Conclusion

Literature, especially belles-lettres and poetry, played a prominent role in the education of imperial elites in the pre-modern age, from ancient Greece and Rome to China, the Middle East, and the Persianate world.

Ideas of the classical, and texts canonized as “classics,” were influential in shaping imperial and antiimperial literary sensibilities in these pre-modern empires as well as in their modern successors. Literature was important in defining the cultural and aesthetic dimensions of pre-modern empires, and it remained so in modern colonialism, when the growth of printing, the spread of literacy, more extensive reading publics, and the emergence of the novel as a dominant literary genre, intensified its role in shaping empire as a literary, cultural, and linguistic process. Both imperial and antiimperial literatures dramatized and interrogated distinctions between civilization and barbarism. Because empires were composite, multiethnic, and multilingual entities, imperial and anti-imperial literatures could be syncretistic in form and content and in their linguistic textures. In the modern era, texts could therefore be simultaneously nationalist and cosmopolitan in outlook. The cosmopolitanism of anti-imperial socialist literature, for example, reflects how empires were crucibles for the intersection between political and literary imaginations, with the circulation of ideas, texts, and bodies of knowledge expanding the horizons of writers and poets, and deepening their practices of writing in opposition to the empires that nurtured them in conflicting and problematic ways. Roberto Schwarz mentions how, in the case of Brazilian literary culture, writers were confronted with a “vast and heterogeneous, but structured field, which is a historical consequence” of empire and “an artistic origin’”¹⁶⁷ This was also evident in the cosmopolitan eclecticism of Indian literatures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Writers in the subcontinent drew upon multiple literary traditions and forms, both Indian and European, in a variety of languages. Their freedom to move across and appropriate the resources and conventions of a range of literary traditions, made available partly as a result of empire, was very much in evidence in their work.1⁶⁸ A cosmopolitan range of references, multilayered historical sensibilities, and a variety of argumentative techniques from different philosophical cultures also characterize the writing of Indian political texts in this period.¹⁶⁹ Thus, while empires were often politically and economically oppressive, they expanded the range of creative materials, literary possibilities, and opportunities for literary experiments available to authors and poets. As such, their creative possibilities in the literary field have to be kept in view alongside their oppressive social, economic, and political hierarchies.

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume One: The Imperial Experience. Oxford University Press,2020. — 584 p.. 2020

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