‘Things Are Not as They Seem’: Colonialism, Capitalism and Neo-Victorian London in The Order: 1886

Fuchs examines how the British colonial project is depicted in the videogame The Order: 1886 (2015). A meta-text composed of various myths, tropes and Victorian legends, the game populates London with the undead and uses them to symbolize the vampiric nature of the colonial enterprise. Presenting a narrative that critiques colonialism, Fuchs argues that The Order interconnects with current concerns about globalisation, its addicts and its residue. Ultimately the game shows the city to be an uncanny space which folds the nineteenth-century setting in on itself to create a contemporary double, while repeating the colonialism and capitalist processes that were foundational to that era. Fuchs suggests that while globalisation has obfuscated colonialist and imperialist practices, the processes undergirding Empire are still very much in place in the early twenty-first century.