Cultural history and Western imperialism : the case of Edward Said
Keith Windschuttle
Journal of the Historical Society, I: 2-3, Winter 2000/Spring 2001
[expanded and modified version]

In her 1999 film of Jane Austen's novel Mansfield Park, the writer and director Patricia Rozema includes an early scene that is not in the book. As Fanny Price departs her family in Portsmouth to live in the grand household of her aunt and uncle, she hears someone wailing on a ship off the coast. ‘Black cargo, Miss' explains the coachman. The ship is a slave transport and it is meant to remind the audience that around 1800, when this scene takes place, England was still a slave-trading nation. It is also a portent of what the heroine will eventually discover is the dark side of her new home. Many among Jane Austen's legions of readers will be upset at the film taking such licence with the novel because it imposes a controversial political issue onto the quintessentially domestic concerns of their favourite author. Those with a little historical and geographical knowledge will also find the scene outlandishly incongruent. Portsmouth is a harbour on the English Channel and, at the time, the transportation of slaves went by the ‘Middle Passage', that is, directly across the Atlantic from the Guinea Coast of Africa to the Americas. To be anywhere near the coast of England, a slave trader would have to be thousands of miles off course. [1]

The scene is in the film because of the literary critic Edward Said. Since 1993, when he published an attention-getting analysis of Mansfield Park, he has persuaded many critics that the novel and its author are deeply implicated in the question of both slavery and imperialism in the islands of the Caribbean Sea, the location of the sugar plantations that fund the lifestyle of some of England's grand estates, including that of the novel's title. This opinion has now worked its way down into the artistic production industry and has generated not only the doctoring of the story by this film but also new editions of the novel drawing attention to this previously undiscussed topic. In the 1996 Penguin Classics edition, the editor's introduction approvingly quotes Said's explanation of the Bertram estate ‘as part of the structure of an expanding imperialist venture', and even the cover blurb feels obliged to call attention to the introduction where ‘the family's investment in slavery and sugar is considered in a new post-colonial light'. [2]

Said's analysis of this novel is a central component of his most ambitious work, Culture and Imperialism (1993). He calls this book ‘a history of the imperial adventure rendered in cultural terms' coupled with a study of the resistance to imperialism by the ‘aggrieved colonised peoples'. [3] The scope of his ‘history', however, is largely confined to that of Britain, France and America and there is nothing about the culture of the earlier European imperial powers, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands, nor about any of the non-European imperialists. The book is not actually a conventional history at all but a collection of analyses of a number of nineteenth and twentieth century novels, some short stories and poems, and one Italian opera. Despite these limitations, Said argues that the works he examines reveal the imperial dimension of Western culture. In particular, they show that the desire to rule distant peoples has had a ‘privileged status' in the countries he discusses. There has been ‘something systematic' about their imperial culture that was not evident in other empires. [4] Moreover, while Europe 's ability to take over and rule distant colonies might now be a thing of the past, the imperialist imperative lives on today in American foreign and economic policy, where it is validated by Western culture and ideology. It is still driven, as it was in the nineteenth century, by the West's ‘untrammelled rapacity, greed and immorality'. [5] Said's target, in other words, is not just the literature of the colonial age but the nature of Western culture itself. For him, Western culture is an imperial culture because it has been so strongly influenced by European conquest and settlement abroad.

Culture and Imperialism, Said says, is an expansion of the arguments he originally put forward in Orientalism, but unlike the earlier book, which he acknowledged derived from theses first advanced by others, he claims the central argument of the newer work is original. Other critics, he says, have overlooked the imperialist dimension of Western culture. Since the philosophy of Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century, Western intellectual practice has been to separate the cultural and aesthetic realms from the worldly domain. [6] What he calls the ‘humanist' study of culture has tried to steer clear of politics and has attempted to transcend the concerns of the everyday world.

Most professional humanists as a result are unable to make the connection between the prolonged and sordid cruelty of such practices as slavery, colonialist and racial oppression, and imperial subjection on the one hand, and the poetry, fiction and philosophy of the society that engages in these practices on the other … Culture conceived in this way can become a protective enclosure: check your politics at the door before you enter it. [7]

Said acknowledges that literary criticism has long housed some schools that have been overtly political. This includes older Marxist groups, such as the Frankfurt School of critical theory, as well as more recent Leftist movements, such as postmodernism, deconstruction and new historicism. But the latter have been primarily concerned with the politics of class, race and gender within Western society and have been ‘stunningly silent', he says, about Western imperialism, racism and opposition movements in the Third World.[8] Overall, Said presents himself as the one who can rectify the failings not only of the intellectual Left but also of the entire Western critical tradition. ‘Most cultural historians, and certainly all literary scholars,' he claims, ‘have failed to remark the geographical notation, the theoretical mapping and charting of territory that underlies Western fiction, historical writing, and philosophical discourse of the time.' [9] By incorporating into the study of literature the attributes of politics and geography, he aims to rectify these alleged failings.

From the seventeenth century onwards, British, French and American cultural works incorporated what Said calls ‘structures of location and geographic reference'. In Britain, he says, these structures can be found as early as the works of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe and Jane Austen. They produce a consistency that ‘fixes socially desirable, empowered space in metropolitan England or Europe and connects it by design, motive and development to distant or peripheral worlds ( Ireland, Venice, Africa, Jamaica ), conceived of as desirable but subordinate.' They produce attitudes about ‘rule, control, profit, and enhancement and suitability' that grow with ‘astonishing power' from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. [10] Moreover, this culture permeated everything around it. Even those works that did not mention empire at all became complicit in this process. Novelists like William Makepeace Thackeray who described metropolitan space were often using it as a metaphor for imperial power. A description of social conflict at home could also be a representation of exotic, racial antagonisms. Even the composer, Giuseppe Verdi, because he demanded total control of the score, the libretto, the conducting and the staging of Aida, was thereby representing the artist as an imperial authority figure. [11] In Said's hands, the notion of Western culture as an imperial culture runs perilously close to being true no matter what its content.

In Orientalism, Said argued the academic field of Oriental Studies was an important cause of Western imperialism. In Cultural and Imperialism, however, says it is not a good idea to try to assign causes. ‘Part of our difficulty today in accepting any connection at all is that we tend to reduce this complicated matter to an apparently simple causal one, which in turn produces a rhetoric of blame and defensiveness.' He adds: “I am not saying that the major factor in early European culture was that it caused late nineteenth century imperialism...' [his emphases] ‘I am saying, however, that European culture often, if not always, characterised itself in such a way as simultaneously to validate its own preferences while also advocating those preferences in conjunction with distant imperial rule.' [12] Elsewhere in this book, however, he takes a stronger line, especially in some of his comments about Mansfield Park. ‘The novel,' Said writes, ‘steadily, if unobtrusively, opens up a broad expanse of domestic imperialist culture without which Britain's subsequent acquisition of territory would not have been possible.' [13] Surprising though it might appear to those who have not heard it before, Said's argument here at least has the virtue of clarity. Jane Austen's writing, he is saying, was an important contribution to British culture, and without that culture imperialism would have been impossible. This would appear to commit him to the position that this culture was a necessary (if not sufficient) cause of British imperialism. There are other passages, however, where he reverts once more to being equivocal, [14] so let us accord him his most defensible position: while perhaps not a direct cause of imperialism, the culture he is discussing was certainly an advocate of imperialism, albeit an advocate that was not always easy to recognise as such.

Most of Culture and Imperialism is taken up by the attempt to establish this case, particularly in its extended discussions of the work of six authors: Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness, Jane Austen in Mansfield Park, Rudyard Kipling in Kim, Giuseppe Verdi's opera Aida, the novels and stories of Albert Camus and (for its anti-imperialism), the poetry of W. B. Yeats. It also ranges very widely, though in less detail, over the work of other authors, with an emphasis on the development of the nineteenth century novel. Of all modern literary forms, Said argues, it is the novel that has been most culpable in reproducing the spatial extensions and power relations of empire.

Literary scholarship and imperialism

Anyone who wants to make the kind of transformation in scholarship that Said attempts in Culture and Imperialism should, at the very least, have a good idea of the field he is trying to overturn. Said, however, appears to be completely unaware of those relationships drawn within literary studies about imperialism before he composed his thesis. He is anything but the first critic to make this connection. Discussion of the interaction between literature and the geography of European expansion is very old. The first Englishman who is known to have identified the link was Francis Bacon who, writing in 1620, said that the European discovery of the wild and barbarous peoples of the ‘New Indies ' had ‘changed the appearance and state of the whole world: the first in literature, the second in warfare, the third in exploration.' [15] In drawing attention to this statement, the American historian, David Armitage, points out that the idea that the expansion of England in the Elizabethan Age and in the seventeenth century caused an explosion of English literature has been made ever since. [16] Armitage cites a range of authors and sources who, especially in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, when the notion was most popular, argued the same thesis that Said claims as his own creation. For instance, one of the first professors of English Literature, Sir Walter Raleigh [sic], wrote in 1906: ‘Shakespeare and Marlowe were, no less than Drake and Cavendish, circumnavigators of the world.' The Cambridge History of English Literature in 1910 endorsed the notion that the expansion of England 's maritime power influenced its literature: ‘Seamen were to make literature; upon their experience was to be built much of the literature that followed. 'And the Cambridge History of the British Empire in 1929 drew links between culture and imperialism: ‘Shakespeare's plays unquestionably quickened the Wanderlust of the average healthy young Englishman.' [17]

Now, Armitage himself is actually critical of the application of this connection to the early modern period -- he calls it one of the ‘enduring myths of modernity' -- because the impact of overseas expansion on English literature in this period was minimal, and because most of the leading authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were either indifferent towards or, like John Milton in Paradise Lost, strongly against the idea that England should try to emulate the empire of Rome. Moreover, contemporaries understood the concepts of ‘literature' and ‘empire' in terms far different from those adopted by modern scholars. To apply modern models of the relationship between culture and imperialism to early-modern literature and British overseas experience, Armitage warns, is to be indifferent to context and to court anachronism.

