Underground Empire: Charles Warren, William Simpson, and the Archeological Exploration of Palestine

Abstract

British army officer Charles Warren's archeological excavations in Jerusalem in the late 1860s on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund and Scottish artist William Simpson's paintings of those activities articulated a new kind of imperial space: the underground empire. The imperial underground was a place that had not yet been conquered and where the British had limited visibility. In contrast to picturesque and panoramic views that created an illusion of order and omniscience, Simpson's sketches depict an imperial presence that was confined, constrained, and in danger of collapse. Yet as the British began to probe this subterranean frontier, they turned the underground world into a place not just of darkness and danger but of exploration and excitement. In the process, Warren's work and Simpson's portrayal of it helped lay the foundation for Britain's eventual conquest of Palestine during the First World War by burrowing beneath Jerusalem's dilapidated Ottoman present in search of its ancient and Judeo-Christian past. Jerusalem was not the only node in Britain's nascent underground empire—British work there occurred alongside the construction of sewers and railway tunnels in London and the mining of gold and diamonds in Australia and South Africa—but it was in Jerusalem that an imperial underground was first and most fully articulated, a space that embodied both the precariousness and the potential of Britain's embryonic efforts to establish a presence in the Middle East.