ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Barry Unsworth’s historical novel, Sacred Hunger (1992), which depicts British colonialism and the eighteenth-century slave trade, demonstrating how its focus on sea voyage and the slave ship complies with the revisionist accounts of the early modern history that reject traditional “terracentric” optics to acknowledge the significance of the seas in shaping modernity and modern globalism. Through the lenses of postcolonial historiography and Foucault’s theories of modern disciplinary techniques the chapter examines the naturalistic representation of the brutality of the slave trade in Unsworth’s novel, paying attention to its imaginative and critical account of the imperialist and racist ideologies of the Georgian period.
