Abstract
It is easy to think of British imperialism as a one-way process, the free and empowered dominating the cultures they colonised. Sussman, in her fine book, rejects this simple binary, pointing out that many of those involved in the exodus from Britain were themselves marginalised and subject to enforced mobility. Looking at the literature of the long eighteenth century (from the 1650s to the 1830s), Sussman traces a series of subtle shifts in conceptions of population and movement, arguing persuasively that “Britain had a much more complicated and vexed relationship to both emigration and colonial expansion than we had previously understood” (p. 5).
Sussman makes her point by tracing a history of mobility from below, which is all the more noteworthy in a period that privileges the viewpoint of the gentry. The chapters discuss the landless poor, the native Irish, discharged soldiers, Highland Clearances and imagined victims of pandemic to show that to be subordinated in this period was also to be vulnerable to being moved against one’s will. Sussman argues that mobility for the marginalised sections of society was viewed as a punishment for most of the early modern period, only to shift in the 1760s to a new paradigm where freedom of movement was increasingly regarded as a right.
Sussman combines historical research, recent theory on colonial settlement and close readings of texts (both literary and otherwise) to generate significant insights, particularly in foregrounding the gendering of mobility, given female reproduction was central to debates about population. Sussman, who peppers the book with succinct judgments, states: “If the imperative at home was to be productive, the imperative abroad was to be reproductive” (p. 32). Particularly fascinating is the idea that as global space was increasingly felt to be filled, there was a corresponding shift to adding temporal depth to geography, either in terms of grafting memory onto place in Goldsmith, or Malthus’s projection of population into the future.
Considering quite a few of the chapters have been published before, the argument has a compelling logic, though it seems strange that in a book on subordinated mobility, Britain’s involvement in the slave trade is barely addressed. Sussman rightly observes that slavery haunts the work, but for a writer who has such interesting things to say on enforced movements of people (and who has also written lucidly on slavery), it would have been good to have had more than a ghostly presence. It would also be interesting to consider how internal migration within Britain further complicates mobility in the period.
It is not possible, of course, to cover everything, and there is ample recompense in the range of material on show. The book begins with Milton’s Eve consoled for losing Paradise by being promised that her progeny will end up “peopling the world”, and finishes with Thomas Malthus, just over a century later, warning that the growth of human population was a global disaster in the making. What happens, asks Sussman, to create such different formulations of emigration, population and colonisation between the 1660s and the 1830s? The answer is an insightful analysis of the “modern mobile subject” (p. 3), where the values of settlement, place and memory are in uneasy dialogue with a nation increasingly defining itself by imperial expansion.
The chapter on Paradise Lost, for instance, brilliantly outlines “a transition from attachment to place to attachment to person” (p. 10). Sussman considers the afterlife of thinking of population as numbers, and how this discourse fractures in Defoe and Swift. Another chapter investigates the way a century of war created a worryingly mobile population, where the switch from war to peace for army veterans placed them in a disturbing liminal realm between ideas of expansion and questions of “home”. Equally original is the way Sussman reframes The Vicar of Wakefield as a text that addresses population and mobility just as much as The Deserted Village, arguing Goldsmith’s imagined community of sympathetic emigrants and displaced rural workers enables an “affective” rather than “geographical” concept of Britain (p. 113), though it would be worth considering the degree to which the sentimental mode was also involved in questioning all borders.
For literary students, the chapters on Milton, Swift, Defoe, Goldsmith, Sir Walter Scott and Mary Shelley provide stimulating, fresh readings of canonical texts. Beyond transport history scholars, for those interested in mobility studies, it should be added there is little about modes of transport or specific routes. Mobility is here largely an overarching construct, but the debates and avenues of inquiry provide a fantastic jumping off point for new research. For instance, I was left wondering how the concrete experiences of various “crossings” might act as waystations between these shifting ideas of movement. Or how might the Malthusian reframing of population as a temporal problem connect to the development of a future-oriented transport infrastructure in the period? This is, however, a deeply imaginative and rich account of how representations of “peopling the world” transformed ideas of mobility in the long eighteenth century.
