- Email: [email protected]
The visual culture of empire
Journal of Historical Geography xxx (2014) 1e4
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Historical Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg
Review article The visual culture of empire Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2012, 288 pages, US$55 hardcover; David Ciarlo, Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2011, 462 pages, US$51.50 hardcover; Ashley Jackson and David Tomkins, Illustrating Empire: A Visual History of British Imperialism. Oxford, Bodleian Library Publishing, 2011, 224 pages, £19.99 paperback; Sarah J. Moore, Empire on Display: San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915. Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 2013, 256 pages, US$34.95 hardcover. Few things appeal more to historical geographers than the combination of empire and visual culture, and this is especially so when the latter deals with maps, landscapes, nature, commerce, race, gender, and the historical geographies of science. Each of the four books under review here covers one or more of these themes to greater or lesser extent, yet none is written by a geographer.1 All the books are lavishly illustrated e two are full color throughout (Visible Empire and Illustrating Empire) and two make good use of black and white images along with color plates. With the partial exception of Visible Empire, all the books address the production and consumption of visual materials in the metropole. The focus is on the everyday nature of image encounters across multiple media and how these stabilize imperial themes. By underscoring the pervasiveness and domestic reach of imperial premises the works illustrate how the history of empire is an inalienable part of national history and culture, something often overlooked in the USA and Germany and, surprisingly, still subject to debate in Britain and Spain. A keen focus on visual culture e rather than any pioneering exploration of empire e unites these books. Two of the three monographs are written by art historians, grounding the overall set within concerns for the cultural and material practice of representation, its ideological consequences, and its participation in the production of meaning.2 Overall the books could be read as a response to Edward Said’s call in Culture and Imperialism to study the history of Western culture as a process intimately entangled
with empire and imperial expansion. The works likewise infer that empire is empowered domestically through the circulation of imperial images that naturalize racial hierarchies, capitalist economic systems, the control of nature, and the benevolence of foreign rule. In Advertising Empire historian David Ciarlo examines how German advertising at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries was constructed transnationally through an imitation of American and British art forms. In a complex and far-ranging study he finds that German commercial culture linked stereotyped racial themes of the colonial encounter with metropolitan advertising to reach a broad audience and to shape public opinion. Advertising Empire shows that the scholarly conundrum questioning whether images shape public perceptions (the Frankfurt School’s notion of a culture industry) or, instead, reflect those perceptions (semiology or cultural studies) is a false binary. Ciarlo argues that both approaches remove the observer and the image from their context, ‘the very milieu that informed both the production of the image and the consciousness of the observer’ (p. 16). His contribution is to examine larger patterns of imperial imagery over time to show how both the creation and consumption of racial images were mutually reinforcing. One of the many innovative aspects of Ciarlo’s study emerge from his excellent use of the trademark rolls of the Imperial Patent Office, where after 1894, German advertisers registered many of their signature designs. This comprehensive archive of text and illustrations e used by Ciarlo in combination with materials from museums and other collections through the mid-1920s e is a stunning reminder of what can be done with a relatively obscure visual archive. In her study of Spanish science at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, art historian Daniela Bleichmar develops the concept of ‘visual epistemology,’ a ‘way knowing based on visuality, encompassing both observation and representation’ (p. 8). For her, visual epistemology operated as part and parcel of an imperial system that had long relied on graphic forms of communication for administrative purposes. In this way Visible Empire draws connections among natural history, visual culture, and the administration of empire in the early modern Hispanic world. Bleichmar examined some twelve thousand
1 A recently published reader examining vision and empire, including maps, photographs, geographical surveys and other media, seeks to bring together previously published articles e including those by Bleichmar and Ciarlo e also contains no geographers; Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy (Eds), Empires of Vision: A Reader, Durham, 2014. Yet, geographers have contributed significantly to the study of empire, vision, and culture; see for example Morag Bell, Robin Butlin, and Michael Heffernan (Eds), Geography and Imperialism 1820e1940, Manchester, 1995; Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765e1843, Chicago, 1997; James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire, Chicago, 1998; Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire, New York, 2000; Felix Driver and Luciana Martins (Eds), Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire, Chicago, 2005; James R. Akerman (Ed), The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire, Chicago, 2009; and Stephen J. Hornsby, Surveyors of Empire: Samuel Holland, J. W. F. Des Barres, and the Making of the Atlantic Neptune, Montreal, 2011. 2 These works draw on prominent art historians, including several books I have been examining for another project such as Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting, Durham, 1999; Geoff Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz (Eds), An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the Atlantic World, 1660e1830, Manchester, 2003; Beth Fowkes Tobin, Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760e1820, Pennsylvania, 2005; Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700e1840, New Haven, 2008.
