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Illustrating Empire A Visual History of British Imperialism
Ashley Jackson & David Tomkins
Oxford: The Bodleian Library, 2011 Paperback. 216 pp. £19.99. ISBN 978 185124 3341
Reviewed by Adam Stephenson Université de Picardie Jules-Verne, Amiens
With its 1.5
million different items—advertisements, playbills, postcards, labels,
programmes, menus, games, ballads, match boxes, posters and so on dating from
the 16th to the 20th centuries—the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera
at the Bodleian Library in Oxford is one of the largest of its kind in the
world. And with the ‘pictorial turn’ in the humanities, the vogue for history
‘from the bottom up’, the current interest in new kinds of historical sources,
the post-modern distrust of grand historical narratives and the well-attested
shorter attention spans of today’s readers, it might be thought that its hour
had come. This is
certainly what the curators think. They are in the process of digitising 65,000
items and putting them on the Internet so that researchers, students, schools
and amateurs can have access to them, and they project a whole series of
history books based on the collection. Illustrating Empire: A Visual History
of British Imperialism is the first of these. The authors,
Ashley Jackson, Professor of Imperial and Military History at King’s College
London and David Tomkins, Project Manager at the collection, have arranged
their material under eight chapter headings covering the main aspects of the
British imperial experience insofar as they feature in the collection:
emigration and settlement, imperial authority, exploration and knowledge, trade
and marketing, travel and communications, leisure and popular culture, jubilees
and exhibitions, and politics. In apparently well-informed, sensible and entertaining
prose, they have written an introduction to each chapter, a paragraph or two of
comment on each of the two hundred or so items and a general introduction to
the volume. If we see it
as an attractive, instructive and relatively inexpensive coffee-table book of
Victoriana and related matter, the work can be considered a success. Readers
will enjoy the sunny picture of the Empire which emerges from this delightfully
varied selection—advertisements for Canadian emigration and Australian dried
fruit; commemorative images of heroic expeditions and royal visits; vivid
depictions of native life (doc.1); celebrations in exhibitions, songs,
shows and board games—tempered by a few denunciatory (if, alas, mostly
image-free) pamphlets and posters (doc.2). However, when we try to
consider Illustrating Empire on its
own terms, as the flagship not only of a new series of historical works, but of
the John Johnson Collection or even of new sciences of ephemerology and visual
history, then our judgment must be more nuanced. To put it schematically, the
authors do a bad job of writing, thinking and looking, and in the process,
often make their images less visible. I will treat each of these points in
turn.
(1) One of a series of four pictures of Australian life (1853) This
sloppiness is due in part to a general policy of informality: right margins are
not justified, the layout is user-seductive, the tone positively matey. Out of
a ‘kaleidoscope of images’ in a ‘gallimaufry of forms’, say the authors, they
have chosen a ‘medley…drawn at random’ from the collection. Not as randomly as
all that, thank goodness, but to get at the truth about these images and the
history they emerge from, the reader has constantly to negotiate linguistic
obstacles. The authors’ taste for the vocabulary of amusing and edifying
generality constantly misleads us: Imperium et libertas, they say, was ‘a popular phrase …
bandied about by, among others, Winston Churchill’; no it wasn’t, it was the
motto of the Primrose League, founded by Winston’s father, Lord Randolph; ‘a
Royal Proclamation of
(2) Poster advertising a meeting with a missionary who had been in China, mid-19th century However, the
authors’ carelessness with words sometimes seems to derive from a deeper
confusion or ignorance. Basic historical concepts are used clumsily, not only
abstractions like representation (the verb ‘to purvey’ is a particular
favourite) and causality (‘to create’, etc.), but also supposedly more
empirical notions (‘the Westminster political structure’, ‘the political
media’, ‘politicized’, ‘exploitation’). Occasionally, they stray into the
territory of postcolonial studies (‘to appropriate’, ‘the Western gaze’,
‘knowledge and power’, etc.), but without any apparent awareness of what this
vocabulary brings with it, apart, apparently, from a right to condescend to the
past. Their use of sneer quotes is a good example of this. Inverted commas are
splashed around so liberally to mean ‘so-called’ (“superiority”, “improve”,
“civilizing”, “experts”, “discovery”, “native law and custom” and so on) that
we no longer know when they correspond to genuine quotations: evangelicals and
utilitarians, we are told, saw the Empire as leading towards ‘human
“upliftment”’; no they didn’t, the word was unknown in the 19th
century. Sometimes, the authors trip
themselves up on their quotes: ‘Some of the “barbaric”
practices that (the missionaries) sought to eradicate', they say, are still
considered “barbaric” ’; no: they are still considered barbaric. Quotation marks are abused throughout the work, now put around indirect speech, now omitted from passages lifted directly from the Internet.
