Introduction: ‘Mother Country’

Abstract

Contemplating in 1840 the imperial reach of the Catholic Church, Thomas Babington Macaulay imagined in a distant future ‘some traveller from New Zealand [who] shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Paul’s’ (‘Von Ranke’ 39). A British colonial taking as an object of aesthetic creativity a recognisably English scene is a speculative curiosity. Australasia had been celebrated in his Minute on Indian Education (1835) as one of the ‘great European communities which are rising’ in the southern hemisphere through the spread of the English language and of education in a British and European epistemological tradition. The other was in the ‘south of Africa’ (428). In India he envisioned the reach of that language and tradition to be the ‘form[ation of] a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’ (430). Twentieth-century writers from the British empire and its decolonizing nations regularly attest to the ways in which being English-speaking and having been educated in the knowledges English makes available has produced England as the centre of an imperial cartography, as a country of the imagination, and as a conflicted site of affiliation (and disaffiliation) encapsulated in the phrase ‘mother country’.