Empire Travel Guides and the Imperial Mind-set from the Mid-Nineteenth to the Mid-Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

Empires throughout history have sought self-confidence and reassurance through erecting a sequence of fantasies designed to justify their existence and seek intellectual and ideological consolation. Their governmental and administrative elites fabricate such notions; their intellectuals, writers and educators develop and disseminate them; and the populace, more or less, accept them as evidence of their superiority. Such fantasies include the fantasy of global government and the related concept of universal monarchy, global and universal defined according to the world view of the Empire concerned. The British fantasy was primarily governmental, based upon culturally specific concepts of ‘freedom’ and administrative and legal arrangements that supposedly set them apart as incomparably capable of world rule. But they also indulged in the fantasy of global monarchy, evidenced by the raising of Queen Victoria’s status to that of Empress (albeit theoretically solely in respect of India) and the appearance of her material presence in statuary throughout the Empire, not to mention on coinage and postage stamps. The second fantasy is the notion of a uniquely superior civilisation, one so distanced from the Empire’s neighbours or, in modern times, overseas ‘others’ as to render rule both inevitable and morally appropriate. The corollary of this is the demarcation of all others as ‘barbarians’. The British elite, deeply influenced as they were by ancient Greece and Rome, as well as by Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, extensively adopted this binary between ‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarism’.¹