![]() "Countries are given histories that can portray areas of soil as living social, economic, and political beings, whereas oceans are viewed primarily as vast and empty moats between those histories" (Steele 1986: vi). "Although history is ostensibly about people, it has tended to become overwhelmingly about 'lands,'" writes Ian Steele. Historians have only just begun to take history offshore to ask questions about oceans and islands. At this point, the insular imagination moved on to the Pacific, where a whole new mythical geography was in the process of formation. By the end of the eighteenth century virtually every Atlantic island had been found, explored, and exploited to the fullest extent possible. In the seventeenth century, mainland colonies of plunder and extraction were overshadowed by sea-borne empires in which islands played a central role economically and strategically. In time, however, these imagined islands were gradually displaced from the charts by those whose value was more economic than speculative. It was on an island that the fiction of the modern individual was first represented. In the course of the sixteenth century, islands became the favored places for locating paradise and Utopia. So powerful was European islomania at this time that even lands that were later to be recognized as continents, the Americas and Australia, were conceived of in insular terms. Covering a historical span from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the contributors include literary and postcolonial critics, historians and geographers.īut it was in the period roughly 1400-1800 that islands of the mind played the most prominent role. The collection argues the need for an island-based theory within postcolonial studies and suggests how this might be constructed. Islands were often seen as natural colonies or settings for ideal communities but they were also used as dumping grounds for the unwanted, a practice which has continued into the twentieth century. The collection addresses the significance of islands in the Atlantic economy of the eighteenth century, the exploration of the Pacific, the important role played by islands in the process of decolonisation, and island-oriented developments in postcolonial writing. This study considers how island dwellers conceived of themselves and their relation to proximate mainlands, and examines the fascination that islands have long held in the European imagination. This innovative collection of essays explores the ways in which islands have been used, imagined and theorised, both by island dwellers and continentals. ![]()
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