And when they are replaced by the more candid ‘so-called’, this misfires, too:
the authors talk about ‘the so-called Communists in Southeast Asia’, as if the
Communist Party of Malaya and the MNLA were either figments of the British
imagination or a bunch of impostors. Condescension
also appears in non sequiturs. ‘Some (locals) were duly impressed, some
indifferent, some contemptuous of British pretensions and the inequity (sic)
of rule by foreign intruders. Nevertheless, the British enjoyed considerable
success in co-opting indigenous elites.’ This ‘nevertheless’ is wrong, for the
contradiction it announces is not with the apparently balanced previous
sentence, but with the unspoken assumption that of course British rule
was iniquitous and contemptible. (The word ‘duly’ in the cliché ‘duly
impressed’ is one for the gullible natives.) ‘Exploration exoticized the wider
world,’ we are told, but this can hardly be true, for the baroque monsters
peopling maps and imaginations prior to exploration were infinitely more exotic
than anything that came after, and anyway, elsewhere the authors say, a little
more plausibly, that explorers and anthropologists ‘revealed how people lived’. Sometimes they go beyond condescension and
simply denounce their wicked subjects: ‘Joseph Chamberlain, the most egregious
imperial politician’, etc. Most perverse is their moralistic denunciation of
what they take to be 19th-century moralism: one missionary paper, they say (doc. 3), ‘strikes a typical moralizing tone’ in condemning Maori images; no it
doesn’t, it calls the images ‘uncouth’, which is aesthetic, not moral
condemnation, and it explains this by saying that the artists ‘change the glory
of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man,’ which is a
theological reason, not a moral one. The words are familiar from Romans 1:23; standing behind them
are the Second Commandment and the story of the Golden Calf, and they served
against Catholics more than Maoris. Unfortunately, this is not the only
quotation the authors miss, to the impoverishment of their commentary. The word
‘typical’ here (‘typical moralizing tone’) and elsewhere tells us as much about
their own bland stereotypes as about the documents themselves. Certainly the
largely positive images the book offers us need to be placed in a more nuanced
context, but not in such ways as these. Occasionally the authors redress the
balance, saying kind things about the missionaries’ educational role and
denunciation of abuses, or comparing imperial publicity with today’s ‘fair
trade’ pictures of ‘happy “native” women picking tea’, but the moral they draw—that
we are no better than our forebears—should make them more cautious about
condescending to their own typecast version of the past.
(3) CMS Missionary Papers, 1816 More serious
than any problem of attitude is the authors’ technical incompetence. They
mishandle basic historical tools such as statistics, now needlessly precise,
wrongly transcribed and taken from a single year but supposed to show growth
over decades, now rounded out and fitted into punchy-sounding but meaningless
sentences like ‘as late as the 1960s tens of thousands of children from British
orphanages and care homes were sent to Australia and other settler colonies’.
