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Underground Empire: Charles Warren, William Simpson, and the Archeological Exploration of Palestine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2024

Jeffrey Auerbach Open the ORCID record for Jeffrey Auerbach [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

British army officer Charles Warren's archeological excavations in Jerusalem in the late 1860s on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund and Scottish artist William Simpson's paintings of those activities articulated a new kind of imperial space: the underground empire. The imperial underground was a place that had not yet been conquered and where the British had limited visibility. In contrast to picturesque and panoramic views that created an illusion of order and omniscience, Simpson's sketches depict an imperial presence that was confined, constrained, and in danger of collapse. Yet as the British began to probe this subterranean frontier, they turned the underground world into a place not just of darkness and danger but of exploration and excitement. In the process, Warren's work and Simpson's portrayal of it helped lay the foundation for Britain's eventual conquest of Palestine during the First World War by burrowing beneath Jerusalem's dilapidated Ottoman present in search of its ancient and Judeo-Christian past. Jerusalem was not the only node in Britain's nascent underground empire—British work there occurred alongside the construction of sewers and railway tunnels in London and the mining of gold and diamonds in Australia and South Africa—but it was in Jerusalem that an imperial underground was first and most fully articulated, a space that embodied both the precariousness and the potential of Britain's embryonic efforts to establish a presence in the Middle East.

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Journal of British Studies , First View , pp. 1 - 32
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The North American Conference on British Studies

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40 On the role of freemasons in the empire, see Harland-Jacobs, Jessica, Builders of Empire: Freemasons and British Imperialism, 1717–1927 (Chapel Hill, 2007)Google Scholar. In 1877 Warren gave a paper on the Temple of Solomon at the Freemasons’ Hall in London; see Warren, “On the Orientation of Temples,” Ars Quator Coronatorum 1 (1888): 36–45. After finishing his work in Palestine, Warren spent time in southern Africa demarcating the boundary between British-administered Griqualand and the Boer Orange Free State, and saw action in the Cape Frontier War of 1877–78. He was subsequently appointed British administrator and commander-in-chief of Griqualand West. In 1882, he was asked to lead a search party to find the Orientalist explorer Edward Palmer and his companions, who had disappeared in the Sinai Desert. When they were found, murdered, Warren tracked down the culprits. In 1885, he was back in South Africa to serve as administrator of Bechuanaland. His greatest fame, however, came not overseas but in London, as commissioner of the Metropolitan Police from 1886 to 1888, a period that included the Jack the Ripper murders. Warren then went overseas again, serving in Singapore from 1889 to 1894 and then in the Anglo-Boer War in 1889–1900. See Shillington, Kevin, Charles Warren: Royal Engineer in the Age of Empire (Bath, 2020)Google Scholar.

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80 W. Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 2 vols. (New York, 1905), 1:400, my emphases. Dean Stanley also placed great emphasis on elevation, writing in Bible in the Holy Land, 31, that “every high point [in the Holy Land] commands a prospect of greater extent than is common in ordinary mountain districts.”

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82 “The Exploration of Jerusalem,” Illustrated London News, 24 April 1869, 425.

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84 “The Explorations at Jerusalem,” Illustrated London News, 24 April 1869, 424; Innes M. Keighren, Charles W. J. Withers, and Bill Bell, Travels into Print: Exploration, Writing, and Publishing with John Murray, 1773–1859 (Chicago, 2015), discuss how publishers “commonly modified the original accounts of explorers and travelers, partly for style, partly for content . . . and always with an eye to the market” (ix). See also Peter W. Sinnema, Dynamics of the Pictured Page: Representing the Nation in the Illustrated London News (Aldershot, 1998); Robert David, The Arctic in the British Imagination, 1818–1914 (Manchester, 2000), 11; Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 59; David Arnold, “Envisioning the Tropics: Joseph Hooker in India and the Himalayas, 1848–1850,” in Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire, ed. Felix Driver and Luciana Martens (Chicago, 2005), 137–55, at 154, all of which discuss the manipulation of illustrations to enhance aesthetic or popular appeal.

85 Edwin Hodder, On “Holy Ground”: Or, Scenes and Incidents in the Land of Promise (London, 1874), 199–200. American missionary James Barclay was the first westerner to write about the caverns, in The City of the Great King: Or, Jerusalem as It Was, as It Is, and as It Is to Be (Philadelphia, 1857), 456–69, part of what he called “the nether city.”

