Abstract
If the perceived emergence of a new world order can inspire, it can also threaten, even for those considered in the vanguard. “The First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” published in January 1851, saw Fraser’s Magazine celebrating Britain’s standing in the world. But the journal was also drawn to consider “Whether the nation still retains those energies and talents which have raised it to such an unexampled pitch of greatness, or whether it exhibits any marks of that degeneracy which history records as having been, sooner or later, the fate of all great and powerful empires?” While this troubling question was thus related to previous eras, there was also a pressing sense of historical specificity. The article began with reference to the impact and effect of modern times, which were characterized by commercial freedom, “the rapid movement and incessant whirl of material things,” and the overturn of “the old sluggish mediaeval mould.”1 Famously, Marx and Engels cast industrial capitalism’s energy with regard to the dissolution of all “fixed, fast-frozen relations”; the bourgeois epoch was about the “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitations.”2
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Notes
Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983), p. 15.
Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (1855–57; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 331.
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John Stuart Mill, The Principles of Political Economy with Some of their Applications to Social Philosophy (1848; London: Routledge, 1891), p. 81.
Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), p. 271.
See Daniel R. Headrick, “The Communications Revolution,” The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 127–210.
Michael Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 241.
C. W. Grant, Bombay Cotton and Indian Railways (London: Longman, 1850), p. 82.
Mrs. [Catherine] Napier, The Lay of the Palace (London: Oliver, 1852), p. 12.
E. D. Chattaway, Railways, Their Capital and Dividends (London: Weale, 1855–56), pp. 132–3.
Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857; London: Penguin, 1997), p. 18
Samir Amin, “Globalism or Apartheid on a Global Scale?” in The Modern World System in the Longue Durée, ed. Immanuel Wallerstein (Boulder: Paradigm, 2004), pp. 5–30 (5).
Doreen Massey, “Is the World Really Shrinking?” A Festival of Ideas for the Future–Open University Radio Lecture, BBC Radio Three (9 November 2006).
Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization (London: Verso, 1995), p. 30.
William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 81–2.
Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (New York: Holt, 2003), p. 45.
Cora Kaplan, Victoriana–Histories, Fictions, Criticisms (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 143–4.
T. H. Lacy, Novelty Fair; or, Hints for 1851: An Exceedingly Premature and Thoroughly Apropos Revue ([1850]), p. 10; “Foreign Families of Distinction in London,” Punch 21 (1851), p. 135.
Thomas Onwhyn, Mr. and Mrs. John Brown’s Visit to London to See the Great Exposition of All Nations (London: Ackerman, n.d.), quoted in Auerbach, Great Exhibition, pp. 174–5.
See Helen Morris, Portrait of a Chef: The Life ofAlexis Soyer, Sometime Chef to the Reform Club (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), p. 104.
Grace Moore, Dickens and Empire: Discourses of Class, Race and Colonialism in the Works of Charles Dickens (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 70.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 87.
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© 2009 Paul Young
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Young, P. (2009). Pax Britannica. In: Globalization and the Great Exhibition. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230594319_5
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