by Tristram Hunt
THE PROSPECT / January 21, 2016
By far the most striking work in Tate Britain’s compelling recent exhibition, Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past,
was Elizabeth Butler’s depiction of an exhausted, slumped British Army
surgeon being slowly carried back to base after the catastrophic 1842
retreat from Kabul. The First Anglo-Afghan War was one of the great
catastrophes of British imperial adventurism and Butler’s The Remnants of an Army
(1872) captures perfectly the expedition’s mixture of futility,
incompetence and arrogance. It is a picture that speaks purposefully to
Bernard Porter and Stephanie Barczewski’s new accounts of the
representation of heroic failure and the lingering impact of imperialism
on British culture. Yet its theme, imagery and place at the Tate serve
only to contradict much of what is argued in each of these ultimately
unsatisfying books.
This is not a bad time to be exploring
the legacies and meanings of British colonialism, as we seem to be
embarking on a renewed bout of Empire-angst. Even as imperial scholars
are stressing more and more the plural, hybrid and diverse nature of the
British Empire—a historical event that encompassed racist brutality in
Jamaica together with an Anglo-Saxon “kith and kin” white commonwealth;
the treaty ports of China together with the plantations of Ulster; the
industrial capitalism of Bombay together with the “civilising mission”
of David Livingstone—the contemporary public debate is still tediously
divided along good versus evil matrices.
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