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87 See, for example, Smith, Sean P., “Aestheticising Empire: The Colonial Picturesque as a Modality of Travel,” Studies in Travel Writing 23, no. 3 (2019): 280–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ghose, Indira, Women Travellers in Colonial India: The Power of the Female Gaze (Oxford, 1998), 40Google Scholar; Tobin, Beth Fowkes, Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760–1821 (Philadelphia, 2005), 12, 120CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

88 Simpson, Underground Jerusalem, iii.

89 Berger, John, Ways of Seeing (London, 1972)Google Scholar; Cosgrove, Denis, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (London, 1984)Google Scholar; Cosgrove, Denis, “Prospect, Perspective, and the Evolution of the Landscape Idea,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 10, no. 1 (1985): 45–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This aligns with Robin Kelsey's argument in Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for the U.S. Surveys, 1850–1890 (Berkeley, 2007), 3, that “the instrumentality of surveys was crucial to the emergence of a new pictorial style” and that “the practical imperatives and social organization of survey work spurred pictorial innovation.” See also Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1991).

90 Thomas and William Daniell, “The Entrance to the Elephanta Cave” and “Part of the Interior of the Elephanta,” Oriental Scenery [. . .] (London, 1795–1807), part 5, plates 7–8. See also “Interior of the Cave of Elephanta,” Illustrated London News, 23 May 1863, 576.

91 Austen Henry Layard, Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon [. . .] (London, 1853), 55, 104.

92 This point is underscored in a popular account of Layard's discoveries: James S. Buckingham, The Buried City of the East, Nineveh: A Narrative of the Discoveries of Mr. Layard and M. Botta at Nimroud and Khorsabad (London, 1851).

93 Although Simpson continued to travel the empire after his time in Jerusalem, with trips to China in 1872, India in 1875, and Afghanistan in 1878 and 1884, he never again made drawings underground.

94 See Tuchman, Bible and Sword; Harrison, Britain in the Middle East; Fromkin, Davd, A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East, 1914–1922 (New York, 1989), 26–30Google Scholar. One exception is Krämer, Gudrun, A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel (Princeton, 2008)Google Scholar. Efraim and Inari Karsh in Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789–1923 (Cambridge, MA, 1999) downplay the role of the British so much that it is almost as if they conquered the region in what Seeley, J. R., The Expansion of England (London, 1883)Google Scholar called a “fit of absence of mind” (8). Many older studies ignore nineteenth-century Palestine entirely. For example, see R. W. Seton-Watson, Disraeli, Gladstone, and the Eastern Question (London, 1935); M. S. Anderson, The Eastern Question, 1774–1923: A Study in International Relations (London, 1966); Clayton, G. D., Britain and the Eastern Question: Missolonghi to Gallipoli (London, 1971)Google Scholar.

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96 Aiken, Edwin James, Scriptural Geography: Portraying the Holy Land (London, 2009), 18–56Google Scholar. These “scriptural geographies” include Edward Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine (New York, 1842); John MacGregor, The “Rob Roy” on the Jordan, Nile, Red Sea, and Gennesareth, &c [. . .] (London, 1870); Oliphant, Laurence, The Land of Gilead with Excursions in the Lebanon (Edinburgh, 1880)Google Scholar; Charles Wilson, Picturesque Palestine, Sinai, and Egypt (London, 1881). See also the famous guidebooks by Murray, Baedeker, and Thomas Cook, the latter himself a member of the Palestine Exploration Fund. See Felicity Cobbing, “Thomas Cook and the Palestine Exploration Fund,” Public Archeology 11, no. 4 (2012): 179–94.

97 Issam Nasser, “In Their Image: Jerusalem in Nineteenth-Century English Travel Narratives,” Jerusalem Quarterly 19 (2003): 6–22, at 20.

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99 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 59. For a suggestive overview, see Peters, John G., “Joseph Conrad and the Epistemology of Space,” Philosophy and Literature 40, no. 1 (2016): 98–123CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On psychosexual space, see Hyam, Ronald, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester, 1991)Google Scholar. On empires as carceral spaces, see Clare Anderson, ed., A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies (London, 2018). More philosophically, see Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, 1991).

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105 Williams, Notes on the Underground, 86.

106 Morrison, Recovery of Jerusalem, 72–74; Warren, Underground Jerusalem, 411. Bute subsequently purchased several of Simpson's Jerusalem paintings for his private collection; see Eyre-Todd, Autobiography of William Simpson, 211.

107 Cook's Tourist Handbook for Palestine and Syria (London, 1876), 182–83.

108 Conder, Claude Reignier, Tent Work in Palestine: A Record of Discovery and Adventure (London, 1880), xiiGoogle Scholar.

