To preserve and diffuse the memory of the noblest series of actions which have ever presented themselves in the history of man; to give to the present and future sons of oppression and misfortune, such glorious lessons of their rights, and of the spirit with which they should assert and support them, and even to transmit to their descendants, the personal resemblance of those who have been the great actors in those illustrious scenes, were objects which gave a dignity to the profession, peculiar to my situation. —John Trumbull, “To Thomas Jefferson,” on 11 June 1789 [1]
How did the British imagined the British Empire from the 1750 to the 1850? What did the British Empire mean to the 18th century Britons? How did they encounter Britishness in the 18th century art-works? What’s the relationships between art, politics and the Great British Empire in the 18th century? And how can we approach to them? Focusing on Holger Hoock’s Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750-1850, I am going to discuss these questions in this lesson plan.
War Was the Catalyst of National Identity
In British history, there were some historical moments, place and monuments which were very important for the Britons to construct their British identity: on the coronation day of the George III of the Great Britain in 1761, on 1 May 1851, when Queen Victoria presided over the opening ceremony of the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, and the coronations and mausoleum of kings at the Westminster Abbey, all these moments and place contributed a lot for the British to define their British identity.
Yet in the wartime, war, as the catalyst for constructing national identity, was very helpful for people to define their own identity. Let’s take the monument of the George III as an example. In the spring of the 1770, the New York press reported that the statues of the George III had arrived at the New York City. The larger-than-life-size equestrian statue of the king would be placed on the Bowling Green at the foot of Broadway in Lower Manhattan, the spot of the 1765Stampt Act Riot. To colonial Americans, this statue was the first public monument in the New York City. It was also highly possible that it was the first public monument in North America, and the first equestrian monument of the George III in his overseas dominions. When it was erected there, it was inaugurated in style, with a procession, patriotic music, and a 32-cannon salute.
However, when the thirteen colonies finally declared their independence from the Great Britain, especially when the Declaration of Independence was read in New York City in July 1776, New York City became the “seat of war” and was marked by a dramatic act of king-killing. Recognizing the king was so tyrannical that he could not protect his subjects in the North America and the encroachment of their liberty, colonial Americans started to fight against the King. In such a moment, the marble pedestal of the George III became the target for the New Yorkers to attack. On the evening of the 9 July 1776, when the Continental soldiers and the mob marched to the Lower Manhattan, they attacked the status of George III there. The assailants vaulted the fence encircling the statue, looped ropes around the horse and rider, and tore it down. Soon the King’s body was killed. For a long time, the North American never imagined that they would kill their king some day. However, in July 1776, when they declared their independence, they cut down their relations with the Great Britain. In this situation, the statue of the George III, once as a great symbol for the colonial Americans to find their British identity, was violently attacked, just because the North Americans did not think themselves as the subjects of the Great Britain any more. What they wanted to do was to create a new republic and find their own new national identity as the Americans.
John Trumbull: “To His Country He Gave His Sword and His Pencil”
Trumbull, a great painter of the United States, took the history of the American Revolutionary War as his lifetime project in painting. For him, war and paintings helped him to define his own identity as an American. In his painting career, focused on heroic sacrifice, military martyrdom, and the universal values of magnanimity, Trumbull started his series with paintings of battles. The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, June 17, 1775 (1786) showed American military martyrdom in the context of a British victory. The Death of General Montgomery in the Attack on Quebec, December 31, 1775 (1786) showed the moment when the Continental general Richard Montgomery died. The Death of General Mercer at the Battle of Princeton, January 3, 1777 portrayed the British grenadiers mortally wounding the general. The Capture of the Hessians at Trenton, December 26, 1776 (1786-1828) gave “a lesson to all living and future soldiers in the service of [their] country, to show mercy and kindness to a fallen enemy, — their enemy no longer when wounded and in their power.”[2] Then In 1786, Trumbull started to compose The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776, which depicted how the American founding fathers, like Thomas Jeffeson, John Dickinson, John Hancock and so on, were drafting The Declaration of Independence.
