18/03/2026
How did eighteenth-century prints imagine empire?
Rather than depicting conquered landscapes, widely circulated mezzotints portrayed the men who secured Britain’s imperial expansion. Prints of figures such as General James Wolfe and William Pitt turned military and political bodies into symbols of conquest, memory, and national identity within colonial homes.
At the same time, Indigenous leaders who fought alongside the British, like Mohawk sachem Hendrick Theyanoguin, were largely absent from these collections, revealing how print culture reinforced a narrative of empire centred on White masculinity.
Read more of Michael Hartman’s essay in Colnaghi Studies Journal (Vol. 18), page 27.
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