Persuasion and Propaganda

Joan Coutu and her publishers have produced a most attractive book, finely illustrated, often by the author's own photographs, evidence of how widely she has travelled in pursuit of her subject. The text is based on an impressive amount of scholarship drawn from many archives and much printed material. The book, as its sub-title proclaims, is about monuments to the dead with imperial connections, both overseas and at home. The monuments overseas which concern Coutu are those ordered from Britain and usually placed in colonial churches, where they now moulder, ‘often cracked and chipped’. Coutu's fieldwork has been particularly focused on the Caribbean, where she has done sterling work in listing and photographing such monuments as have survived natural disasters and the inevitable neglect by post-planter Anglican congregations with very limited resources, but the further survival of which cannot be indefinitely assured. In Britain, posthumous recognition for national heroes entailed a monument at Westminster Abbey or later at St Paul’s, but Coutu also examines memorials in other public places and in private parks

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Colonialism · Empire · Library science · Listing (finance · Neglect · Persuasion · Political science · Scholarship · Subject (documents · Australian History and Society · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law · Philosophy