“a Bloody War or a Sickly Season”: the Remains of a Middling British Imperialist in Early Colonial Sierra Leone

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Lord Jim and other middling imperialists Joseph Conrad’s ‘Lord’ Jim is a louche British sailor, serving in the Indian Ocean. While navigating the Patna from the Indonesian archipelago to Mecca, Jim and the other European officers become convinced that the ship is about to sink. They abandon the Patna for the lifeboats, and leave the passengers—mostly pilgrims on the Hajj—to die. But the Patna does not sink, and Jim is punished by a colonial court of inquiry. He takes the blame alone, loses his navigation certificate, and retreats to ‘Patusan,’ an island in the South Seas, where he sacrifices himself in an affair of honor. In the epigraph above, Jim reflects on his position among the officers of the Patna. The quotation shows his haughty sense of himself as an upright man in the tropics, standing out from among indolent “natives” and dilapidated Europeans. But Jim’s cowardice and public humiliation put the lie to his grandiosity. Lord Jim offers two important lessons in writing the history of the British Empire. First, Jim's decisions are colored by a sense of himself as an imperial hero, and by his notion of imperial heroism—the self-regard of imperial personnel mattered. Second, for every ‘great man’ of the Empire, there were a thousand Lord Jims. The lives of the working people of the Empire—common sailors, soldiers, and laborers—require imaginative reconstruction. The role of the middle classes in British domestic history is well known, but bureaucrats and career petty officers have been neglected by historians of the British Empire.[2] Middling imperialists, including career administrators, warrant officers, and clerks, left a fecund archive of paperwork and occasional writing. Just as Lord Jim cracks open a colonial life to reveal the seedy, wriggling ambiguities at the heart of British colonialism in Southeast Asia, so the lives of middling officials can

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