Hardeep Dhindsa (KCL) - 2020-21 Students

Agents of Empire: Cultural Imperialism, White British Identity, and the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour

The primary aim of this thesis is to move away from the perception of the Grand Tour as a phenomenon that only concerns polite connoisseurship, and situate it firmly within the context of a growing empire, both racially and economically. I argue that Whiteness was a key identity marker in engagements with the classical world both at home and abroad. I first explore how ‘Britishness’ was defined by colonial endeavours and classical models of empire, before looking at the evolution of racial explanatory models in the eighteenth century. I then analyse three geographical case studies from the Grand Tour to see how different forms of Whiteness manifested. In Rome, we find gendered forms of racial discrimination, while in South, travellers often relied on tropes from colonial travel literature to describe the population. The excavations around Vesuvius also disrupted the canon of Greco-Roman art through the discovery of painted frescoes and phallic votive objects. Finally, I explore the act of collecting and displaying antiquities through a colonial lens, before questioning the relationship between White skin and White marbles in sculpture galleries.