Popular Imperialism and the Textual Cultures of Empire

Livingstone, Justin D.

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-24459-0_5

Justin D. Livingstone⁶

Part of the book series: Britain and the World ((BAW))

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Abstract

This chapter revisits John M. MacKenzie’s scholarship from the perspective of a literary critic in order to assess his contribution to the study of popular imperial literature. It addresses MacKenzie’s research on adventure fiction and the representation of the natural world; his studies of heroic biography and the construction of imperial reputations; and his work on the geographical imaginations of British guidebooks and the Protestant missionary record. The chapter also sketches possibilities for future research emerging from a closer convergence of imperial history and literary studies. It argues that there is scope to extend the ‘four nations’ approach and comparative perspectives on European empires to the study of imperial literary production, and to investigate the ways in which some neglected late-imperial forms responded to decolonisation.

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Notes

1.
John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 12.
2.
Berny Sèbe, Heroic Imperialists in Africa: The Promotion of British and French Colonial Heroes, 1870–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 5.
3.
Stuart Ward, ‘The MacKenziean Moment in Retrospect’, in Andrew S. Thompson, ed., Writing Imperial Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 30–31.
4.
Cherry Leonardi, ‘The Power of Culture and the Cultures of Power: John MacKenzie and the Study of Imperialism,’ in Andrew S. Thompson, ed., Writing Imperial Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 49.
5.
MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, 3 and 199.
6.
MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, 203 and 207–8.
7.
MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, 199, 206, and 209.
8.
Ward, ‘MacKenziean Moment’, 42; and MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, 3.
9.
Leonardi, ‘Power of Culture’, 60.
10.
Andrew S. Thompson, ‘Introduction’, in Andrew S. Thompson, ed., Writing Imperial Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 15; and Ward, ‘MacKenziean Moment’, 43.
11.
MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, 2.
12.
Ward, ‘MacKenziean Moment’, 31 and 36.
13.
In his riposte to Edward Said’sOrientalism, MacKenzie argues that popular culture was a critical omission from Said’s project. John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 14.
14.
John M. MacKenzie, ‘Hunting and the Natural World in Juvenile Literature’, in Jeffrey Richards, ed., Imperialism and Juvenile Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 146–47.
15.
MacKenzie, ‘Hunting and the Natural World’, 147 and 154.
16.
MacKenzie, ‘Hunting and the Natural World’, 150 and 157–58.
17.
MacKenzie, ‘Hunting and the Natural World’, 165, 168, and 170. Imperial hunting and the development of game conservation receive monograph-length treatment in MacKenzie’s, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988).
18.
For other research on imperial fiction and masculinity, see Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventure in a Man’s World (London: Harper Collins, 1991); Richard Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure (London: Routledge, 1997); and Bradley Deane, Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Other key works addressing imperial masculinity include Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire, and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994); and John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays on Gender, Family, and Empire (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005).
19.
On the emerging field of ‘postcolonial ecocriticism’, see Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (London: Routledge, 2010).
20.
John Miller, Empire and the Animal Body: Violence, Identity and Ecology in Victorian Adventure Fiction (London: Anthem Press, 2012), 3, 11, and 31.
21.
Miller, Empire and the Animal Body, 24.
22.
For a discussion of the ‘imperial gothic’, see Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 227–53. Among the better-known discussions of Haggard’s fiction are Anne McClintock, ‘Maidens, Maps and Mines: King Solomon’s Mines and the Reinvention of Patriarchy in Colonial South Africa’, in Cherryl Walker, ed., Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945 (Cape Town: David Philip, 1990), 97–124; and Laura Chrisman, Rereading the Imperial Romance: British Imperialism and South African Resistance in Haggard, Schreiner, and Plaatje (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 23–119. For monograph-length treatment, see Gerald Monsman, H. Rider Haggard on the Imperial Frontier: The Political and Literary Contexts of His African Romances (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 2006).