0305-7488/$ e see front matter http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.05.023
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Review article / Journal of Historical Geography xxx (2014) 1e4
painted images amassed by the Spanish Crown between the 1770s and the early 1800s, most of which are stored in a vault at the Royal Botanical Garden in Madrid. By contextualizing her reading of these paintings in a broader history of science she shows that the visual culture of natural history was global in its endeavor and ideology, that naturalists from throughout Europe understood their tasks in similar ways, consulted the same books and looked at the same images, and that this produced a ‘shared visual language’ (p. 9). Her work, thus, challenges e but, as I show below, also supports e recent works insisting that the history of science has a distinct geography.3 One of her more well-developed findings e already known from earlier works she is associated with4 e is that Spanish natural history labored to not only make imperial nature visible but to make much of the empire invisible. By abstracting and decontextualizing botanical fragments, the visual language of Enlightenment science erased the all-important human and physical geographies that connected plants to humanity and ecology, separating society from environment, nature from culture, a debilitating state of mind still with us. In Empire on Display art historian Sarah Moore descriptively analyzes the visual materials produced as part of San Francisco’s PanamaePacific exhibition of 1915 through the lens of expansionist, racialized, and masculinist discourses. She explores how the fair commended the completion of the Panama Canal and how it embodied the historical arc of the construction of an American empire: ‘the coordinates of empire [can] be traced from Havana Harbor, at the beginning of 1898, to the Culebra Cut in the Canal Zone and to the Court of the Universe at the PanamaePacific exposition with its central sculptural ensemble dedicated to the Lord of the Isthmian Way’ (p. 5). Moore argues that the exhibition in general and the Panama Canal display in particular ‘functioned pedagogically and embraced Social Darwinian logic, which assumed an evolutionary trajectory of civilization’ (pp. 5e6) that also progressed east to west across the North American continent and placed Euro-American males at its pinnacle. The work fits comfortably within American Studies traditions that have examined the cultures of US imperialism, how they link to racism at home and abroad, and how these cultures have been fervently displayed and celebrated.5 Intended for a popular audience, Illustrating Empire, presents a selection of British imperial ephemera from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries drawn from The John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. Collected by John de Monins Johnson (1882e1956), a printer at the University of Oxford Press, the compendium e including advertisements, calendars, exhibition programs, games, handbills, labels, menus, playbills, popular prints, postcards,
posters, prospectuses, street ballads, and tins e contains over one million items and is among the largest collections of ephemera in the world. The collection is necessarily permeated by imperial themes even if that was not Johnson’s intention. In stark contrast to the other books under review here, the authors Ashley Jackson and David Tomkins intended to let the ‘powerful and often complex images that conveyed information and ideas about empire and the non-European world. speak for themselves’ (p. 7). In this way, the authors hope that the book does not ‘take sides in the academic debate that centres upon the extent to which British society was, or was not, affected by imperial ideas’ (pp. 15e16). Yet, the images presented e allegedly chosen ‘at random’ (p. 19) e cannot help but show how Imperial Britain’s place in the wider world became ‘part of the furniture of British life’ at home (p. 9). The strength of the book is the high quality reproductions and the matter-of-fact descriptions the authors provide e just enough context to give intrepid students the ability to ponder the geographic foundations that brought these objects into being and the cultural and material work they might have done. Visible Empire explores the paintings produced by botanical artists who accompanied four Spanish Royal Botanical Expeditions to Chile and Peru (1777e1788), New Granada (1783e1816), New Spain (1787e1803), and the naval expedition to the Americas and Asia led by Alejandro Malaspina (1789e1794). Devised during the reigns of Charles III (1759e1788) and Charles IV (1788e1808), and coordinated with the help of The Royal Academy of Fine Arts (f. 1744), the Royal Botanical Garden (f. 1755), and the Royal Natural History Cabinet (f. 1776), the voyages sought to use Enlightenment science to restore the empire to prosperity by connecting past successes to a new botanical reconquista that built on longstanding visual traditions. Beginning with the commissioning of indigenous artists in New Spain to the Padrón Real and the maps of the Relaciones Geográficas, early modern Spanish officials had long privileged visuality in their production, transfer, and use of knowledge.6 In developing her ideas of visual epistemology, Bleichmar details how botanical artists were trained in expert viewing. Eighteenthcentury publications, she argues, stressed that vision provided the best method for investigating nature and that images provided the preferred means to transmit knowledge. Indeed, she shows that many botanists preferred to examine drawings in the laboratory rather than actual plants in the field. The Linnaean system relied on triangulation between specimens, images, and textual information and informed a shared visual and verbal vocabulary. This is why all the royal expeditions took as many books with them as they could carry, lest the artists succumb to ‘observational paralysis’ (p. 55)! In sum, ‘Eighteenth-century natural history was premised on a visual epistemology that allowed naturalists around the world to
3 Although Bleichmar is aware of this literature she does not adequately confront the implications head on; see for example Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith (Eds), Geography and Empire, Cambridge, 1994; Roy MacLeod (Ed), Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise, Chicago, 2000; David N. Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge, Chicago, 2003; Charles W.J. Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically About the Age of Reason, Chicago, 2007; Simon Naylor, Regionalizing Science: Placing Knowledges in Victorian England, London, 2010; Peter Meusburger, David N. Livingstone, and Heike Jöns (Eds), Geographies of Science, Heidelberg, 2010; David N. Livingstone and Charles W.J. Withers (Eds), Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science, Chicago, 2011. 4 Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (Eds), Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, Philadelphia, 2005; James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (Eds), Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, New York, 2008; Daniela Bleichmar, Paula De Vos, Kristin Huffine, and Kevin Sheehan (Eds), Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500e1800, Stanford, 2009; Daniela Bleichmar and Peter Mancall (Eds), Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World, Pennsylvania, 2011. 5 Robert Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876e1916, Chicago, 1985; Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease (Eds), Cultures of United States Imperialism, Durham, 1994; Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore (Eds), Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S. -Latin American Relations, Durham, NC, 1998; Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture, Cambridge, MA, 2005; David Brody, Visualizing American Empire: Orientalism and Imperialism in the Philippines, Chicago, 2010. 6 Scholarship elaborating this point for the early modern Hispanic world include Claire Farago (Ed), Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin American, 1450e1650, New Haven, 1995; Simon Varey, Rafael Chabrán, and Dora Weiner (Eds), Searching for the Secrets of Nature: The Life and Works of Dr. Francisco Hernández, Stanford, 2000; Heidi V. Scott, Contested Territory: Mapping Peru in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Notre Dame, 2009; Jordana Dym and Karl Offen (Eds), Mapping Latin America: A Cartographic Reader, Chicago, 2011; Ilona Katzew (Ed), Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World, Los Angeles, 2011; Kathryn M. Mayers, Visions of Empire in Colonial Spanish American Ekphrastic Writing, Lewisburg, PA, 2011; Mary E. Miller and Barbara E. Mundy (Eds), Painting a Map of Sixteenth-Century Mexico City: Land, Writing, and Native Rule, New Haven, 2013.
