"For gorsake, stop laughing! This is serious": The British World as a Community of Cartooning and Satirical Art

Abstract

<p>Regarded by Arthur Balfour as "one of the great sources" from which historians might "judge…the trend and character of English thought and life,"¹ cartoons have peppered the works of British World history over the past two decades. They have been used to illustrate everything from the imagining of Canadian relations with Britain and the United States;² attitudes towards the "naked natives and noble savages" of Africa;³ and the "everyday Britishness" of women's lives in 1914-1918.⁴ It is scarcely possible to imagine British expansion in Africa without Linley Sambourne's "Rhodes Colossus",⁵ and Chris Holdridge has been particularly active in identifying the importance of satire for British identity in the Cape Colony.⁶ However, the worldwide British practice and culture of satirical art, cartooning, and caricature, has scarcely been studied. This is surprising, because if it is true that the newspaper was "a core institution" for the "reification of local customs and peoples, the making of colonies of laws and legislation, and imagining new narratives of community,"⁷ then alongside it and within it, satirical prints, magazines, caricatures, and cartoons were just as crucial.</p>