ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the contention that The Purple Land replaced history with geography, as it considers how William Henry Hudson's narrative rejected a British imperial project bound up with the enlightened rationale, economic imperatives and industrialised advances of the modern world-system. Hudson was born in Argentina in 1841, the son of emigrants from the United States who farmed cattle and sheep on the pampa. The Purple Land That England Lost was his first novel; it appeared with the subtitle Travels and Adventures in the Banda Oriental in two slim volumes towards the end of 1885. In line with Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener's insistence that 'The romance of the outlandsas a genre, breaks up the globe', the 'green world' charted by Hudson's novel can be understood to have worked against what Williams describes as the troubling 'prospect of fin du globe, the end of the world not in time but in space'.
