The artist John Gordon Thompson created the cartoon "Stamping It Out" in August 1880. Originally working as a civil servant in London, Thompson started his cartooning career by contributing to Punch in 1861 and The Graphic in 1870. He joined Fun as its staff cartoonist from 1870 to 1893. During this time, he continued to illustrate books and magazines and exhibit paintings at the Royal Academy. He was best known for his cartoons on the Disraeli-Gladstone rivalry; however, he also drew a series of cartoons on the Second Anglo-Afghan War and other military engagements.

By August 1880, the Second Anglo-Afghan War itself was coming to a close: the penultimate battle—the Battle of Maiwand—had occurred a month earlier in July 1880, and the final Battle of Kandahar would come a month after this image in September of that same year. As the name implies, the Second Anglo-Afghan War was the second in a series of wars fought between native Afghan leaders and the British from the mid-nineteenth century and into the early twentieth. Throughout the nineteenth century, in the contest known as the Great Game, the British and Russian Empires both attempted to assert power as the imperial hegemon in Central Asia. As the latter began to move troops around within the region, the British saw the need to establish a stronghold. They were particularly anxious about the security of their imperial crown jewel, India, for which Afghanistan served as a buffer zone and gateway into the North-West Frontier. To secure this zone, the British attempted to install a line of Afghan emirs, a controversial move that ignited the First Anglo-Afghan War in which the British suffered various defeats. Though the British ultimately claimed victory and withdrew, Dost Muhammad Khan, the emir they had deposed to install Shah Shuja, returned to power.

In 1878, Sher Ali Khan, the then-emir of Afghanistan and son of Dost Muhammad, received a Russian envoy who had forced his way into Kabul, despite the fact that he had refused a similar British diplomatic mission. Prompted by this affront and their anxieties over Russia, the armies of the British Raj started the Second Anglo-Afghan War in September of that year, taking Kabul by force. In May of 1879, Sher Ali’s son, Yaqub Khan, signed the Treaty of Gandamak. This was part of an effort to ensure Great Britain’s influence in Afghanistan and install a permanent ambassadorial presence in Kabul. An uprising in Kabul in September of 1879 and the murder of the British consul, however, reignited the conflict and the British once again sent troops to suppress the rebellion and occupy Kabul. The brother of Yaqub Khan defeated British troops in 1880 at Maiwand, then besieged British troops at Kandahar. The British again claimed victory at Kandahar to end the war, but decided upon an “honorable withdrawal."

During this time, new print technologies as well as new “scientific” theories on race further transformed imperialist ideologies and their dissemination. Improvements in steam paper manufacturing, the invention of lithography, and new techniques in wood engraving brought about the birth of the first illustrated magazine in Victorian England. These magazines covered diverse topics accompanied by rich illustrations designed to appeal to middle-class audiences, ranging from politics and literature to London culture and society. In the 1840s and 1850s, the most influential of these magazines, Punch, began to use the word “cartoon” to describe its humorous editorial illustrations, ushering in the modern usage of the word. Fun magazine, which rose in popularity towards the end of the nineteenth century, took much of its visual and physical properties from Punch, garnering it the nickname “Poor Man’s Punch,” or “Funch.”

Fun, like other popular periodicals, published its magazines first in a weekly issue and then in a biannual volume. Each weekly issue contained one large-scale feature cartoon called a “big cut,” the subject and message of which was decided upon each week by the magazine staff. With the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan as its subject, Fun published the illustration “Stamping It Out” as the big cut of its 11 August 1880 weekly issue and later published it again in Volume Thirty-Two of the magazine’s biannual publications, from which this image is taken. (No copies of the weekly appear to have survived.)

Throughout both Afghan wars, eyewitness accounts were preoccupied with both Afghanistan's treacherous landscape and romantic images of battles promoted by the British press. British troops described the difficulty of fighting in the inhospitable desert climate and the rocky mountains that created treacherous passes, thereby downplaying the role of Afghan tribal fighters by attributing their successes to the environment -- or removing them from the narrative altogether. This conflation between the local landscapes and the Afghan tribesmen reflected broader imperial ideologies that portrayed imperial success as the triumph of civilization over an inhospitable natural world, one which became deeply intertwined with the discourse of race. Even before Darwin published On the Origin of Species, new “scientific” theories about race attempted to connect physical characteristics (such as skull size and facial features) to positions on an evolutionary scale. Combined with Darwin’s theories, ideas about the evolution of different races became associated with the evolution of animal species, most obviously apes, and “inferior” or “less-developed” races were increasingly portrayed as hybridized human-animals, just as in “Stamping It Out” and other editorial illustrations.

1. John Adcock, "Frederick Barnard and John Gordon Thompson of FUN," Yesterday's Papers, accessed December 10, 2017, http://john-adcock.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/John%20Gordon%20Thomson. ↵
2. Ibid. ↵
3. Edmund Yorke, Playing the Great Game: Britain, War and Politics in Afghanistan since 1839 (London: Robert Hale, 2012), 294. ↵
4. Rebecca Fraser, The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present: A Narrative History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 587. ↵
5. Ibid. ↵
6. Robert T. Harrison, Britain in the Middle East: 1619-1971 (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 56. ↵
7. Fraser, Story of Britain, 587. ↵
8. The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica, "Anglo-Afghan Wars," Encyclopædia Britannica, July 25, 2012, accessed March 25, 2017, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Anglo-Afghan-Wars. ↵
9. Byron Farwell, Queen Victoria's Little Wars (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 205. ↵
10. Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica, "Anglo-Afghan Wars." ↵
11. Yorke, Great Game, 294-308. ↵
12. Henry J. Miller, "Mirroring Acts: Benjamin Disraeli, John Tenniel, and the Victorian Political Cartoon" Nineteenth Century Studies no. 23 (2009), 40. ↵
13. Charles Press, The Political Cartoon (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981), 45. ↵
14. Antoinette Burton, An ABC of Queen Victoria's Empire: or a Primer of Conquest, Dissent and Disruption (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). ↵
15. Ibid. ↵