There is a paucity of scholarship on feeling and emotion in studies on British imperialism, yet, as Joanna Lewis's new book demonstrates, sentiment and emotion were driving forces that shaped how Britain saw her empire. In particular, Empire of Sentiment shows us quite how important David Livingstone was to become in death to Britain's imagining of her imperial role. The final hours of the nineteenth-century explorer and missionary, in April 1873, must have been excruciating. Suffering from fever, anal bleeding, and horrific back pain, he died on his knees, alone, in a hastily erected hut in the village of Chitambo (modern-day Chipundu in Zambia). Such a dramatic, and ultimately isolated, death was ripe fruit for the sentiments of a Victorian Britain that supposed itself a liberal colonial power.

To die racked with disease after struggling to find the source of the Nile, having not seen his own family in seven years, ensured Livingstone had all the qualities of a romantic, self-sacrificing Victorian hero. “Disease, death, struggle and sacrifice” are powerful propagandistic tools as Lewis shows in her intriguing study of the relationship between emotion and imperialism (163). Each of her seven chapters shows how the emotional capital of the symbolism of Livingstone's death was used by various interest groups, from the London Missionary Society to the British Central Africa Company and the Zambian United National Independence Party, to further their own ends.

Through multiple examples from the periodical press at the time, chapter 1 explores the coverage of the returning of Livingstone's body to Britain and how this was the start of a long and complicated emotive resonance. The nature of his body's return, being carried by hand to the coast of Africa and then accompanied on ship by Jacob Wainwright (an African assistant and former student), began the hagiography that, as Lewis notes, has continued in some form or other to the present day.

Chapter 2 is a compelling reading of the behaviors of competing interest groups in the wake of Livingstone's death, and how “Livingstone's death pinned down Africa” in the British imagination (37). His physical suffering became totemic of Britain's opinion of herself in her benevolent imperialism on the global stage. In chapter 3, Lewis highlights the farcical drive between 1890 and 1899 to reach the tree under which Livingstone's heart had been buried. For competing European imperial interests, getting to the tree signified the ability to take the mantle of Livingstone's perceived humanitarian role in Africa, adroitly described by Lewis as a search for “the ‘lost heart’ of imperialism” (94).

The book is particularly interesting when Lewis writes of the muted or silenced actors in the field of European exploration of Africa. Of note in chapter 4 is the detail provided about Jacob Wainwright and how he had “become a hostage to events when he agreed to accompany Livingstone's remains home” (129), unwittingly drawn into the narrative which would be foundational in enunciating Livingstone as the emblematic benevolent white man in Africa. Chapters 5 and 6, with their focus on postcolonial Zambia, Malawi, and Zimbabwe, are where Lewis's comprehensive understanding of the sociocultural history of the regions is most evident. Chapter 5 offers a detailed case study of the town of Livingstone in Zambia. The town unwittingly mirrored the changing rhetoric from “high-Victorian liberal humanitarianism” (160) to “heroic pioneering” (165) to Arcadian colonial idyll and ultimately aggressive segregation politics and economics. Chapter 6 looks at the example of Kenneth Kaunda's use of a propagandistic ideology of Livingstone which tied in to a romantic “mishmash of socialist, African and Christian doctrines” (198). Not for aught did Kaunda term Livingstone “Africa's first freedom fighter”; instead, as Lewis shows, Livingstone was valuable in bolstering Kaunda's political capital with his Christian support base (201).

Chapter 7 reaffirms Lewis's main premise, that the emotional and sentimental memorialization of Livingstone and the romance of his death were central to British imperial ideology. This is also an important chapter in reiterating the sometimes lost nuance of the differences in memorialization of Livingstone in Scotland and England. Lewis notes that the Scottish “found in Livingstone's stance, determination and poor background a proud son who epitomised a Scottish self-understanding of being kinder to ‘natives,’ and who was much nicer than the English” (213).

The book is at its best when Lewis engages with the rise of modern Zambia and the excellent drawing together of snippets of information that evidence how influential people of color were in British colonialism, though they had been so comprehensively muted by previous narratives. My main quibble with the book concerns the distracting textual mistakes. The inclusion of some modern phraseology can also be jarring, such as “Victorian selfie” (15, 109) and the description of Edward J. Glave as a “Victorian heart-throb” (92).

Lewis's monograph is well situated in a recent wave of research that includes the excellent Livingstone's “Lives”: A Metabiography of a Victorian Icon by Justin D. Livingstone (2014) and Sarah Worden's edited collection David Livingstone: Man, Myth and Legacy (2012), which moves away from the previous binary approaches to the study of Livingstone and instead endeavors to explain why he still has a powerful cultural resonance, and what that in turn can tell us about British society and nineteenth-century Western exploration of Africa. Lewis argues, with the support of excellent anecdotes and examples, that Livingstone has become transmuted from a real being into a sublime ideal, predicated on a noble death for an imagined higher cause, to become the ultimate sentimental propaganda for empire.