other side of the coin in this section represents a more conventionally scientific temper – though this in itself is in no way free of an underlying racist attitude, as is evidenced by the presuppositions of the surgeon Charles Bell’s ostensibly objective account of the human skull and its implications for concepts of artistic expression. A very different example of science at work on culture is furnished by the French expedition to Egypt of c.1800. Along with the earlier Cook voyages to the Pacific, few enterprises point so clearly to the dual nature of the European Enlightenment. On the one hand, Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, predicated on his own assumption of the democratic purport of the French revolution and its transmutation into an imperial enterprise (albeit one still notionally flying the flag of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity), was a blatantly imperialist project designed in geopolitical terms to cut off the British from their burgeoning empire in India. But on the other side, the involvement of a small army of scientists, savants and artists produced for the first time a comprehensive mapping of the civilization of ancient Egypt on a scale far beyond anything undertaken before. Although there had been serious antiquarian study of Egyptian history, religion and artefacts developing through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this had been seriously hampered by an inability to read the Egyptian language. The Napoleonic expedition to Egypt, through the publications it inspired and the subsequent translation of the hieroglyphics which it substantially enabled, laid the groundwork for modern Egyptology.
A later example also involving the intersection of art and science comes towards the end of the section in John L. Stephens’s account of the ruins of the ancient Mayan civilization. Partly this is conveyed by his penchant for exhaustively detailed verbal description (something also at work in Edward Moor’s earlier descriptions of the sculptures of deities of the ‘Hindu pantheon’). But it is also demonstrated by Stephens’s interest in the visual representation of ruins, involving both print technology and early photography.
The second section, IIIB, shifts the focus from science and philosophy to the imagination, thus following up the thread that starts with Section IIA. Section IIIB includes extracts from texts by figures associated with literary Romanticism, ranging from Coleridge through Byron and De Quincey to Tennyson. Visual artists represented include John Constable, the Scotsman David Roberts and J. A. D. Ingres, as well as substantial extracts from the correspondence and notes made by Delacroix during his visit to North Africa in 1832.
Neither Constable nor Ingres travelled outside Europe, and indeed Constable’s subject matter remained resolutely English. Roberts’s travels to Egypt and the Holy Land were a fairly straightforward commercial enterprise intended, and as it turned out, successfully so, to provide him with material for a career as a painter of fashionable Oriental subjects, with a dash of romantic melancholy for the transience of antique grandeur. Delacroix’s situation was more complex. The enabling factor behind his journey was Delacroix’s connections in high society that made it possible for him to satisfy his romantic attraction to the Orient by accompanying a diplomatic mission intended to secure France’s developing imperial interests in North Africa. It is these circumstances of Delacroix’s being in North Africa at all that have come to overshadow his reports in some recent post‐colonialist accounts. Both Delacroix’s political conservatism and the conclusions which hostile critics have drawn about his supposed attitudes to women have come in some quarters to overshadow his achievements as a painter. It is worth recalling that, for no less a figure than Baudelaire, Delacroix was the pre‐eminent modern artist. In our view, it would be damaging to ignore the richness of Delacroix’s insights in terms of their impact on the emerging technical radicalism that was the cornerstone of artistic modernism as a formation. No less significant in the present context is the qualified admiration he felt for the different culture he encountered. It is doubtless a descendant of the ‘noble savage’ tradition inherited from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, doubtless too, a symptom of his discomfort with emergent modernity, but it is also a precursor of the ‘primitivism’ that was to be such a hallmark of later artistic modernism. Although this amounts to relatively little, when compared with the extent to which the Impressionists and later the Expressionists were influenced in their core technical radicalism by the art of other cultures they encountered, nonetheless Delacroix’s experience of what he saw in North Africa – natural and human – had an impact on the technical constitution of his art: on both his colour and his facture. And that was both a harbinger of what was to come, and perhaps, with benefit of hindsight, one of the first really significant cracks in the edifice of the post‐Renaissance academy.
The third section, IIIC, shifts the angle of vision to include selections that explicitly attempt to intervene in the changing realities of the world. These range from Tom Paine’s epochal statement of the Rights of Man to Lord Macaulay’s then widely praised but now notorious Minute on Indian education. Here Macaulay explicitly distances himself from the arguments of earlier British commentators such as William Jones, who had evinced sympathy for the deep civilization of India, and argues instead for the abandonment of both indigenous Indian languages and the incumbent Persian language of the Mughal courts in favour of an exclusive focus on English for purposes of Indian education. Macaulay here follows in the footsteps of the earlier Anglophile James Mill, whose enormous treatise on India opens with an argument for it being unimportant ever actually to go there – a sentiment which says more about the presuppositions underlying the British imperial presence in India than any number of putatively scientific surveys of Indian culture and society. Although cast in the language 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.
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