Afterword

Abstract

What is it that makes an imperial hero and allows the survival of his or her reputation in the post-colonial era? In this concluding piece to the special issue of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History on the decolonisation of imperial heroes, John MacKenzie considers the modern afterlives of the ‘heroic myths of empire’ which he identified in 1992. Considering the crucial ‘d's' (deeds, death, developments and dissemination), he shares here his reflections on the making, unmaking and debunking of colonial heroes over more than a century.

Notes

1 MacKenzie, ‘T. E. Lawrence’.

2 Sèbe, Heroic Imperialists in Africa.

3 Helly, Livingstone's Legacy.

4 Lytton Strachey included General Gordon as the subject of the fourth essay in Eminent Victorians.

5 Aldington, Lawrence of Arabia.

6 This rise and fall has, however, been overdone. See MacKenzie, ‘David Livingstone—Prophet or Patron Saint of Imperialism’.

7 Jeal, Livingstone. The biography was re-published, with only very slight additions, in 2013. In debunking Livingstone, Jeal paid no attention to Livingstone's scientific and medical, philological and anthropological interests, all of which have been re-valued in modern times.

8 Huntford, Scott and Amundsen.

9 Although lots of pubs were named after Havelock, mainly in the north east of England, and some of these names survive.

10 Lawrence Dritsas has re-valued Livingstone's scientific achievements, notably in the Zambezi Expedition (see Zambesi) while his medical significance has been powerfully revised by Michael Barrett, professor of biochemical parasitology at Glasgow University. Barrett has described Livingstone as the father of Scottish immunology. Barrett, ‘What is David Livingstone's Legacy 200 Years after his Birth?’, New Statesman, 28 Feb. 2013.

11 It is of course more than a happy accident that Scotland's independence referendum was scheduled to take place in the year marking the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn.

12 The tomb and memorial to the Glasgow-born Sir John Moore at La Coruña in northern Spain describes him as a founder of Spain's freedom.

13 Glover has two modern biographies: McKay, Scottish Samurai; and Gardiner, At the Edge of Empire. On the centennial of his death in 2011, the Japan Times (an English-language newspaper in Japan) carried an article with the title ‘The Scot Who Shaped Japan’, 11 Dec. 2011.

14 In the inscription on the plinth, it is apparent that the word ‘English’ has been scratched out and ‘Scots' has been substituted, not quite filling the available space.

15 J. E. Hoare has suggested that ‘the direct role of the foreign settlements in the modern development of Japan was therefore essentially a marginal one’, but in some respects this is belied by the ‘heritage’ approach to Glover and others in Nagasaki. Hoare, Japan's Treaty Ports and Foreign Settlements, 177.

16 Amazingly, the bomb and ensuing fires left the foreign settlement area largely intact.

17 Gupta, The Relic State.

18 Personal reminiscence.

19 In February 2014, it was announced that the Maharashtra cabinet had voted an enormous sum of money in order to erect another statue of Shivaji, the ‘tallest statue in the world’, twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, on a rocky island in the Arabian Sea, as well as another statue of the ‘warrior king’ at Mumbai airport. It was specifically stated that these would be tourist attractions. There was also an element of ‘statue wars' in this since it was suggested that they were countering a proposal by Gujerat to erect a statue of Sardar Vallabhai Patel.

20 MacKenzie, ‘Nelson Goes Global’. There is a notable statue of Nelson in Trafalgar Square (still known as such, though renamed National Heroes Square), Bridgetown, Barbados, and Nelson is of course commemorated at Nelson's Dockyard, English Harbour, Antigua. This is ironic because the rather earnest young Captain Nelson was loathed in the Caribbean for his over-zealous application of the Navigation Acts, incurring the personal enmity of plantation owners, merchants and American shippers alike. If he had died before Trafalgar, his reputation in the West Indies would have been as a villain rather than as a hero. But Trafalgar and the defeat of the French and the Spanish changed all that. There is also a Lord Nelson pub in Bridgetown. Presumably the retention of these names and the statue is very much tourism related. The Nelson column in Montreal survives, as well as monuments and statues in Liverpool, Birmingham and Edinburgh, although Nelson monuments in Dublin and County Cork have been destroyed by Irish republicans. A Nelson statue was unveiled in Gibraltar for the Trafalgar bicentennial in 2005. It stands in Trafalgar Road opposite the Trafalgar cemetery, almost as an act of defiance to Spain.

21 Stanley, How I Found Livingstone.

22 Jeal, Stanley. This can be seen as part of Jeal's project to denigrate Livingstone, partly by restoring Stanley to a more notable role in African exploration and consequently to a higher heroic status. In 2013, it was apparent that it was an effort which had signally failed.

23 Consider the title of Georgina Howell's biography: Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations; see also Winstone, Gertrude Bell.

24 Royle, Orde Wingate.