Abstract
The vast physical spaces of empire created fundamental difficulties for any conceptualization of a unified imperial entity. As studies of the imperial experience in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have increasingly discovered, these difficulties manifested themselves at an administrative level (particularly so in the period before the invention of the telegraph) and at a personal level, as the gulfs between imperial outposts sundered families, delayed correspondence, and rendered worryingly fragile the networks of communication on which the far-flung British empire depended for its day-to-day survival.1 In the case of British India, the focus of this chapter, orders sent by ship from London by the government or the East India Company sometimes reached their destination only after the intended recipient had died. Horace Walpole, writing in his commonplace book in 1786, observed a military blunder occasioned by such a lapse of communication:
One of the great mischiefs of our possessions in India is the vast Distance. At the End of the Last War with France, two naval Engagements by Land, one by Sea, for which fourscore Officers & 2000 Soldiers were slain happened, before an account of the peace could reach India.2
As the example from Walpole indicates, any suggestion that Britain’s empire was at this time a honed administrative machine would be very wide of the mark.
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Notes
See for example, Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 2001); Thomas L. Haskill’s chapters on slavery and the physical expansion of the markets in
Thomas Bender, ed., The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (London: University of California Press, 1992);
Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith, eds., Geography and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); and
Morag Bell, Robin Butlin, and Michael Heffernan, eds., Geography and Imperialism 1820–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).
Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: an Exploration of Landscape and History (London: Faber, 1987).
Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) examines the emotional relation between “the West” and China and is an important forerunner for work in this area. See also
Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and
Holger Hoock, Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750–1850 (London: Profile, 2010).
See Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (London: Harvard University Press, 2006).
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 11;
David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch and L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 227.
Armitage, Ideological Origins of the British Empire, 11. One precursor is found in Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), where we are told that the Virginia plantation belonging to Moll’s “husband” (actually brother) “turn’d to no account at this distance, compa’d to what it would do if he liv’d upon the spot.” See Moll Flanders, ed. David Blewett (London: Penguin, 1989), 132.
See Natasha Easton, “Between Mimesis and Alterity: Art, Gift and Diplomacy in Colonial India,” in Romantic Representations of British India, ed. Michael Franklin (London: Routledge, 2006), 84–112.
See Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: the British in Bengal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), which argues that Hastings’s rule was essentially predicated on an effort to reconstruct what was believed to be a lost Mughal constitution.
See John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989).
William Cowper, Poetical Works (London: Tegg, 1858), 174.
For literary representations of nabobs, see Philip Lawson and Jim Phillips, “‘Our Execrable Banditti’: Perceptions of Nabobs in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain,” Albion 16 no.3 (1984): 225–241;
James Raven, Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992);
M. O. Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Chapter 5..
See Lucy S. Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 329–414 and
C. H. Philips, The East India Company 1784–1834 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961), Appendix I.
Cited in Marshall’s introduction to Burke, Writing and Speeches, ed. Paul Langford, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 5: 18.
For Burke’s early involvement with Indian affairs, see Marshall, Impeachment of Warren Hastings, 1–38 and Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1997), 257–311.
For a detailed reading of Burke’s account of the emotions and their relation to human reason, see David Dwan, “Edmund Burke and the Emotions,” Journal of the History of Ideas 72, no.4 (2011): 571–593.
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. Adam Philips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 41. Subsequent references given in text.
See Philip Mercer, Sympathy and Ethics: a Study of the Relationship between Sympathy and Morality with Special Reference to Hume’s Treatise (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 9.
See Luke Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics and the Colonial Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (London: Chicago University Press, 1992), 28–30.
Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 42, 21. See also
Frederick G. Whelan, Edmund Burke and India: Political Morality and Empire (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 40–42.
On Burke’s visualization techniques, see Frans De Bruyn, “Burke and the Uses of Eloquence: Political Prose in the 1770s and 1780s,” in The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Institutes Political and Military written originally in the Mogul Language by the Great Timur, trans. William Davy and Joseph White (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1783). On the relativism of Hastings’s administration in Bengal, see Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (London: Routledge, 2002).
Siraj Ahmed, “The Theatre of the Civilised Self: Edmund Burke and the East India Trials,” Representations, 78 (2002): 28–55, 41.
See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) and
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003).
Máire ní Fhlathúin, ed., The Poetry of British India, 1780–1905, 2 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), 1: 27.
Fanny Burney, Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay (1778–1840), ed. Charlotte Barrett, 6 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1905), 3: 413.
Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Culture, and Society in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
James Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
Jürgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, ed. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo de Grieff (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 201.
See Marshall Myers, “The Uses of Pathos in Charity Letters: Some Notes towards a Theory and Analysis.” Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 37, no.1 (2007): 3–16.
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Rudd, A. (2015). Space, Sympathy, and Empire: Edmund Burke and the Trial of Warren Hastings. In: Stock, P. (eds) The Uses of Space in Early Modern History. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137490049_8
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