Rules Britannia: Board Games, Britain, and the World, c. 1759-1860

Abstract

Focusing on Georgian and Victorian Britain, this thesis examines didactic boardgames as cultural artefacts exploring the bounds of moral sympathy and responsibility in an ostensibly Anglocentric world. It refutes previous conclusions that exposure to imperial ideology via these games in childhood necessarily led to an imperialist identity in adulthood and thence to imperialist activity later in the nineteenth century, highlighting instead how games encouraged players to question the appropriateness of affiliating oneself with the British imperial project by accounting for circumstantial differences at home and abroad. It defies a hypodermic model of communication which posits players as passive and highly susceptible to manipulation by demonstrating instances of player modifications to rules and/or content that, in changing the values and assumptions of the original game, suggest what contemporaries found to be objectionable or missing in standard gameplay. It examines this dialectic between game and player across four thematic categories: teleological games, geographical games, ethnographic games, and zoological games.