Imperial Boredom

It is hard not to be impressed by the imaginative leap Jeffrey A. Auerbach took in conceiving this book. Instead of flicking reflexively past the passages in diaries and travel accounts which complain of nothing much having happened, he has turned them into a monograph. His book suggests that historians have been too prone to describing the British empire as characterised mainly by heroism and derring-do, or by oppression and exploitation. Either way, being involved in it sounds fairly engaging. The book argues that, in fact, ‘a significant and overlooked feature of the nineteenth-century British imperial experience was boredom and disappointment’ (p. 3), and that this was as true for those charged with running things as it was for rank-and-file soldiers and settlers. The evidence presented amply bears out these claims. But most of us would probably be willing to accept Auerbach’s proposition a priori: a lot of people

Ancient history · Boredom · Economic history · Empire · Epistemology · Comics and Graphic Narratives · History · Philosophy