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This course will examine literature that tries to make sense of the British empire as a cultural, political, and economic project. How did British writers use literature to develop their own understandings of what it meant to be a part of, and rule, an empire? Did the novel allow them to imaginatively traverse geographical distance and cultural differences? How could poetry help them justify the subjection of strangers? What kinds of critiques and defenses of the imperial project did drama permit? Course texts will be drawn from writers working for and against the British empire around the world over multiple centuries, including colonial officials and apologists like John Dryden, Daniel Defoe, Robert Rogers, and Charles Dickens, as well as indigenous, African, and otherwise colonized writers Mary Prince, E. Pauline Johnson, Toru Dutt, and Dean Mohomet.