UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation analyzes how the life story of Hector Macdonald, a soldier hero of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century British empire, has been commodified, circulated, altered, and ultimately misremembered in ways that obscure his sexual abuse of children. Despite his fame and his practical and propagandistic uses to the empire, Macdonald was about to be court-martialed when he died by suicide in 1903. The charges against him were never revealed, and they have been the subject of speculation for decades. Frequently, observers have blamed the court martial on a classist or homophobic conspiracy. I refute these interpretations by citing previously overlooked statements of British Ceylonese boys aged twelve to sixteen who disclosed that Macdonald had been sexually abusing them for months. Macdonald was facing court martial because he abused children. I argue that that sexual scandal was not peripheral to the project of empire; rather, it could threaten its very existence. The Macdonald scandal reveals the extent to which tensions and overlaps between silence and publicity shaped imperial governance in an era when (mis)information spread quicker than ever before. The official response was one that relied heavily on silencing public talk of the boys’ disclosures in order to maintain British control and prestige during a fraught time in the history of gender, sexuality, and empire. In private, imperial officials discussed the case frequently. They used euphemisms that contrast with the boys’ directness and highlight how norms of masculine honor and sexual propriety could be maintained through a combination of speech and silence. This mix of half-secrets and incomplete publicity produced uneven knowledge. Those in the know kept quiet while confidently incorrect voices were the loudest. The result is a persistently misremembered Macdonald narrative that illustrates the enduring yet limited power of strategic governmental silence around scandal, as well as changing understandings of child sexual abuse, sex between men, and the shifting contours of belief from the Victorian era to the #MeToo era.