The Representation of Foreign Countries in English Literature

Great Britain as a worldwide system of colonies dominated the world for some three centuries. The first uncertain British attempts to establish overseas settlements were made as early as the sixteenth century. Huge economic and trade success, plus maritime expansion, resulted in the seventeenth century in the establishment of settlements in North America and the West Indies. The East India Company established its first trading posts in India at the beginning of the seventeenth century and the same company helped to establish British supremacy in Penang, Singapore, Malacca and Labuan. The first permanent British settlement in Africa was on James Island in the Gambia River in 1661.

After World War I and even more so after World War II nationalist movements started to develop in most of the British colonies and the first colony to gain its independence was India in 1947, which still retained an association with Great Britain, though. India's and Pakistan's independence was followed by Ceylon's and Burma's in 1948, and so, one country after another became free. Britain's remaining colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean Islands achieved their independence in the 1960s. The very last important British colony, Hong Kong, was returned to China in 1997. By then, virtually nothing remained of the empire.

If you look at this impressive colonial history, it might seem that the British, of all nations, should be most used to living side by side with the foreign, exotic countries, strange cultures and nations. But on the evidence of English literature, this is not always so. Furthermore, it is not uncommon to find feelings like uneasiness and fear, ignorance and superiority toward foreign countries in English books.

Good examp...

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... to impose English ways and views onto other nations. A good example of this is Mr. Waddington in Maugham's Painted Veil.

In the two books discussed above, and probably in much other English literature as well, we can still see that the cleavage between the English and other nations was not so big and impossible to bridge. Thanks to the amount of the people who believed in equal human rights and right to chose their own way, in the middle of the twentieth century the social and political beliefs started to change. English "masters" began to see that their "servants" have faces similar to their own, and behind those faces there is the whole world of new, fascinating culture to discover. I would like to end with words from E. M. Forster: ."..is a globe of men who are trying to reach one another (...) by help of goodwill plus culture and intelligence." (Ford: p. 27).