Island Logic, Continent Logic: The Travelogues and Fictions of the First Opium War

Kuehn suggests that the First Opium War (1839–42) signals not only the shift from Britain as a seaborne Empire to one that increasingly focuses on land-based campaigns but also a larger conceptual shift from a worldview that sees oceans dominating the map to one which favours continents and land mass. Hong Kong and the many islands between the future British colony and the Chinese mainland play an important transitional role in this context. Second, and borrowing Roland Greene’s idea of “island logic,” Kuehn then analyses how these two competing clusters of thought—one sea-based, connecting and modular, the other land-based, hegemonic and totalizing—find expression in various Opium War military travelogues and contemporary (sea and island) novels by Frederick Marryat and Charles Dickens.