ROBERT SOUTHEY'S IBERI AN ORIENTALISM: THE 'HIS TORY OF THE MOORS' PROJECT(1)

In the 1830s, the British Romantic historian and Poet Laureate Robert Southey planned to write a history of the Moors. Little is known about this project but we may be certain that Southey embarked on it since the publication of the work was announced in the preface of S. A. Dunham's History of Spain and Portugal and in advertisements and catalogues of Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia. It is not possible to know today how far the project went because the evidence that has survived is scarce. Nonetheless, I claim in this paper that two long articles that Southey published in 1827 and 1829 should be regarded as early attempts of this historiographical enterprise. These two texts, the importance of which seems to have eluded those who have studied Southey's work, briefly narrate the history of the presence of the (so-called) Moors in the Iberian Peninsula. In both articles, the British historian depicts the character of the Moors and the relationship between them and the Christians. I argue in this paper that both Iberian Muslims and Christians represent for Southey the "Other", whose values, traditions and collective personality are regarded as the antithesis of those that he believed were manifested in nineteenth-century Britain. This representation is indicative of the civilisational superiority of the British in order to justify their hegemonic position in Mediterranean Europe as well as in the Arab world.