Nation-Space in Enlightenment Britain

About this book

"Nation-Space in Enlightenment Britain: An Archaeology of Empire is a provocative intervention that extends the parameters of on-going dialogues about British identity during the Enlightenment. Drawing on literary, theatrical, artistic, and other cultural productions, this book describes how British identity emerges not despite of but due to its fluid, volatile, and subversive impulses and expressions. The imperial establishment--codified in the logics of the corporation, the academy, the cathedral, the theater, as well the private parlor or garden--derives its power from scripting and championing a resistance to precisely those subversive elements which threaten or undermine the foundations of order and liberalism in civil society. Choudhury argues that imperial Britain can best be understood in terms of this culture's investment in spatial alignments which celebrated a radial interface with remote points of commercial interest. The volume shows that Daniel Defoe, Arthur Onslow, David Garrick, Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander, Hans Sloane, Francis Barber, Samuel Johnson, Charles Burney, and George Frideric Handel were not only part of a dazzling line-up of the empire's architects. In retrospect, their contributions reflect a remarkably modern pattern: the spatial dimension of corporate culture, and this culture's dependence on, and thus its collusion with, global commerce"--