SourceLab
Vol. 1, No. 4 (2018)
10.21900/j.sourcelab.v1.442

During the Second Anglo-Afghan War, a British military column set out from the city of Kabul on August 8, 1880. Their destination was Kandahar; their mission: the relief of a garrison besieged by Afghan fighters. The journey consisted of a three hundred mile march across mountainous terrain. To the North, Russia - the United Kingdom's chief imperial rival in Central Asia - monitored the situation with tremendous interest. Believing the lives of British soldiers and the security of India at stake, the British people too focused their attention on “the march to Kandahar." Print media outlets provided widespread coverage of the expedition’s progress. The physical progress of the march and imperial policies surrounding it became subjects of intense public discussion and cartoons from the period.

The source presented here is John Gordon Thompson's political cartoon "Stamping It Out," a political commentary from the time. Published in Volume Thirty-Two of Fun magazine on August 11, 1880,  just three days after the expedition set out, this cartoon captured Victorian racial attitudes and British apprehensions concerning the conflict. It depicts "John Bull" (a personification of England) stomping on a swarm of dangerous "Afghan" scorpions; meanwhile, "India's" future is in jeopardy as she stands defenselessly and looks on with clasped hands.

This SourceLab edition presents Thompson's "Stamping It Out"  within a broader historical context of Victorian political cartoons, imperial conflicts, and historical ideas of race. This image emerged from a rich nineteenth-century British tradition of political cartooning as well as conventions of dehumanizing racial iconography. We include as supplements the entire Volume Thirty-Two of Fun, in which the issue was later anthologized - no copies of the weekly magazine are known to survive - as well as other examples of editorial cartoons and illustrations by John Gordon Thompson from the Second Afghan War and other imperial conflicts.