French Literature Reviews - 2026
The Cultural Work of Empire
History, Politics and Society
Carol Watts, The Cultural Work of Empire : The Seven Years’ War and the Imagining of the Shandean State, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2007, 352 p.
ISBN 978 0 7486 2564 2
SUMMARY
This book argues that the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) fostered a profound historical consciousness in British cultural life concerning the boundaries of belonging to community, family, and nation. Global conflict catalyzed a radical reimagining of the state and the subjectivities of those within it.
Laurence Sterne’s distinctive literary voice offers a compelling lens through which to examine the transformations of mid-eighteenth-century British culture. The perils of wartime generated unforeseen liberties and crises in the formation of domestic imperial subjects—repercussions that would echo through anti-slavery movements and colonial conflicts stretching from America to India. Focusing primarily on the period from the 1750s to the 1770s, the study examines the writings of Johnson, Goldsmith, Walpole, Burke, Scott, Wheatley, Sancho, Smollett, Rousseau, Collier, Smith, and Wollstonecraft alongside Sterne’s narratives. It weaves together debates among moral philosophers and philanthropists, political pamphlets, poetry, grammar exercises, and paintings by Kauffman, Hayman, and Wright of Derby, thereby tracing both investments in and resistances to the cultural work of empire.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carol Watts is a Senior Lecturer in the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. She has published extensively on eighteenth-century subjects ranging from architecture to women's temporality, including contributions to Radical Philosophy and South Atlantic Quarterly, as well as articles on Laurence Sterne. Author of Dorothy Richardson (1995), she is currently researching the circulation of eighteenth-century women’s writing and continuing her work on transatlantic relations for an upcoming book entitled The Loss of America.
During the mid-eighteenth century, global conflict and imperial expansion prompted widespread reflection on the nature of community, nationhood, and individual subjectivity. Writers and thinkers across Europe grappled with the domestic and international repercussions of wartime crises, which intersected with emerging debates on liberty, moral philosophy, and social order. This period of intense political and cultural transformation laid important groundwork for later discussions surrounding colonial governance and anti-slavery movements.
Readers interested in eighteenth-century British literature, imperial history, and cultural studies may find this volume relevant. Carol Watts, The Cultural Work of Empire : The Seven Years’ War and the Imagining of the Shandean State, examines the writings of Laurence Sterne alongside a diverse range of figures including Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Phillis Wheatley, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Drawing on political pamphlets, poetry, and visual arts, the work traces how various authors and artists engaged with the cultural complexities of empire during the decades surrounding the Seven Years War.