Incursions, incisions, omissions: liberal imperialism, violence and British Southeast Asia in Francis Leggatt Chantrey, Major General Robert Rollo Gillespie, and Joseph Edgar Boehm, Richard Southwell Bourke, sixth earl of Mayo

Abstract

This article considers the sculpted monuments in St Paul’s Cathedral to nineteenth-century protagonists in Britain’s invasion and rule of Southeast Asian territories (including Burma (Myanmar), Indonesia and the Andaman Islands). It focuses on two works in particular: Sir Francis Leggatt Chantrey’s monument to Major General Robert Rollo Gillespie, and the monument to Richard Southwell Bourke, sixth earl of Mayo and viceroy of India, attributed to Joseph Edgar Boehm. The first commemorates the man considered by his supporters to be the hero of the British East Indies after smashing a hole in the Indigenous power structures of the Indonesian archipelago so that it could be claimed for British India. The second remembers a man who was one of the British East Indies’ many victims, even as he ran the place. His story and his monument indicate the extent to which Southeast Asia became a region to which British India despatched its problems – and in which the liberal ideology used to justify nineteenth-century British imperialism met its limits. These two men’s imperial histories and sculpted memorials are read in turn as distinct and divergent instances of liberal imperialism’s simultaneous dependence upon, and denial of, its own capacity for brutal violence. The article argues that, viewed up close and in context, both monuments bear traces of that violence, its consequences, and the alibis, omissions and occlusions with which it was – and, in the neoliberal present, continues to be – cloaked in public discourse.