Histories of emotions can sometimes feel strangely prescient to a reader's everyday life. And so it was for me with Jeffrey A. Auerbach's Imperial Boredom: Monotony and the British Empire, which I read during the repetitive days of a COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in Melbourne, Australia. Imperial Boredom is a fascinating, rich, and sometimes disturbing account of colonists’ experiences of boredom across the British Empire in the nineteenth century. According to Auerbach, boredom and disappointment have been “overlooked” (3) in our accounts of the experiences of the empire thus far. Imperial Boredom draws on an array of letters, diaries, memoirs, artwork, and literature produced by (mostly) ordinary colonists to begin to correct this account, bringing boredom and monotony to the forefront of everyday life in the nineteenth-century British Empire as a result.
Auerbach argues that boredom was a “central” and “perhaps defining” (3) feature of colonists’ experiences of the empire in the nineteenth century. Leaning on psychological, philosophical, literary, and historical scholarship, he defines boredom as an emotional state that is fostered when people have nothing much to do and little of interest around them. Like many historians of emotion, Auerbach does not restrict his research to the specific use of the term boredom by colonists. Instead, he looks for evidence of boredom in the use of a range of terms including dull, tedious, uninteresting, monotonous, wearisome, banal, routine, tiresome, dreary, and disappointing. The focus is on colonists’ experiences of imperial boredom in India, southern Africa, and the Australian colonies in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Each chapter closely considers boredom in one of five key settings: on sea voyages, during land travel, while governing, while soldiering, and as settlers.
The first chapter sets the scene for the boredom of empire—or perhaps an empire of boredom—by charting the tedium of sea voyages in the nineteenth century. As Auerbach explains, for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sea voyages were typically described as dangerous and thrilling. By the late eighteenth century, however, a sense of boredom had crept into accounts of ocean travel. This sense of boredom became more prevalent in the nineteenth century, when complaints about the monotony of imperial journeys were common. This was particularly the case in descriptions of the journey to the Australian colonies during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, which typically sailed out of the sight of land for almost three months.
Auerbach gives the reader a sense that not everyone described ocean travel as boring, and that even those who did were not necessarily bored all the time. But the relentless monotony of daily life on a long sea voyage is what comes through most strongly in this chapter. Auerbach also establishes a format that each of the subsequent chapters largely follow. Experiences of imperial boredom in the middle decades of the nineteenth century are often contrasted with accounts of the excitement, dangers, interest, or busyness of life in the empire before or after that period. There are reminders that boredom was not the only experience of the empire in the mid nineteenth century. And most interestingly, in each chapter, Auerbach narrates the different ways that imperial boredom was fostered in each particular setting. On ocean voyages, boredom was produced by the everyday monotony of life at sea. But the boredom of imperial landscapes was more about their disappointments, especially in contrast to the high expectations that had been established by the picturesque art of empire. The boredom described by imperial administrators was different again, shaped in particular by the banality of the empire's bureaucracy. The boredom of soldiers was more likely to be the result of the unexpectedly monotonous and repetitive life of a soldier, which could sometimes leave them not simply bored but also “deeply disillusioned” (140) with the imperial project. The monotony and isolation of everyday life could leave bored settlers similarly disenchanted with the empire, which Auerbach links to the significant number who returned to Britain during this period.
A number of key characteristics of imperial boredom emerge across the five chapters, including monotony, disappointment, and a lack of meaning or purpose in everyday life. Auerbach's ability to convey a sense of specificity about the experiences of boredom within each setting, however, is Imperial Boredom's greatest strength. This specificity kept key questions about the nature of boredom—and what it might mean to be bored in the British Empire in the nineteenth century—firmly in view in ways that have stayed with me. Writing this review from within my overly familiar four walls, I found that Auerbach's approach also made me carefully consider the kind of conditions that might need to be in place for boredom to be felt at all.
What is missing from Auerbach's account, however, is a sense of the implications of foregrounding boredom in a history of the British Empire. What does it mean to narrate colonists as bored in an empire at the height of its power? Was there a link between individual or collective boredom and the British imperial project in the nineteenth century, beyond a sense of disenchantment among some colonists? And how did the boredom of British colonists figure in contact and conflict with Indigenous peoples across the empire during this period? Auerbach positions Indigenous peoples’ boredom as beyond the scope of this project, which is about the “fantasies and realities” (10) of British colonists. But Indigenous peoples were part of the fantasies and realities of the empire, and their almost complete absence from this book reads oddly, perhaps particularly from present-day Melbourne. At times, I found this absence to be deeply troubling, as when imperial soldiers are described as experiencing one-sided battles as tedious and dissatisfying. And Auerbach's concluding remarks about the ordinariness of bored men and women colonists—and the relationship between this boredom and the end of the empire—raised more questions than they answered.
Even so, Imperial Boredom is a lively, engaging, and important exploration of colonists’ experiences of boredom in the British Empire in the nineteenth century. Auerbach offers much insight into both the history of emotions and the history of empire. And I hope that it will help to prompt further work at the intersection of these two areas of scholarship in the near future.
