“Contemporary historians and critics find the Victorian period a richly complex example of a society struggling with the issues and problems we identify with modernism.” (982)

Final decade (1890s) as bridge between two centuries

“England gained particular profit from the development of its own colonies, which, by 1890, comprised more than a quarter of all the territory on the surface of the earth; one in four people was a subject of Queen Victoria. By the end of the century England was the world’s foremost imperial power.” (980)

“The image of Britain that persists in the collective global unconsciousness was founded deliberately to make sense of the empire and romanticize it for ordinary British citizens, most of whom had neither a complete understanding of the atrocities nor the voting rights that would make their opinion relevant. Britain wrote and rewrote itself as the protagonist of its own legends, making its barbarism bearable and its cultural dominance natural.”

“It is worth stressing that at this time the slave trade was not only legal but also considered by many an essential and necessary part of the British Empire, both as a source of wealth and as a ‘training ground’ for British seamen.”

History usually written by winners (colonizers), not by losers (colonized)

"History of Mary Prince": her story is told to a woman who writes it down, then edited by abolitionist society. Therefore, it is written for an abolitionist audience, and made appropriate for them. It is not her authentic narrative.

20 million pounds paid to slave owners as compensation for their "lost property" (aka slaves)

Dramatic Monologue: the tendency of nineteenth-century white writers to adopt the voices of people of color ⭐ could be radical while also distancing themselves
⭐ exploit the gap between author and speaker without having to own it directly
⭐ one of the most obvious historical instances of white women speaking for instead of with black women

Read it as a painting of the uncomfortable relationship between abolition and imperialism

“Thus what might ultimately serve to connect her to Englishness is not so much her repeated assertions of loyalty and patriotism to England but a sense of shared knowledge with the English audience she constructs -- a shared knowledge of discrepancy, of irony, and of mimicry.” (504)

Growing oppression of Indians by British: context for rebellion

“I am deeply impressed by the difficulty of ruling India, as it is now governed by force, exercised by a few who are obliged to employ natives as the instruments of coercion. That force is the base of our rule I have no doubt; for I see nothing else but force employed in our relations with the governed.” (1614)

“This undeniably paternalistic rhetoric reflects the sense of colonial proprietorship that pervaded the exhibit, and which justified past and future imperial ventures. (2)

“To put it another way, ‘Brown Romantics’ are not marginalized because they are brown; on the contrary, they are ‘brown’ because they are marginalized.” (3)

Japan as "self-colonized" culture; "imitative modernity"

Indians put on display like animals at a zoo