Empire of Sentiment: The Death of Livingstone and the Myth of Victorian Imperialism by Joanna Lewis, and: Imperial Emotions: The Politics of Empathy across the British Empire by Jane Lydon (review)

Sentiment, emotion, empathy: the two monographs reviewed here examine the significant ways feeling shaped nineteenth-century British imperialism. Jane Lydon's Imperial Emotions: The Politics of Empathy across the British Empire takes Australia as its focal point; Joanna Lewis's Empire of Sentiment: The Death of Livingstone and the Myth of Victorian Imperialism looks to Africa. Both contribute to a larger conversation about affect and colonialism that includes Leela Gandhi's Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (2006), Margrit Pernau's edited collection Civilizing Emotions: Concepts in Nineteenth-Century Asia and Europe (2015), and, most recently, Tanya Agathocleous' Disaffected: Emotion, Sedition, and Colonial Law in the Anglosphere (2021).

Central for both Lewis and Lydon are the mechanisms by which British colonizers justified their actions to white communities both at home in the United Kingdom and abroad on the Australian and African continents. Lewis focuses on the fabrication of David Livingstone as a "poster boy" for Britain's expansion into Africa (4). The response to Livingstone's wretched 1873 death from malaria and dysentery in Chitambo, in what is now the Republic of Zambia, "created a strong emotional culture which would underpin support for empire during the mid-Victorian era and beyond" (9). As an anti-slavery campaigner, explorer, and missionary, Livingstone would come to be seen as "Christ-like" in his sacrifice (80); the story of his life and death—some parts real, many parts fabricated—would be used "to manipulate human emotion" in support of white intervention in Africa (57).

Lewis's book concentrates first on the immediate aftermath of Livingstone's death: the struggle to bring his body back to Britain, and the fanfare around his burial at Westminster Abbey. Newspaper coverage and hagiographic biographies "helped to nudge British liberalism and anti-slavery to drive forwards the formal colonial rule in eastern and central/south Africa as a national duty," the result of which was the disastrous 1880s partitioning of Africa by European powers: the so-called "Scramble for Africa" (86). Feelings inspired by Livingstone, Lewis argues, inaugurated decades of colonial violence that were "cloak[ed] … under a humanitarian disguise" and organized around the largely invented narrative of the explorer's life (121). Sentimental imperialism in effect offered a logic for white people to feel good about doing ill, to see colonial violence and cupidity as instead self-sacrificial heroism.

Lewis's story throughout is not about Livingstone himself, but instead his many afterlives: the slow transformation of his story across the decades, and the different uses to which that story has been put. Though the abundance of detail sometimes weighs down the chapters, the overall arc of the narrative is significant. The twentieth-century permutations of the Livingstone mythology are especially appalling. Chitambo was to become a white settlement and tourist destination; the town of Livingstone emerged as "the territory's unofficial capital of white racism" (167), a "nostalgic pioneer fantasy destination for white tourists" (184). Not until the later twentieth century, as Lewis shows in her final chapter, did Livingstone the man come under scrutiny: as a husband and father who had abandoned his family, and as a narcissist who "had deluded himself into believing he was following God's orders, when in reality he was simply pursuing his own wish to explore" (230). Livingstone's life produced "a powerful fiction," and Lewis's accounting of it reminds readers to be skeptical not just of Livingstone, but of all hagiographic colonial narratives (249).

Lydon's Imperial Emotions shares with Lewis's Empire of Sentiment the argument that...