In this chapter, I intend to discuss not the historical accuracy or inaccuracy of Orientalist representations in the nineteenth century but the Oriental fantasy elements at play in British fiction in the Victorian age, the Orientalist conventions that writers drew on for their imaginative work. This means I distinguish between fiction set in the Orient (the genre that stages in fictional form the complex interchanges between East and West) and “Orientalist discourse” (a vast body of writings of multiple genres that Said draws on in his book Orientalism: the body of work produced by professional and amateur Orientalists). In particular, I am interested in exploring a larger theme that gives some shape to this diverse body of fiction or at least the canonical representatives of it: what one might call the gradual displacement of the focus of Oriental fiction from a fascination with Oriental object to fascination with European subject, its gradual movement from a preoccupation with what Disraeli called the “Great Asian Mystery” to foregrounding what I am calling “The Great European Mystery.” That early twentieth-century British fiction focuses intently on British character and empire, anyone familiar with the work of Forster, Orwell, Greene and others can attest, but it is prevalent in nineteenth-century canonical fiction set in the Orient as well.

In nineteenth-century British fiction, replication, in the sense of both repetition and duplication, seems to be a common feature, especially of the fiction we now classify as canonical. In this essay I will mainly be using the term “replication” interchangeably with “repetition” but will argue that both differ from the semantically close term “representation” for the obvious reason that a “representation” need not resemble what it represents. It merely has to signify what it represents, and the form that signifier takes need not resemble what it represents any more closely than Ferdinand de Saussure's drawing of a tree in his Course in General Linguistics “resembles” the English word “tree.” Iconic representation, in other words, is by no means the only form of representation, as the American pragmatist philosopher C. S. Peirce noted some time ago (Peirce).

A structural feature of much novelistic plotting but particularly prominent in the Bildungsroman, repetition, as Peter Brooks argues, is central to establishing metaphorical meaning effects generated at the level of plot (Brooks 503–5). At the level of character in nineteenthcentury fiction, doubled characters are often used to insinuate a close thematic linkage between seemingly opposite character traits, such as, for instance, respectability and monstrosity.

Middle-class Victorians were, to put it mildly, of two minds on the subject of “bureaucracy.” While the term itself was always used in a pejorative sense (it was principally associated with inefficiency, the suppression of individual freedom, and what would come to be called economic “irrationality”), Victorian Britons were nonetheless mightily proud of the accomplishments of both their efficiently-managed businesses at home and their well-drilled armies abroad. By 1871, many had also been greatly impressed by the German military machine, which seemed to have demonstrated through its rapid but crushing victory over France that large-scale organization and efficiency were not necessarily incompatible things.

The political leaders most impressed with T. E. Lawrence's deeds of valor — Lord Curzon and Winston Churchill — sought to reconceive the British imperial mission in the aftermath of World War I, and their reconceptualization would place greater emphasis not only on the indirect exercise of power but on a new (at least public) commitment to the eventual independence of the lands Britain ruled. The Common-wealth idea, which benefited from Lawrence's public support, was one new idea which seemed to offer a chance for the British government to retain its colonial empire while making fine adjustments in the way colonialism was portrayed to the public. In the immediate postwar era, as Kathryn Tidrick has said, “The Commonwealth became to politicians and men of affairs what Indirect Rule was to the DO — a chance to display those qualities which justified them in the possession of an empire, and thereby ensure its perpetuation.”

Another new idea was “mandate” rule. Lord Cromer's view of imperial service as a moral duty the conqueror performs for the conquered seems to have finally become official policy in this period, with the acceptance by the British government of League of Nations' “mandates” to rule a number of territories said to be “on the road” to independence.

Although not a colonial official himself, Rudyard Kipling, when he returned to India in 1882 to become sub-editor of the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore and begin his career as a serious writer of fiction, found himself among hordes of English who were. In fact, the note of defensive self-assertion which sounds through Kipling's “know-it-all” attitude in his early writing seems to serve a dual purpose: to represent in fictional form the attitudes so common among the types of English officials he knew in India, and to express a more complicated, if somewhat transparently desperate, longing for the expert knowledge usually available only to credentialed bureaucrats. Not only do many of Kipling's tales center themselves on the figure of the solitary administrator, a bureaucrat who is essentially alone yet the center of a complex web of power and information systems, but his work often presents an “official” view of the cosmic order as a seemingly suitable metaphor for cosmic order itself.

