2. Level I: Technological

3. By 1900: ¼ of globe’s surface ruled formally by England (“informal empire” larger). 400 million people formally subject to British sovereignty; more under “influence” Level II: Political / Cultural

4. George Cruikshank, The British Beehive, 1867, etching Level III: Economic

6. Immanuel Wallerstein  Core / Periphery / Semiperiphery  MACRO vs. Micro-structures of analysis, “the longue duree”  “World systems are the only real social systems” (4)  Integrated through markets, not (exactly) state-forms  World empires vs. World economies (2)

7. Edward Said  “Without empire… there is no European novel as we know it” (69).  “In reading a text, one must open it out both to what went into it and to what its author excluded” (67)  Novels “participate in, are part of, contribute to an extremely slow, infinitesimal politics that clarifies, reinforces, perhaps even occasionally advances perceptions and attitudes about England and the world” (75)

8. Fredric Jameson  A growing contradiction between lived experience and structure, … between a phenomenological description of the life of an individual and a more properly structural model of the conditions of existence of that experience” (410)  “PROBLEMS OF FIGURATION” (410)  And the big one….

9. Postmodernism 411

10. What aesthetic forms could be adequate to this new scenario?

11. Bleak House (1853) as World System?  Dickens’ massive novel, inspired by the Great Exhibition (1851)  Mrs. Jellyby: “telescopic philanthropy”