Jeffrey Auerbach
From the viceroys of India drowning in tedious paperwork to soldiers with no one to fight, Jeffrey Auerbach describes the ennui that gripped Britons on the frontline of empire in the 19th century
The Victorian empire was full of excitement, but it could also be dull and disappointing. Happily for me as a researcher, boredom turned out to be a fascinating topic, one that sheds new light on the imperial experience.
Jeffrey describes the ennui that gripped British imperialists in the 19th century
The British empire was the largest in the history of the world – one on which the sun never set. It was also a place of widespread and at times crushing monotony, as the empire grew larger and more bureaucratic with fewer opportunities to discover the unknown or interact with indigenous people.
Not everyone found the empire boring, nor was it boring all the time. It would also be a stretch to suggest that the millions of people over whom the British ruled found the empire boring, although the novelist Jamaica Kincaid claimed in A Small Place (1988), her moving portrait of postcolonial Antigua, that: “Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom.” Still, the Aboriginal experience with British settlers was a story of great violence and hardship, and for many Indians and Africans the empire was devastating and dehumanising.
For the British, however, boredom was increasingly how they experienced the empire, whether it was the Marquess of Hastings complaining that his journey up the Ganges in 1815 was “extremely tedious”, to gold diggers in Australia who groused about “the monotony of bush life”. These feelings of boredom had very real consequences, from soldiers who succumbed to alcoholism, to émigrés who returned home, to officials who quit the imperial service. The early empire may have been about wonder and marvel but, as the following eight examples prove, the 19th-century empire was far less exciting.