Published on Romantic Circles ( https://www.rc.umd.edu) Home > Heinowitz, "The Allure of the Same: Robert Southey's Welsh Indians and the Rhetoric of Good Colonialism" Heinowitz, "The Allure of the Same: Robert Southey's Welsh Indians and the Rhetoric of Good Colonialism" Sullen Fires Across the Atlantic: Essays in Transatlantic Romanticism Sullen Fires Across the Atlantic: Essays in Transatlantic Romanticism The Allure of the Same: Robert Southey's Welsh Indians and the Rhetoric of Good Colonialism Rebecca Cole Heinowitz, Bard College "[S]ince the period of the conquest. . . Western Europe has tried to assimilate the other, to do away with an exterior alterity." (Todorov 247) Much has been made over the last two decades of the power relationships that inhere in the opposition between selfhood and otherness, particularly within the context of British colonial expansion. Often overlooked, however, is the complex rhetoric of sameness that attended British imperialism in India, and more importantly, in Spanish America, during the early decades of the nineteenth century. The rhetoric of otherness was useful in justifying colonialism by the emphasis it placed on the necessity of improving allegedly benighted and savage peoples. The rhetoric of sameness, on the other hand, functioned to allay the anxieties of an era beset by the horrors of colonial mismanagement by stressing the naturalness and moral uprightness of imperialism. The most famous instance of such colonial mismanagement was that of Warren Hastings, Governor General of India, whom Edmund Burke condemned in no uncertain terms: He is never corrupt without he is cruel. He never dines without creating a famine. He feeds on the indigent, the decaying, the ruined. . . not like the generous eagle, who feeds upon a living, reluctant, equal prey: No, he is like the ravenous vulture, who feeds upon the dead. . . Mr. Hastings feasts in the dark alone; like a wild beast he groans in a corner over the dead and dying.(Trial of Warren Hastings 64) [1] 1. In the most widely attended public trial of the period, Burke brought to light a staggering exegesis of Britain's colonial guilt. With deliberate awareness, Burke attempted to do for late eighteenth-century Britain what Bartolomé de Las Casas had done for Spain over two hundred years earlier: to exonerate his nation by exposing its violence and greed before the very leaders responsible for its colonial policy. Pleading his case before the court of Ferdinand and Isabella, Las Casas declaimed: 2. Heinowitz, "The Allure of the Same: Robert Southey's Welsh Indi... https://www.rc.umd.edu/print/praxis/sullenfires/heinowitz/heinowi... 1 of 19 4/2/18, 3:02 PM