Nonetheless, it is certainly true that, by the nineteenth century, not only were individual works of literature extolling the romance of the imperial adventure but English literature as a body of work was itself employed as part of the project. One of Said's graduate students has pointed out that as early as 1813 the study of English poetry and novels was prescribed for the Indian education system under the terms of the Charter Act. Said argues that this demonstrates that the subject of English Literature was actually an imperial invention, designed to help pacify the natives. ‘What has conventionally been thought of as a discipline created entirely by and for British youth was first created by early nineteenth-century colonial administrators for the ideological pacification and reformation of a potentially rebellious Indian population, and then imported into England for a very different but related use there.' [18] Unfortunately, these comments once again demonstrate Said's ignorance of the history of the very discipline in which he practices. The notion of a canon of great works of English literature was actually invented in the mid-eighteenth century by the Scottish education system with the creation of the new university subject of Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres. [19] The subject was later renamed English Literature and exported from Scotland to England and then to the colonies. Rather than a ploy to placate the Indians — the notion that a study of Shakespeare, for instance, would mollify a rebellious population is absurd — the most plausible explanation is that the British brought their literature to the subcontinent primarily to impress its peoples with its artistry, to share its insights into the human condition, and to display an understandable pride in the accomplishments of their civilisation.

The imperialism of Charles Dickens and Thomas Mann

Early in Culture and Imperialism, Said provides a sample of his methodology with a discussion of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. In this novel, the central character, Pip, is rescued from his rural village and educated in London to become a gentleman, courtesy of a mysterious benefactor. It turns out that the funding for his elevated status has been provided by Abel Magwitch, a convict once helped by Pip during a brief escape. Magwitch was subsequently transported to Australia where, after his penal servitude, he made a fortune grazing sheep. Magwitch eventually returns to England and reveals himself to Pip. However, according to the novel, it is illegal for those transported to Australia to return. So Magwitch is hunted to his death by the police and an old adversary. Under the laws of transportation, as Dicken's tells it, his fortune is forfeited to the Crown. Pip is thus reduced to his former humble status but finds he cannot pick up the threads of his earlier life. Wiser for his adversity, he leaves England for Egypt to work as a clerk in the trading company of Herbert Pocket, a friend he helped in London during his days as a gentleman.

Said notes that most critics who have written about Great Expectations treat it strictly as a domestic novel and ‘situate it squarely within the metropolitan history of British fiction'. For Said, however, the references to Australia and Egypt make it a novel about the British imperial experience. ‘We can locate Magwitch and Dickens not as mere coincidental references in that [colonial] history, but as participants in it, through the novel and through a much older and wider experience between England and its overseas territories.' [20] He makes this claim despite the fact that none of the action of the novel is actually set in any overseas territory, and no one in the story displays any ‘colonial' characteristics. Apart from Magwitch telling Pip he felt lonely and melancholy in his ‘solitary hut' when first employed as a shepherd in New South Wales, Dickens gives no description of his life in the colony. Nor does he describe Pocket as a trader in Cairo. Before Said, critics had treated these locations not as places that offered any attributes to the story but as convenient, off-stage sites where the plot could be advanced but no other quality imparted.

Despite his claims to be adding a geographic dimension to his analysis of the novel, there is nothing in Said's discussion of Great Expectations that does anything more than point out that it uses some overseas sites as plot locations. He points to no Australian, Egyptian or even colonial content as such. This is because, despite Said, the ‘colonial' references in Dickens are no more than the familiar and acceptable literary device that traditional critics have recognized. This is the same device that, for instance, Emily Brontë uses in Wuthering Heights, when she removes Heathcliff from the scene for two years and then brings him back flush with funds. Apart from speculation by the housekeeper that he might have been in the army, Brontë gives us no indication of how Heathcliff made his money. Where he might have earned it is quite incidental to Wuthering Heights, just as the source of Magwitch's income is incidental to Great Expectations. Dickens could just as easily have let his convict escape and sent him to make his fortune out of North Sea whale oil or Romanian gold instead of Australian sheep, and he could have made Herbert Pocket a trader in Liverpool or Amsterdam, for all the difference it would have made to the novel.

Indeed, the book would have been more historically accurate if Magwitch had escaped to somewhere in Europe, because then Dickens would not have had to falsify the legal status of Australian convicts in the way he did. For there was no law about transportation that forbade convicts to return from Australia to England or that made them thereby forfeit their property. Many convicts returned home after their sentences of seven or fourteen years, and they were able to take with them whatever wealth they had accumulated. The first convict to return, a woman transported in 1788, did so as early as 1794. Once their term had expired, or they were pardoned, all that convicts needed to return to England was to raise the fare for the passage home. [21] Said, however, is unaware of all this since he takes Dickens's plot in Great Expectations at its word -- ‘subjects can be taken to places like Australia,' Said writes, ‘but they cannot be allowed to “return” to metropolitan space' [22] -- and because the only Australian history books he appears to have read are two of the most unreliable products of recent times: The Fatal Shore, by the art critic Robert Hughes, and The Road to Botany Bay by the poststructuralist theorist Paul Carter. [23]

Even worse are Said's assumptions about the history of imperialism in Egypt. Dickens wrote Great Expectations in 1860-61, when Egypt was still part of the Ottoman Empire and well before it was occupied by Britain in 1882. When the novel was written, British firms had substantial interests in trade and investment in Egypt, it is true, and Britain was the principal foreign economic influence. [24] But Egypt was not then governed by the British, nor was it part of their Empire. To start a trading company in Cairo, an Englishman like Herbert Pocket would still have needed to apply for permission to the viceroy of the Ottoman Sultan. For Said to call Egypt a British ‘overseas territory' at the time Great Expectations was written is a chronological elision to mislead readers about the true historical setting of the novel.

Said argues that Dickens and other British authors use sites like these as part of their stories because the fact of imperialism readily allows them to encompass other countries within their imagination. ‘References to these places are made because they can be.' [25] However, a piece of writing cannot seriously be regarded as part of an imperialist culture simply because it mentions by name some location in an overseas territory. If we allowed that, then a great deal of the literature of almost every country would become an endorsement for imperialism. Any sojourn in the city of London by a character in a novel by Vikram Seth or Arundhati Roy, for instance, would thereby become evidence of India 's imperialist designs on the United Kingdom. Said's purpose, we should remember, is to identify those works that helped give Britain and France a positive attitude towards imperialism. To accomplish this he needs to establish, at the very least, what a reference to an overseas territory means in its context, how it contributes to the totality of the work, and what political weight it carries in relation to the quest for empire. In his account of Great Expectations, Said does none of this. Hence he offers nothing to implicate Dickens in a pro-imperialist culture.

The same points can be made about several other attempts by Said to use European novels to substantiate his thesis. He writes that ‘many of the most prominent characteristics of modernist culture, which we have tended to derive from purely internal dynamics in Western society and culture, include a response to the external pressures on culture from the imperium.' As evidence of this, he cites Thomas Mann's novel, Death in Venice :

In Mann's great fable of the alliance between creativity and disease -- Death in Venice -- the plague that infects Europe is Asiatic in origin; the combination of dread and promise, of degeneration and desire, so effectively rendered by Aschenbach's psychology is Mann's way of suggesting, I believe, that Europe, its art, mind, monuments, is no longer invulnerable, no longer able to ignore its ties to its overseas domains. [26]

The plague that infects Europe is Asiatic in origin. Therefore the novel is a response to the pressures imperialism is forcing onto European culture. This is Said's entire argument about this book. It would be hard to find a less substantial connection made within a literary analysis. The obvious reason for Mann's choice of direction was that the disease of his story, the pandemic of bubonic plague that swept Europe and the rest of the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, had actually originated in south-western China. It would have been odd -- and maybe then of some significance -- if he had said it came from anywhere but Asia. Said's attempt to score a political point out of this unexceptional issue tells us little about the imperialist assumptions of the novelist and far more about the anxieties of the critic scraping to find evidence for his thesis. Yet contemporary writers have almost fallen over themselves in their rush to praise this kind of analysis. ‘Readers accustomed to the precision and elegance of Edward Said's analytical prowess,' writes the Nobel laureate, Toni Morrison, for the cover blurb of Culture and Imperialism, ‘will not be disappointed.' What is it, then, that has earned Said's literary criticism so formidable a reputation?

Jane Austen and slavery

In Culture and Imperialism Said gained most attention for his analysis of Jane Austen's novel Mansfield Park. It came as a shock to many of Austen's readers to be told she was implicated in so political a process as imperialism, and it was an even greater surprise to find there was actually some evidence for the claim. In this novel, published in 1814, the nine-year-old Fanny Price leaves her large, impecunious family to be brought up in the household of her aunt and uncle, the wealthy Sir Thomas Bertram, at his estate Mansfield Park. Fanny is timid and cautious but steadfast in all her social relationships, unlike most of her cousins, the Bertram children. When the latter reach young adulthood, Sir Thomas is called away from home on a lengthy business journey. His eldest son Tom has been mixing with unsavoury characters and got badly into debt, so he takes Tom with him to keep him out of trouble. Sir Thomas's wife is an empty-headed, indolent woman, while her other sister, who lives nearby, is a cruel but ineffectual chaperone for the children. As a result, during his absence the order and discipline Sir Thomas had tried to instil in his children dissipates. His daughter Maria, who is betrothed to marry into the local, landed Rushworth family, flirts with the handsome, worldly Henry Crawford. His younger son Edmund, whom his cousin Fanny secretly loves, becomes fascinated by Henry's charming but artificial sister Mary, while his other daughter, Julia, attracts a foolish suitor, Mr Yates. In Sir Thomas's absence, the only person to show any strength of character is Fanny. However, upon Sir Thomas's return, Edmund comes to his senses. Henry Crawford also undergoes a bout of self-criticism, decides he loves Fanny and proposes to her. Despite considerable pressure from her aunt and uncle, Fanny still nurses her love for Edmund and so rejects Henry, who soon after takes up again with the now-married Maria, and runs off with her. At the same time, Julia elopes with Mr Yates. Edmund is thus left as the only reputable child of the family. He ultimately becomes a minister of the Church of England, whereupon he and Fanny marry.