109 Warren, Underground Jerusalem, 103.

110 Warren, 446–51. The year before Underground Jerusalem was published, Warren wrote a pamphlet, The Land of Promise; or, Turkey's Guarantee (London, 1875), in which he argued that Palestine was already under foreign rule and envisaged the replacement of the Ottomans by a European colonial entity similar to the pre-1857 East India Company that would facilitate the restoration of the Jews to the region. Claude Conder, who conducted the survey of Western Palestine with Kitchener on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund, also supported colonization; see Conder, Tent Work in Palestine, 377.

111 Morrison, Recovery of Jerusalem, 67.

112 Walter Morrison, “Lecture at the Plymouth Athenaeum,” n.d., PEF/DA/1865/2, Palestine Exploration Fund Archives.

113 Warren, Underground Jerusalem, 150–54.

114 Walter Morrison to A. S. Ayrton, 13 September 1871, PEF WS/19, Palestine Exploration Fund Archives; Morrison to Aryton, 7 October 1871, PEF WS/24, Palestine Exploration Fund Archives; “Palestine Exploration Fund (1865–1884),” OS/1/17/1, National Archives, London; Besant, Twenty-One Years’ Work, 11.

115 Warren, Underground Jerusalem, 286.

116 Martin Lynn, “British Policy, Trade, and Informal Empire in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” in Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 3, The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Porter (Oxford, 1999), 101–21, at 101. See also Gallagher, John and Robinson, Ronald, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review 6, no. 1 (1953): 1–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cain, P. J. and Hopkins, A. G., British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion (New York, 1993), 6–9Google Scholar.

117 On China, see Jürgen Osterhammel, “Britain and China, 1842–1914,” in Porter, Oxford History of the British Empire, 3:146–69; Jürgen Osterhammel, “Semi-Colonialism and Informal Empire in Twentieth-Century China,” in Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities, ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel (London, 1986), 290–314, at 297–98; Resat Kasaba, “Treaties and Friendships: British Imperialism, the Ottoman Empire, and China in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of World History 4, no. 2 (1993): 215–41. James Onley, The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, Rulers, and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf (Oxford, 2008), discusses the variety of protected and princely states in Persia and the Persian Gulf that surrounded Britain's informal empire in India.

118 Parry, Promised Lands, 19.

119 Parry, 298, 317, 334–53, 373–74.

120 Roger Hardy, The Bride: An Illustrated History of Palestine, 1850–1948 (Cricklade, 2022), 127; Alexa von Wining, Intimate Empire: The Mansurov Family in Russia and the Orthodox East, 1855–1936 (Oxford, 2022), 53–85.

121 Clacy, Ellen, A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852–53 (London, 1853), 79Google Scholar.

122 McCombie, Thomas, Australian Sketches: The Gold Discovery, Bush Graves, &c. (London, 1861), 57Google Scholar.

123 William Kelly, Life in Victoria, or Victoria in 1853, and Victoria in 1858 [. . .], 2 vols. (London, 1859), 2:173.

124 Howitt, William, Land, Labour, and Gold: Or, Two Years in Victoria; with Visits to Sydney and Van Diemen's Land. (Kilmore, 1855), 254Google Scholar.

125 Frost, Warwick, “The Environmental Impacts of the Victorian Gold Rushes: Miners’ Accounts during the First Five Years,” Australian Economic History Review 53, no. 1 (2013): 72–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The most prolific artist of the Australian gold rush was Samuel Thomas Gill, who produced dozens of lithographs documenting life on the diggings, including Sketches of the Gold Diggers Comprising 16 Chromo-Lithographic Plates (London, [1855]); The Victorian Gold Fields during 1852 & 3 [. . .] ([Melbourne], 1869); The Gold Fields of Victoria during 1852–3 (Melbourne, 1872), but none focus on the underground.

126 Gardner F. Williams, The Diamond Mines of South Africa, 2 vols. (New York, 1906), 1:307–8; Meredith, Martin, Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa (New York, 2007), 13Google Scholar, 17, 153; Allen, Charles V., “Diamond Mining in the Kimberley Field,” Engineering Magazine 26, no. 10 (1903): 81–98Google Scholar.

127 Adele Buckland, introduction to Buckland, Adelene and Qureshi, Sadiah, Time Travelers: Victorian Encounters with Time and History (Chicago, 2020), xiiiCrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Girouard, Mark, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven, 1981)Google Scholar; Turner, Frank M., The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, 1984)Google Scholar; von Riper, A. Bowdoin, Men Among the Mammoths: Victorian Science and the Discovery of Human Prehistory (Chicago, 1993)Google Scholar; Rudwick, Martin J. S., World before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform (Chicago, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Paul Readman, “The Place of the Past in English Culture, c. 1890–1914,” Past & Present, no. 186 (2005): 147–99.