File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2000/postcolonial.0007, message 73


Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2000 12:42:58 -0400 (EDT)
From: Joseph Flanagan III <flanagan-AT-odin.english.udel.edu>
Subject: RE: Empires Re-done


I had the same response...there's no real short answer to the question of
how to compare Roman and British empires. You may, however, want to
reconceive the quesiton a bit. Perhaps you could look at how the British
themselves saw the comparison, and thus focus on how the Roman Empire was
represented within British/English texts (the distinction is used to
signify writing before the 18th century. As far as I know, there is only
one queen of Great Britain named Elizabeth. That doesn't prevent people
from talking about Elizabeth II--which says a lot about how the term
"British" simply disguises the "English" conquest of the isles). 
Renaissance literature could be a good place to start--Shakespeare's Roman
plays as an example of proto-British Empire, for example. There's also the
famous opening scene in *Heart of Darkness* Joe 




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