Before Said, most critics who analysed Mansfield Park treated the absence from home of Sir Thomas as nothing more than a device of the plot. The novel sends him off to attend to some financial problems on his sugar plantation in Antigua, one of the Leeward Islands of the Caribbean. Critics have traditionally assumed the author chose this location so Sir Thomas could be away from Mansfield Park for eighteen months and that so long an absence would make plausible the disintegration of the regime he had established. Even as eminent a critic as Lionel Trilling, who has written one of the most influential essays on the novel, felt no call to discuss Antigua or the financial problems that might have arisen there. [27] In other words, like Dickens's choice of Australia for the abode of the convict Magwitch in Great Expectations, Austen's choice of Antigua as Sir Thomas Bertram's destination was interpreted for a long time as being purely incidental to the meaning of the novel.

Said, however, argues there is far more to it than this. This novel, he says, is one of the earliest and most powerful illustrations of his thesis about the culture of imperialism. ‘The perfect example of what I mean,' he writes, ‘is to be found in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, in which Thomas Bertram's slave plantation in Antigua is mysteriously necessary to the poise and beauty of Mansfield Park, a place described in moral and aesthetic terms well before the scramble for Africa, or before the age of empire officially began.' [28] Although there is no actual description of the Antiguan property in the novel, nor any details provided of the business Sir Thomas conducted there, its presence is clearly felt, Said claims. The reader can see that the personal authority Sir Thomas wields at home displays the same qualities he would deploy in the imperial domain of the Caribbean. Said cites a long passage from the novel about how Sir Thomas, on returning home to find his house disarrayed by a proposed theatrical performance by his children, quickly restores order and eradicates all signs of frivolity. ‘There is nothing in Mansfield Park that would contradict us,' he writes, ‘were we to assume that Sir Thomas does exactly the same things -- on a larger scale -- in his Antigua “plantations” '. [29]

The Caribbean property and the English estate are inextricably linked by ties that are both economic and moral, Said claims. Antigua provides the material support for the lifestyle in England and, in turn, the style and elegance of Mansfield Park endows the possession of imperial territory with legitimacy. ‘Jane Austen sees the legitimacy of Sir Thomas Bertram's overseas properties,' he argues, ‘as a natural extension of the calm, the order, the beauties of Mansfield Park, one central estate validating the economically supportive role of the peripheral other.' [30] Moreover, other critics (even those he admires like the Marxist, Raymond Williams) are wrong when they claim that it is possible to discuss Austen's views about moral behaviour as somehow separate from the hierarchical structure of the society she describes. ‘I have tried to show,' Said argues, ‘that the morality in fact is not separable from its social basis: right up to the last sentence Austen affirms and repeats the geographical process of expansion involving trade, production, and consumption that predates, underlies, and guarantees the morality'. [31] In other words, Austen's book presumes the economic necessity of imperialism and endorses it morally as well.

Austen, of course, does not do anything as explicit as discuss colonisation or imperialism herself. Her endorsement of the process, Said argues, has to be seen in her underlying, unspoken assumptions and in the framework of thought she brings to her writing. As well as locating Sir Thomas's business interests in the Caribbean, these assumptions permeate the novel through such sub-plots as the burgeoning naval career of Fanny's brother William and even through such trivial incidents as the idle request by Lady Bertram for William to buy her a shawl on his visit to India. Said comments: ‘These signs of “abroad” include, even as they repress, a rich and complex history, which has since achieved a status that the Bertram's, the Prices, and Austen herself would not, could not recognise.' [32] It is these unspoken assumptions, which Said says can only be sensed by carefully reading the novel in full, that makes Austen not only complicit in the creation of Britain's pro-imperialist culture but one of its influential figures:

Mansfield Park connects the actualities of British power overseas to the domestic imbroglio within the Bertram estate … in reading it carefully we can sense how ideas about dependent races and territories were held both by foreign office executives, colonial bureaucrats, and military strategists and by intelligent novel readers educating themselves in the fine points of moral evaluation, literary balance, and stylistic finish.[33]

If all this were true, then Jane Austen would indeed have contributed to a culture of imperialism.

To assess Said's thesis, it should first be noted that his account of Mansfield Park does represent one unequivocal step forward in the critical analysis of the novel. Said was the first modern critic to take seriously the portrait of Sir Thomas Bertram as a West Indian planter. Sir Thomas is not, as some critics still mistakenly presume, [34] a member of the landed aristocracy. Jane Austen's identification of the source of his fortune would have had much more significance to her readers in the early nineteenth century than most twentieth century critics have realised. By giving him a sugar plantation in Antigua, the author was not simply providing a means to remove him from the scene, as had long been thought. In the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the West Indian planters formed a recognisable social and political group in England. Those who were members of Parliament constituted a lobby that consistently argued and voted to protect its members' interests, especially over the question of the slavery that provided their labour force. It was well known at the time that, although West Indian sugar had been the source of several fortunes in the eighteenth century, the planters had recently fallen on difficult times, especially with the abolition of the transportation of slaves in 1807, which had undermined their ready access to cheap labour and forced many to reorganise their business affairs. [35] By providing him with such a background, Austen was drawing on a social type that was well publicised at the time and familiar to her readers.

This type-casting has been confirmed by the critic Brian Southam, the chairman of the Jane Austen Society, who has used it to provide additional insight into how the novelist viewed the Bertram family. ‘There is something distinctly “modern-built”, nouveau and West Indian about Sir Thomas and his social standing', Southam writes, ‘a point worth making since some commentators wholly misplace Sir Thomas, writing about him as a member of the old and established landed gentry who bears an ancient title'. This background explains why Sir Thomas did not marry into the aristocracy or gentry himself and why he had such poor relatives as his wife's sisters. This was also why he was so determined his daughter Maria would make ‘a connection exactly of the right sort' and marry into the Rushworth family, who had lived for centuries in their ancient manor. Whereas the planters had once been known for their ostentatious display of wealth and conspicuous consumption, Southam argues Sir Thomas was a newer example of this class:

Jane Austen's readers would recognise his type immediately: not at all the character ‘West-Injine' fresh from the Caribbean -- vulgar, flamboyant, free-spending and high-living -- sneered at by the King, the court and the Tory gentry … but a second-generation absentee, set on rising above and obscuring the origins of his wealth; on giving his sons, via Eton and Oxford, connections and a gentleman's education; and on securing further connections and alliances through the marriage of his daughters, and through the marriage of Fanny Price to Henry Crawford. [36]

In all his comments about Sir Thomas, Said presumes that Jane Austen endorses his character and regards him as a pillar of order, discipline and authority. In this, Said is following the interpretation of Lionel Trilling in the 1950s. ‘Of all the fathers of Jane Austen's novels,' Trilling wrote, ‘Sir Thomas is the only one to whom admiration is given … It is he, in his entire identification with his status and tradition, who makes of Mansfield Park the citadel it is.' [37] Although Trilling acknowledges that Sir Thomas's authority is fallible, and he suffers the reckless misdeeds of his children as a result, he argues that both the heroine and the author of the novel endorse Sir Thomas and his values for having created ‘the Great Good Place ' that is Mansfield Park. Said backs this interpretation, especially the notion that Fanny is morally in accord with Sir Thomas. He is not only her uncle and friend but also her ‘mentor'. [38] If we accept all this, then much of Said's argument does indeed follow: the imperialism and the slavery represented by the Antiguan sugar plantation are converted to propriety, order and comfort in England, and Jane Austen gives the whole process her moral sanction.

However, the interpretation of the novel established by Trilling and continued by Said deserves to be seen as a serious misinterpretation. Far from Sir Thomas Bertram being the only positive father figure in Jane Austen's novels, he is, in fact, yet one more example of the weak and self-absorbed patriarchs who hold the fate of her heroines in their hands. Finding Sir Thomas a figure of admiration can only be done by misinterpreting the text and by ignoring or distorting the plot of the novel. Jane Austen's most recent biographer, Claire Tomalin, is far more convincing in her assessment of his defective character:

Sir Thomas Bertram is not so much better than his wife and sister-in-law. He has the very moderate virtue of dignity, but he chose his own wife badly, and he does not know how to talk to, let alone bring up, his children, or how to control his sister-in-law's bad behaviour in spoiling his daughters and crushing his niece. He lacks any perception of people's characters, allowing one daughter to marry a dolt -- she is of course following in his own footsteps -- and trying to bully Fanny into a loveless match. Here most clearly he expresses a view Fanny considers wholly wrong, although she won't tell him so; she expects a ‘good man' to see that it is unpardonably wicked to marry without affection, but he doesn't, and she is reduced to hoping he will reconsider the matter. Instead he behaves disingenuously towards her, sending her to [her family home at] Portsmouth to bring her round to the advantage of marrying well, although through all the years of her childhood it has not occurred to him that she might wish to visit her parents, brothers and sisters. His self-righteousness and confidence in his own judgement are broken only by the behaviour of his daughters. [39]

That this assessment is supported by the novel itself is clear even in one of the passages that Said cites as evidence for his own case. Near the end of the book, when Sir Thomas contemplates the wreckage of his plans for his children, he acknowledges his own mismanagement in allowing his sister-in-law to have had such a deleterious role in their upbringing. But he thinks to himself that there must have been more involved:

Some thing must have been wanting within, or time would have worn away much of its ill effect. He feared that principle, active principle, had been wanting, that they had never been properly taught to govern their inclinations and tempers, by that sense of duty which can alone suffice. [40]

The principle that Sir Thomas recognises had been wanting in the character of his children is plainly ‘that sense of duty', or what we might now call a sense of responsibility. In the context of their position in the novel, the sentiments expressed in this realisation are obviously endorsed by the author herself. She is saying that Sir Thomas's emphasis on parental authority and discipline, couped with his stern demeanour, had been misplaced because they had failed to engender in his children an internal sense of responsibility appropriate to their family, their wealth, their social status and privilege. They think only of themselves and their pleasures and ignore their duty to others. Yet even though Said cites these very words as part of the longer paragraph in which they are embedded, he ignores Sir Thomas's own conclusion about his children's failings and substitutes something else entirely. Said comments: ‘What was wanting within was in fact supplied by the wealth derived from a West Indian plantation and a poor provincial relative, both brought to Mansfield Park and set to work… A “principle wanting within” is, I believe, intended to evoke for us memories of Sir Thomas's absences in Antigua, or the sentimental and near whimsical vagary on the part of the three variously deficient Ward sisters …' [41] In writing this, Said is simply substituting his own theories for the meaning of the text of the novel. This is an example not of legitimate interpretation, still less of ‘analytical prowess', but of a critic deceived by his own ideological presumptions.