Review article / Journal of Historical Geography xxx (2014) 1e4
participate in collective empiricism and communicate with one another through images, objects, and texts’ (p. 76). Although subtly challenging the geography of science literature mentioned above, Bleichmar shows that the Nueva Granada expedition headed by José Celestino Mutis provides a counterexample. The Nueva Granada expedition was unique in that Mutis worked with a very large workshop with fixed personnel who studied together for over three decades. Mutis trained Colombian Creoles who learned to paint expertly in a European style but, as Bleichmar shows, often chose not to. In developing their ‘American style,’ these Creole artists often rejected an adherence to the strict grammar of eighteenth-century botanical illustrations that focused on specific parts of detailed floral anatomy and fruit, were always green and static, and embodied numerous observations of multiple specimens. Instead, Mutis’s Creole painters often embellished European models with subtle flourishes of color and design. Like the great polymath and Mexican Creole José Antonio de Alzate, Colombian Creole artists partially rejected ‘a vision of global nature based on a diagnostic, taxonomic gaze that functioned to remove strangeness, rather than accentuate it’ (pp. 157e158). Bleichmar contrasts the Creole style with the eighteenth-century casta paintings from Mexico and the cuadros de mestizaje from Quito. Here, race was portrayed in very humanized and often rural contexts of the New World, and the flora of the region was often prominently displayed alongside the castas to demonstrate their regional specificity. Although both botanical and casta paintings relied on the visual to transmit knowledge only the casta tradition set out to contextualize people with place, race with region. Bleichmar explains this contradiction by stating that the ‘Two visions of Spanish American nature are the two faces of a coin, alternate but not separate, opposed by not contradictory’ (p. 184). Although this rationalization is unsatisfying, the book and its astonishing visual qualities are significant achievements. Even broader in scope and thicker in backstory than Visible Empire is Advertising Empire. The book has won at least two scholarly awards and it is easy to see why. Much more than a study of ‘Race and Visual Culture in Imperial German,’ the book is also a history of colonialist thought among German peoples and an erudite interpretation of consumer behavior and marketing strategies vis-à-vis technological change, racism, and popular culture fads.7 The first part of the book provides a history of visuality and the origins of mass-produced commercial imagery in Germany before the twentieth century. The second part presents a visual history that contextualizes the changing patterns of German advertising across different products and media through the early 1920s, as new racial motifs served in the lead up to World War I and, then, the anti-occupational campaigns of the Weimar Republic. By the early twentieth century Ciarlo finds that one of the most persistent and powerful visions in the German consumer imaginary to be those that engaged with the interaction of colonial rule and racial differentiation. Given Germany’s limited colonial engagement, Ciarlo sets up his study by asking why colonial themes became so pervasive? Why did the ads work? He answers this, in part, by showing how images in general and of blacks in particular came to be seen as not only legitimate for business use but as necessary for commercial success. At the heart of his study, thus, is the question of how capitalism successfully imitated transnational art forms, especially those emanating from Imperial Britain and the ‘savage’ USA, and marshaled stereotyped racial difference to sell stuff to consumers who had little or no personal interactions with people of color. The meticulous study provides several counter-
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intuitive and nuanced findings that demonstrate the danger of viewing racial stereotypes primarily through the eyes of their creators. Advertising Empire locates the origins of a relationship between German commodity culture and colonialism at the great exhibitions of Bremen in 1890 and in Berlin in 1896. Following the ideas of Walter Benjamin, Ciarlo shows how the fairs sought to invest commodities with larger meanings and significance through artful presentation. Despite the organizer’s best efforts, however, fairgoers preferred to have fun and, in general, ignored the colonial exhibits and their meager products. However, the Berlin Colonial Exhibition of 1896 marked a turning point because it set up three ‘authentic’ native villages from Africa and the South Pacific, which allowed one guidebook to boast ‘the materials are real. and so too are the Coloreds!’ (p. 57). These contained spectacles combined with traveling and exotic Völkerschau (people shows) to disseminate a new visual form, ‘a style that set the commodity into a new, powerful tableau of meaning by placing it in a larger visual field’ (p. 64). Ciarlo shows, however, that the purported authenticity of the exhibits was not as commercially successful as the exaggerated racial stereotypes that emerged elsewhere. Instead, sensationalist shows put on by P.T. Barnum and traveling minstrel groups from the USA infused the German populace with a powerful sense of the otherness and provided a new mode of racist entertainment that commercial advertising tapped into and further exploited. As Ciarlo puts it, ‘Sensational spectacles in the 1880s gave way to planographic panopticism in the 1890s. From there it was but one step to chromolithographed savagery. Together, these visual styles created a template for German commercial culture’ (p. 23). Fifteen years after the German colonial project began, German advertisers grafted the transnational motifs already present in society and wove them into those depicting exotic primitives of tropical Africa. By 1900 the African figure became a staple of German visual advertising. The 1904 Herero uprising and the image of a race war that followed complicated the simple, happy-go-lucky representational strategy, but Ciarlo shows how older modes of depiction could serve a new purpose. Ciarlo also shows how colonial African illustrations in everyday advertising contributed to the militarization of Germany in the lead up to 1914 and during the post-war occupation period. For example, the Black Horror campaign of 1920 depicted a white, naked, vulnerable, and feminine figure encircled in the grasp of a semi-human African soldier serving in the French occupying forces. Advertising Empire, thus, shows how African imagery changed from flattery of the German viewer in the early 1900s to one in which the Weimar viewer was made to feel threatened. Yet, as Ciarlo argues, ‘the propaganda scenes retain the essential configurations of advertising, namely overstatement, simplified delineation, and repetition of patterns of depiction’ (p. 317). It is not the continuity of content that linked race to empire among the German population, but the patterns of stereotypes and subordination. Ciarlo’s story resonates with me personally. My late father was born into a rural German hamlet in 1937. His first encounter with a real-life black person occurred when American forces quartered themselves in his family’s farmhouse. He told me that he imagined the black men would behave like either savage simpletons or mammoth predators, and he feared for the worst. But knowing some English from school he was forced to interact with the men. Fifty years later he still recalled how courteous the men were and how this shocked his preset sensibilities: images presumably formed in school more than any advertising he might have been exposed to.
See also Volker M. Langbehn (Ed), German Colonialism, Visual Culture and Modern Memory, London, 2010.
