Political Magic examines British fictions of exploration and colonialism from 1650 to 1750, arguing that narratives of intercultural contact reimagine political categories such as sovereignty and popular power. These fictions refigure the commoner as a superstitious savage encountering Britons as civilizing sovereigns. Authors of these narratives use the colonial scene as a political allegory; just as the sovereign is in some sense exterior to the legal order, so is the colonist exterior to the colonized. These fictions reveal aspects of political thought in this period that official discourse ... More

Political Magic examines British fictions of exploration and colonialism from 1650 to 1750, arguing that narratives of intercultural contact reimagine political categories such as sovereignty and popular power. These fictions refigure the commoner as a superstitious savage encountering Britons as civilizing sovereigns. Authors of these narratives use the colonial scene as a political allegory; just as the sovereign is in some sense exterior to the legal order, so is the colonist exterior to the colonized. These fictions reveal aspects of political thought in this period that official discourse shunted aside-particularly the status of common folk as political subjects, whose “liberty” was proclaimed even as it was undermined in theory and in practice. Political Magic traces fictional efforts to manage these tensions. These texts repeatedly focalize moments of savage wonder, in which “uncivilized” people stand astonished when first witnessing European displays of technological prowess, particularly gunpowder. This repeated motif--the “first gunshot topos”--performs important conceptual work on ideas of consent and political legitimacy. Wonder induces admiration, and admiration transforms the unruly savage into a docile subject. However, as manifestations of force held in abeyance, these technologies also signal the reliance of sovereigns on extreme violence as the foundation of their authority. By examining works by Margaret Cavendish, Daniel Defoe, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, and Eliza Haywood in conjunction with political writing and travelogues, Political Magic locates a subterranean discourse of sovereignty in the century after Hobbes, finding surprising affinities between the government of “savages” and of Britons.