Strange Deaths in Liberal England: Traffics and Discoveries, Media War, and the Machineries of Social Change

Abstract

By focusing attention on urban deprivation, government incompetence, and the passing of well-mannered, aristocratic modes of politics, the South African war exposed social fissures that, for Kipling, demanded systems — mechanical, efficient, predictable — to reassert national stability and discipline. It is no coincidence that in a sequence of science-fiction stories begun in the early 1900s, and no doubt inspired by his reading of H.G. Wells,¹ he fantasises about a global dictatorship policed by the Ariel Board of Control — a futuristic totalitarian power that employs sophisticated methods of travel, communications, and weaponry to subdue restless populations. This notion of technicalauthoritarian power with military leanings and know-how belongs very firmly to the period leading up to the First World War. It is a reflex of political change, and for Kipling places the technologies of the new century in a pivotal, organising role.