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Review article / Journal of Historical Geography xxx (2014) 1e4
Empire on Display provides a reflection on the manifestation of the masculinist narrative underpinning American westward and international expansion. The book starts with New York Governor, Theodore Roosevelt’s Chicago ‘Strenuous Life’ speech in April of 1899, two months after the US Senate ratified the treaty with Spain concluding the Spanish-American War. Roosevelt defined the nation as one of ‘stern men with empire on the brains’ and, as Moore puts it, he ‘extolled imperialism as America’s national destiny and as the force to expand the American economy, ensure military superiority and international trade, improve racial fitness, bolster nationalism, and invigorate the American man’ (p. 3). Roosevelt also stressed the need to build the Isthmian canal to unite and, then, control the seas. Sixteen years later, in ‘the Court of the Universe’ at the PanamaePacific International Exposition in San Francisco, Roosevelt basked in the celebration of his accomplishment. The international fair was also intended to celebrate the rebuilding of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake and fire, highlight its location as the gateway to the Pacific, and to anticipate the glories of an expanding American empire. In addition to a scaled replica of the Panama Canal, that carried actual passengers through a series of locks, there were other gigantic miniatures displaying Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon e which Moore explores as dress rehearsals for imperialism. The former was staged by the Union Pacific Railroad and the latter by the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway. On the roof of the entrance to the Grand Canyon exhibit was an entire Pueblo Indian Village, complete with some twenty American Indians who were hired to live and work there throughout the fair. Thus, Moore tells us, the railroads tamed the wild frontier and made it safe for the visual consumption of its natural splendors. Moore sets up the fair’s narrative of progress, commerce, industry, overseas expansion, and the benevolent nature of US activities in the Philippines, within the context of other, recent Pacific fairs, and especially those of Portland (1905), Seattle (1909), and AlaskaeYukonePacific Exposition (1909). Her chapter on the Panama Canal is evocative but thin on historical context. Yet Moore is, above all, a writer and finds innovative ways to repeat similar things in witty ways: ‘America’s technological triumph over nature on foreign soil was understood as evidence of the nation’s revitalized manliness, technological prowess, and assurance of its rightful place at the imperial table’ (p. 47). Chapter four is perhaps the most interesting for geographers because Moore deconstructs the layout of the exhibition itself. Drawing attention to the exhibition’s map allows her to summarize recent research in critical cartography and the spatial turn in history. Moore shows that the fair’s very spatiality reproduced the ideology of an empire moving westward. The names of the exhibits aid her writing and make any further analysis almost redundant, e.g., Sterling Calder’s Lord of the Isthmian Way that sat atop a globe at the Fountain of Energy. To one writer, the Fountain of Energy exhibit ‘made the Isthmus of Panama look like a geographical nuisance no virile people could tolerate’ (p. 107). To another, the canal was simply a ‘correction of an oversight of nature’ (p. 119). A female figure reclining in profitless slumber at the Court of the Universe is described by Moore as awaiting arousal and implantation of the seeds of civilization by the likes of the Lord of the Isthmian Way (p. 107). Of the many equestrian statues displayed at the fair, Moore revels in the famous ‘End of the Trail’ figure by James Earle Fraser and shows how it was paired with the quintessential Euro-American Pioneer: stand-ins for wilderness and civilization respectively: ‘The elongated spear that the rider [a bare-chested American Indian man] holds points at a sharp downward angle to the abyss of extinction that awaits these remnants of the wilderness frontier that was America’s past’ (p. 123). Moore argues, the statue provides a history lesson in American colonial encounters:
those not up to the challenge of advancing civilization will meet their demise. Writings about international fairs and exhibitions always seemed to me to be too fun to be serious: the imaginative geographies of the planners are always outlandish and an easy target. Without the proper context of the Gilded Age, American Indian reservations, discussion of the actual designs of the USA in Latin America or the Pacific, or more impressions of the 18,000 people who actually visited to the PanamaePacific International Exhibition, it is difficult to see Empire on Display and Moore’s metanarrative about its meaning as more than an academic exercise in discursive writing, even if we can enjoy the read and appreciate the research she conducted. Illustrating Empire, in contrast, presents several dozen images covering two centuries of British imperial ephemera and draws only a few modest conclusions. Eight chapters group the ephemera of empire by theme, including: settlement and emigration; civic and military authority; exploration and knowledge; trade, commerce and marketing; travel communications and networks; leisure and popular culture; jubilees and exhibitions; empire and politics. Each chapter starts with a short introduction and then representative ephemera are presented with varying amounts of context. For example, attractive brochures tempting Britons to start new lives in Australia, Rhodesia, and Canada present scenes of idyllic farm life. Page images from The Imperial and Colonial Magazine and Review, with its common slogan Imperium et Litertas, highlight the alleged ‘beneficence of British rule’ (p. 47). Many images convey the manner in which ideas of Africa were formed in the public mind. A common assumption projected e without a hint of irony e was that only European action could end the evils wrought by the slave trade, ‘humanitarianism justifying empire’ (p. 87). As with Advertising Empire, the collection shows that race and empire were e and perhaps, still are e ubiquitous motifs used to sell stuff. The use of maps showing the extent of the British empire or its parts was another common commercial theme that should not be surprising. The stylized path of Lord Roberts drawn over a sectional map of Southern Africa during the Boer War is shown to spell, Bovril, a liquid soap. In other cases, stereotyped colonial scenes depict majestic and virile ambassadors alongside fawning natives. Colman’s Starch adverts used painted scenes depicting the Prince of Wales greeting nobles and hunting tigers from atop an elephant during his tour of India and Ceylon in 1875e1876 (p. 116). Colman’s Starch capitalized, literally, on the popularity of an excursion widely reported in the press, supporting Ciarlo’s arguments that commercial culture built upon and further diffused imperial images. Meanwhile, images of card and board games that allowed players to tour through and trade in foreign possessions from the 1850s through the 1930s demonstrate to readers the insidious and acclimatizing nature of colonial culture in the metropole. Taken as a whole these four books suggest that a visual culture seeking to exaggerate and hierarchicalize racial difference, celebrate masculinist conquests, sell stuff, and control nature are mutually constitutive of the imperial rule of ‘other’ peoples and places. Yet, the question of how a visual culture of empire consumed in the metropole actually configures imperial rule on foreign ground or is experienced by the subjects of overseas empires remains unanswered in these books. Karl Offen University of Oklahoma, USA E-mail address: [email protected]
