Internal Colonialism and the British Novel
Janet Sorensen, Indiana University
Volume 15, no. 1, October 2002
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
In the wake of recent studies of British national cultural formations and, increasingly, their relationship to colonial practices, the concept of internal colonialism has garnered increased attention. Defined in Michael Hechter’s seminal study as “the political incorporation of culturally distinct groups by the core,” internal colonialism addresses the process by which, in the crucible of nation building and its organization of a competitive domestic economy, a national core expands, subsuming “peripheral” geographic zones. This territorial annexation also propels a political and cultural exclusion. In Hechter’s initial application of the concept to Britain’s “Celtic periphery,” he demonstrates the Anglo-British core’s systematic economic underdevelopment of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Often referred to as the “training ground” for the repressive practices of its overseas empire, Britain’s internal colonies were subject to similar methods of political control and manoeuvres of cultural suppression and appropriation. Attention to the political and cultural dynamics of internal colonialism has important implications for the ways in which we read eighteenth-century fiction, and a number of ground-breaking recent studies, from Katie Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism to Leith Davis’s Acts of Union, have undertaken analyses of the role that internal colonialism has played in shaping British literary production. The three essays that follow explore the significance of internal colonialism, particularly in the Scottish context, for understanding the novel form and specific novels of the mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Colonialism” include:
Empire, Race, and the Debate over the Indian Marriage Market in Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800)
by JOHN C. LEFFEL (ECF 26.3, Spring 2014)
Penelope Aubin and Narratives of Empire
by EDWARD J. KOZACZKA (ECF 25.1, Fall 2012)
Cosmopolitans, Slaves, and the Global Market in Voltaire’s Candide, ou l’optimisme
by INGVILD HAGEN KJØRHOLT (ECF 25.1, Fall 2012)
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