Empire and mobility in the long nineteenth century

By Manchester University Press

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jun 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526126405

Book preview

General editors: Andrew S. Thompson and Alan Lester

Founding editor: John M. MacKenzie

When the ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series was founded by Professor John M. MacKenzie more than thirty years ago, emphasis was laid upon the conviction that ‘imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies’. With well over a hundred titles now published, this remains the prime concern of the series. Cross-disciplinary work has indeed appeared covering the full spectrum of cultural phenomena, as well as examining aspects of gender and sex, frontiers and law, science and the environment, language and literature, migration and patriotic societies, and much else. Moreover, the series has always wished to present comparative work on European and American imperialism, and particularly welcomes the submission of books in these areas. The fascination with imperialism, in all its aspects, shows no sign of abating, and this series will continue to lead the way in encouraging the widest possible range of studies in the field. ‘Studies in Imperialism’ is fully organic in its development, always seeking to be at the cutting edge, responding to the latest interests of scholars and the needs of this ever-expanding area of scholarship.

Empire and mobility in the long nineteenth century

SELECTED TITLES AVAILABLE IN THE SERIES

WRITING IMPERIAL HISTORIES

ed. Andrew S. Thompson

GENDERED TRANSACTIONS

Indrani Sen

EXHIBITING THE EMPIRE

ed. John McAleer and John M. MacKenzie

BANISHED POTENTATES

Robert Aldrich

MISTRESS OF EVERYTHING

ed. Sarah Carter and Maria Nugent

BRITAIN AND THE FORMATION OF THE GULF STATES

Shohei Sato

CULTURES OF DECOLONISATION

ed. Ruth Craggs and Claire Wintle

HONG KONG AND BRITISH CULTURE, 1945–97

Mark Hampton

Empire and mobility in the long nineteenth century

Edited by

David Lambert and Peter Merriman

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2020

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 2638 2 hardback

First published 2020

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Vintage World Map, 2015 © Michal Bednarek, bednarek-art.com

Cover design: riverdesignbooks.com

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

To Alex and Tilly

To Eiry and Fflur

Contents

List of figures

Notes on contributors

Acknowledgements

1Empire and mobility: an introduction David Lambert and Peter Merriman

2Military print culture, knowledge and terrain: knowledge mobility and eighteenth-century military colonialism Huw J. Davies

3A contested vision of empire: anonymity, authority and mobility in the reception of William Macintosh’s Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa (1782) Innes M. Keighren

4The art of travel in the name of science: mobility and erasure in the art of Flinders’s Australian voyage, 1801–3 Sarah Thomas

5‘On their own element’: nineteenth-century seamen’s missions and merchant seamen’s mobility Justine Atkinson

6‘Easy chair geography’: the fabrication of an immobile culture of nineteenth-century exploration Natalie Cox

7Consorting with ‘others’: vagrancy laws and unauthorised mobility across colonial borders in New Zealand from 1877 to 1900 Catharine Coleborne

8Trekking around Upper Burma: Charlotte Wheeler-Cuffe’s exploration of the frontier districts, 1903 Nuala C. Johnson

9Reading the skies, writing mobility: on the road with a colonial meteorologist Martin Mahony

10Grounded: the limits of British imperial aeromobility Liz Millward

11Afterword: Westward the course of empire takes its way Tim Cresswell

Index

Figures

4.1Ferdinand Bauer, Trichoglossus haematodus (Rainbow lorikeet), c. 1811, London, watercolour on paper, 33.6 × 50.6 cm; The Natural History Museum, London (© The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London)

4.2Ferdinand Bauer, Thysanotus patersonii (Twining fringe-lily), 1806–10, London, watercolour on paper, 52.5 × 35.8 cm; The Natural History Museum, London (© The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London)

4.3Ferdinand Bauer, Acanthaluteres brownii (Spiny-tailed, or Brown’s, leatherjacket), c. 1811, London, watercolour on paper, 33.8 × 50.5 cm; The Natural History Museum, London (© The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London)