Tens of thousands … per year? we ask. Per decade? Between the beginning of the
century and 1967, perhaps, but we can’t be sure. Even when the facts and figures
are accurate and unambiguous, they too often serve to dazzle rather than
enlighten. Even worse, in
a book of images, is the treatment of the images themselves. The authors nearly
always use them as a pretext to talk about something else. Sometimes, by a
process we might call ‘vertical conflation’, they run together different levels
of reality, not distinguishing the book’s illustrations from the exhibition
programmes, matchboxes, board games, etc. they represent, nor these from the
pictures on them, and these latter hardly ever from the scenes, people, things
and places depicted. At other times, by a process we might call ‘horizontal
conflation’, they sidestep to whatever takes their fancy, as when an engraved
portrait of George Augustus Selwyn, the first Bishop of New Zealand—or rather,
a photo of an unidentified page containing it—is flanked by a paragraph devoted
in large part to someone else, James Brooke, the White Rajah of Sarawak, or
when, despite a tempting scene from Treasure
Island, what must be the cover of a 1930 travel brochure for a
cruise inspires a comment which mentions neither the cover nor the brochure nor
the cruise, but tells us instead in pointless detail how, when and where the
cruise ship met its end: ‘Of 832 passengers and crew, all but 5 survived’ (sic, doc. 4). Elsewhere, images of
magazine covers give rise to gossip about the magazines themselves, their
founders, fates, etc. This is certainly not the stuff of the ‘visual history’
we were promised in the title.
(4) Cover of a travel brochure (partly obscured by a
related but unexplained item), 1930, and caption A special case
of this ‘horizontal conflation’ is the slippage from a particular imperial
image to social representations of the Empire that we see whenever the authors
touch on the question of ‘the extent to which British society was, or was not,
affected by imperial ideas.’ This has been an object of particularly lively
debate recently, both because of its intrinsic historical interest and because
of what it tells us about who we are supposed to blame for the British Empire.
Although they announce that they are ‘seeking not to take sides’ in the debate,
the authors go on to tell us dozens of times not only that ‘British society’
was ‘saturated’, ‘steeped’, ‘suffused’, ‘permeated’, etc. with imperial
imagery, references and so on but also that these ‘shaped’ (or occasionally,
‘helped shape’) ‘British perceptions’. But how can we be sure of this? A
collection showing only imperial imagery can tell us nothing about the much
greater mass of non-imperial imagery; and we would need to know who saw these
images, in what circumstances, how their behaviour changed afterwards, etc. In
November
(5) Stanley in Africa, the kind of aggressive, exciting, amoral image proposed by Dean Several of
their pictures, for example, come from two publications, Dean’s Gold Medal Series, n°14, Stanley in Africa (doc. 5) and Darton’s Heroes in Africa (docs. 6 & 7: both
dated ‘c.1890s' (sic)—in fact 1890). They are included in the chapter on
Exploration and Knowledge, alongside missionary reports, the ground plan of
Rhodes House, etc. and are treated similarly, the first being described as a
‘magazine…which presented stereotypical images of Africa’, the second as a
‘brochure’ whose ‘stories present common, albeit false, assumptions about
Africa’. But this is all grossly misleading. These are not ‘magazines’ or
‘brochures’—perhaps for adults—but toy books, a familiar Victorian genre, not
really ephemera at all and, more importantly, not for adults but for children,
something which Jackson and Tomkins contrive not to notice. It is as if we had
not distinguished The Beano and
The Uses of Literacy. Most of the numbers in Dean’s series—Struwelpeter of Today, Stories about Jesus, Some Old Nursery Friends, etc—say
nothing about Africa or the Empire, any more than do most of Darton’s
publications. Dean had his books translated into other tongues including
Swedish, not the language of a noticeably imperial nation in the 1890s (pace
Norway), and Darton’s ‘common, albeit false’ assumption ‘that only European
action could end the evils of the slave trade’ seems to me not false, but
demonstrably true (not that European action did entirely wipe out the slave
trade). And the description of the slave caravan given by Darton (doc.6) is, as far as I am able to
ascertain, accurate enough for a children’s book.
