Poetry, peripheries and empire opponents of empire to its continuation After 1807 liberal writers felt able (however myopically) to portray Britain’s empire as one in which native peoples received liberty and law, in contrast to their enslavement and exploitation in the empires of Spain, Portugal, France and the Ottomans And in this revised view of empire, the agents of civilization were not only naval officers (who now patrolled the seas to stamp out illegal slave-trading) but also missionaries The missionary movement began in 1795, when the London Missionary Society was founded and sent mostly preachers to the South Sea islands that Cook had recently visited By the early nineteenth century the movement had expanded, with Southey’s favorable reviews of missionary reports helping to bring the movement to the notice of the middle-class public He worked in tandem with William Wilberforce, who led a parliamentary campaign on behalf of missions By 1813, the campaign had succeeded in forcing a reluctant East India Company, afraid that attempts to proselytize might lead to disturbances among its Hindu and Muslim subjects, to support Christian missionaries in its territories A new justification of empire was now under way: British rule brought Christian civilization as well as liberty This ideology in turn produced a modification of a popular genre that had itself been bound up with imperial issues since its origins – the verse romance Ever since 1704, when the Arabian Nights Tales began to appear in French translation, poets had occasionally tried their hands at stories of love set in an exotic East Until the 1820s, however, such stories usually displayed no more than a smattering of Oriental color William Collins said of his “Persian Eclogues” (1742) that they might as well have been called Irish as Persian: their exoticism was non-specific By the second half of the eighteenth century, a more detailed appropriation of Eastern culture was beginning In France, Germany, and Britain a new generation of scholars was translating Arabic and Persian poetry from manuscript In doing so, they brought far more precise and historically aware versions of Eastern cultures back to Europe than had previously been the case These versions had their limitations since the scholars’ understanding was largely textual, made from European libraries rather than after immersion in the contemporary Middle East William Jones was the foremost scholar to bring about this transformation in Britain “Persian” Jones, as he was nicknamed, used his astonishing facility as a linguist to translate ancient Arabic and Persian poets.13 And Jones was not only a translator, but a pioneering cultural historian who replaced Collins’s vague and generic Orientalism with a sophisticated argument for the importance of Arabic and of Persian poetry as intense art emerging from distinct cultural traditions and specific geographic conditions By 1783 Jones 185 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008