The same is true of Said's interpretation of Jane Austen's ‘unspoken assumptions' about English naval power and of how these assumptions reflected Britain 's imperial culture. He has not made a good choice in using Mansfield Park to advance this thesis. For although Austen's own brothers Charles and Francis had naval careers, and while her novel Persuasion contains some very favourable characterisations of naval officers, Mansfield Park puts a different perspective. Fanny's brother does find his place in the world through the navy, and to that extent the novel is positive about the service, but Austen also portrays some acutely negative aspects. This is accomplished partly through the scenes of Fanny's family at Portsmouth harbour, where her father, an alcoholic Lieutenant of the marines, virtually ignores her presence, and also through the character of Admiral Crawford, the uncle and guardian of Henry and Maria. Claire Tomalin is surely right again when she observes: ‘On the worldly side, Henry and Maria Crawford have been tainted by their uncle the Admiral, who has the power of patronage, keeps a mistress openly and passes on a light-hearted attitude towards unnatural vice in the navy to his niece.' [42] In pursuit of his thesis, Said tries to make the most of one side of the novelist's portrait of the navy, but omits the other side entirely.

Finally, there is the now famous question about slavery on Antigua, which, since Said's intervention, has become virtually a compulsory talking point in any discussion of the novel. In Chapter Twenty One, Fanny tells Edmund how she loves to hear Sir Thomas talk about the West Indies. She then recounts a conversation she had with her uncle: ‘Did you not hear me ask him about the slave trade last night?' she asks, and then adds: ‘-- but there was such dead silence!' The silence not only afflicted Sir Thomas but also his other children who sat by in the room ‘without speaking a word'. [43] This is the only mention of slavery in the book and critics have offered differing interpretations of it. Brian Southam says that by broaching this hitherto sensitive and unmentionable subject in the Bertram household, Fanny is revealed unmistakably as a ‘friend of the abolition' and an opponent of the plantocracy. Moreover, since we know from the biographical details of Jane Austen's life that she and her brothers were strongly opposed to slavery, and since in Emma she has her heroine use the abolitionists' term ‘the traffic in human flesh', Southam argues that her original readers would have applauded both Fanny Price and her author for their stand. On the other hand, the critic Kathryn Sutherland has argued that the ‘dead silence' does not necessarily mean that the family felt guilty about the question. It may have simply reflected the bored uninterest of the other young people, who would have clammed up if faced with a discussion about politics of any kind. [44] Either of these interpretations is possible, although the inference that the issue was too embarrassing rather than too boring to discuss is the more plausible.

Said, however, has a different explanation. He thinks the ‘dead silence' is meant ‘to suggest that one world could not be connected with the other since there simply is no common language for both'. [45] In other words, those for and those against slavery had no common terminology or means of talking to one another about the issue. This interpretation is, to say the least, strange. The novel is set shortly after the abolitionist campaign had succeeded in passing its legislation through Parliament in 1807, when the debate over slavery was still fresh in the minds of anyone who took an interest in politics. [46] Rather than each side of this debate being confined to its own linguistic cocoon for the want of a common language, the opposite was true. Both sides had argued their respective cases for decades from pulpits, newspapers, the quarterly reviews and political meetings, and had long practised dissecting and countering the claims of their opponents. West Indian slave owners like Sir Thomas Bertram had defended their interests in the House of Commons where they put their position vigorously, using all these tactics. [47] There might have been little moral agreement between the two sides and, in the context of the Bertram household, this makes Fanny naïve for raising the issue, but Said's claim that Jane Austen is suggesting there was some impassable linguistic divide that prevented debate is simply not credible, either within the milieu of the novel itself or the times in which it was written.

Moreover, if the Bertram household was divided into two worlds over the question of slavery, where does this leave Said's principal thesis? If, as he says, there were two such worlds, it should be possible to identify those members of the family who took each side. By questioning the slave trade, the heroine would not appear to be among its defenders. Yet Said's whole objective is to argue that, on the issue of the Antiguan interests, the novel takes the side of the slave owners. If this were true, Jane Austen would have been quite inconsistent to make Fanny Price -- whom Said calls ‘the spiritual mistress of Mansfield Park' who eventually ‘inherits' [sic] the estate [48] -- so divorced from the Bertrams on this crucial issue. Fanny would not have been in accord with her uncle and ‘mentor' after all. Clearly, it is the critic, not the novelist, who is confused. By acknowledging the existence of two opposing views in the household over slavery, he undermines his entire thesis. Said's political antennae, so finely tuned to pick up any potentially usable reference to imperialism in Austen's work, might have been functioning when he seized upon this reference, but the critical ability he displays when it comes to actually analysing her output is insensitive and dogmatic. The only thing his thesis on Mansfield Park succeeds in demonstrating is that the anti-imperialist ideology he deploys is much too blunt an instrument to prick the reputation of so fine a novelist as Jane Austen.

Opera: the imperial article de luxe

As well as being a professor of literature, Said prides himself on being a music critic. He has written a book of essays entitled Musical Elaborations (1991) and, in an interview in 1987 declared: ‘Music is the great passion of my life'. [49] In his music essays, he has challenged what he describes as the carefully husbanded territories of musicologists. He speaks of music's professionals ‘maintaining boundaries and enclosures' which, thanks to his political perspectives, he is able to penetrate. [50] The contribution to ‘situating music' that he makes in Culture and Imperialism is an analysis of Giuseppe Verdi's opera, Aida, which he offers as another example of the imperialist character of Western artistic forms. His overall argument is that Aida is a spectacle that reflects European imperialism in Egypt in the late nineteenth century. The opera's notion of Egypt is not realistic but is an archaeological reconstruction derived from French Egyptology, an ‘Orientalised Egypt'. [51] It contains ‘imperialist structures of attitude and reference' that acts as an ‘anaesthetic' on European audiences, leading them to ignore the brutality that accompanied their conquest of other countries. It fosters military aggression towards the Orient: ‘As a visual, musical and theatrical spectacle, Aida does a great many things for and in European culture, one of which is to confirm the Orient as an essentially exotic, distant and antique place in which Europeans can mount certain shows of force.' [52] Hence, ‘the embarrassment of Aida,' according to Said, ‘is finally that it is not so much about but of imperial domination.' [53] By analysing the politics of this one piece of work, Said hopes to expose much more. He believes this approach will not only reveal the imperial dimension of this particular work but will also implicate the art form of opera itself in the culture of empire. ‘Aida, like the opera form itself, is a hybrid, radically impure work that belongs equally to the history of culture and the historical experience of overseas domination.' [54]

Despite this grand ambition, the evidence Said marshals is hardly adequate to sustain it. He provides no explanation of the links between Aida and the rest of the canon of opera, still less of what connects opera as an art form to overseas domination. He offers only a perfunctory analysis of the libretto of Aida and pays even less attention to the music, with no discussion at all of the score. Instead, he concentrates most on the staging of the opera's first performance.

Aida was commissioned by the viceroy of Egypt, Khedive Ismail, for the Italian Theatre or Opera House in Cairo, which had opened in November 1869 with a performance of Verdi's Rigoletto. The composer then agreed to create a special opera for Egypt. It was written in 1870 and premiered on 24 December 1871. The initial treatment, or scenario, was the work of Auguste Mariette, the well-known French archaeologist and Egyptologist. Although Said refers to ‘Mariette's libretto', [55] the original libretto was actually written by Camille du Locle in French and then translated into Italian and re-worked by Antonio Ghizlanzoni and the composer. Nonetheless, Mariette had an important influence on the opera, not only in suggesting the original approach but also in designing the sets and costumes for the first performance in Cairo. Mariette's inspiration for the opera, Said claims, was influenced by two sources. The first was his role as designer of antiquities at the Egyptian pavilion in the Paris International Exhibition of 1867, ‘one of the greatest and earliest displays of imperial potency.' [56] The second was the Description de l'Egypt, the twenty-four volume account of Napoleon's expedition to Egypt in 1798 produced by a team of French experts on the ancient world. According to Said, this document amounts to a virtual invitation for a figure like Napoleon to conquer Egypt and to celebrate the fact in opera. ‘The most striking pages of the Description seem to beseech some very grand actions or personages to fill them, and their emptiness and scale look like opera sets waiting to be populated.' [57]

Hence the concept of Egypt reflected in Aida, the Exhibition and the Description, Said claims, is nothing but a European invention. All three are merely the product of European culture. ‘The simple point to be made here is that Egyptology is Egyptology and not Egypt,' Said writes. And the country they portray is not the real Egypt of the time but a fantasy imperial trophy. ‘Their implied European context is a theatre of power and knowledge, while their actual Egyptian setting in the nineteenth century has simply dropped away.' [58]

