Sentimental Visions of Empire in Eighteenth‐Century Studies

This survey of recent critical work on the role played by the sentimental in eighteenth‐century representations of empire is organized around four central issues. The first addresses the double‐edged use of sentimental writing as a form of ideological mystification – the palliating representation of scenes of colonial violence and imperial exploitation as moments of benevolence or sentimental exchange – and as a form of critique – as a means of representing the causes and consequences of remote actions as an incitement to proper action. The second takes up the way sentimentality is entwined with questions of commerce as a means of thinking about relations across the vast distances of empire, focusing in particular on the way sentimental tropes enabled thinking about the emergence of the global. The third turns to the utility of sentimental language for forging bonds of sympathetic identification with broader communities of nation and of empire, with particular attention to the way the extension of sympathy to another imperils the sanctity of the feeling self, while the final section addresses the way sentimental tropes police the circulation of sympathetic feeling as the means of monitoring the very boundaries of the human in the context of eighteenth‐century empire. Throughout I stress the need for more comparative work on the role played by the sentimental not only within different domains of imperial activity but also across periods, disciplines, and national discourses. The essay includes an extensive bibliography of recent studies of eighteenth‐century sentimentality in relation to empire.