ABSTRACT
It is a familiar, if overworked, device to represent the British Empire at its height as a great swathe of pink, stretching across the map of the world from Vancouver to Otago. While this cartographic image faithfully depicts the near-global extent of empire, it reveals little about its more intimate associations. There is, by contrast, a very different testament to empire displayed in cathedrals and parish churches in Britain, as in other parts of the former empire, in the marble plaques commemorating individuals who lived and died abroad. These church monuments suggest a different imaginative geography: there are no maps carved in stone; empire is seldom, if ever, explicitly named. Rather than swathes of pink, there appear constellations of widely scattered places: the names of Indian battlefields or West Indian islands nestle alongside English towns and cities; Home Counties parishes are united with tropical islands half a world away. Places thousands of miles apart are thrown into promiscuous association: the remoteness and exoticism of a global empire is brought home to the intimacy of the parish church.
