The British Empire's Fear and Fascination with the Occult
Social science review archives. May 24, 2026 Anaushey Batool
The British Empire's engagement with the occult was a structural feature of imperial governance, not a peripheral curiosity. Occult belief was simultaneously legitimized and suppressed along lines of race, class, and gender: elite esotericism in Britain was protected under scientific and artistic frameworks, while working-class practitioners faced legal persecution. In the colonies, indigenous spiritual systems were criminalized as seditious or dismissed as irrational superstition, even as British audiences consumed their aesthetics from a distance. Decisions about whose spiritual knowledge counted as truth were themselves acts of power.