Yet, as the reception of this new work has shown, a backlash is already making itself felt, even as many of the relevant texts are finally becoming widely available and the serious study of Romanticism and empire is just getting underway. Makdisi's powerfully argued book enters a recently trivialized dialogue with a series of claims that some will consider outrageous, amounting to a fundamentally new understanding both of Romanticism and empire. It is this very outrageousness that makes Romantic Imperialism so timely and so welcome. Each of these virtues comes at a certain price. It is refreshing in its willingness to take a strong position and argue it through without piling up qualifications and concessions, even though this same feature makes it misleadingly easy to take exception to this or that statement or reading.
Modernization entails the reinvention both of space and time.
On the other, a program of progress and development is imposed throughout the globe, not least in the metropolitan centers themselves. Romantic writers illustrate these tendencies while attempting to contest them, constructing imaginary refuges from the modernizing process that cannot, however, ultimately withstand the process they throw into relief. Scott's comparisons of Highlanders to Africans or Orientals are anything but incidental. As Edward Waverley moves forward in space, he moves backwards in time, into the pre-modern temporality of the Highlands. Scott's Highlands constitute a colonial space valued for its exoticism and yet destined to be violently brought into the orbit of British modernity.