Empire and mobility in the long nineteenth century

David Lambert, Peter Merriman, David Lambert, Peter Merriman

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Print ISBN:
  9781526126382
• Subtopic: Historical Geography
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526126405
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Mobility was central to imperialism, from the human movements entailed in exploration, travel and migration to the information, communications and commodity flows vital to trade, science, governance and military power. While historians have written on exploration, commerce, imperial transport and communications networks, and the movements of slaves, soldiers and scientists, few have reflected upon the social, cultural, economic and political significance of mobile practices, subjects and infrastructures that underpin imperial networks, or examined the qualities of movement valued by imperial powers and agents at different times. This collection explores the intersection of debates on imperial relations, colonialism and empire with emerging work on mobility. In doing this, it traces how the movements of people, representations and commodities helped to constitute the British empire from the late-eighteenth century through to the Second World War.

Chapter One

Empire and mobility: an introduction

David Lambert and Peter Merriman

‘And so Phileas Fogg had won his bet.’ The protagonist of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, the well-to-do English gentleman, Phileas Fogg, had wagered his acquaintances at the Reform Club £20,000 that he could undertake an unprecedented circumnavigation from London to Suez, Bombay, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Yokohama, San Francisco, New York and back to London within eighty days. ‘To do so’, Verne explained, ‘he had used all possible means of transport: steamships, trains, carriages, yachts, commercial vessels, a sledge and an elephant.’¹ Yet, although Fogg’s winnings were cancelled out by the costs of his peregrination, he had acquired a ‘charming wife’, Mrs Aouda, along the way. Originally serialised in French in 1872 and published in English two years later, Verne’s story unfolded in real time and gripped contemporary audiences. The journey at its centre had been made possible by a series of recent developments in transport infrastructure – the opening of the Suez Canal (1869), the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad across the USA (1869) and the linking of railways in the Indian sub-continent (1870) – as well as by longer-established improvements in transport technologies associated with the application of steam power. Exemplifying how life imitates art, the story also inspired real-world travellers to try to match and even beat Fogg’s fictional accomplishment.²

Unlike the more fantastical forms of transport that featured in Verne’s Extraordinary Journeys, starting in 1863 with Five Weeks in a Balloon, Fogg circumnavigated the globe using familiar modes such as steam trains, sailing ships and animal power. Around the World in Eighty Days also differs from some of Verne’s other works in that it does not involve a journey to an ‘unknown’ part of the world. As Brian Aldiss puts it: Fogg ‘forges no new pathways; he travels well-known routes, since his objective is to defeat not space but time’.³ While less obviously concerned with colonial themes – be it the metaphorical treatment of (Western) colonisation in The Mysterious Island or a focus on an implacable enemy of terrestrial empires, Captain Nemo, who first appears in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea – Around the World in Eighty Days is about ‘empire’ nonetheless.⁴ The novel is a partial tour of the current (and former) British Empire, complete with brief sketches and potted histories of Aden, British India, the Andaman Islands, Singapore and Hong Kong, as well as a journey across the USA. As Fogg’s party travel to Allahabad by elephant, they disrupt a sati ceremony and make a chivalrous rescue of the young Indian widow, Mrs Aouda, who will later become Fogg’s wife, thus enacting one of the central justifications for the British colonisation of India. Other imperial themes appear elsewhere in the story: the Hong Kong opium den full of ‘emaciated, stupefied wretches’ in which Fogg’s manservant Passepartout is drugged is an Orientalist set-piece, while the attack as the party travel on the Union Pacific Railroad by a band of Sioux warriors, who ‘swarmed’ onto the train like ‘enraged monkeys’, evokes commonplace Western ideas about race in the late nineteenth century.⁵ Moreover, the specific mobilities and immobilities that Fogg and his companions encounter, including the drugged Mrs Aouda upon the funeral pyre, the befuddled opium addicts in Hong Kong and the agile Sioux warriors, also evoke wider imperial movements, whether of reformist sentiment or the antagonistic relationship between Euro-American settlement and indigenous peoples.

Most broadly, Around the World in Eighty Days is about how the world’s mobilities were being remade by Anglo-imperial hegemony, a ‘paean to the speeding up of the human world’ that was produced by the ‘global interlocking passenger transport systems’ of the Victorian era.⁶ It is also a portrait of an English protagonist whose qualities were ideal for travelling across this world and for the business of empire-making. Phlegmatic, precise and stiff-upper-lipped, Fogg possesses ‘better knowledge than anyone else of world geography’ and the mathematical precision with which he travels from one place to another mirrors his machinelike character.⁷ He is also willing and able to spend money and commit acts of violence to achieve his aims; his rescue of Passepartout from the Sioux raiders was described by Verne as an act in which ‘Phileas Fogg quite simply does his duty’.⁸ Fogg is, then, an arch-imperialist, mastering all he surveys with a dispassionate composure. As such, Verne’s story is concerned both with the imperial (re)making of time and space, and with the actions of an imperial subject.

The themes of movement and travel that are central to Verne’s story also serve to articulate its underlying imperial themes. Our argument in Empire and Mobility is that a thorough engagement with questions of mobility – and immobility – has much to offer to the study of empire more broadly, and not merely in terms of transport technologies and infrastructures, but also the cultures, discourses, practices and subjectivities with which they are associated. As such, this book is intended to serve as the first wide-ranging collection exploring the intersection of scholarly debates on imperial relations, colonialism and empire, with work on mobility and cultures of movement. In this introductory chapter we will outline why the foregrounding of a critical perspective on mobility and movement can reinvigorate histories of imperialism, outlining the different practices, subjects and things which have moved or have enabled or constrained imperial mobilities. As such, this chapter will set out the interdisciplinary, conceptual and historical context for the volume, as well as introduce the chapters that follow.

