Walter Scott’s “classical form of the historical novel” establishes a plot of modern national formation through political absorption into a greater imperial union through the dialectical clash of opposing forces. Relocating agency from individual persons to an impersonal historical process, the novel generates soft or weak protagonists who waver between political allegiance and – with the biologization of historical purpose later in the nineteenth century – between dispositions of gender, sex, and race. The historical novel is refitted for Victorian imperial romance and its ideological program of “Greater Britain,” a global union of English-speaking peoples, in Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! Historical novels written in the imperial peripheries – in Quebec and Bengal – adapt the “Greater Britain” plot and destabilize it from within. Aubert de Gaspé’s Les anciens Canadiens justifies the conquest of New France through an equivalence between French settlers and Scottish Highlanders, which is derailed by a third group the Indians, the actual natives whose elimination secures the imperial dispensation. In Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Anandamath, an eighteenth-century Hindu rebellion against Mughal overlords prepares the way for the future ascendancy of an independent Indian nation in which synthesis with imperial Britain is only a passing stage.