Sculpting the Tropics: Visualising the East and West Indies in the Westminster Abbey Pantheon c.1761 - 1838

This thesis explores sculptural representations of the tropical East and West Indies in the Westminster Abbey pantheon between approximately the coronations of King George III in 1761 and Queen Victoria in 1838. This period witnessed the emergence and entrenchment of the British East India Company's territorial control over much of South Asia and the apex and abolition of Britain's Transatlantic trafficking and enslaving plantation trades in the Caribbean. It also saw over two hundred monuments erected in the Abbey. I extract seven monument case studies from the sub-canon of East India Company and abolitionist monuments as examples of how the British visually engaged with their expanding empire in South Asia and with their enslaving and emancipating presence in the Caribbean. Several of these monuments were executed by canonical sculptors from a nascent British school which emerged in the late eighteenth century, including Thomas Banks, John Bacon Junior, Sir Richard Westmacott, and Sir Francis Chantrey. Others were executed by sculptors from earlier generations, such as Peter Scheemakers and William Tyler, and later Royal Academicians, such as Henry Weekes. I revisit some of the more popular Abbey monuments with new perspectives, and also introduce some lesser-known, but no less significant, monuments which warrant greater research attention. I synthesise multiple fields of research, including British sculptural and church monument studies, British imperial art histories, and histories of the Abbey, combined with methodological approaches drawn from queer and feminist theories; critical race theories; and post-colonial and decolonial criticisms. I challenge conventional hegemonic gender- and hetero-normative readings of imperial monuments in the pantheon, finding nuances and contradictions between imperial visualisations of the geographically disparate but tropically homogenised East and West Indies, presented side-by-side in the Abbey, which continue to shape British perceptions of the empire and its contemporary legacies.