This monograph has demonstrated that the dynamic between centred text and margin provided a model through which Romantic-period writers could establish the relationship between the nation-state and its ‘others’. Just as these writers evinced an anomalous attitude towards annotation – both dismissing and relying upon it – so many of them placed these communities in a contradictory position: as locations ancillary to the nation, yet also foundational to it. The Romantic-period text therefore manifested a new structure of global power, as metropolitan centres imposed coherence and command over a variety of internal and external ‘peripheries’. Nonetheless, writers such as Smith, Owenson, Burns and Byron used the margins as a covert space to contest the marginalization of indigenous peoples.

A close inspection of the margins of Romantic-period texts shows us how the imperial nationalism that emerged in late eighteenth-century Britain sought to subsume a diversity of different regional polities within a single political community administered by an urban bourgeoisie. It located these alternative social formations as archaic, rustic peripheries, in opposition to the democratic modernity of the metropolitan centre. These anterior polities came to exist as spectres within the modern nation. In one sense, they constituted geographical and imaginative spaces at the far reaches, attesting to the centrality of the metropolitan worldview. In another, by embodying forms of kinship displaced by democratic organization, they formed temporal others against which the nation-state could assert its own modernity.