Said then offers an account of the city of Cairo at the time the opera was staged. It was divided both geographically and socially into two sections. One was the Western and modernised part of the city undergoing an economic boom and populated by European investors and traders and their Egyptian partners and clients. The other part contained the ‘teeming quarters' of the old, medieval city, inhabited almost entirely by impoverished Arabs. ‘The Opera House built by Ismail for Verdi sat right at the centre of the north-south axis, in the middle of a spacious square, facing the European city, which stretched westwards to the banks of the Nile.' [59] Hence, Said argues, Aida was alien to most of Egypt. It was ‘an imperial article de luxe purchased by credit for a tiny clientele whose entertainment was incidental to its real purposes … an imperial spectacle designed to alienate and impress an almost exclusively European audience'. [60] The opera embodied the authority of a European version of Egypt at a moment in its nineteenth century history when the country was being colonised by Europeans. The martial music of Aida's score was even taken up by the Khedive and used in the Egyptian national anthem. [61]

The imperial context also affected the way the composer approached his work. Verdi had no feelings at all about modern Egypt, Said maintains, and conceived Aida as an opportunity to pursue purely artist objectives, without any commercial or political inhibitions. ‘ Egypt 's submissive or at least indifferent presence in his life allowed him to pursue his artistic intentions with what appeared to be an uncompromising intensity.' [62] While Verdi's biographers and other critics have long regarded his desire to retain more control over the production of this opera as stemming from the disappointing responses to his two previous works, La forza del destino and Don Carlos, [63] Said sees this in political and, not unexpectedly, imperialist, terms. ‘I believe Verdi fatally confused this complex and in the end collaborative capacity to bring a distant operatic fable to life with the Romantic ideal of an organically integrated, seamless work of art, informed only by the aesthetic intention of a single creator. Thus an imperial notion of the artist dovetailed conveniently with the imperial notion of a non-European world whose claims on the composer were either minimal or non-existent.' [64]

Before we go any further, it needs to be said that Said's complaint that the opera and composer are indifferent to the realities of Egypt and to the Arabs of Cairo can hardly be taken as a serious criticism of this work. In striving to make a case out of the details of the opera's original performance, Said seems to forget that Aida is an opera about ancient Egypt -- the Egypt of the Pharaohs. His whole critique conflates ancient and modern Egypt into one entity. However, the Egyptians portrayed in the opera are not Arabs, a people who arrived in the country in the seventh century AD and who were then a predatory imperial power. The Egyptians of Aida are the original Egyptians who inhabited the country three or four thousand years before the tribesmen from Mecca and Medina conquered it. The Egypt of the Arabs is no more the Egypt of the Pharaohs than it is the Egypt once ruled by the ancient Greeks or the Egypt that was part of the Roman Empire in the Christian era. Reproving Verdi or Mariette for their inattention to what Said calls the ‘real Egypt' in the slums of Arab Cairo in the nineteenth century is about as sensible as admonishing Shakespeare in Julius Caesar for focusing entirely on the events of 44 BC and not showing more sympathy for the plebs of Rome circa 1599. As for Aida providing the music for the Khedive's national anthem, this is an Egyptian urban myth, which Said has repeated without checking its authenticity. [65]

Moreover, to complain that any opera is unrealistic is an act that ought to disqualify someone from the ranks of opera critics forever. Realism is just about the last attribute opera has ever sought. This is an art form, remember, where characters sing instead of speak to one another, in which large women in their fifties can pass as seductive teenage girls, where white men portray black men and vice versa, where black women can become Chinese princesses, where plenty of women portray men and some men act as girls. It is an art form that once cast fat, castrated men, who sang like boys, in the roles of Roman generals and Crusader knights. It permits singers to make confidential asides that can be heard by members of the audience but not apparently by the other characters standing nearby, and allows magical events, ghosts, sea serpents, monsters (some of whom sing in Italian), ocean storms, lightning strikes and anthropomorphic gods of various religions to make regular appearances on stage. To try to score a political point out of an opera's lack of realism is to display how unfit one is to talk about the subject.

It is equally imperceptive to complain that, because its staging and costumes derive from the discoveries of Egyptology, Aida is politically tainted by this. It is true that ‘Egyptology is not Egypt' but it is still the only field whose archaeological and philological studies provided what was known in 1870, and what is known today, about ancient Egypt. Rather than being a European conceit, Egyptology has long provided the principal means through which people of any culture, Egyptian Arabs included, can know the ancient history of that country. Although the Arabs inhabited the territory and possessed its artefacts for a thousand years before modern European archaeologists became interested in them, they showed little curiosity about the ancient culture or religion and produced no substantial body of scholarship on either. Of course, as it has unfolded over the last two hundred years, European knowledge of ancient Egyptian culture has gone through a series of revisions, as one might expect in a field where new discoveries are progressively made. But if, as Said says, Egyptology is misleading about the ‘real Egypt ' where else does he imagine knowledge of the place in 3000 - 4000 BC could possibly have come from?

One of the reasons Said pays so much attention to the commissioning and first performance of Aida is because he claims that this history largely accounts for the nature of the opera itself, that is, of its music, libretto and staging. ‘ Aida quite precisely recalls the enabling circumstances of its commission and composition,' he argues, ‘and, like an echo to an original sound, conforms to aspects of the contemporary context it works so hard to exclude.' [66] Yet, as I suggested above, his interpretation offers very little comment on the opera as opera. This is another strange aspect of his approach because one might have expected this particular libretto to provide some fertile compost for Said's political imagination. The story of Aida is about star-crossed lovers: Radames, the Egyptian general, is in love with Aida, the defeated Ethiopian king's daughter, who is kept as a hostage and slave of Amneris, the daughter of the Egyptian king, at a time when Egypt and Ethiopia have resumed war with one another. Egypt again becomes the victorious military power and the second act of the work contains the most spectacular scene in all opera, the triumphal procession and display of the trophies of victory before the Egyptian king and his priests. Yet Said makes nothing out of either the military conflict or the triumphal march except to note -- accurately, in this case -- that in the twentieth century different directors have taken various approaches to the second act, with some going over the top in the attempt to out-spectacle their predecessors, while a few have taken a more sombre approach, giving some sympathy to the Ethiopian captives.

What is particularly puzzling is that Said fails to even mention the one issue that his readers might have expected someone committed to his thesis would feel compelled to comment upon. This is the evidence from Verdi's own political inclinations, from the letters he wrote when composing the work, plus the belief of a line of critics ever since, that Aida is actually an anti-imperialist opera. Let me present some of this evidence to demonstrate how Said engages in silence and evasion over what he should have seen as an important challenge to his thesis.

Verdi, as Said himself well knows, was Italy 's favourite nineteenth century composer and a hero of the Risorgimento, the political and cultural movement that helped arouse the national consciousness of the Italian people, and led to a series of political events that by 1861 had freed most of the Italian states from Austrian domination and united them politically. ‘Va, pensiero', the Hebrew slaves' chorus from Verdi's Nabucco (1842), became the unofficial anthem of the movement. Verdi's political views were public knowledge: he was a nationalist who was opposed to Austrian imperialism in Italy and, as a general principle, to all European imperialism at the time. He was against British imperialism in India and hoped the British would be expelled from that country. His views shifted from the Left of his youth, when he consorted with nationalist revolutionaries, to a more conservative position in middle and old age, but he retained his belief in Mazzini's principle that no nation had the right to rule another. When Italian nationalism itself turned into imperialism in the 1880s and 1890s, he was appalled and regarded Italy 's defeat by the Ethiopian forces at Adowa in 1896 as a salutary lesson. [67] Verdi composed Aida in 1870 while the Franco-Prussian War was underway. In fact, the war delayed the opening of the opera because the sets and designs were trapped in Paris during the Prussian siege of the city. Verdi's sympathies were all with the French and he despised German militarism. At one stage during the composition he told his librettist Ghislanzoni to add some extra lines to the Egyptian priests' chorus about how their army had been helped by divine providence and that God was on their side, because he wanted to satirise the same sentiments recently expressed in a public telegram by Kaiser Wilhelm. [68]

There are aspects of the plot that seem to reflect the composer's nationalist views. Aida's father, the Ethiopian king Amonasro, who is captured by the victorious Egyptians, stands proud as a representative of his nation amidst its humiliation. He plots another war to throw off the yoke of Egyptian tyranny. The most moving aria in the whole opera is ‘O patria mia', sung by Aida as she sits on the moonlit banks of the Nile and remembers her homeland. Both words and music of this piece evoke the landscape of Ethiopia. This has led several commentators to argue that the opera itself embodies Verdi's own antipathy to foreign domination and his support for national liberation. The English historian, John MacKenzie, for instance, argues that the famous triumphal march in Act Two should be played with a strong hint of satire. It was intended not to glorify military triumph but to mock the pomposity of the conquerors. ‘Aida,' he asserts, ‘is just about as anti-imperialist an opera as you can get.' [69]

Although this claim is far more plausible than Said's pro-imperialist thesis, ultimately the evidence of the work itself does not support either view. All we know from the opera about the politics of Egypt and Ethiopia is that they are at war. Although the fact of Aida's captivity can make her people appear the victims of Egyptian power, we cannot be sure that the kingdom of Ethiopia is a helpless victim itself. Despite being defeated twice, the Ethiopian king seems readily able to rally his troops for a third battle. We do not know whether Egypt fights to keep Ethiopia under its imperial domination or whether the Ethiopians are a power in their own right, rivals of Egypt with imperial designs of their own. Rather than commenting on whether the Ethiopian cause is just or unjust, the opera itself is simply not concerned with such matters. It is a dramatic exploration of what happens when the power of love comes into conflict with national loyalties and patriotism and at the same time crosses the divide between the elite and the inferior within a hierarchical society. Verdi was not interested in which side was right or wrong but in the dilemma that discord at the social level posed for his characters in their private lives. Even though he might well have had German militarism somewhere in the back of his mind when he wrote the triumphal march, it is not credible that he meant this scene primarily as satire. Its setting is genuinely spectacular -- the Temple of Ammon and the king's throne at the gates of Thebes. The sheer length of the scene's twenty six minute duration invites an extended and lavish procession, with performers and animals bearing as many trophies as the production's budget can bear. The flourish of the trumpets, the outbursts of acclaim, the dances before the throne are all meant to be magnificent and dazzling.

