‘The Belfast Chameleon’: Ulster, Ceylon and the Imperial Life of Sir James Emerson Tennent

Abstract

Using the varied life and career of the Belfast-born writer, parliamentarian and sometime colonial administrator James Emerson Tennent as a case study, this article explores the complexity of imperial lives and highlights some aspects of Ulster's connection to empire in the pre-Home Rule era. One of many Ulstermen active in imperial administration, Emerson Tennent served as colonial secretary in Ceylon between 1845 and 1850. Although short-lived and controversial, his career as a colonial administrator is nevertheless revealing, particularly insofar as it offers insights into the personal animosities and the networks of connection that existed in Ceylon's close-knit British community. More broadly, the article seeks to view the metropolitan and the colonial as a whole, arguing that while Emerson Tennent spent only a brief time in the Empire his imperial life was longer and more complex than this suggests. To this end, the imperial rhetoric he expressed as a parliamentarian in the 1830s and early 1840s is discussed, as are his later writing on Ceylon and his donations of scientific specimens and ethnographic artefacts to the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society. Through writing and donation, it is argued, Emerson Tennent continued his imperial career, mediating empire to metropolitan audiences, both local and national.