Perennial Empires: Postcolonial, Transnational, and Literary Pers ...

Regarded as one of the most lavish manors in England, Somerleyton reflected a material resplendence that once fueled the nation’s imagination; the place was maintained, as Sebald informs readers, by a certain Sir Morton Peto, who was “among the foremost entrepreneurs and speculators of his time.” Peto’s shrewd financial investments in colonial railway building in countries as diverse as “Canada, Australia, Africa, Argentina, Russia and Norway” (33), through his railway contracting firm, Messrs. Jackson, Brassey, Peto, and Betts,⁶ provided him with the financial clout to “crown his ascent into the highest social spheres by establishing a country residence, the comfort and extravagance of which would eclipse everything the nation had hitherto seen” (33). The extensive railway networks which the British built throughout their empire represented, of course, a key technology in Britain’s civilizing mission to bring modern industry to the colonies, but more importantly, the railway provided the means to transport the spices, sugar, tea, coffee, tobacco, gold, and silver that fed the mercantile profits that sustained the English social order during the nineteenth century (Williams 280). These tenuous and obscured connections between Somerleyton Manor and the colonies surface only through Sebald’s own investigations into Peto, but they are subtly downplayed as the spontaneous recollections of a casual observer wandering Somerleyton’s grounds.

Successful entrepreneurs such as Sir Morton Peto thus built their own personal empires upon the backs of the colonies’ agricultural economies, many of which incorporated extensive systems of slave trade and labor. The investment of colonial capital in country estates by the likes of Peto was, however, absorbed into the national imagination as part of British inheritance. Yet these links to imperial violence that Sebald suggests in The Rings of Saturn remain occluded and suppressed. The manor façade still serves as an example of what Ian Baucom terms “authentic and auratic architectures of belonging” (17). Another reason, however, lies in the fact that, although the manor house represented demonstrable success at the apex of nineteenth-century English society and in time came to represent English heritage, the interior of manor homes came to represent national identity. Linda Colley argues that, from the early