Jeffrey A. Auerbach, Imperial Boredom: Monotony and the British Empire, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018.

Jeffrey Auerbach’s latest book, Imperial Boredom : Monotony and the British Empire (2018), is a remarkably rich compilation of complaints and confessions of boredom by British colonists across the empire in its heyday, the middle decades of the nineteenth century. 1 The author argues that, despite the exciting stories of glory and adventure which promoted imperial expansion and colonization (usually conveyed by propagandistic materials such as published memoirs, travel narratives, and commissioned art), the British empire turned out to be a boring and disappointing endeavour for several individuals who travelled across, represented, settled, governed, and fought for it. This is a provocatively original argument in the study of imperial history. By rereading British imperial primary sources through the critical prism suggested by Auerbach, historians of the British empire are able to detect, beyond the gloriously apologetic narrative of the civilizing mission, numerous pieces of evidence demonstrating that the government of the empire in the bombastically portrayed age of ‘high imperialism’ was indeed a dull, dreary, and deflating drudgery.