Heroic failure and the British is Stephanie Barczewski's most recent treatment of British polar exploration. Barczewski's first work on the topic was Antarctic destinies, a commendably thorough dual-narrative of the changing reputations of Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton (Barczewski Reference Barczewski2007). In a subsequent article Barczewski expressed her wish that future polar history should concentrate, not on ‘the feats or failures of individual explorers’ (Barczewski Reference Barczewski and Kennedy2014: 226) nor on ‘the human focus’ (Barczewski Reference Barczewski and Kennedy2014: 228), but instead on ‘the environmental history of the Antarctic’ and ‘what the history of environmental change in the Antarctic means for all humanity’ (Barczewski Reference Barczewski and Kennedy2014: 228). However, in her new book Barczewski evidently still believes ‘the human focus’ is worth examining: here she tackles the feats and failures of historical individuals, some of them polar explorers.

This book's hypothesis appears to be that, from 1800 until the end of the British empire, British failure, military and expeditionary, was publicly promoted as ‘heroic’ as a specific strategy to provide public distraction from the supposedly shameful existence of the British Empire. The book, however, lacks evidence for a concerted propaganda campaign at the highest levels. As Barczewski has hypothesized a direct link between the celebration of ‘heroic failure’ and British shame arising from imperialism, it is a pity that she does not identify any individual or organization whose specific aim was to use the concept of heroic failure to ‘help the British feel good about the uglier aspects of imperialism in the nineteenth century’ (page ix). Furthermore, Barczewski's underlying hypothesis of generalized guilt for the Empire's existence more properly belongs to the twenty-first century, not the nineteenth. Previous to the First World War, empires and colonialism had been the global norm. Almost every European nation possessed foreign colonies: France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Portugal, Italy, the Netherlands, even Denmark. Outside of Europe, the United States had the Philippines and Puerto Rico, whilst Japan had Formosa (now Taiwan) and Korea. It is therefore difficult to reconcile these facts with Barczewski's hypothesis of nineteenth-century British shame at their possession of an empire.

Ultimately, Barczewski's approach to the topic is quite nebulous, and appears to consist of the exposure of flaws and imperfections within certain acts of British heroism and within the people involved, followed by the contrast of these often private flaws against contemporary celebrations and tributes. (Given that era's respect for the age-old custom of ‘speaking well of the dead’, the fact of such tributes was hardly unusual.) Generally, the methodology of seeking problems within any human venture will inevitably harvest results; however, too great an emphasis on fault runs the risk of producing a skewed portrait where objective merit goes unremarked. Such unintentional skewing can be seen in this book's treatment of the 1854 Charge of the Light Brigade. Here the emphasis is on the immediate losses for the British, but this approach does not take into account the Charge's eventual military effect, which was to drive the Russians away from the British Balaclava-Sebastopol supply route (failure to do so would have led to the British either having to raise the siege of Sebastopol or surrender outright). Nor does it consider the Charge's psychological impact on the Russians, who were stunned by their opponents’ evident courage. Ten days later came the Battle of Inkerman, a Russian defeat by British and French forces: after that, there were no further major attempts by the Russians to defeat the British in the field.

Another example of this unintentional skewing occurs when Barczewski erroneously dismisses Captain Scott's scientific programme on his 1910−1913 Terra Nova expedition as a failure, quoting at length a single letter from Hugh Robert Mill on its insufficient new geographical discoveries. This approach disregards the rest of the expedition's wide scientific programme (zoology, glaciology, geology, meteorology, oceanography, magnetic observations, etc.). Given the recommendation in Barczewski's Reference Barczewski and Kennedy2014 article that more attention be paid to ‘the history of environmental change in the Antarctic’, it is a great pity that in this book she does not mention the vast amount of scientific data from Scott's last expedition (not least the extensive meteorology) which has been so useful to present-day scientists studying that very topic. The scientific successes of Scott's expedition have been evident for decades, and should have been noted for the sake of accuracy.

