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1 - Politics of colonial sensation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

James Epstein
James Epstein
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
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Summary

Within a month of the news of Britain's capture of Trinidad having reached London, Covent Garden theater registered the victory. On May 11, 1797, the career of the opera Abroad and at Home was interrupted by the performance of “A New Musical, Dramatic Spectacle, called The Surrender of Trinidad or, Safe Moor'd At Last.” The theater provided a venue for empire's penetration of metropolitan culture. Events of the day, particularly the war with France and its allies, were quickly brought to the stage. These were desperate times for Britons, abroad and at home. The day following the first performance of Surrender of Trinidad, the mass naval mutiny at Spithead spread to the royal fleet at the Nore, threatening to leave British shores unprotected from French invasion. The same number of the True Briton which carried news of a British fleet transporting troops under the command of General Sir Ralph Abercromby as poised to attack Trinidad, reported Victor Hugues, the French revolutionary commissioner based on Guadeloupe, as ready to invade the British island of Dominica at the first opportunity. By this time, moreover, it was clear to the government that Britain would abandon its four-year occupation of the revolutionary island of Saint-Domingue, ending an operation that proved staggeringly expensive in terms of monetary funds and military lives.

Type
Chapter
Information
Scandal of Colonial Rule
Power and Subversion in the British Atlantic during the Age of Revolution
 , pp. 13 - 45
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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