All Hail Queen Victoria’s Empire

Imperial Map of the British Empire

Sep 20, 2022

The Imperial Federation League map was published at the time of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in 1886, "a showcase for the wealth and industrial development of the British Empire." It is "dated just before the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 1887," and "reflects the celebratory consciousness of Victoria’s Empire."

"The map is the perfect symbol of the state." In many ways, this is "an excellent candidate for the quintessentially imperial map. It seems to encapsulate the culture of high Victorian imperialism in a single iconic image conjoining the infrastructure of empire (represented by the statistics of trade and by the lines connecting major ports of call) and imperial fantasy (especially the use of statuesque human bodies, flora and fauna around its crowded margins to denote whole continents, races and landscapes)." The late Brian Harley, the intellectual leader of cartographic "deconstruction," wrote that “As much as guns and warships, maps have been the weapons of imperialism" and he used this map to illustrate the point!

But further analysis suggests a more complex picture. Although the map cites the author of its statistical data, it does not (surprisingly) name the mapmaker. As a result of an outstanding recent paper, we now know that the map was prepared by a well-regarded illustrator of the time, Walter Crane, a leader of the British Arts and Crafts Movement. He is considered to be the most influential, and among the most prolific, children's book creators of his generation. The work matches his characteristic style, and the lower left corner of the map bears his tiny mark: a crane and the initials W. C.

Crane's work was distinctive; his "clearly delineated designs have a little of the stridency of the propagandist together with the insistence upon facts of the Victorian." The failure to credit Crane was no doubt a result of his politics: he was "a leading figure in the socialist movement", and for years contributed weekly cartoons to the leading movement periodicals, Justice and Commonweal, "glorifying the cause of Labour, or protesting against the tyranny of Capital."

In many ways, Crane had the last word. A "particularly striking feature" of "Freedom," "Fraternity" and "Federation" at the top of the map "is their headwear, distinctly reminiscent - at least to those who cared to read the symbolism - of the red Phrygian cap worn by liberated slaves in ancient Rome, which was adopted as a French revolutionary symbol of liberty and widely used as an anti-colonial icon in the nineteenth century." And while Britannia sits astride the world as always, and Atlas carries the world on his shoulders as always, there is a novel sash across his chest, reading "Human Labour"!

You might also enjoy …