23.
Important works on Conrad and imperialism include Andrea White, Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition: Construction and Deconstructing the Imperial Subject (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Christopher GoGwilt, The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
24.
Miller, Empire and the Animal Body, 30.
25.
For his most recent discussion of imperial ‘afterlives’, see John M. MacKenzie, ‘Afterword’, in Max Jones, Berny Sèbe, John Strachan, Bertrand Taithe, and Peter Yeandle, eds., Decolonising Imperial Heroes, special issue of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 42 (2014), 969–79.
26.
John M. MacKenzie, ‘Heroic Myths of Empire’, in John M. MacKenzie, ed., Popular Imperialism and the Military (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 112 and 114.
27.
MacKenzie, ‘Heroic Myths’, 112 and 115; and John M. MacKenzie, ‘David Livingstone: The Construction of the Myth’, in Graham Walker and Tom Gallager, eds., Sermons and Battle Hymns (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 27.
28.
MacKenzie, ‘David Livingstone: The Construction of the Myth’, 27; and MacKenzie, ‘Heroic Myths’, 115.
29.
John M. MacKenzie, ‘T. E. Lawrence: The Myth and the Message’, in Robert Giddings, ed., Literature and Imperialism (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), 151.
30.
MacKenzie, ‘T. E. Lawrence’, 151.
31.
Geoffrey Cubitt, ‘Introduction: Heroic Reputations and Exemplary Lives’, in Geoffrey Cubitt and Allen Warren, eds., Heroic Reputations and Exemplary Lives (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 1–21.
32.
MacKenzie, ‘David Livingstone: The Construction of the Myth’, 31; and MacKenzie, ‘Heroic Myths’, 115.
33.
MacKenzie, ‘Heroic Myths’, 124.
34.
MacKenzie, ‘David Livingstone: The Construction of the Myth’, 33; and John M. MacKenzie, ‘David Livingstone and the Worldly Afterlife: Imperialism and Nationalism in Africa’, in John M. MacKenzie, ed., David Livingstone and the Victorian Encounter with Africa (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1996), 203.
35.
Justin D. Livingstone, Livingstone’s ‘Lives’: A Metabiography of a Victorian Icon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014).
36.
Nicolaas A. Rupke, Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 208 and 215.
37.
Sèbe, Heroic Imperialists, 3–4.
38.
Sèbe, Heroic Imperialists, 66–67, 132.
39.
Sèbe, Heroic Imperialists, 17, 296.
40.
See, for example, Michael Benton, Literary Biography: An Introduction (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), xv–xvi, 30, and 35.
41.
Hermione Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 12; and Miranda Seymour, ‘Shaping the Truth’, in Peter France and William St. Clair, eds., Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 255 and 264.
42.
Ben Pimlott, ‘Brushstrokes’, in Mark Bostridge, ed., Lives for Sale: Biographers’ Tales (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 166.
43.
Max Jones, Berny Sèbe, John Strachan, Bertrand Taithe, and Peter Yeandle, ‘Decolonising Imperial Heroes: Britain and France’, in Max Jones, Berny Sèbe, John Strachan, Bertrand Taithe, and Peter Yeandle, eds., Decolonising Imperial Heroes, special issue of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 42 (2014), 809.
44.
John M. MacKenzie, ‘Missionaries, Science and the Environment in Nineteenth-Century Africa’, in Andrew Porter, ed., The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880–1914 (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2003), 130. On ‘imaginative geographies’ as ‘representations of other places – of peoples and landscapes’, see Derek Gregory, ‘Imaginative Geographies’, in Derek Gregory, Ron Johnston, Geraldine Pratt, Michael J. Watts, and Sarah Whatmore, eds., The Dictionary of Human Geography, 5th edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 369–71.
45.
MacKenzie, ‘Missionaries, Science’, 107 and 109.
46.
MacKenzie, ‘Missionaries, Science’, 110.
47.
MacKenzie, ‘Missionaries, Science’, 116.
48.
MacKenzie, ‘Missionaries, Science’, 120–21.
49.
MacKenzie was also among the first to address the connections between nineteenth-century missionaries and modern science. See also David N. Livingstone, ‘Scientific Inquiry and the Missionary Enterprise’, in Ruth Finnegan, ed., Participating in the Knowledge Society: Research Beyond the University Walls (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 50–64. For another discussion of missionary science in southern Africa, see Georgina H. Endfield and David J. Nash, ‘Drought, Desiccation and Discourse: Missionary Correspondence and Nineteenth-Century Climate Change in Central Southern Africa’, Geographical Journal 168 (2002), 33–47. Endfield and Nash examine missionary records as repositories of climate data and analyse the interpretive frameworks through which missionaries understood environmental change.