There is little doubt Verdi was trying to recreate in operatic form the glories of ancient Egypt, especially its military glory. But it begs credulity to claim that the opera's celebration of the military triumph of this exotic society thereby makes it an opera of nineteenth century European imperialist domination. It is even less plausible to claim that its parade of ancient Egyptian military might would have encouraged Verdi's audiences to want to subjugate the modern version of that country. One would have thought that, if the composer had really wanted to create an Oriental world Europeans could dream of conquering, he might have chosen to display something less formidable than what was, in its day, the most powerful military force on Earth. Moreover, this opera no more ‘anaesthetised' Europeans to imperial conquest than the same composer's treatment of revenge, regicide and prostitution in his other works would have inured his audiences to these forms of behaviour. Life does sometimes imitate art, it is true, but there is nothing in Said's critique to establish that in Aida this was either Verdi's intention or his achievement.

I have not offered here any critique of Said's discussion of the music of this opera. This is because, as I noted before, his attempts are so insubstantial that there is virtually nothing to comment upon, with no discussion at all of the score. I also noted that in his 1991 work, Musical Elaborations, Said was keen to portray himself as the one critic with the ability to break through the boundaries imposed on the subject of music by traditional musicologists. He promised a political approach that would open up what had long remained enclosed and well-guarded territory. This ploy, however, deserves to be read in light of the example he sets in his analysis of Aida. Rather than ‘situating' music, Said is trying to bypass the subject altogether by pretending one can be a music critic without understanding music qua music. In particular, he is telling those who don't know any better that to have strong critical opinions about a musical work, a technical understanding of music is not necessary and, anyway, is something subservient to the main task of political analysis. If we accepted this, it would mean that amateurs like Said can come into the field and not only take their place alongside people who are genuinely qualified but also define the latter as a narrowly-focused group, jealously defending a privileged position.

This is precisely what Said and his accomplices have already achieved in literary criticism, where people with expertise in nothing more substantial than the theories of feminism, gay liberation and multiculturalism have come into fields like English Renaissance literature and classical drama and literally taken over academic departments and journals. The qualities Said displays in his analysis of Aida reveal what is in store for musicology, were the same to happen there. His attempt to impose an ideological interpretation leads to several fundamental mistakes about the nature of the opera, its setting and its plot lines, and leaves his readers bereft of any sensible comment about the music, the orchestration or the singing. In other words, were Said and his followers to gain the influence in music criticism that they now enjoy in literature, the loss would be enormous.

Kim and the eyes of India

Rudyard Kipling's reputation as an advocate and apologist for imperialism, especially among those who have read little of his work, would seem to make him an easy target for Said's thesis. From the emergence of his great popularity as a writer in the 1890s until his death in 1936, Kipling was the unofficial poet laureate of the British Empire. Even though his famous hymn of 1897, Recessional, warns against national hubris and emphasises the impermanence of imperial rule, it contains the most powerful lines ever written to commemorate empire:

God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far flung battle line,
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine -- [70]

Kipling was an imperial expansionist, especially in Africa where he was a good friend and political supporter of Cecil Rhodes. [71] When he lived in India, he despised the Babus, the educated Hindus employed by the British. [72] He encouraged American imperialism, and his poem The White Man's Burden was actually written as a commentary on the American victory in the war against Spain in 1898. His lines: ‘Your new caught sullen peoples/ Half devil and half child', referred to the inhabitants of the former Spanish colony of the Philippines, which the Treaty of Paris had ceded to the United States. [73] In his later years, Kipling often made crude anti-Semitic comments in letters to friends. [74] Were he writing today, there would be a queue of prosecutors wanting to charge him with racial vilification, hate speech, intolerance of minorities and various other politically incorrect crimes.[75]

There has never been any question that Kipling not only contributed to Britain 's imperial culture but also was one of its chief spokesmen. If Said had wanted to make this point, he would have been only stating the obvious, which would hardly have warranted a long essay in Culture and Imperialism. Instead, he has a more important target: Kipling's literary status. For, despite the jingoism for which he is best known today, those who have read the body of his work recognise Kipling as one of the great English writers. He was accorded this standing in his own time: in 1907 he became the first Englishman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and on his death was buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. But an even more powerful endorsement of his abilities is the regard in which he has been held by many eminent writers of the past century, including some to whom Said still defers. Among his admirers have been T. S. Eliot, Henry James and Jorge Luis Borges. Eliot edited a collection of his poetry, while two of his own major poems, The Waste Land and Four Quartets, contain Kipling influences. [76] Henry James was a long-standing personal friend who, though he despaired of Rudyard's ‘loud, brazen, patriotic verse', thought Kim was a ‘magnificent book'. [77] Borges counted Kipling as one of the lasting influences on his work. [78]

Much of this esteem is due to Kipling's masterpiece Kim ¸ published in 1901. In this novel, Kimball O'Hara, the orphaned son of a sergeant of an Irish regiment stationed in northern India, grows up like a native in the streets and bazaars of Lahore. Aged about twelve, he meets by chance the Teshoo Lama, an old monk from Tibet, the former Abbott of a Buddhist monastery, who is searching for a mythical river of enlightenment. Lured by the adventure of travel, Kim joins the lama as his chela, or disciple. On their journey, he finds his father's old regiment, is adopted by it and sent to school, only resuming his role of wandering with the lama during his holidays over the next three years. Kim also acts as a messenger for Mahbub Ali, an Afghan horse trader who is a spy for the British in the contest for Great Power supremacy in Asia (‘the Great Game'). The head of the British secret service, Colonel Creighton, recognises Kim's potential as an agent and recruits him, under the direction of Hurree Babu and Lurgan Sahib, two unlikely but highly effective spies. While still chela to the lama, who remains unaware of his role in intelligence, Kim distinguishes himself by rescuing from a dangerous predicament another member of the secret service, and eventually by helping foil an attempt by French and Russian agents to foment a revolt against British rule on the North-West frontier. The novel provides strikingly vivid portraits of everyday life on the Grand Trunk Road, on the Indian railway, in villages of the Himalayan foothills, on small farms and city bazaars. It is remarkable for its detailed and largely affectionate account of the culture and religions of northern India and, particularly, for its empathy with the spirituality of Buddhism, as personified by the lama.

Kim is a novel that actually reverses the direction of the cultural transmission for which Kipling is otherwise known through his slogan ‘the White Man's Burden'. Instead of bringing British civilisation to the natives, this novel brought the civilisation of India to its British readers in a way that no other cultural artefact had done before or, indeed, since. Moreover, through its Buddhist critique of the inconsequence of Western material ‘progress', and of the sins of pride, vanity and self-centredness, it contains powerful antidotes to European vainglory. It is critical of the idea that the British might be able to ‘civilise' India in any cultural or religious sense. The most objectionable character in the whole novel, in fact, is the representative of English evangelicalism, the Anglican cleric Reverend Bennett, who looks at the lama ‘with the triple-ringed uninterest of the creed that lumps nine-tenths of the world under the title of “heathen”.' [79] The book also portrays the English notion of education as a form of imprisonment that teaches little wisdom except for practical skills in navigation and map making. Kim's real education takes place on the road and at the feet of the lama, who at one stage, in an understatement fully endorsed by the author, tells his chela: ‘The Sahibs have not all of this world's wisdom.' [80] Yet these sentiments are all couched within an adventure story that tells of British success in fending off Russian and French challenges to its control of India.

In singling out this novel for attention in Culture and Imperialism, Said's objective is not to praise its merits, even though he does defer to the critical opinion established by Eliot and James and concedes that it can be read as ‘belonging to the world's greatest literature, free to some degree from its encumbering historical and political circumstances'. [81] Instead, his aim is to diminish its literary reputation, to show that it is not as enlightened or sympathetic as it seems and that, even in the attention it pays to Indian culture and religion, it still serves the baser political objectives of the British Empire. Said begins his critique by deferring to the expectations of his own political constituency for a discussion of how the novel treats the question of contemporary identity group politics, that is, on how it handles the triumvirate of gender, race and class. It is no surprise to find Kipling is reprimanded for his failings on all three scores.

On gender: ‘The women in the novel are remarkably few by comparison, and all of them are somehow debased or unsuitable for male attention -- prostitutes, elderly widows, or importunate or lusty women like the widow [sic] of Shamlegh.' [82] Now, while Kim is largely a novel of male adventure, this is a particularly insensitive comment for it completely overlooks the role of the ‘Eye of Beauty', the old woman of Kulu. From the time she first meets the lama and his chela on the Grand Trunk Road until she takes them into her household and nurses both back to health near the end of the novel, Kipling establishes her as one of the most memorable and venerable female characters in English literature. Indeed, this ‘strong-tongued, iron-willed old lady' [83] seems exactly the sort of person of whom modern feminists should approve. She is old but powerful because of her wealth; she is wise and cynical about men, whom she tends to treat like children; yet despite her tough exterior she has a generous heart. Only a preconceived, political reading of the novel would describe her and the other female characters as ‘debased'.

On race: While Said acknowledges that English and American readers might appreciate the positive portrayal of Indians on the road, he claims Indians themselves will read this differently, focussing on what he calls ‘Kipling's stereotypical views -- some would call them racialist -- on the Oriental character'. [84] He combs the novel for illustrations of racist stereotyping and comes up with a total of nine examples. Some of them are apparently credible: ‘Kim would lie like an Oriental'; others draw a very long bow: when Hurree Babu hides the packet taken from the foreign agents, he ‘stowed the entire trove about his body, as only Orientals can'. [85] What Said fails to do in any of these examples, however, is give the context of the statement to see how the author regards it; whether in each case he endorses it, as Said presumes he does, or whether he is making the statement ironically in order to draw attention to a view that the context shows is false. One of Said's nine examples is where Hurree Babu equates being a Bengali with being fearful. Now, Hurree Babu says things like this in the novel because he is actually playing at being the stereotypical Bengali. It is part of his disguise and turns out to be remarkably effective when it earns him the trust of the French and Russian agents. His actions in leading the unwitting foreigners back to Simla, minus their maps, survey data and letters of support from Indian princes, show the real Babu to be a fearless and heroic figure. Yet because he pretends at one stage to be something he is not, Said takes his comment and face value and thinks this thereby reveals Kipling as a racist. This is not ‘analytical prowess'; it is a simplistic, ideological misreading of the text.

