Introduction: Insensible Empire

Summary

“I see, not an East-India bill, but a West-Britain bill preparing for dissolving not only all principles of constitution, but the constituency itself; for removing the seat of government for ever from the soil, and eternizing the provinciality and servitude of my country [Ireland], under an administration unalterably English.”

William Drennan, A Letter to the Right Honorable William Pitt (1799)

“We trace the spirit of Milesian poetry to a higher source than the spring of Grecian genius; for many figures in Irish song are of oriental origin; and the bards who ennobled the train of our Milesian founders, and who awakened the soul of song here, seem, in common with the Greek poets, ‘to have kindled their poetic fire at those unextinguished lamps which burn within the tomb of oriental genius.’ ”

Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), The Wild Irish Girl (1806)

“The beauteous forms, the dazzling splendours, the breathing odours of the East, seem at last to have found a kindred poet in that Green Isle of the West, whose Genius has long been suspected to be derived from a warmer clime, and now wantons and luxuriates in these voluptous regions, as if it felt that it had at length regained its native element.”

Anon., Rev. of Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh (1817)

While scholars have dealt in some detail with Romantic and Victorian orientalism, and postcolonial studies in general have dealt extensively with colonial and imperial literatures, little attention has yet been paid to the ways in which nineteenth-century writers from colonized nations wrote about colonization beyond their own borders.