Emotions are everywhere in the history of the British Empire. Yet, surprisingly, Imperial Emotions is the first book to directly and explicitly address the cultural power of emotion in British imperial narrative and visual imagery. In this dense and beautifully crafted monograph, Jane Lydon argues that emotion played a constitutive role in creating, as well as contesting, group identity and difference in the British Empire. Imperial Emotions takes a wide chronology, spanning the late eighteenth century to the present day, while the distinct case studies primarily focus on the circuits of communication between Australia, North America, New Zealand, and metropolitan Britain. Lydon's stated aim is to understand how “emotional narrative defined specific objects of communities, whether white settlers, Aboriginal people, missionaries, orphans or members of the royal family” (7). Drawing on published literary and visual representations of imperial conquest over Aboriginal peoples, Imperial Emotions shows how emotions have been harnessed to create a sense of belonging to whiteness and Britishness that relied on the exclusion of Aboriginal people from the “emotional community” (5).

Imperial Emotions is about the ways in which debates over the proper limits and focus of empathetic emotions constructed the boundaries of ethno-national and imperial community. Chapter 1 begins by situating the settler colonial project that began in Australia in 1788 in the context of a changing discourse of sensibility, imperial humanitarianism, and universalism. Focusing on the New Zealander as a symbol of the contested future of civilization, Lydon introduces two alternative visions of imperial futurity that have informed debates over Australasia's settler-colonial future into the twenty-first century: On the one hand, Jacques-Julien Houtou de Labillardière's idea of a “larger world with a mosaic of diverse peoples,” on the other hand, Thomas Babington Macaulay's racist and paternalist view of the settler colonies as the inheritors of English civilization in the aftermath of metropolitan decay (45). Neither author's vision of the future included aboriginal Australian people, an erasure that Lydon argues enabled the genocidal violence of settler-colonialism to be naturalized and packaged as a sad inevitability.

Chapter 2 confronts the cultural history of frontier violence by looking at the emotions portrayed in visual representations of the Myall Creek Massacre in 1838, and of the “Overlanders”—white settler-colonists who established the route between Melbourne and Adelaide between 1837 and 1841 (53). Lydon shows how representations of conflict between settler-colonists and Aboriginal peoples changed during the 1830s and 1840s in response to humanitarian sentiment. For example, George Hamilton's sketches and prints of his Overland journeys increasingly portrayed Aboriginal people as “aggressive and savage” and white settlers (distinct from white convicts) as “hardy” and “masculine” (72–73). Hamilton's increasing bifurcation of white and black was a response, Lydon argues, to wider debates over who should be the proper objects of sympathy and philanthropy. These debates circulated around British imperial space. Whereas the antislavery humanitarian lobby represented Aboriginal peoples as the victims of white violence, men like Hamilton increasingly sought to redirect British sympathy toward white colonists. His politics drew on and reflected the wider debate over humanitarianism that was taking place during this period, in which metropolitan critics accused imperial philanthropists of misdirected sympathy. This debate over the “politics of empathy” is the focus of the third chapter, in which Lydon discusses the Australian reception of the American novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) (83). Although subsequently critiqued for its use of racist stereotypes and its celebration of black subservience, the novel was used by the Tasmanian Aboriginal activist Mary Ann Cochrane and by campaigners against the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from families to highlight the similarities between the plight of African Americans under slavery and that of Aboriginal peoples. Ultimately, Lydon argues that despite its limitations, the affective strategy that Uncle Tom's Cabin employed is suggestive of the “radical social potential” of empathy to act as a bridge across difference (99).

Chapter 4 discusses the consolidation of white racial solidarity in Charles Dickens's writing, particularly in the character of Jo in Bleak House (1852–53), an orphaned boy from Britain's industrial heartlands. Through Bleak House Dickens critiqued what he called “telescopic philanthropy”: the idea that sympathy for indigenous peoples overseas was misdirected and even disloyal (121). Situating the novel in the context of Dickens's wider racial thinking, Lydon shows how Jo's pitiful character played a role in redirecting empathy and compassion away from indigenous peoples and towards poor and homeless whites. In contrast, Lydon's discussion of Reverend John Brown Gribble's missionary philanthropy in chapter 5 illustrates the continuities and subtle shifts in “cosmopolitan humanitarianism” (121). Whereas the Overlanders of the 1830s and 1840s had embodied the celebration of the “hardy” frontiersman, Gribble's “Christian manliness” of the 1880s and 1890s added an ethical and spiritual dimension to portrayals of white masculinity (126). Chapter 6 discusses the use of lantern slide performances by Dr. Thomas Barnardo to promote the project of sending orphan boys from Britain to Australia and New Zealand, and by Gribble in order to illustrate his success in “civilizing” Aboriginal peoples. Using the same medium, these performances offered competing messages about “who to feel sorry for and whose lives were valuable or grievable” (163). Yet, Lydon argues, both performances played a role in “helping to create and justify the hierarchy of class, race and gender that supported imperialism” (163). The final chapter brings the narrative up to the present day, looking at the ways in which the same emotional frameworks that constructed a community of feeling between Britain and settler-colonial Australia have structured the debates over republicanism and monarchy. What that framework shares, Lydon concludes, is the erasure and exclusion of Aboriginal people, and therefore the denial of their dispossession, displacement, and exploitation, upon which Australia as a nation has been built.