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Historical Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg
Review article The visual culture of empire Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2012, 288 pages, US$55 hardcover; David Ciarlo, Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2011, 462 pages, US$51.50 hardcover; Ashley Jackson and David Tomkins, Illustrating Empire: A Visual History of British Imperialism. Oxford, Bodleian Library Publishing, 2011, 224 pages, £19.99 paperback; Sarah J. Moore, Empire on Display: San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915. Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 2013, 256 pages, US$34.95 hardcover. Few things appeal more to historical geographers than the combination of empire and visual culture, and this is especially so when the latter deals with maps, landscapes, nature, commerce, race, gender, and the historical geographies of science. Each of the four books under review here covers one or more of these themes to greater or lesser extent, yet none is written by a geographer.1 All the books are lavishly illustrated e two are full color throughout (Visible Empire and Illustrating Empire) and two make good use of black and white images along with color plates. With the partial exception of Visible Empire, all the books address the production and consumption of visual materials in the metropole. The focus is on the everyday nature of image encounters across multiple media and how these stabilize imperial themes. By underscoring the pervasiveness and domestic reach of imperial premises the works illustrate how the history of empire is an inalienable part of national history and culture, something often overlooked in the USA and Germany and, surprisingly, still subject to debate in Britain and Spain. A keen focus on visual culture e rather than any pioneering exploration of empire e unites these books. Two of the three monographs are written by art historians, grounding the overall set within concerns for the cultural and material practice of representation, its ideological consequences, and its participation in the production of meaning.2 Overall the books could be read as a response to Edward Said’s call in Culture and Imperialism to study the history of Western culture as a process intimately entangled
with empire and imperial expansion. The works likewise infer that empire is empowered domestically through the circulation of imperial images that naturalize racial hierarchies, capitalist economic systems, the control of nature, and the benevolence of foreign rule. In Advertising Empire historian David Ciarlo examines how German advertising at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries was constructed transnationally through an imitation of American and British art forms. In a complex and far-ranging study he finds that German commercial culture linked stereotyped racial themes of the colonial encounter with metropolitan advertising to reach a broad audience and to shape public opinion. Advertising Empire shows that the scholarly conundrum questioning whether images shape public perceptions (the Frankfurt School’s notion of a culture industry) or, instead, reflect those perceptions (semiology or cultural studies) is a false binary. Ciarlo argues that both approaches remove the observer and the image from their context, ‘the very milieu that informed both the production of the image and the consciousness of the observer’ (p. 16). His contribution is to examine larger patterns of imperial imagery over time to show how both the creation and consumption of racial images were mutually reinforcing. One of the many innovative aspects of Ciarlo’s study emerge from his excellent use of the trademark rolls of the Imperial Patent Office, where after 1894, German advertisers registered many of their signature designs. This comprehensive archive of text and illustrations e used by Ciarlo in combination with materials from museums and other collections through the mid-1920s e is a stunning reminder of what can be done with a relatively obscure visual archive. In her study of Spanish science at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, art historian Daniela Bleichmar develops the concept of ‘visual epistemology,’ a ‘way knowing based on visuality, encompassing both observation and representation’ (p. 8). For her, visual epistemology operated as part and parcel of an imperial system that had long relied on graphic forms of communication for administrative purposes. In this way Visible Empire draws connections among natural history, visual culture, and the administration of empire in the early modern Hispanic world. Bleichmar examined some twelve thousand
1 A recently published reader examining vision and empire, including maps, photographs, geographical surveys and other media, seeks to bring together previously published articles e including those by Bleichmar and Ciarlo e also contains no geographers; Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy (Eds), Empires of Vision: A Reader, Durham, 2014. Yet, geographers have contributed significantly to the study of empire, vision, and culture; see for example Morag Bell, Robin Butlin, and Michael Heffernan (Eds), Geography and Imperialism 1820e1940, Manchester, 1995; Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765e1843, Chicago, 1997; James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire, Chicago, 1998; Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire, New York, 2000; Felix Driver and Luciana Martins (Eds), Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire, Chicago, 2005; James R. Akerman (Ed), The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire, Chicago, 2009; and Stephen J. Hornsby, Surveyors of Empire: Samuel Holland, J. W. F. Des Barres, and the Making of the Atlantic Neptune, Montreal, 2011. 2 These works draw on prominent art historians, including several books I have been examining for another project such as Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting, Durham, 1999; Geoff Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz (Eds), An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the Atlantic World, 1660e1830, Manchester, 2003; Beth Fowkes Tobin, Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760e1820, Pennsylvania, 2005; Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700e1840, New Haven, 2008.