4.4William Westall, Views on the South Coast of Terra Australis, engraving on paper, 72.4 × 99.8 cm, from Matthew Flinders, A Voyage to Terra Australis, London: G. and W. Nicol, 1814, plate XVII (By permission of the National Library of Australia, Canberra)

4.5William Westall, South Coast, Bald Head, Eclipse Island and Seal Island, [1801], pencil on paper, 20.0 × 36.5 cm (By permission of the National Library of Australia, Canberra)

4.6William Westall, Views on the South Coast of Australia, 1801–2, watercolour on paper, 31.1 × 44.5 cm (By permission of the National Library of Australia, Canberra)

4.7Ferdinand Bauer, Portunus pelagicus (Blue swimming crab), c. 1802, St Vincent’s Gulf, South Australia, pencil on paper, 52.8 × 35.6 cm (By permission of Naturhistorisches Museum, Wien)

4.8William Westall, King George’s [i.e. George] Sound, View from the North-West, [1801], pencil and wash on paper, 16 × 26.7 cm (By permission of the National Library of Australia, Canberra)

6.1W. D. Cooley, ‘Map of Dr Lacerda’s Route from Tete to Cazembe’, c. 1845 (© Royal Geographical Society (with IBG))

6.2Letter from David Livingstone to the editor of the Athenaeum, 25 November 1856 (© Royal Geographical Society (with IBG))

6.3‘Dr Livingstone at Work on his Journal’, from Henry M. Stanley, How I Found Livingstone, London: Sampson Low, 1872, facing p. 563 (© Royal Geographical Society (with IBG))

6.4Chair used by Dr Livingstone during his expedition to Lake Nyasa, 1858–64 (© Royal Geographical Society (with IBG))

8.1Map of Burma

8.2Dendrobium fimbriatum growing on Bauhinia purpurea over Chaung ta Shé, Mogôk (Courtesy of the National Botanic Gardens, Dublin)

8.3Charlotte Wheeler-Cuffe sketching at Mandalay, no date (Courtesy of the National Botanic Gardens Dublin)

11.1Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, mural study, US Capitol, 1861/62 (Image in public domain, available from Architect of the Capitol, Washington, DC, www.aoc.gov/art/other-paintings-and-murals/westward-course-empire-takes-its-way)

11.2Alexander Gardner, ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way’: Laying Track 600 Miles West of St. Louis, Missouri, 19 October 1867, albumen silver print, 33.2 × 47.6 cm, 84.XM.1027.37; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program)

11.3Frances Flora Bond Palmer, Across the Continent – Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 1868, New York: Published by Currier & Ives, 152 Nassau Street (Photograph, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, www.loc.gov/item/90708413/)

Notes on Contributors

Justine Atkinson is a Conjoint Fellow specialising in colonial histories of maritime mobility, in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Newcastle, Australia, where she was awarded her PhD in history. Her research interests include transnational and frontier histories, and fringe communities as sites of cultural encounters. Her recent work considers the role of women’s networks in supporting colonial seafaring families in Newcastle. Her current research project focuses on nineteenth-century seafarers’ missions in the British world, with a particular interest in these missions as contested spaces on the colonial frontier and opportunities for expressing ideas of ‘home’ and place within the empire.

Catharine Coleborne is Professor and Head of the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research interest in mobility studies developed while she was based in New Zealand at the University of Waikato. In 2015, she held a CeMoRe (Lancaster University) Visiting Research Fellowship to examine historical understandings of mobility, with her work published in the journals Transfers and Law Text Culture. Her wider research programme covers the histories of mental illness, institutions, medicine, law and health in colonial Australia and New Zealand. Her books include Madness in the Family: Insanity and Institutions in the Australasian Colonial World, 1860–1914 (Palgrave, 2010); Insanity, Identity and Empire (Manchester University Press, 2015); and Why Talk About Madness? Bringing History into the Conversation (Palgrave, 2019). She is the co-editor of six books, including (with Diane Kirkby) Law, History, Colonialism: The Reach of Empire (Manchester University Press, 2001, 2009). Her future study of mobilities, Move On: Regulating Mobility in Australia and New Zealand, 1840s–1905, focuses on the regulation of colonial mobility in Australia and New Zealand through an examination of vagrancy laws.

