British army officer Charles Warren's archeological excavations in Jerusalem in the late 1860s on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund and Scottish artist William Simpson's paintings of those activities articulated a new kind of imperial space: the underground empire. The imperial underground was a place that had not yet been conquered and where the British had limited visibility. In contrast to picturesque and panoramic views that created an illusion of order and omniscience, Simpson's sketches depict an imperial presence that was confined, constrained, and in danger of collapse. Yet as the British began to probe this subterranean frontier, they turned the underground world into a place not just of darkness and danger but of exploration and excitement. In the process, Warren's work and Simpson's portrayal of it helped lay the foundation for Britain's eventual conquest of Palestine during the First World War by burrowing beneath Jerusalem's dilapidated Ottoman present in search of its ancient and Judeo-Christian past. Jerusalem was not the only node in Britain's nascent underground empire—British work there occurred alongside the construction of sewers and railway tunnels in London and the mining of gold and diamonds in Australia and South Africa—but it was in Jerusalem that an imperial underground was first and most fully articulated, a space that embodied both the precariousness and the potential of Britain's embryonic efforts to establish a presence in the Middle East.

中文翻译：

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地下帝国：查尔斯·沃伦、威廉·辛普森和巴勒斯坦的考古探索

1860 年代末，英国陆军军官查尔斯·沃伦 (Charles Warren) 代表巴勒斯坦探索基金会 (Palestine Exploration Fund) 在耶路撒冷进行了考古发掘，苏格兰艺术家威廉·辛普森 (William Simpson) 的绘画作品则描绘了一种新的帝国空间：地下帝国。帝国地下是一个尚未被征服的地方，英国人的能见度有限。与营造秩序和无所不知的错觉的风景如画的全景图相反，辛普森的草图描绘了一个受到限制、约束和崩溃危险的帝国存在。然而，当英国人开始探索这个地下边界时，他们将地下世界变成了一个不仅充满黑暗和危险，而且充满探索和兴奋的地方。在此过程中，沃伦的作品和辛普森对其的描述为英国在第一次世界大战期间最终征服巴勒斯坦奠定了基础，他们在耶路撒冷破败的奥斯曼帝国的遗迹下挖掘，寻找其古老的犹太基督教历史。耶路撒冷并不是英国新生地下帝国的唯一节点——英国在伦敦修建下水道和铁路隧道，以及在澳大利亚和南非开采黄金和钻石——但正是在耶路撒冷，帝国地下帝国首次出现。这个空间体现了英国在中东建立存在的萌芽努力的不稳定和潜力。