50.
The Comaroffs, who situated missionaries as ideological agents of colonialism, did much to lead research on missions and empire. See Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, I: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Other important contributions include Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester: Apollos, 1990); A. N. Porter, Religion Versus Empire?: British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); and Norman Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
51.
Anna Johnson, Missionary Writing and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 32. For other discussions of missionary literature, see Esme Cleall, Missionary Discourse: Negotiating Difference in the British Empire, c. 1840–95 (New York: Palgrave, 2012); and Robbie McLaughlan, Re-imagining the ‘Dark Continent’ in Fin De Siècle Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 24–39.
52.
Jeffrey Cox suggests that across the nineteenth century, the ‘most important popular source of information about non-Western people…came from churches, chapels, and Sunday Schools’. Jeffrey Cox, ‘Were Victorian Nonconformists the Worst Imperialists of All’, Victorian Studies 46 (2004), 246.
53.
MacKenzie, ‘Missionaries, Science’, 129.
54.
Dana L. Robert, ‘Introduction’, in Dana L. Robert, ed., Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1706–1914 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 4 and 20.
55.
John M. MacKenzie, ‘Empires of Travel: British Guide Books and Cultural Imperialism in the 19th and 20th Centuries’, in John K. Walton, ed., Histories of Tourism: Representation, Identity, and Conflict (Clevedon, Buffalo: Channel View, 2005), 21.
56.
MacKenzie, ‘Empires of Travel’, 24–25.
57.
MacKenzie, ‘Empires of Travel’, 25–26.
58.
See, for example, Steve Clark, ed., Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit (London: Zed Books, 1999); James S. Duncan and Derek Gregory, eds., Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing (London: Routledge, 1999); and Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst, eds., Travel Writing, Form and Empire; The Poetics and Politics of Mobility (New York: Routledge, 2009).
59.
For scholarship on the guidebook, see Barbara Schaff, ‘John Murray’s Handbooks to Italy: Making Tourism Literary’, in Nicola J. Watson, ed., Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 106–18; and Gráinne Goodwin and Gordon Johnston, ‘Guidebook Publishing in the Nineteenth Century: John Murray’s Handbooks for Travellers’, Studies in Travel Writing 17 (2013), 43–61.
60.
Thompson astutely notes that the distinction between ‘aesthetic and functional’ forms of travel text is simplistic and problematic. He also discusses the respective merits and problems of ‘exclusive and inclusive’ definitions of travel writing. Carl Thompson, Travel Writing (New York: Routledge, 2011), 15 and 13–27.
61.
MacKenzie, ‘Empires of Travel’, 35.
62.
MacKenzie, ‘Empires of Travel’, 35–36. See also John M. MacKenzie, ‘Empire Travel Guides and the Imperial Mind-Set from the Mid-Nineteenth to the Mid-Twentieth Centuries’, in Martin Farr and Xavier Guégan, eds., The British Abroad Since the Eighteenth Century, II: Experiencing Imperialism (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 116–33.
63.
Jeffrey Richards and John M. MacKenzie, The Railway Station: A Social History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 340–83.
64.
Robert H. MacDonald, The Language of Empire: Myths and Metaphors of Popular Imperialism, 1880–1918 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994); Jeffrey Richards, ed., Imperialism and Juvenile Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989); and Tim Youngs, Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, 1850–1950 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). More recent literary perspectives include my own Livingstone’s ‘Lives’ and Carol Polsgrove’s Ending British Rule in Africa: Writers in a Common Cause (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012).
65.
Catherine Belsey, ‘All Texts are our Province’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 30 January 1988. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/all-texts-are-our-province/105709.article.
66.
For a nuanced early discussion of what some historians saw as the ‘colonisation of imperial studies’ by postcolonial scholars, see Dane Kennedy, ‘Imperial History and Post-Colonial Theory’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 24 (1996), 345–63.
67.
