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’s patronym (which means dark man or boy in French) essentialises the anxieties that structure his career in his racial ancestry. The narrator’s refusal of assumptions of political community, his resistance to being seen as ‘part of Lebrun’s revolution’, ‘an expression of Lebrun’s will’, 84 is realised in his inability to eat the food served to him among Lebrun’s admirers
of a flawed imperial ethos. From the early stages of expansion in the seventeenth century Britain’s role had been defined by a distinct sense of imperial authority, much of it derived from ancient and medieval legacies. The Roman notion of Imperium described the limited but absolute authority of a single individual over a territory embracing more than one political community. In medieval Europe
and to and from the British Isles, suggesting that the empire was understood by British politicians and administrators as a single political community. 7 See, for instance, Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago, 2002