In Trumbull’s paintings, he commemorated dead heroes and martyrs and praised the American founding fathers. Through painting, he finally found what did an American mean to him. In the mid-1780s, Trumbull told a correspondent: “I am now …employ’d writing in my language, the History of our country.”[3] It is not a surprise that when he wrote his autobiography in 1841, Trumbull’s self-image was a national artist, as well as a patriotic visual historiographer.
British Empire as an “Imagined Community”
But what did the British identity mean to the British in the 18th century? And how can we approach to it? In the Sinews of Power, John Brewer examines the fiscal-military institution and other characters of the nation-state and defined the British state as “the sinew of power”.[4] Then he explains the transformation of art, music, theatre, and literature in the polite public sphere. As an excellent historian, Brewer helps us to understand the rise of the Great Britain as a nation-state in the 18th century. However, he neglects the significance of the art and war in helping the British to shape the British identity and pays little attention to “the pleasure of the imagination.” While in fact, Britons also built empires in their cultural imagination. After all, empire-building requires not just economic and military power, but also an intellectual and imaginative effort. Brewer simplifies the notion of the British state, which limits his interpretation of the empire-building of the British Empire in the 18th century.
Disagreeing with Brewer, Holger Hoock thinks that historians should interpret the British state in a new way. By saying the British ‘state,’ Hoock points out, it means not just the formal institutions of the state: “the monarchy, national government, and parliament, the diplomatic and armed services, as well as the formal institutions of imperial governance.” Beyond these, he claims that the British state encompasses “a wider, loosely connected network of institutions and influence, such as military academies, corporate bodies like the East India Company, and national cultural institutions such as the British Museum.”[5] Unlike Brewer who emphasizes the significance of taxation, finance, military, army and other dimensions of the nation-state to approach the British history, Hoock argues that historians should pay more attention to the topic of imperial imagination through cultural politics and political culture.
Moreover, Hoock claims that historians should understand the role of the war and art played in shaping the cultural nation and national culture. In his opinion, “War was not just, first, a catalyst of the emergence of the fiscal-military state after the Glorious Revolution and, second, a catalyst of notions of national identity and consciousness throughout the Second Hundred Years War with France (1689-1815).War played an important role, too, in the shaping of notions of national culture, the cultural nation, and the cultural state.”[6] That’s to say, war, empire and the evolution of the cultural state and cultural nation were inextricably intertwined. Then he assumes that we should explain it from the perspective of cultural politics and political culture rather than from the perspective of the “sinew of the power,” only if we want to understand what did the British Empire mean to its subjects in the 18th century. In order to do this, “the historians need to consider both changing socio-political realities and the creative potential of cultural forms. Understanding the relationships of culture, ideas, symbols, and discourses to power requires that we investigate both how texts and artefacts work as systems of signification and how they were produced, used, interpreted, and circulated.”[7] Rather than claim we should explore them separately, Hoock argues that we should examine art, war, empire and the evolution of the cultural state and cultural nation together.
From the 1750 to the 1850, as a powerful empire, the British Empire had overseas colonies in North America, India, Mediterranean, Near East, Asian and other regions. In order to maintain its hegemony around the world, it competed with other European countries, like the France, the Spain, the Netherland and so on; in order to maintain its rule in its colonies, it harshly repressed a lot of revolts in its colonies. In this period, the British Empire had a lot of wars or battles with its European enemies and colonials. During the wars, some of the British were died and became the national heroes; some of the monuments of the British Kings were destroyed, which helped the colonists to redefine their national identity rather than as the Britishness. Luckily, with the help of artists, painters and sculptors, through their art-works, we can revisit the past and understand the relations of art, cultural politics and imperial imagination in the 18th century.
[1] Trumbull, Autobiography, 159. Cited from Holger Hoock, Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750-1850 (Profile Books: 2010), 111.
[2] Cited from Hoock, ibid, 113.
[3] Hoock, ibid, 110
[4] See John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688-1783 (Cambridge: 1990).
[6] Hoock, ibid, 13
[7] Hoock, ibid, 12.
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