On class: Said describes Kim as ‘a humble Irish boy, lower on the hierarchical scale than full-blooded Englishmen'. He adds: ‘Kim, after all, is both Irish and of an inferior social caste; in Kipling's eyes this enhances his candidacy for service.' [86] These comments are just as insensitive as Said's claims about gender and race. There is nothing in Kim to intimate that being Irish is somehow low class. This is a belief that Said imports from outside the novel. Kim is a Sahib and, while that status is certainly different to that of the Indians in the novel, there are no ethnic distinctions made among the Sahibs themselves. In fact, on page one of the novel, Kipling himself emphasises this by describing the boy as ‘English'. We know that Kim's father was a sergeant, so this locates him firmly within the hierarchy of the military of the day. But taking that hierarchy as given, Kim's Irishness is irrelevant to his social class. The only cultural characteristic about his family background that counts for anything is that his father was a Catholic. This, in fact, is not a negative but a very positive factor because it is one reason why, instead of being consigned to the Military Orphanage, he is sent to St Xavier's School at Lucknow, the best in India, where his education assists his recruitment to the secret service.

On homosexuality: If a critic wants to tug his forelock to all the currently influential identity groups, he had better not omit the gay lobby, else he is liable to be labelled a homophobe or some other kind of compound term pariah. Said is not about to make this mistake, so he plays the homosexual card in his account of ‘the almost idyllic relationship' between Kim and the old lama. He says there are parallels between the male friendship of this novel and that of Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick and The Deerslayer. ‘Some critics,' he says, ‘have speculated on a hidden homosexual motif in these relationships.' [87] Now, putting it this way -- saying, in effect, ‘some critics, but not necessarily me', and emphasising the speculation involved -- is a way of advancing the argument without endorsing it. Said doesn't name the critics who have made this suggestion, so we cannot check if he is reporting them accurately, nor even if they exist. He has raised the issue in this pusillanimous way so that those gays who insist on giving a sexual interpretation to any show of love between a man and a boy will be satisfied enough to keep Said on their list of approved authors. I think, however, that his comments are disturbingly revealing, both about Said and the milieu to which he is pandering. There is something sick and obsessive about a culture that wants to read homosexuality into every male relationship, especially those where sex would be alien, unnatural and otherwise unthinkable. This is certainly true of Kim and the lama, where the age difference is that of grandfather and grandson and where both are plainly celibate. A common ploy of critics like Said when dealing with Victorian authors, who wrote at a time when sex could not be easily discussed, is to search for hidden motifs or symbols that illuminate the purported sexual content, which the author has either deliberately or unconsciously suppressed. But this cannot be done with Kipling's novel, nor indeed with a number of his early short stories where sex is the overt subject matter. In Kim, the author felt no need to sublimate the discussion of sexuality. Near the end of the novel, the woman of Shamlegh quite openly propositions the now sixteen-year-old hero. Kim is flattered but knocks her back, reminding her that, as chela to the lama, he is a priest. [88]

The main accusation Said presses against Kim is that the novel is a reflection of Kipling's ‘imperialist vision'. The aesthetics of the literature, he maintains, are dependent upon imperial control. [89] Yet he has to reconcile this with Kipling's empathy for Indian culture, which the novel's readers have long found the antithesis of any perspective that might be described as imperialist. Said attacks this perception by identifying Kipling with the character of Colonel Creighton, nominally a scholar of Indian culture employed by the Ethnographical Department but actually the head of the British secret service in India. Said notes that Creighton ‘works with Muslims, Bengalis, Afghans, Tibetans without ever appearing to belittle their beliefs or slight their differences.'

If we can ascribe a consistent point of view to Kipling, we can find it in Creighton, more than anyone else. Like Kipling, Creighton respects the distinctions within Indian society. When Mahbub Ali tells Kim that he must never forget he is a Sahib, he speaks as Creighton's trusted, experienced employee. Like Kipling, Creighton never tampers with the hierarchies, the priorities and privileges of caste, religion, ethnicity, and race; neither do the men and women who work for him. [90]

Said claims one can see Creighton's way of looking at India reproduced everywhere in Kim -- ‘Kipling's patiently detailed register of India's different races and castes, the acceptance of everyone (even the lama) of the doctrine of racial separation, the lines and customs which cannot easily be traversed by outsiders'. [91] In other words, the detailed ethnography of the novel is all there for a political purpose: to understand India the better to control it. Knowledge equals power, and so Kipling's insights into Indian culture, and his apparent celebration of its religious diversity and ethnic differences, serve the interests of British imperialism after all. Not only this, but the author and his British readers thereby gain both a vision and a sense of possession of India that is denied to the Indian people themselves.

It is as if he were saying, India is ours and therefore we can see it in this mostly uncontested, meandering and fulfilling way. India is ‘other' and, importantly, for all its wonderful size and variety, it is safely held by Britain. [92]

Now, it is well known that Colonel Creighton is a composite character based on people Kipling had met who performed the same ethnographic, surveying and intelligence roles in northern India during the imperial era. Kipling's sister Trix married Captain John Fleming, a member of the Survey of India, a mapping unit that also gathered military and political intelligence. One of Fleming's colleagues was a Colonel Crichton. [93] The fictional Creighton also shares the ethnographic interests of Kipling's father, Lockwood, who was the curator of the Lahore Museum, the ‘Wonder House' where the novel opens. [94] However, for Said to claim that Creighton is the character whose outlook is most like Kipling's is to display an extraordinary failure of critical analysis and to reveal an embarrassing ignorance of the novelist's biography. For the character in Kim whose vision most resembles Kipling's is, of course, Kim.

Like the hero of his novel, the young Kipling grew up mixing with the lower orders of Indian society and speaking the vernacular. In Kipling's case, he did this partly in the streets and bazaars but more in the kitchen and servants' quarters of his parents' house and compound while his mother and father maintained a busy round of social engagements. In his first five years, he spent most of his days with his ayah, an Indian bearer and others in the retinue of eight servants. ‘There came a point where kitchen Hindustani was so much the lad's first tongue,' his biographer Andrew Lycett records, ‘that he had to be reminded to speak English when he was presented to his parents in the early evenings.' [95] It was because his father was concerned the boy was being spoilt by this and was losing his English cultural ‘birthright' that, on a visit home in 1871, he left him and his sister to be boarded and educated there. Kim's feeling that his time at school was a kind of imprisonment echoed Kipling's own experience of English education. [96] When Kipling completed school, aged sixteen, his father arranged a job for him on the Civil and Military Gazette, a daily newspaper in Lahore. Over the next seven years he was the principal journalist on this paper, as well as a writer for the Pioneer, published in Allahabad. In this role, Kipling went several times up and down the route between Lahore and Benares, making the same journey travelled by Kim and the lama in the novel. [97] He frequented the bazaars and knew the opium dealers and, probably, the prostitutes who appear in the book. [98] Each year, he joined his family in their summer retreat to Simla in the Himalayan foothills where he trod the same paths as Kim in his early days as a secret service recruit. Kipling knew the sights, smells, sounds, customs, languages and religions of this whole region from direct, first hand experience, just like his boy hero.

The evidence of the novel is that, instead of this experience giving him an ‘imperialist vision' or a sense of imperial possession, Kipling found it profoundly humbling. He did not write the novel until he was in his mid-thirties, by which time he had left India and lived in both the United States and England, but his sense of the grandeur of the country never left him. To read Kim is to see India not from a British perspective but through the eyes of India. It is to share Kipling's sense of awe. When Mahbub Ali asks: ‘And who are thy people, Friend of all the World?' Kim replies, ‘This great and beautiful land.' [99] On the Grand Trunk Road :

The diamond-bright dawn woke men and crows and bullocks together. Kim sat up and yawned, shook himself, and thrilled with delight. This was seeing the world in real truth; this was life as he would have it -- bustling and shouting, the buckling of belts, and beating of bullocks and creaking of wheels, lighting of fires and cooking of food, and new sights at every turn of the approving eye. The morning mist swept off in a whorl of silver, the parrots shot away to some distant river in shrieking green hosts: all the well-wheels within earshot went to work. India was awake, and Kim was in the middle of it. [100]

In Kim's relationship with the lama, that is, in the central bond between the characters who carry the weight of the novel, the fact that he is British and a representative of the imperialist power is deliberately put in its place. The lama says to him:

‘Never was such a chela. I doubt at times whether Ananda more faithfully nursed Our Lord. And thou art a Sahib? When I was a man -- a long time ago -- I forgot that. Now I look upon thee often, and every time I remember that thou art a Sahib. It is strange.'
‘Thou hast said there is neither black nor white. Why plague me with this talk, Holy One? Let me rub the other foot. It vexes me. I am not a Sahib. I am thy chela, and my head is heavy on my shoulders.' [101]

The claim that Indians would read passages like these and discover racist stereotyping or imperialist domination is simply unbelievable, or at least it used to be unbelievable before the post-colonial criticism of Said and his followers took over and redefined the limits of politically acceptable commentary. Although Kipling himself remained a product of his times and never approved of an India free from British rule, he was a great enough novelist to write a work that pursued its own logic and pushed beyond the constraints of his personal preconceptions and preferences. In the world he creates in Kim, and in the novel's sense of what is enduring about human relationships and society, British imperialism leaves the core of India intact and is plainly a transitory phase of history -- as indeed it turned out to be. Kipling the artist was more prescient than Kipling the man.