0305-7488/$ e see front matter http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.05.023
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Review article / Journal of Historical Geography xxx (2014) 1e4
painted images amassed by the Spanish Crown between the 1770s and the early 1800s, most of which are stored in a vault at the Royal Botanical Garden in Madrid. By contextualizing her reading of these paintings in a broader history of science she shows that the visual culture of natural history was global in its endeavor and ideology, that naturalists from throughout Europe understood their tasks in similar ways, consulted the same books and looked at the same images, and that this produced a ‘shared visual language’ (p. 9). Her work, thus, challenges e but, as I show below, also supports e recent works insisting that the history of science has a distinct geography.3 One of her more well-developed findings e already known from earlier works she is associated with4 e is that Spanish natural history labored to not only make imperial nature visible but to make much of the empire invisible. By abstracting and decontextualizing botanical fragments, the visual language of Enlightenment science erased the all-important human and physical geographies that connected plants to humanity and ecology, separating society from environment, nature from culture, a debilitating state of mind still with us. In Empire on Display art historian Sarah Moore descriptively analyzes the visual materials produced as part of San Francisco’s PanamaePacific exhibition of 1915 through the lens of expansionist, racialized, and masculinist discourses. She explores how the fair commended the completion of the Panama Canal and how it embodied the historical arc of the construction of an American empire: ‘the coordinates of empire [can] be traced from Havana Harbor, at the beginning of 1898, to the Culebra Cut in the Canal Zone and to the Court of the Universe at the PanamaePacific exposition with its central sculptural ensemble dedicated to the Lord of the Isthmian Way’ (p. 5). Moore argues that the exhibition in general and the Panama Canal display in particular ‘functioned pedagogically and embraced Social Darwinian logic, which assumed an evolutionary trajectory of civilization’ (pp. 5e6) that also progressed east to west across the North American continent and placed Euro-American males at its pinnacle. The work fits comfortably within American Studies traditions that have examined the cultures of US imperialism, how they link to racism at home and abroad, and how these cultures have been fervently displayed and celebrated.5 Intended for a popular audience, Illustrating Empire, presents a selection of British imperial ephemera from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries drawn from The John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. Collected by John de Monins Johnson (1882e1956), a printer at the University of Oxford Press, the compendium e including advertisements, calendars, exhibition programs, games, handbills, labels, menus, playbills, popular prints, postcards,
posters, prospectuses, street ballads, and tins e contains over one million items and is among the largest collections of ephemera in the world. The collection is necessarily permeated by imperial themes even if that was not Johnson’s intention. In stark contrast to the other books under review here, the authors Ashley Jackson and David Tomkins intended to let the ‘powerful and often complex images that conveyed information and ideas about empire and the non-European world. speak for themselves’ (p. 7). In this way, the authors hope that the book does not ‘take sides in the academic debate that centres upon the extent to which British society was, or was not, affected by imperial ideas’ (pp. 15e16). Yet, the images presented e allegedly chosen ‘at random’ (p. 19) e cannot help but show how Imperial Britain’s place in the wider world became ‘part of the furniture of British life’ at home (p. 9). The strength of the book is the high quality reproductions and the matter-of-fact descriptions the authors provide e just enough context to give intrepid students the ability to ponder the geographic foundations that brought these objects into being and the cultural and material work they might have done. Visible Empire explores the paintings produced by botanical artists who accompanied four Spanish Royal Botanical Expeditions to Chile and Peru (1777e1788), New Granada (1783e1816), New Spain (1787e1803), and the naval expedition to the Americas and Asia led by Alejandro Malaspina (1789e1794). Devised during the reigns of Charles III (1759e1788) and Charles IV (1788e1808), and coordinated with the help of The Royal Academy of Fine Arts (f. 1744), the Royal Botanical Garden (f. 1755), and the Royal Natural History Cabinet (f. 1776), the voyages sought to use Enlightenment science to restore the empire to prosperity by connecting past successes to a new botanical reconquista that built on longstanding visual traditions. Beginning with the commissioning of indigenous artists in New Spain to the Padrón Real and the maps of the Relaciones Geográficas, early modern Spanish officials had long privileged visuality in their production, transfer, and use of knowledge.6 In developing her ideas of visual epistemology, Bleichmar details how botanical artists were trained in expert viewing. Eighteenthcentury publications, she argues, stressed that vision provided the best method for investigating nature and that images provided the preferred means to transmit knowledge. Indeed, she shows that many botanists preferred to examine drawings in the laboratory rather than actual plants in the field. The Linnaean system relied on triangulation between specimens, images, and textual information and informed a shared visual and verbal vocabulary. This is why all the royal expeditions took as many books with them as they could carry, lest the artists succumb to ‘observational paralysis’ (p. 55)! In sum, ‘Eighteenth-century natural history was premised on a visual epistemology that allowed naturalists around the world to
3 Although Bleichmar is aware of this literature she does not adequately confront the implications head on; see for example Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith (Eds), Geography and Empire, Cambridge, 1994; Roy MacLeod (Ed), Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise, Chicago, 2000; David N. Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge, Chicago, 2003; Charles W.J. Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically About the Age of Reason, Chicago, 2007; Simon Naylor, Regionalizing Science: Placing Knowledges in Victorian England, London, 2010; Peter Meusburger, David N. Livingstone, and Heike Jöns (Eds), Geographies of Science, Heidelberg, 2010; David N. Livingstone and Charles W.J. Withers (Eds), Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science, Chicago, 2011. 4 Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (Eds), Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, Philadelphia, 2005; James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (Eds), Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, New York, 2008; Daniela Bleichmar, Paula De Vos, Kristin Huffine, and Kevin Sheehan (Eds), Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500e1800, Stanford, 2009; Daniela Bleichmar and Peter Mancall (Eds), Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World, Pennsylvania, 2011. 5 Robert Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876e1916, Chicago, 1985; Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease (Eds), Cultures of United States Imperialism, Durham, 1994; Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore (Eds), Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S. -Latin American Relations, Durham, NC, 1998; Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture, Cambridge, MA, 2005; David Brody, Visualizing American Empire: Orientalism and Imperialism in the Philippines, Chicago, 2010. 6 Scholarship elaborating this point for the early modern Hispanic world include Claire Farago (Ed), Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin American, 1450e1650, New Haven, 1995; Simon Varey, Rafael Chabrán, and Dora Weiner (Eds), Searching for the Secrets of Nature: The Life and Works of Dr. Francisco Hernández, Stanford, 2000; Heidi V. Scott, Contested Territory: Mapping Peru in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Notre Dame, 2009; Jordana Dym and Karl Offen (Eds), Mapping Latin America: A Cartographic Reader, Chicago, 2011; Ilona Katzew (Ed), Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World, Los Angeles, 2011; Kathryn M. Mayers, Visions of Empire in Colonial Spanish American Ekphrastic Writing, Lewisburg, PA, 2011; Mary E. Miller and Barbara E. Mundy (Eds), Painting a Map of Sixteenth-Century Mexico City: Land, Writing, and Native Rule, New Haven, 2013.