Bart Moore-Gilbert, for instance, suggests that MacKenzie’s response to postcolonialism reveals ‘the deep antipathy which the conservatives feel towards what they view as an upstart’. Bart Moore-Gilbert, ‘Postcolonial Cultural Studies and Imperial Historiography: Problems of Interdisciplinarity’, Interventions 1 (1999), 399. Ali Behdad sees in MacKenzie ‘a marked suspicion of theory’. Ali Behdad, ‘Orientalism Matters’, Modern Fiction Studies 56 (2010), 710. Taoufiq Sakhkhane describes MacKenzie as representative of an ‘exclusivist mentality prevalent in Western academia’, where disciplines are ‘privileged fiefdoms’. Taoufiq Sakhkhane, Spivak and Postcolonialism: Exploring Allegations of Textuality (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 11. For a discussion of the quite different representations of MacKenzie that emerged in response to his criticism of Edward Said and during his debate with Bernard Porter, see Leonardi, ‘Power of Culture’, 58–60.
68.
Leonardi, ‘Power of Culture’, 58.
69.
Leonardi, ‘Power of Culture’, 51 and 63.
70.
Alan Lester, ‘Spatial Concepts and the Historical Geographies of British Colonialism’, in Andrew S. Thompson, ed., Writing Imperial Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 120–21. A detailed assessment of the influence postcolonial studies has had on imperial history is offered in Dane Kennedy, ‘Postcolonialism and History’, in Graham Huggan, ed., Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 467–88.
71.
Lester discusses the overlap and tensions between the ‘new imperial history’ and approaches in the Studies in Imperialism series. Lester, ‘Spatial Concepts’, 120–24.
72.
Brantlinger’s Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies is notable for its range of sources, which include missionary records, emigration narratives and historical biography. Patrick Brantlinger, Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009).
73.
John M. MacKenzie, ‘Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English Worlds? A Four-Nation Approach to the History of the British Empire’, History Compass 6 (2008), 1244.
74.
Simon Potter has developed a four-nation approach to the press as a means of reporting the British Empire. See Simon J. Potter, ‘Introduction: Empire, Propaganda and Public Opinion’, in Simon J. Potter, ed., Newspapers and Empire in Ireland and Britain: Reporting the British Empire, c. 1857–1921 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2004), 11–22. In the same collection, MacKenzie argues for the importance of ‘pluralistic’ analysis of Irish, Scots, Welsh, and English newspaper coverage of empire. John M. MacKenzie, ‘The Press and the Dominant Ideology of Empire’, in Simon J. Potter, ed., Newspapers and Empire in Ireland and Britain: Reporting the British Empire, c. 1857–1921 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2004), 37.
75.
For MacKenzie’s interest in comparative studies of European imperialism, see John M. MacKenzie, ed., European Empires and the People: Popular Responses to Imperialism in France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). His inclination towards a broader comparative approach is exemplified by the recent Encyclopedia of Empire, which covers empires from the ancient to the modern world. John M. MacKenzie with Nigel R. Dalziel, eds., The Encyclopedia of Empire (Chichester: Wiley, 2016).
76.
Elements of a comparative perspective appear in Martyn Cornick, ‘Representations of Britain and British Colonialism in French Adventure Fiction, 1870–1914’, French Cultural Studies 17 (2006), 137–54. Cornick examines the ways in which French adventure fiction constructed a national-imperial identity in opposition to the British.
77.
John M. MacKenzie, ‘The Persistence of Empire in Metropolitan Culture’, in Stuart Ward, ed., British Culture and the End of Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 21–36.
78.
Matthew Whittle, Post-War British Literature and the ‘End of Empire’ (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 4 and 8.
79.
Whittle, Post-War British Literature, 5–6.
80.
Whittle, Post-War British Literature, 12; and MacKenzie, ‘Persistence of Empire’, 23.

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Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK
Justin D. Livingstone

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Department of History, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA
Stephanie Barczewski
School of History, Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK
Martin Farr

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Livingstone, J.D. (2019). Popular Imperialism and the Textual Cultures of Empire. In: Barczewski, S., Farr, M. (eds) The MacKenzie Moment and Imperial History. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24459-0_5

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