(6) The more edifying vision of Africa proposed by Darton More
importantly, the authors do not seem to notice that these two works and the
images they contain are very different; indeed, in an article in BBC History Magazine July 2011
(accessible on the Internet) they confuse the two, giving the clearly printed
cover of Dean’s Stanley in Africa the
caption ‘Darton’s Heroes in Africa’. But the two rival children’s publishers
see the world very differently. The enterprising Dean is cashing in on the
short-lived Stanley craze (he brought out spinoffs including a sort of jigsaw
puzzle of his brutal, amoral pictures); Darton, on the other hand, the
successor to a long line of Quaker publishers, tries to fill the young reader
with pity for the victims of the slave trade. With a little attention, the
different character of the images leaps to our eyes. Both include a shooting
scene (docs. 5 & 7), but Darton
does not show crazed savages being slaughtered, only arrows which have all
fallen wide; the hero and his men are not arrayed in an immovable straight line
stretching to infinity, but crouched defensively behind trees; etc. Jackson and
Tomkins see no further than the catch-all ‘stereotypes’ and ‘common
assumptions’ that they themselves have brought to the pictures. (Not that such
stereotypes are absent; but more needs to be said.)
(7) Darton’s hero in a tight spot Too often, the
authors not only do not see the image they have in front of them, but they make
it difficult for us to see it too. An engraving of East India House in 1803 is
accompanied by an account of an earlier building on the site. ‘Above the Doric
pilasters,’ say the authors, describing Ionic columns, ‘was a frieze of
treglyphs (sic), symbolizing the prudence and wisdom of the Company.’ Triglyphs
cannot symbolise anything much—perhaps metopes are meant—and in such an abysm
of ignorance, we cannot expect any competent speculation on, say, the different
reasons why such dull classicism was preferred to the Neo-Mughal style chosen
by returning Company nabobs at Daylesford, Sezincote and elsewhere. Worse, we are
not told the size of any of the objects represented, and many of them have been
reduced, making the pictures difficult to appreciate and the words illegible (a
problem also on the Internet site of the collection). A splendid-looking board
game from
(8) A Tour Through the British Colonies and Foreign Possessions, John Betts &
Co, 1855
Even worse, we
are hardly ever told the nature of the pictures, and never that some of them
have been cut to fit onto one page. Among these is one of my favourites, A Nobleman in Ceylon (late eighteenth
century) (doc.10). Where does it come from? What is its size
and medium? Whose is the title? Even: does it belong in a collection of
ephemera? The authors describe the image as ‘emphasizing the status of
indigenous elites within the imperial system’; but ‘status’ is hopelessly vague
(high status?/low status?), the ‘emphasizing’ belongs to the historian, not the
source, and the ‘imperial system’ in question is not British but Dutch, for, as
they go on to say, ‘in the late 18th century....Ceylon was ruled by the Dutch’.
(This is not quite accurate, either, for they have forgotten the independent
Kingdom of Kandy.) And once again the authors wade out of their depth into
unfamiliar vocabulary, saying nonsensically that ‘(the nobleman’s) dhoti, with
kastane with lion-headed hilt, is almost certainly… produced on the Coromandel
coast.’ One would like to have been told more about the striking mixture of
Eastern and Western clothes, the significance of the right hand tucked into the
coat, etc. ‘Expertly
written,’ says a back-cover testimonial from a serious historian who should
have known better, and ‘beautifully reproduced’—perhaps the image on his front
cover is less like a botched Photoshop job than the ill-cut, dark, discoloured
one on mine. I will not discuss minor mistakes which a halfway competent
proof-reader would have picked up—part of the introduction to Chapter 6
included in Chapter 7, documents and what they represent misidentified, etc.—but
quickly conclude with the reflection that the title, Illustrating Empire: A Visual History of British Imperialism, is a triple misnomer: firstly, one cannot
illustrate ‘Empire’, but only a text with pictures or an argument or theory
with examples; secondly, this is not a history of British Imperialism, for too
much is missing and too much non-imperial material is included; and thirdly, it
does not correspond to any defensible notion of visual history, except,
minimally, to the history of what things looked like. Furthermore, as a plea
for printed ephemera, it is very misleading, given that the most historically
instructive ephemera—trade lists, classified advertisements, etc.—are often
textual not iconographic. In short, apart from the undeniable charm and
interest of many of the images it contains, this work belongs with the ephemera
it promotes, and may be of as much concern to historians of libraries,
publishing and careers in the 21st century as to students of the British Empire
in the 18th, 19th and 20th.
(10) A Nobleman
in Ceylon (late 18th century)
Cercles © 2012
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