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participate in collective empiricism and communicate with one another through images, objects, and texts’ (p. 76). Although subtly challenging the geography of science literature mentioned above, Bleichmar shows that the Nueva Granada expedition headed by José Celestino Mutis provides a counterexample. The Nueva Granada expedition was unique in that Mutis worked with a very large workshop with fixed personnel who studied together for over three decades. Mutis trained Colombian Creoles who learned to paint expertly in a European style but, as Bleichmar shows, often chose not to. In developing their ‘American style,’ these Creole artists often rejected an adherence to the strict grammar of eighteenth-century botanical illustrations that focused on specific parts of detailed floral anatomy and fruit, were always green and static, and embodied numerous observations of multiple specimens. Instead, Mutis’s Creole painters often embellished European models with subtle flourishes of color and design. Like the great polymath and Mexican Creole José Antonio de Alzate, Colombian Creole artists partially rejected ‘a vision of global nature based on a diagnostic, taxonomic gaze that functioned to remove strangeness, rather than accentuate it’ (pp. 157e158). Bleichmar contrasts the Creole style with the eighteenth-century casta paintings from Mexico and the cuadros de mestizaje from Quito. Here, race was portrayed in very humanized and often rural contexts of the New World, and the flora of the region was often prominently displayed alongside the castas to demonstrate their regional specificity. Although both botanical and casta paintings relied on the visual to transmit knowledge only the casta tradition set out to contextualize people with place, race with region. Bleichmar explains this contradiction by stating that the ‘Two visions of Spanish American nature are the two faces of a coin, alternate but not separate, opposed by not contradictory’ (p. 184). Although this rationalization is unsatisfying, the book and its astonishing visual qualities are significant achievements. Even broader in scope and thicker in backstory than Visible Empire is Advertising Empire. The book has won at least two scholarly awards and it is easy to see why. Much more than a study of ‘Race and Visual Culture in Imperial German,’ the book is also a history of colonialist thought among German peoples and an erudite interpretation of consumer behavior and marketing strategies vis-à-vis technological change, racism, and popular culture fads.7 The first part of the book provides a history of visuality and the origins of mass-produced commercial imagery in Germany before the twentieth century. The second part presents a visual history that contextualizes the changing patterns of German advertising across different products and media through the early 1920s, as new racial motifs served in the lead up to World War I and, then, the anti-occupational campaigns of the Weimar Republic. By the early twentieth century Ciarlo finds that one of the most persistent and powerful visions in the German consumer imaginary to be those that engaged with the interaction of colonial rule and racial differentiation. Given Germany’s limited colonial engagement, Ciarlo sets up his study by asking why colonial themes became so pervasive? Why did the ads work? He answers this, in part, by showing how images in general and of blacks in particular came to be seen as not only legitimate for business use but as necessary for commercial success. At the heart of his study, thus, is the question of how capitalism successfully imitated transnational art forms, especially those emanating from Imperial Britain and the ‘savage’ USA, and marshaled stereotyped racial difference to sell stuff to consumers who had little or no personal interactions with people of color. The meticulous study provides several counter-
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intuitive and nuanced findings that demonstrate the danger of viewing racial stereotypes primarily through the eyes of their creators. Advertising Empire locates the origins of a relationship between German commodity culture and colonialism at the great exhibitions of Bremen in 1890 and in Berlin in 1896. Following the ideas of Walter Benjamin, Ciarlo shows how the fairs sought to invest commodities with larger meanings and significance through artful presentation. Despite the organizer’s best efforts, however, fairgoers preferred to have fun and, in general, ignored the colonial exhibits and their meager products. However, the Berlin Colonial Exhibition of 1896 marked a turning point because it set up three ‘authentic’ native villages from Africa and the South Pacific, which allowed one guidebook to boast ‘the materials are real. and so too are the Coloreds!’ (p. 57). These contained spectacles combined with traveling and exotic Völkerschau (people shows) to disseminate a new visual form, ‘a style that set the commodity into a new, powerful tableau of meaning by placing it in a larger visual field’ (p. 64). Ciarlo shows, however, that the purported authenticity of the exhibits was not as commercially successful as the exaggerated racial stereotypes that emerged elsewhere. Instead, sensationalist shows put on by P.T. Barnum and traveling minstrel groups from the USA infused the German populace with a powerful sense of the otherness and provided a new mode of racist entertainment that commercial advertising tapped into and further exploited. As Ciarlo puts it, ‘Sensational spectacles in the 1880s gave way to planographic panopticism in the 1890s. From there it was but one step to chromolithographed savagery. Together, these visual styles created a template for German commercial culture’ (p. 23). Fifteen years after the German colonial project began, German advertisers grafted the transnational motifs already present in society and wove them into those depicting exotic primitives of tropical Africa. By 1900 the African figure became a staple of German visual advertising. The 1904 Herero uprising and the image of a race war that followed complicated the simple, happy-go-lucky representational strategy, but Ciarlo shows how older modes of depiction could serve a new purpose. Ciarlo also shows how colonial African illustrations in everyday advertising contributed to the militarization of Germany in the lead up to 1914 and during the post-war occupation period. For example, the Black Horror campaign of 1920 depicted a white, naked, vulnerable, and feminine figure encircled in the grasp of a semi-human African soldier serving in the French occupying forces. Advertising Empire, thus, shows how African imagery changed from flattery of the German viewer in the early 1900s to one in which the Weimar viewer was made to feel threatened. Yet, as Ciarlo argues, ‘the propaganda scenes retain the essential configurations of advertising, namely overstatement, simplified delineation, and repetition of patterns of depiction’ (p. 317). It is not the continuity of content that linked race to empire among the German population, but the patterns of stereotypes and subordination. Ciarlo’s story resonates with me personally. My late father was born into a rural German hamlet in 1937. His first encounter with a real-life black person occurred when American forces quartered themselves in his family’s farmhouse. He told me that he imagined the black men would behave like either savage simpletons or mammoth predators, and he feared for the worst. But knowing some English from school he was forced to interact with the men. Fifty years later he still recalled how courteous the men were and how this shocked his preset sensibilities: images presumably formed in school more than any advertising he might have been exposed to.
See also Volker M. Langbehn (Ed), German Colonialism, Visual Culture and Modern Memory, London, 2010.
