Victorian Visions of War and Peace: Aesthetics and Violence in the British Empire, 1851-1900

Historian Sean Willcock explores how visual media influenced imperial statecraft and created the aesthetic and ethical frameworks for confronting colonial violence.

In an era that saw the birth of photography and the rise of the illustrated press, British perceptions of empire became increasingly defined by the processes and products of image-making.

The Victorians increasingly turned to visual spectacle to help them impose imperial sovereignty. The British Empire was thus rendered into a spectacle of 'peace', from world fairs to staged diplomatic rituals. Yet this occurred against a backdrop of incessant colonial war. Far from being ignored, these campaigns were in fact unprecedentedly visible within the cultural forms of Victorian society.

This talk will examine how Victorian artists sought to visualise warfare during a period of rapid cultural and technological change. Sean Willcock will discuss the visual conventions that made violence palatable to the Victorians, and the cultural anxieties that arose as the changing face of modern warfare made old romantic notions of battle increasingly difficult to sustain.

About the speaker

Dr Sean Willcock is departmental lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Oxford. He was previously a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London and has been awarded research funding from the Art and Humanities Research Council, the Yale Centre for British Art and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.