The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century

With the arrival of Edward Said’s Orientalism and the dawn of New Historicist criticism, many scholars have been re-evaluating the past, particularly the study of eighteenth-century colonialism. Now, instead of taking historical accounts from dominant countries as the objective truth, both literary critics and historians are shifting their gazes toward the oppressed voice of the “other,” or the imperialized country. This new consciousness of the colonialized viewpoint has attracted a large part of eighteenth century study recently. Kathleen Wilson’s book, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century veers away from this trend, however, and directs her focus back on imperialist Britain while still maintaining an awareness of underrepresented elements of society. She examines the rapid change and expansion of the time and wonders, how is it that the English maintain a sense of identity in the midst of such a transitional era? She poses this question as a starting point, and answers it with a series of interconnected essays that address the nature of gender, race, sexuality and knowledge in the British colonies and mainland.

The very structure of Wilson’s book is an interesting approach to the genre of cultural studies. She begins her introduction saying, “This book, to my mind, is a monograph masquerading as a book of essays” (ix). She elaborates on this statement by pointing out that all of the essays are written by the same author, share the same structure and all take similar approaches toward the British problem of identity. What she presents the reader with, essentially, are five essays that she has skillfully intertwined through her introduction that read more like chapters in a book. The related structures of these essays along with their shared theme give this work as sense of uniformity throughout.

The first essay in Wilson’s book is entitled, “Citizenship, empire and modernity in the English provinces.” In this chapter, she discusses the concept of modernity and the difficulties involved in not only tracing its development, but also giving it an exact definition. She challenges theories of societal modernity that conceptualize it as a linear account of those “unfolding processes that are believed to have generated the structures and texture of ‘modern life’” (30). These structures include industrialization, urbanization, technology and government. The problem with this conception, Wilson argues, is that it doesn’t take into account the intimately intertwined nature and relationships that progress entails. She envisions modernity, instead, as “not one moment or age, but a set of relations that are constantly being made and unmade, contested and reconfigured” (31). It is through this lens that Wilson views eighteenth-century England.

Wilson’s examination of modernity focuses on the emerging print culture of the time and how it worked to help create a fluid yet consistent sense of the English nation and citizenship. She outlines the mass circulation of newspapers and other periodicals of the time, and shows how these printed works operated to create a sense of unity among the people of England. With this mass circulation, like ideas and like values could pervade the entire nation, creating a common ground that had previously never existed. Wilson claims that in this atmosphere, “literacy becomes the test of citizenship and the instrument of political subjectivity itself” (35). With the emergence of print culture, those who could read had suddenly become privy to information that had previously been narrowly circulated such as the actions and policies of the government.

Other social trends such as clubs and theaters also helped to establish a national identity. Wilson shows that the more opportunity for the exchange of ideas between different people, the more ability to homogenize these ideas and synthesize a more singular national interest and sense of citizenship. While all of these factors were working together to unify Britain, however, colonialism worked to drive a wedge between ideas of nationalism and unified identity. A very clear example of this is in the American Revolution. A moderate conflict between English citizens and English colonists manifested itself into a war, which caused further turmoil in Britain as disagreement arises over the country’s colonialist policies. Overall, the first essay goes to show how the marketplace of ideas created a sense of unity among the citizens of Britain, yet that this new national consciousness was not without dissention.

Another chapter that is of particular interest is entitled, “The Black Widow: Gender, race and performance in England and Jamaica.” In this chapter, Wilson utilizes historical data and memoir to reconstruct the life of Teresia Constantia Phillips, a woman who used her sexuality and limited influence to try and procure a living. Wilson shows how Phillips attempted to climb the rungs into upper society only to find herself shut out because of her sexual exploits. Eventually, Phillips published An Apology for the Conduct of Mrs. T.C. Phillips, an autobiography intended “in part to blackmail the Earl of Chesterfield, a former amour, into paying her annuity” (132). Going public with her exploits with the Earl, however, firmly established Phillips’ “overdetermined status as a scandalous woman within the British Atlantic world” (132).

After being partially ostracized from British society, and partially run out of town for her exorbitant debts, Phillips eventually found herself in Jamaica. Her time there is a true testament to the ingrained notions of cultural dominance that placed England at the top of the international hierarchy. Wilson comments, “Phillips, then, clearly enacted her Englishness as a sign of difference that upheld the systems of political, racial and gender subordination in Jamaica” (157). Even Phillips, a scorned woman in her former society, maintains her English ideals when she travels to Jamaica and uses them to place herself atop the Jamaican social structure. Wilson, through her case-study of one of eighteenth-century Britain’s most scandalous women, shows how English identity is not easily shed, even by a scorned expatriate.

The remaining essays in the book address women, nationalism, and sexuality among England’s colonial forces. One, entitled “The island race: Captain Cook and English ethnicity,” addresses the role of the voyages of Captain Cook in establishing a nationalistic identity. Wilson argues that the empirical observations brought back from his many voyages made Cook a national hero who established a nationalist identity in Britain. In “Britannia in battle: Women, war and identities in England and America,” the role of women in the English army is examined, as Wilson details their roles as both practical helpers and traveling symbols of domesticity in the army. The final essay, “Breasts, sodomy, and the lash: Masculinity and enlightenment aboard the Cook voyages,” Wilson comes back to the voyages of Captain Cook, this time focusing on the sexual symbols and practices of the natives the crew encounters, and how the taboo nature of these practices served to establish Englishness among the sailors who used the to maintain themselves as separate and more civilized than the various cultures they came across. Throughout the work, Wilson uses several different aspects of English colonialism to establish a sense of national, cultural, and racial identity in the rapidly shifting dynamics of the eighteenth century.      

What Wilson does not do particularly well, however, is show how identity operates among the vast majority of English citizens. She addresses identity among explorers, colonizers, soldiers, and women on the fringes of society, but the status quo or mainstream society in this work seems conspicuously absent. Presumably, for every one woman carrying supplies in the battlefield, there are ten at home performing traditional domestic tasks. How, one is left to wonder, do the changing roles of women thousands of miles away operating within a different social sphere affect the identities of these women at home? This idea translates across genders and classes as well. The question that remains inadequately addressed is one of the majority population.  How, specifically, do their attitudes change within this very transitional climate? Despite a short discussion of the marketplace of ideas, this element of society seems to be under-addressed. Of course, the problem of finding a notable historical figure that is strictly conventional may present a difficulty, but a more in-depth look at the climate within England instead of without would give a better idea of how identity operated in the most powerful empire in the world.

Overall, Kathleen Wilson’s book is a strikingly unified and cohesive collection of essays. She utilizes a similar structure within each: a main point revolving around the life and experiences of a certain historical individual, as in the case of Teresia Phillips and Captain Cook, which utilizes evidence from cross-disciplinary sources such as literature and geography. In short, Wilson accomplishes what she sets out to do in her introduction and clearly and cohesively helps to explain the problem of a mixed and transitional notion of English identity. Although her approach is contrary to that of New Historicism, in that she focuses not on the colonized, but on the colonizers, she manages to give a picture of both England and the different cultures it comes into contact with in a way that represents both groups fairly while simultaneously showing how outside influences worked to help create English unity.