The Long Shadow of the British Empire

Abstract

More than 25 years ago, my cousin Spencer Bloomfield stirred my interest in our English ancestor, Dr. Sidney Spencer Kachalola Broomfield.1 Both Spencer and I were curious about Broomfield’s imperial and colonial role in Northern Rhodesia. Broomfield is the archetypical European male, whose life story (as a result of his imperial career across the British Empire) is found in the British official archive in both the empire and the metropole. Broomfield’s life story has all the elements of the white male transnational traveler’s tales about adventure, hunting, exploration, and discovery in culturally diverse and remote geographical locations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Broomfield traveled, explored, pioneered, and “careered” in varying sites of the European Empire. My initial fascination with Broomfield was his “absent” presence within my family history in Zambia.2 Since then, though, my interest in Broomfield has broadened to encompass his “haunting” presence in the wider British Empire, particularly in Zambia—the former British Protectorate of Northern Rhodesia—and in Australia.