Edward John Eyre: The Hero As Murderer
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Tanning and foxing
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
Few figures in the annals of colonial history are as morally complex and fiercely contested as Edward John Eyre — explorer, governor, and instrument of empire — whose extraordinary life is dissected with unflinching precision in Geoffrey Dutton's landmark biography, Edward John Eyre: The Hero as Murderer. Dutton chronicles the double life of a man celebrated in Australia for his epic overland expeditions across uncharted desert, yet condemned in Britain for his brutal suppression of the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica in 1865, an act of colonial violence that sent shockwaves through Victorian society and put figures such as John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle on opposing sides of a defining moral debate. Dutton's prose is measured yet penetrating, presenting Eyre not as a simple villain or a straightforward hero, but as a deeply human product of empire — shaped by its ambitions, its prejudices, and its capacity for both extraordinary courage and shocking cruelty. The biography argues that Eyre's story is inseparable from the broader story of British imperialism, illuminating how the same ideology that drove men to heroic feats of exploration also licensed the violent subjugation of colonised peoples. Rich in historical detail and moral gravity, this work stands as an essential reckoning with the contradictions at the heart of the British Empire — and leaves the reader to ask: where exactly does the hero end, and the murderer begin?
Author: Geoffrey Dutton
Format: Paperback
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Tanning and foxing
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
Few figures in the annals of colonial history are as morally complex and fiercely contested as Edward John Eyre — explorer, governor, and instrument of empire — whose extraordinary life is dissected with unflinching precision in Geoffrey Dutton's landmark biography, Edward John Eyre: The Hero as Murderer. Dutton chronicles the double life of a man celebrated in Australia for his epic overland expeditions across uncharted desert, yet condemned in Britain for his brutal suppression of the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica in 1865, an act of colonial violence that sent shockwaves through Victorian society and put figures such as John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle on opposing sides of a defining moral debate. Dutton's prose is measured yet penetrating, presenting Eyre not as a simple villain or a straightforward hero, but as a deeply human product of empire — shaped by its ambitions, its prejudices, and its capacity for both extraordinary courage and shocking cruelty. The biography argues that Eyre's story is inseparable from the broader story of British imperialism, illuminating how the same ideology that drove men to heroic feats of exploration also licensed the violent subjugation of colonised peoples. Rich in historical detail and moral gravity, this work stands as an essential reckoning with the contradictions at the heart of the British Empire — and leaves the reader to ask: where exactly does the hero end, and the murderer begin?