Art in Theory. Группа авторов

of administration rather than religion, Macaulay’s Minute is both an eloquent statement of his belief in the ‘civilizing mission of Empire’ and a calculated denigration of the more open attitudes of his predecessors in the eighteenth century. For an explicitly religious statement of the twin values of civilization and Christianity, matched by a swingeing attack on indigenous culture, one need look no further than William Ellis’s Polynesian Researches: a text that the historian of changing representations of the Pacific, Rod Edmond, assesses as having been as influential on the nineteenth century as the very different reports of Bougainville and Cook had been on the eighteenth (Edmond, Representing the South Pacific, 1997, p. 105).

In addition to such statements of emerging nineteenth‐century imperialism, we have also sought to include a selection of texts expressing various forms of resistance to it. These include dissenting voices coming from within the Euro‐American centre of the emerging capitalist world‐system, as well as two voices talking back to Empire from its periphery. One of these latter is the Persian traveller Mirza Abu Taleb Khan; we reprint extracts responding to his experience of the material culture he encountered during a visit to Britain and Ireland at the turn of the nineteenth century. The other selection is from the Indian historian Ram Raz’s pioneering effort to write a history of Hindu architecture, which was published as early as 1834. This was the only Hindu Indian source cited by Owen Jones in his later Grammar of Ornament published in the wake of the Great Exhibition of 1851. In addition to the already mentioned extract from Paine’s Rights of Man, texts by Blake and Wordsworth have been included in this section rather than in IIIB precisely because they relate to particular events impacting on the geopolitics of the period: the American and French revolutions and the Haitian revolution against slavery. Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ is included here for its continuing defence of the values of liberty and its implicit criticism of the modern tyrant Napoleon, as well as his predecessors in antiquity. For similar reasons, one of the few works of visual art by a major artist to highlight the iniquities of the Atlantic slave trade is also included in Section IIIC: J. M. W. Turner’s Slave Ship of 1840. This work is of such signal importance that we have included Turner’s own verse ‘Fallacies of Hope’, which he appended to the frame of the painting when it was displayed at the Royal Academy, and two commentaries on it. Ruskin’s famous assessment of the picture as one of Turner’s greatest nonetheless relegates its subject matter to a footnote, while the novelist Thackeray’s assessment is a reminder of how pervasive racist attitudes had become in Western culture by the middle years of the nineteenth century.