Soiled bodies: unearthing the colonial Caribbean in the memorials of Ralph Abercromby, John Moore and Thomas Picton, c. 1803–1816

Abstract

This article moves beyond iconography to seek out traces of the colonial Caribbean in the memorials to Lieutenant-General Sir Ralph Abercromby by Richard Westmacott (c. 1803–09), Lieutenant-General Sir John Moore by John Bacon Jr (1815), and Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Picton by Sebastian Gahagan (1816). In these memorials, ‘soil’ in its figurative, imagined and literal forms offers a lens through which to consider Caribbean colonialism in relation to the peculiar contradiction of attraction and repulsion that characterized British attitudes towards this region of the empire. Using ‘soil’ as a lens in this way blends the superficial Napoleonic commemorations of these officers with broader imperial resonances of this conflict, and amplifies early nineteenth-century debates in Britain regarding the regulation and abolition of African enslavement and the trade in enslaved Africans. Recognizing the significance of soil is therefore essential to identifying traces of the colonial Caribbean in St Paul’s, thereby rectifying the iconographic absence of this imperial context across the pantheon, and further demonstrating methodological resistance to discursive erasures of Britain’s contested histories.