Movement, migration, travel and empire

While this collection makes an argument for the value of an explicit and conceptually informed focus on mobility and immobility within work on empire, themes of movement, flow and circulation have not been absent from the field. A work like Valeska Huber’s Channelling Mobilities, with its multi-scalar analysis of the multiple forms of movement associated with the Suez Canal, was among the most explicit moves in this direction (albeit one framed as global, rather than imperial, history), but there have been wider developments too. For example, recent work on empire and metropolitan culture – as embodied in the ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series of which Empire and Mobility is part – includes recent books such as Markku Hokkanen’s Medicine, Mobility and the Empire.⁹ Likewise, themes of flow and circulation have been apparent in research on empire informed by postcolonial approaches. In Moving Subjects, for example, Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton make an explicit call for a ‘kinetic model’ of imperial space to be used to examine the intimate collisions and collusions between ‘mobile subjects’.¹⁰ In briefly reviewing existing work that anticipates or is broadly compatible with a more overt focus on the theme of mobility, our intention is not simply to acknowledge what has gone before, but to identify familiar starting points from which scholars unacquainted with these ideas might strike out.

Andrew Thompson argues that a ‘raison d’être of empire lay in the constant shifting of people between different parts of the world in ways that were likely to destabilise old identities and forge new ones’.¹¹ Indeed, migration has been the most significant theme related to movement in histories of imperialism, be it its causes and especially its consequences for non-metropolitan regions, or the role of population flows in the creation of settler societies and colonial enclaves.¹² Complementing overviews and syntheses have been case studies of particular groups of migrants and specific destinations.¹³ In this way, the relationship between migration and facets of identity such as ethnicity, gender and religion have been examined, bringing greater precision to or complicating broader accounts. The role of the imperial state and non-state institutions in promoting, supporting and regulating emigration, such as churches and philanthropic organisations, has also received attention,¹⁴ as have migratory phenomena that are sometimes overlooked, such as that to the imperial centre from elsewhere and return migration from the empire.¹⁵

Imperial migration was not only a matter of voluntary population movements, as the histories of transportation and convict labour demonstrate.¹⁶ The trans-Atlantic slave trade, which saw more than 12 million African men, women and children forcibly transported to European colonies and their successor states in the Americas from the sixteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, is the most infamous example. Its shifting patterns are now understood better than ever before due to the information available from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database – though the quantitative enumeration of this coercive mass mobility can leave its individual or experiential dimensions obscure.¹⁷ The involvement of different empires and states in trans-Atlantic slave trading ended in the early-to-mid-nineteenth century. Yet, similar forms of movement emerged in the wake of abolition, particularly that of indentured Indian and Chinese workers brought to labour in the Caribbean and other tropical colonies.¹⁸ The destinations for enslaved and indentured labourers were plantation colonies, where they were subject to restrictions on their movement, a reminder that mobility and immobility were often entwined.¹⁹ Indeed, recent work on the efforts by the British state to supress the slave trade demonstrates that the attempt to end one type of mobility could bring about new forms, whether those of the British naval personnel who served in the West African Squadron or of the ‘Liberated Africans’ seized from slave ships who were subsequently landed at Sierra Leone or St Helena, some of whom were then recruited to work as free labour in the Caribbean or serve in the British military units of the West India Regiments.²⁰ Such work underscores the ‘multiple mobilities’ to which Huber has urged global and imperial historians to attend.

As well as settlement or long-term migration, trans-imperial mobility was also characterised by more temporary forms of movement. These included royal tours made by European monarchs to their colonies, as well as by their representatives, such as viceroys and colonial governors, but also by the indigenous rulers to Europe. Such elite forms of mobility could be highly significant in cultural and political terms, and much attention has been given to their pageantry and surrounding symbolism.²¹ However, most movements across empire were not so elevated. They included movements by junior officials and administrators in the colonial bureaucracy, as well as all manner of others, from town planners and foresters, to soldiers and sailors.²² Other forms of movement took place against the backdrop of empire, if not always directly in its service. These were undertaken by explorers, missionar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter One Empire and mobility: an introduction
• Chapter Two Military print culture, knowledge and terrain: knowledge mobility and eighteenth-century military colonialism
• Chapter Three A contested vision of empire: anonymity, authority and mobility in the reception of William Macintosh’s Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa (1782)
• Chapter Four The art of travel in the name of science: mobility and erasure in the art of Flinders’s Australian voyage, 1801–3
• Chapter Five ‘On their own element’: nineteenth-century seamen’s missions and merchant seamen’s mobility
• Chapter Six ‘Easy chair geography’: the fabrication of an immobile culture of nineteenth-century exploration
• Chapter Seven Consorting with ‘others’: vagrancy laws and unauthorised mobility across colonial borders in New Zealand from 1877 to 1900
• Chapter Eight Trekking around Upper Burma: Charlotte Wheeler-Cuffe’s exploration of the frontier districts, 1903
• Chapter Nine Reading the skies, writing mobility: on the road with a colonial meteorologist
• Chapter Ten Grounded: the limits of British imperial aeromobility
• Chapter Eleven Afterword: Westward the course of empire takes its way
• Index