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Empire on Display provides a reflection on the manifestation of the masculinist narrative underpinning American westward and international expansion. The book starts with New York Governor, Theodore Roosevelt’s Chicago ‘Strenuous Life’ speech in April of 1899, two months after the US Senate ratified the treaty with Spain concluding the Spanish-American War. Roosevelt defined the nation as one of ‘stern men with empire on the brains’ and, as Moore puts it, he ‘extolled imperialism as America’s national destiny and as the force to expand the American economy, ensure military superiority and international trade, improve racial fitness, bolster nationalism, and invigorate the American man’ (p. 3). Roosevelt also stressed the need to build the Isthmian canal to unite and, then, control the seas. Sixteen years later, in ‘the Court of the Universe’ at the PanamaePacific International Exposition in San Francisco, Roosevelt basked in the celebration of his accomplishment. The international fair was also intended to celebrate the rebuilding of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake and fire, highlight its location as the gateway to the Pacific, and to anticipate the glories of an expanding American empire. In addition to a scaled replica of the Panama Canal, that carried actual passengers through a series of locks, there were other gigantic miniatures displaying Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon e which Moore explores as dress rehearsals for imperialism. The former was staged by the Union Pacific Railroad and the latter by the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway. On the roof of the entrance to the Grand Canyon exhibit was an entire Pueblo Indian Village, complete with some twenty American Indians who were hired to live and work there throughout the fair. Thus, Moore tells us, the railroads tamed the wild frontier and made it safe for the visual consumption of its natural splendors. Moore sets up the fair’s narrative of progress, commerce, industry, overseas expansion, and the benevolent nature of US activities in the Philippines, within the context of other, recent Pacific fairs, and especially those of Portland (1905), Seattle (1909), and AlaskaeYukonePacific Exposition (1909). Her chapter on the Panama Canal is evocative but thin on historical context. Yet Moore is, above all, a writer and finds innovative ways to repeat similar things in witty ways: ‘America’s technological triumph over nature on foreign soil was understood as evidence of the nation’s revitalized manliness, technological prowess, and assurance of its rightful place at the imperial table’ (p. 47). Chapter four is perhaps the most interesting for geographers because Moore deconstructs the layout of the exhibition itself. Drawing attention to the exhibition’s map allows her to summarize recent research in critical cartography and the spatial turn in history. Moore shows that the fair’s very spatiality reproduced the ideology of an empire moving westward. The names of the exhibits aid her writing and make any further analysis almost redundant, e.g., Sterling Calder’s Lord of the Isthmian Way that sat atop a globe at the Fountain of Energy. To one writer, the Fountain of Energy exhibit ‘made the Isthmus of Panama look like a geographical nuisance no virile people could tolerate’ (p. 107). To another, the canal was simply a ‘correction of an oversight of nature’ (p. 119). A female figure reclining in profitless slumber at the Court of the Universe is described by Moore as awaiting arousal and implantation of the seeds of civilization by the likes of the Lord of the Isthmian Way (p. 107). Of the many equestrian statues displayed at the fair, Moore revels in the famous ‘End of the Trail’ figure by James Earle Fraser and shows how it was paired with the quintessential Euro-American Pioneer: stand-ins for wilderness and civilization respectively: ‘The elongated spear that the rider [a bare-chested American Indian man] holds points at a sharp downward angle to the abyss of extinction that awaits these remnants of the wilderness frontier that was America’s past’ (p. 123). Moore argues, the statue provides a history lesson in American colonial encounters:
those not up to the challenge of advancing civilization will meet their demise. Writings about international fairs and exhibitions always seemed to me to be too fun to be serious: the imaginative geographies of the planners are always outlandish and an easy target. Without the proper context of the Gilded Age, American Indian reservations, discussion of the actual designs of the USA in Latin America or the Pacific, or more impressions of the 18,000 people who actually visited to the PanamaePacific International Exhibition, it is difficult to see Empire on Display and Moore’s metanarrative about its meaning as more than an academic exercise in discursive writing, even if we can enjoy the read and appreciate the research she conducted. Illustrating Empire, in contrast, presents several dozen images covering two centuries of British imperial ephemera and draws only a few modest conclusions. Eight chapters group the ephemera of empire by theme, including: settlement and emigration; civic and military authority; exploration and knowledge; trade, commerce and marketing; travel communications and networks; leisure and popular culture; jubilees and exhibitions; empire and politics. Each chapter starts with a short introduction and then representative ephemera are presented with varying amounts of context. For example, attractive brochures tempting Britons to start new lives in Australia, Rhodesia, and Canada present scenes of idyllic farm life. Page images from The Imperial and Colonial Magazine and Review, with its common slogan Imperium et Litertas, highlight the alleged ‘beneficence of British rule’ (p. 47). Many images convey the manner in which ideas of Africa were formed in the public mind. A common assumption projected e without a hint of irony e was that only European action could end the evils wrought by the slave trade, ‘humanitarianism justifying empire’ (p. 87). As with Advertising Empire, the collection shows that race and empire were e and perhaps, still are e ubiquitous motifs used to sell stuff. The use of maps showing the extent of the British empire or its parts was another common commercial theme that should not be surprising. The stylized path of Lord Roberts drawn over a sectional map of Southern Africa during the Boer War is shown to spell, Bovril, a liquid soap. In other cases, stereotyped colonial scenes depict majestic and virile ambassadors alongside fawning natives. Colman’s Starch adverts used painted scenes depicting the Prince of Wales greeting nobles and hunting tigers from atop an elephant during his tour of India and Ceylon in 1875e1876 (p. 116). Colman’s Starch capitalized, literally, on the popularity of an excursion widely reported in the press, supporting Ciarlo’s arguments that commercial culture built upon and further diffused imperial images. Meanwhile, images of card and board games that allowed players to tour through and trade in foreign possessions from the 1850s through the 1930s demonstrate to readers the insidious and acclimatizing nature of colonial culture in the metropole. Taken as a whole these four books suggest that a visual culture seeking to exaggerate and hierarchicalize racial difference, celebrate masculinist conquests, sell stuff, and control nature are mutually constitutive of the imperial rule of ‘other’ peoples and places. Yet, the question of how a visual culture of empire consumed in the metropole actually configures imperial rule on foreign ground or is experienced by the subjects of overseas empires remains unanswered in these books. Karl Offen University of Oklahoma, USA E-mail address: [email protected]