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Stamping It Out (1880): Imagining the Second Anglo-Afghan War

About this Edition

In early 2017, historian Antoinette Burton approached SourceLab with a digital copy of Thompson’s “Stamping It Out,” unsure of its origins but interested in its potential utility for studying portrayals of British imperial conflicts in the nineteenth century. Though we quickly found the original source in Fun magazine, what remained less clear was the wider context in which Thompson produced his illustration. 
     
This edition places “Stamping It Out” within the century’s deep history of British imperial conflict and the imagery of hostilities abroad, with special attention given to the Great Game and the Second Anglo-Afghan War. In order to achieve this, we have provided an annotated version of the image, supplemented our edition with the entire thirty-second volume of Fun, and presented other period editorial drawings and cartoons that depict Britain’s imperial belligerence in Asia and Africa – including others by Thompson – with special attention to the graphic dehumanization of foreign foes and non-white colonial subjects. These supplemental illustrations appeared in other issues of Fun as well as in Punch and The Illustrated London News. Drawn from a larger pool of images that we uncovered during our research for this edition, we selected our supplements both for the portrayal of British imperial conflict abroad and the representation of British conceptions of race in the late nineteenth century.
     
This version of “Stamping It Out” is Google’s digitization of an original housed at the Princeton University Library and hosted by HathiTrust. The original at Princeton is on page 55 of the biannual volume, which collected all of the weekly numbers from the second half of 1880. The cartoon from the weekly issue does not survive, due to the low-quality paper and glue binding used in publication. Reprinting in the half-yearly edition, on paper of finer stock and with a cloth binding, aided in the preservation of this edition's image.  

The citation for the HathiTrust version is:
 

Thompson, John Gordon. "Stamping It Out." Illustration. Fun, August 11, 1880. From HathiTrust Digital Library https://hdl.handle.net/2027/njp.32101064074816?urlappend=%3Bseq=342 (accessed April 11, 2017).



See our Citation Guide for information on how this edition may be cited. 

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