Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity. Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN: 0-521-58438-8 (hbk); 0-521-586046 (pbk). Price: £37.50, $59.95 (hbk); £13.95, $18.95 (pbk)

In Romantic Imperialism, Saree Makdisi presents a richly detailed bridge between postcolonial theory and Romantic studies. On one side, we have postcolonial theory's identification of modernity as both an episteme dominated by capitalist-inflected imperialism and a force driven to absorb objects and subjects into a totalizing uniformity (geographically, ideologically, commercially); on the other, familiar authors from the romantic canon, primarily William Blake, William Wordsworth, Walter Scott, P.B. Shelley, and Byron. The bridge, however, marks a contestatory space. Makdisi aligns romanticism with "anti-modernity," suggesting that it "can be partly understood as a diverse and heterogeneous series of engagements with modernization. . . . It can also be understood as a mediating discourse, through which the multitudinous political and economic facets of modernization . . . are related to each other to a greater or lesser extent, situated as parts of an overall cultural transformation" (6). Romanticism's diversity emerges dialectically, as romanticism/modernity is aligned with local/global, discontinuity/continuity, constellation/empire, resistance/dominance, "spot of time"/temporality, and nature/technology. Makdisi begins with, and at key points returns to, James Mill's History of British India. This is a commonly cited text in discussions of early nineteenth-century orientalism and imperialism. But Makdisi's point is specific and grounds the central premise of his study: For Makdisi, Mill thus clarifies the transformation of (national) whig history into (global) modern history. The work of Edward Said and Frederic Jameson, as well as Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, are clearly powerful influences here, and there is a concomitant emphasis on a twentieth-century notion of modernity (rather than, say, an Enlightenment concept of the "modern"). In Romantic Imperialism, the literature of the early nineteenth century is represented primarily in terms of its engagement with a nascent modernity, as the new assimilatory and self-consciously global history "provided the conditions for the simultaneous emergence of a discontinuous constellation of attempts to resist, or to chart out alternatives to, its history—in romanticism" (4). Following his interest in globalization and imperialism, Makdisi situates the texts he considers in the context of geographical and economic displacements: Wordsworth's Prelude and "Michael" are linked to the rural diaspora and subsequent overflow in the cities; Scott's Waverley is associated with the clearing of the Highlands; orientalist discourse is located in the context of colonial administration and colonization; and Blake's representations of London are clarified through a discussion of the transformation of labour relations and values. Through such displacements, London and the "East," imperial core and periphery, collapse into each other: the imperial port-city absorbs global subjects, "so that one need go no further than London to see much of the entire planet" (31), and the orient is defined through its relationship to the core, in "the end of a quest for otherness and a troubled beginning of a new quest for sameness" (121). As the key site of the "convergence of capitalist and imperialist practices" (2), London occupies both "the space of empire" and the "abstract space of capital" (31, 43). The centre and circumference of modernity, London anticipates De Quincey's nightmare vision of the orient in the threat it poses to the bourgeois subject's epistemological mastery (36). London thus becomes central to Makdisi's interesting discussion of Wordsworth's "spot of time": "it is as a refuge to the spatio-temporal flows of modernization," which overwhelm London, "that Wordsworth must construct a more stable, recognizable, and knowable kind of place: a spot of time" (43). Makdisi offers a similarly compelling extension of Blake's "Satanic wheels": "the machinic tyranny of the industrial revolution is transcoded in his works, and appears in his poetry as this complex of wheels and cogs, metaphors for …