There is no question that an important thesis deserves to be written about the relationship between Western imperialism and literature. Such a thesis should address both particular works and the corpus of European writing as a whole. What this chapter has tried to demonstrate is that Said's Culture and Imperialism is not only inadequate for this task but is of value only in providing a model of how not to proceed. To be done properly, such a study would be well advised to reverse Said's methodology and his targets. Rather than finding imperial exploitation behind every chapter, it would concede that much of this literature, like the writing of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, was largely indifferent to the concerns of empire. It would recognise the long tradition of major figures, from John Milton to William Blake to the Bloomsbury group, who were opposed to or critical of imperialism. And it would also need to admit that some overtly pro-imperialist authors, like Rudyard Kipling, were concerned with more enduring issues about human existence than Said is willing to acknowledge.

Said's attempt in Culture and Imperialism to impose his brand of political analysis and postcolonial ideology onto these works does not illuminate them but distorts their meaning and demeans their value. By importing an anti-imperialist political perspective into literary and opera criticism he accomplishes little more than those earlier Leftist critics from whose efforts he claims to depart. Said's criticism of Great Expectations, Mansfield Park, Aida and Kim resembles some of the worst examples of vulgar Marxist reductionism that once tried to expose great works of art as ‘nothing but' the outlook of the aristocracy, the middle class, the petty bourgeoisie, or some other targeted social class. All that Said has added is the claim that the same compositions should also be read as endorsements of the conquest and government of other races and distant lands. The level of sophistication of the analysis, however, has not improved one iota.

Notes

1. For a history of the routes used, see David Eltis, ‘Trans-Atlantic Trade', in Seymour Drescher and Stanley L. Engerman (eds.) A Historical Guide to World Slavery , Oxford University Press, New York , 1998, pp 370-5

2. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park , edited with an introduction and notes by Kathryn Sutherland, Penguin, London , 1996, pp xxiv-xxv and back cover

3. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , (1993), Vintage, London , 1994, pp xxvi-xxvii

4. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p xxv

5. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , pp 8, 342-3

6. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 68

7. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p xiv

8. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , pp 66, 70, 336-7. Although he still pays homage to the theories of Michel Foucault and still endorses his notion of a thought-determining ‘discourse', by the time he wrote Culture and Imperialism , Said had become somewhat disenchanted with Foucault too, because of the declining interest in politics expressed in his later writings, see pp 132, 335-6

9. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 69 [his emphasis]

10. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 61

11. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 140

12. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 96

13. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 114

14. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , pp 12, 95-6

15. Francis Bacon, Instatauratio Magna (1620), in James Spedding and others, (eds.), The Works of Francis Bacon , 7 vols, London, 1857-59, Vol I, pp 221-2.

16. David Armitage, ‘Literature and Empire', The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol I, The Origins of Empire , ed. Nicholas Canny, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998, pp 99-123

17. all cited by David Armitage, ‘Literature and Empire', p 99

18. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 48, citing Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India , London , 1990

19. Robert Crawford, ‘The Scottish Invention of English literature', chapter one of his Devolving English Literature , Oxford , 1992. This reference is cited by David Armitage, ‘Literature and Empire', pp 121-2, who points out that the first course in Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres was given at Edinburgh University in 1748-51 by a young lecturer named Adam Smith, who later moved to Glasgow University where he wrote The Wealth of Nations and became the world's best-known and longest-lasting critic of imperialism.

20. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , pp xv-xvi

21. This has always been acknowledged by Australian historians and is not a contentious issue. The most recent general history of Australia discusses the options convicts had for returning: see Alan Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia : A History, Volume One , Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1997, pp 75, 77, 86, 208-10, 309-10

22. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p xvii

23. Said describes Hughes's The Fatal Shore, as ‘magisterial', whereas Australian academic historians were largely united in their embarrassment about its inaccuracy and about what one of them called its ‘pseudo-scholarship' (Alan Atkinson in Australian Historical Studies , 106, April 1996, p. 197). Hughes published his account of Australia as Britain's nineteenth century ‘gulag archipelago' at precisely the time that most local historians, including those on the Left who had once endorsed the thesis, were united in rejecting it as a piece of mythology. See the revisionist anthology, Stephen Nicholas (ed.), Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia's Past , Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1988. For a less than sympathetic view of what Said calls the ‘brilliantly speculative' work by Paul Carter, see Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History , Encounter Books, San Francisco , 2000, Chapter 4.

24. P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688-1914 , Longman, London , 1993, pp 362-5

25. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 78 [his emphasis]

26. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , pp 227-8

27. Lionel Trilling, ‘ Mansfield Park ', in his The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism , Oxford University Press, Oxford , 1980, pp 181-202

28. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 69. The change of name from ‘Sir Thomas' to ‘Thomas' is Said's in this instance, even though he restores the title in the next citation. The description ‘slave plantation' rather than the more accurate ‘sugar plantation' is Said's also.

29. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 104

30. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 94

31. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 111

32. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 111

33. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 114

34. for example, Peter Conrad, ‘The Empire strikes back', The Australian's Review of Books , 1999 check date

35. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , pp 112-3

36. Brian Southam, ‘The silence of the Bertrams', Times Literary Supplement , 17 February 1995, p 13

37. Lionel Trilling, ‘ Mansfield Park ', pp 197-8

38. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 106

39. Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life , Viking, London , 1997, pp 230-1

40. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park , (1814) Penguin Classics, London , 1996, p 382

41. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 110

42. Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life , p 226

43. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park , pp 165-6

44. Katheryn Sutherland, ‘Introduction', Mansfield Park , Penguin Classics edition, 1996, p xxiv

45. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 115

46. Brian Southam argues for a setting of 1810-1813, ‘The Silence of the Bertrams', p 13

47. The history of the British abolitionist campaign is detailed in Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1870 , Picador, London , 1997, where the debates in the House of Commons are reported pp 505-56

48. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , pp 101, 106. In fact, Fanny never becomes the actual mistress of Mansfield Park , and Said is mistaken when he says she inherits the estate. She marries the second Bertram son, Edmund, whereas the eventual real heir would be the first-born son, Tom. On their marriage, Fanny and Edmund move into the Mansfield Parsonage, not Mansfield Park .

49. Imre Salusinszky, Criticism in Society , Methuen , New York , 1987, p 141

50. Edward Said, Musical Elaborations , Columbia University Press, New York 1991 check ref page no.

51. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 145

52. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 134

53. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , pp 156-7, 138 [his emphases]

54. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 137 [my emphasis]

55. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 145

56. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 144

57. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 145

58. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , pp 141, 145

59. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 155

60. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 156

61. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 151

62. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 140

63. Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi, Volume Three , Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992, pp check ref;

64. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 140

65. According to the Verdi scholar, Julian Budden: ‘Nowhere is there any confirmation of this assertion though many Egyptians believe it to this day.' Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi, Volume Three , p 163n. See also the entry for ‘national anthems' in Grove's Musical Dictionary .

66. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 151

67. Julian Budden, Verdi , J. M. Dent and Sons, London , 1985, p 150

68. M. Rose, Verdi's ‘Egyptian Business', in Aida: English National Opera Guide, London 1980, also Hans Busch, Verdi's Aida: The History of an Opera in Letters and Documents.

69. John M. MacKenzie, ‘Occidentalism: Counterpoint and Counter-polemic', Journal of Historical Geography , 19, 3 (1993) p 342

70. collected in T. S. Eliot, A Choice of Kipling's Verse , Faber and Faber, London , 1963, p 139

71. Andrew Lycett, Rudyard Kipling , Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London , 1999, pp 293, 343

72. Andrew Lycett, Rudyard Kipling , p 153

73. Andrew Lycett, Rudyard Kipling, p 311

74. Andrew Lycett, Rudyard Kipling , pp 474, 496

75. As well having views that would now be called racist, Kipling thought homosexuality an abomination and was well known for his opposition to feminism, especially through his anti-suffragette poem The Female of the Species. He also urged the prosecution for obscenity of the lesbian novelist Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness .

76. T. S. Eliot (ed.) A Choice of Kipling's Verse ; for influences on The Waste Land see Andrew Lycett, Rudyard Kipling , p 497, for Four Quartets , see Elizabeth Lowry, ‘The lights that failed', Times Literary Supplement , 19 February, 1999, p 4

77. Andrew Lycett, Rudyard Kipling , pp 330, 332

78. Raymond Carr, ‘From the bard's harp to the tango', The Spectator , London , 5 February 2000, p 29

79. Rudyard Kipling, Kim , (1901), Macmillan, London , 1949 edn, p 124

80. Rudyard Kipling, Kim , p 274

81. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 175

82. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 165. The person Said calls ‘the widow of Shamlegh' is referred to in the novel as ‘the Woman of Shamlegh'. She has two husbands still alive, so can hardly be a widow. Said is confusing her with the woman of Kulu, who is a widow.

83. Rudyard Kipling, Kim , p 92

84. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , pp 163-4

85. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 181

86. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , pp 175, 166

87. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 167

88. Rudyard Kiplng, Kim , pp 379-80

89. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , pp 192, 195

90. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , pp 186-7

91. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 187

92. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , p 194

93. Andrew Lycett, Rudyard Kipling , p 161

94. Andrew Lycett, Rudyard Kipling , pp 44-6

95. Andrew Lycett, Rudyard Kipling , p 31

96. Andrew Lycett, Rudyard Kipling , check ref. See also the novel of his schooldays Stalky and Co (1899).

97. Andrew Lycett, Rudyard Kipling , Chapters 4, 5 and 7

98. In the 1880s in India he experimented with both opium and hashish. It was most likely his early experience of the brothels of Lahore that, on his death, caused his wife to destroy the manuscript of his first attempt to write what eventually became Kim , a novel called Mother Maturin , which revealed his youthful penchant for low life. See Andrew Lycett, Rudyard Kipling , pp 97-8, 499

99. Rudyard Kipling, Kim , p 193

100. Rudyard Kipling, Kim , pp 103-4

101. Rudyard Kipling, Kim , p 386