The history of the British Empire also belongs to the history of the emotions. As the cliché goes, this was an empire of blood, sweat and tears. So far, we have been less interested in the latter. Yet surely empire was a maelstrom of radical feeling. The intensity of the lived experience of the colonial ruling class on the ground often generated strong emotions: lust, disappointment, loneliness, depression, hatred. The language of imperialism at home, so much a language of patriotism, masculinity and duty, was fundamentally a language of emotion. And life on a settler frontier – ‘an island of white’ – could suddenly swing between extremes, switching from the extraordinary to the mundane, from absolute power to complete vulnerability. In such a state of flux, the ‘precarious hinge’ of emotional control could very easily slip.

Emotion is not an easy object of study. The complexity and abundance of human emotions make for challenging research. This is especially true for historians interested in a past when feelings were deliberately repressed or brushed aside, and for which records of the inner life are sparse. But it is worth trying, especially if we accept the principle that feelings are not just determined by deep psychology, genetics or biological drivers but are ‘historical constructions born out of an accident of our language, relationships and material circumstances … When we write the history of the emotions, we make available novel descriptions and associations that in turn create new ways of understanding’.

This book is a history of one particular accident. It focuses on the history of the experience of British rule in Africa, at home and overseas, from the late nineteenth century.