Empires of Sentiment; Intimacies from Death: David Livingstone and African Slavery ‘at the Heart of the Nation’

The article re-examines the death of David Livingstone. It highlights the importance of an outpouring of disinhibited emotion in 1874. Despite a shambolic funeral, a working-class underdog and an anti-slavery tradition were placed ‘at the heart of the nation’. Media coverage generated the experience of intimacy from sentimentalised versions of Livingstone's death and interactions with Africans, unleashing mass empathy, moral feeling and humanitarian impulse. It was crucial to the development of Britain's soft-power empire liberalism, inspiring a powerful network, aware of public opinion, to later intervene in eastern Africa. Thus the role of emotion and emotion capital should be factored more into the history of empire.