blanchard-Demouge (Madrid: BaiIly-Baillière, 1913), II. 10. The translation is my own.
Thomas Scanlan, Colonial Writing and the New World 1583–1671: Allegories of Desire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1 and passim.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas Roche (London: Penguin, 1978);
Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (Glasgow: Maclehose and Sons, 1904);
Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, ed. Elizabeth Cook (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991).
David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (London: Penguin, 2001), xvii.
Hechter’s Internal Colonialism is an early effort to analyze the relations between Britain and its “Celtic fringe” from a sociological perspective. See also Baker, Between Nations; Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997);
and Christopher Highley, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Crisis in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
The years since Huhne’s Colonial Encounters have seen the emergence of a prodigious bibliography on these two texts. Two particularly interesting examples of the possibilities of imperium studies are an older study, William C. Spengemann’s “The Earliest American Novel: Aphra Behn’s Ooronoko” (Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 38 [1984]: 384–414), which challenges the reading of Ooronoko as a British text and proposes it as the first American novel, irrespective of the birth of America as a nation, and Diana de Armas Wilson’s “The Novel as Moletta: Cervantes and Defoe,” in her Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World, which argues for the hybrid “hispanicity” of Robinson Crusoe.
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© 2003 Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren
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Fuchs, B. (2003). Imperium Studies: Theorizing Early Modern Expansion. In: Ingham, P.C., Warren, M.R. (eds) Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980236_4
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