Barczewski argues that Britain is rare amongst nations in choosing to celebrate ‘heroic failure’. However, other nations besides Britain have their equivalent of the posthumous Victoria Cross; they too have erected statues to, or named locations after, courageous people who did not have luck on their side. Paying tribute to fallen heroes appealed to nineteenth-century idealistic sensibility, and one such example was G.F. Watts’ ‘Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice’, proposed in 1877 and unveiled in London's Postman's Park in 1900. This wall of plaques immortalized rescuers, largely working-class civilians, who died during their efforts at life-saving. Even unsuccessful rescues were commemorated on Watts’ memorial, reflecting the sensible awareness that ‘self-sacrifice’ did not always lead to a successful outcome. In this vein Captain Scott was celebrated in 1913 as a leader who stayed with and supported his debilitated men, instead of abandoning them to save himself. This required no external political ‘spin’; Scott's staying with his injured team members was documented fact, and even today many would find a leader's ‘leaving no man behind’ to be commendable. (On the theme of polar exploration, it is somewhat harsh to address Scott's or Franklin's deaths in terms of ‘failure’ considering the countless explorers and mountaineers who have died during ventures into obviously hazardous terrain. Even the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, who is commended for his south pole expedition in Barczewski's book, ultimately perished in the Arctic ocean with his five-man crew in 1928.)

The book's narrowly-focused interpretation of certain events as British propaganda and nothing else sometimes leads to a crucial disregard of other key elements. For example, Barczewski writes of the battle of Omdurman that Lord Kitchener ‘understood that Omdurman was about confirming Gordon's nobility, not about crushing the Sudanese’ (page 189). However, it is unrealistic to suggest that Britain would have sent an army of 25000 men along the Nile for the sole purpose of ‘confirming Gordon's nobility’ as late as 1898, a full thirteen years after Gordon's death in 1885. Omdurman is more realistically viewed as a pragmatic exercise in geo-political strategy, allowing the establishment of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (adding a million square miles to the British Empire) and stopping the French colonial empire's advance into the Sudan.

Further unintentional skewing occurs whenever Barczewski criticizes British policy in isolation, without reference to the wider global context which would result in a fairer perspective. For example, she stresses British culpability for the fate of the Australasian aborigines (which is entirely correct), but unusually conflates this with the fate of the Native Americans when she accuses the British of ‘killing off large numbers of American Indians and aborigines’ (page 35). Whilst there were bloody conflicts between the British and the Native Americans during the initial settlement, the British protected Native American rights in the 1763 Treaty of Paris by forbidding colonial settlements west of the Appalachian mountains. By 1776 the British had reached a peaceful settlement with the Native American nations: the real killings and displacement of Native Americans occurred after the British had departed from America, between 1783 (the founding date of the American Republic) and the 1890 Battle of Wounded Knee. If Barczewski condemns the treatment of Native Americans, her target should be the USA, not the British. Similarly, Barczewski briefly mentions slavery in the British Empire in order to condemn it, finishing with the statement that ‘slavery was not abolished until the 1830s’ (page 225): however, a wider contextual view would also note that the British Empire was the first of the Western world powers to abolish slavery, and that the British subsequently attempted to atone by setting up, at some expense, the West Africa Squadron of Royal Naval ships to prevent the slave trade from Africa to the rest of the world.

In conclusion, this book is provocative and unashamedly partisan; however, a more objective approach, careful to include context and merit as well as fault, would have been preferable for a work of reference. The book also has a habit of placing harsh moral blame on individuals for outcomes, which can sometimes result in a disregard of the role played by chance and happenstance within wars and exploration. (When examining such events, historians must be careful to bear in mind the slender margin by which such ventures may sometimes succeed or fail, and thus avoid the ‘just-world fallacy’ of judging purely on outcome.) Barczewski's best work to date has been Antarctic destinies, which was distinguished by the balanced and informative presentation of copious evidence. Here, her hypothesis of a direct link between the celebration of ‘heroic failure’ and contemporary guilt for the British Empire is somewhat anachronistic, and some of this book's conclusions are weakened when outside evidence is introduced.