Barbarian nations in a civilizing empire: naturalizing the nation within the British Empire 1770-1870

This thesis examines the emergence of the nation in the British Empire in the process of thinking about empire, economy and biology during the late-Enlightenment and the nineteenth century. A key aspect of this, Knapman argues, was concern over the dialectic of civilization and order as it related to the barbarian and the savage. The notion of the barbarian grounded the European nations in time and therefore constructing a sense of origin and particularism. Equally the savage and the barbarian placed non-European cultures in time. The thesis draws on a range of writers from eighteenth and nineteenth centuries such as Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, David Hume, Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, James Cowles Prichard, Robert Knox and many other lesser-known figures. This is related to an examination of the nation in British representations of Southeast Asia, including colonial officials such as Stamford Raffles, John Crawfurd, and James Brooke who produced encyclopaedic accounts of their experiences in Asia. The thesis argues that while the complex grammar of the British Empire divided the world into spheres of civilisation and barbarism, it retained a special place for barbarians within the core and thus allowed for the naturalisation of nations within the context of an empire of civilizing others