Empire, Barbarism, and Civilisation: Captain Cook, William Hodges and the Return to the Pacific

by Harriet Guest

Overview

The artist William Hodges accompanied Captain Cook on his second voyage to the South Pacific in 1772–5. His extraordinarily vivid images, read against the fascinating journals of Cook and his companions, reveal as much about European cultures and historiography as about the peoples they visited. In this lively and original book, Harriet Guest discusses Hodges's dramatic landscapes and portraits alongside written accounts of the voyages and in the context of the theories of civilisation which shaped European perceptions – theories drawn from the works of philosophers of the Scottish enlightenment such as Adam Smith and John Millar. She argues that the voyagers resorted to diverse or incompatible models of progress in successive encounters with different groups of islanders, and shows how these models also structured metropolitan views of the voyagers and of Hodges's work. This fully illustrated study offers a fresh perspective on eighteenth-century representations of gender, colonialism and exploration.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521881944
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	12/20/2007
Pages:	270
Product dimensions:	7.20(w) x 9.96(h) x 0.71(d)

About the Author

Harriet Guest is Professor of English in the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York.

Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. The great distinction; 2. Curiosity and desire; 3. Curiously marked; 4. Terms of trade in Tonga and Vanuatu; 5. New Zealand colonial romance; 6. Ornament and use in London; Epilogue: the effects of peace and the consequences of war in 1794-5; Bibliography.

Editorial Reviews

"As Guest shows in her articulate and comprehensive study, the visual representations of the second voyage, in particular, are divided by the competing demands of Enlightenment theories of culture, on the one hand, and the historical moments of encounter, exchange, and violence between the British and European voyagers and the peoples of the South Pacific, on the other"
-Pamela Cheek, University of New Mexico

From the Publisher