When the Gladstone government dispatched General Charles Gordon to Khartoum in January of 1884, it assigned him a confusing mission that was the inevitable outgrowth of incoherent policy. Convinced that the Mahdist uprising was not worth the cost of suppressing, the British government seems to have envisioned the impossible: that Gordon, renowned for exceptional powers of “personal influence,” would be able to stage a withdrawal of Europeans and Egyptian troops without needing a costly imperial army to keep the Mahdi at bay during the withdrawal. To be sure, the government took its time in approving the mission, for Gladstone himself ordered it only after the public outcry in Britain, carefully nurtured by W. T. Stead's Pall Mall Gazette, which editorialized that the triumph of the Mahdi would inevitably lead to the reestablishment of slavery in the Sudan, had become too politically powerful to be resisted any longer.

Sub-Saharan Africa in the years before the “Scramble” was a place about which Europeans knew comparatively little. While centuries of European and Arab slave-trading left both West and East coasts dotted with slaving stations, Europeans seldom ventured far inland from the coasts in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, principally because they lacked detailed maps of the interior and feared the threat posed by tropical diseases. These two conditions of African exploration would remain largely unchanged until the nineteenth century. The African interior (and especially the Congo watershed, covered as it was with forbidding jungle punctured here and there by majestic rivers) would remain largely uncharted until the invention of the steamboat made upriver travel practical. And the best-known tropical disease — malaria — would remain an unmasterable threat until quinine came into widespread use during the Victorian age. For this reason, the steamboat and quinine were probably the two items of material culture most responsible for making the nineteenth-century European exploration and exploitation of the African continent possible.

Britain's role in Sub-Saharan Africa in the early nineteenth century was shaped by its position as the world's most important sea power.

This book has been a book about management: the management of the self in the interest of the management of others, and the management of feeling to which the bureaucrat must submit. In asserting a connection between that mysterious thing the English call “character” and the colonial enterprise, I have suggested that the unique demands of the work that is rule led to the discursive construction of a type of bureaucratic subject designed to rule as unobtrusively as possible, a subject designed to meet the taxing psychological demands of Indirect Rule.

Adapting a notion of the subject made available to them by Victorian novelistic culture and already put into administrative practice in the Punjab of the Lawrences, turn-of-the-century promoters of empire such as Cromer and Lugard sought to formulate a system of rule for the colonies that would procure for imperial rule the appearance of innocence that grand moral projects commanded in the Victorian middle-class mind. By demanding much personal sacrifice from would-be administrators, the theory of Indirect Rule evolved into a philosophy of government over the conquered masquerading as a philosophy of the self-government of the bureaucrat. In designing this theory, the theorists of Indirect Rule were able to insure a role for a new kind of professional colonial manager in a twentieth-century world order characterized by gradual decolonization, for, when the goals of rule are conceived in instrumentalist terms, the means of rule — bureaucracy — becomes a powerful machine capable of generating new business for itself, as it generates new goals to replace its founding purpose, and supplies new gratifications in place of the old.

An explorer visits a penal colony one day to observe an apparatus. The guardian of the apparatus is an officer, who, without being asked, proceeds to explain the history of the ingenious machine to the explorer. The machine, it seems, was originally a product of the fertile imagination of the exalted “old Commandant,” who was responsible for “the organization of the whole penal colony” in former days.

As the explorer soon discovers, the apparatus itself is no ordinary engine of torture. It is, in fact, a writing machine, the “Designer.” Equipped with a harrow fitted out with a sharp needle, the apparatus is designed to write into the naked flesh of the prisoner the commandment that the prisoner is charged with having disobeyed. It does so by making numerous slow passes across the body of the prisoner while he is strapped helplessly to its bed. While the first of these etchings creates superficial wounds, each time the apparatus finishes a complete sentence, the needle, which is fitted into the arm of the apparatus, returns to the beginning again to make another cut — each subsequent pass producing progressively deeper marks in the prisoner's body as the apparatus embellishes its initial sentence.

With the coming of World War I, the first general European war since early in the industrial age, one begins to glimpse the appearance, for the first time, of the recognizably modern bureaucratic military state: one featuring universal conscription and the deliberate reorientation of domestic productive capacity to the manufacture of war materiel on a vast scale. When the war was over and its cost, measured in masses of slaughtered young men, was weighed against the relatively minor adjustment of the European balance of power that the Versailles Treaty imposed, many Europeans concluded that the mechanized slaughter of modern warfare rendered obsolete all previous ways of measuring the efficacy of individual agency and the glory of battle.