Natalie Cox is a Project Manager in the British government, specialising in digital transformation and change programmes. Her research interests encompass cultures of travel and exploration, histories of cartography and scientific cultures from the Age of Discovery to the present day, and she currently sits on the Council of the Hakluyt Society as the Royal Geographical Society Representative. She is a former AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award holder at the University of Warwick, and her PhD rethought how geographical knowledge was made and developed by examining the work of nineteenth-century ‘armchair geographers’ and the ways they expanded knowledge about the world without physically exploring it. She held a Huntington Library Research Fellowship where she worked closely on explorer Sir Richard Burton’s personal library.

Tim Cresswell is a geographer and poet. He is the author or editor of over a dozen books on themes of place and mobility including, most recently, Maxwell Street: Writing and Thinking Place (University of Chicago Press, 2019). His two collections of poetry, Soil (2013) and Fence (2015), were both published by Penned in the Margins. He co-edits the interdisciplinary journal GeoHumanities and is the first Visiting Professor at the Centre for Place Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. Tim lives and works in Edinburgh, where he is Ogilvie Professor of Geography at the University of Edinburgh.

Huw J. Davies is Reader in Early Modern Military History at the Defence Studies Department, King’s College London. He teaches international history and strategic studies at the Joint Services Command and Staff College, Shrivenham. His main research interests focus on military knowledge, learning, adaptation and innovation in the eighteenth-century British Army. This expands on his work researching the British Army in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and British India. He has published two monographs – Wellington’s Wars: The Making of Military Genius (Yale University Press, 2012) and Spying for Wellington: British Military Intelligence during the Peninsular War (Oklahoma University Press, 2018). His third book, A Wandering Army: British Military Knowledge and Power, 1750–1850, is forthcoming, also with Yale University Press.

Nuala C. Johnson is Professor of Geography at Queen’s University Belfast. Her research is both historical and contemporary in focus. She has written extensively on nationalism and the politics of identity; public monuments and collective memory; literary spaces; and the historical geographies of science. Her recent work has been particularly engaged with analysing the development of botanical gardens and their aesthetics and with natural history travel. She is currently working on a project on botanical illustration and empire. She is author of Ireland, the Great War and the Geography of Remembrance (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Nature Displaced, Nature Displayed: Order and Beauty in Botanical Gardens (I.B. Tauris, 2011), and has edited three further books.

Innes M. Keighren is Reader in Historical Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has research interests in geography’s disciplinary and discursive histories, in book history and in the history of science. He is author of Bringing Geography to Book: Ellen Semple and the Reception of Geographical Knowledge (I.B. Tauris, 2010) and co-author of Travels into Print: Exploration, Writing, and Publishing with John Murray, 1773–1859 (University of Chicago Press, 2015). He is currently working on a new book focusing on the transnational reception of the eighteenth-century Scottish travel writer William Macintosh.

David Lambert is Professor of History at the University of Warwick. His research is concerned with slavery and empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, focusing on the Caribbean and its place in the wider (Atlantic) world. He is the author of White Creole Culture, Politics and Identity during the Age of Abolition (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Mastering the Niger: James MacQueen’s African Geography and the Struggle over Atlantic Slavery (University of Chicago Press, 2013), and the editor of Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2006). He is currently writing a book on the shifting image of the West India Regiments over the ‘long’ nineteenth century. He edits the journal Slavery & Abolition.

Martin Mahony is Lecturer in Human Geography in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA). Following a PhD at UEA he held positions at King’s College London and the University of Nottingham, alongside visiting positions at Leuphana University and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. His research interests include the politics of climate change and the history of atmospheric science and technology. He is currently investigating the historical geographies of meteorological knowledge-making in the British Empire and their intersections with imperial mobilities, and is working on a book on this topic titled Atmospheric Encounters: Historical Geographies of the Aerial Future.

Peter Merriman is Professor of Human Geography at Aberystwyth University in Wales. He has published extensively on the geographies and histories of mobility, with a particular focus on the historical geographies of driving and roads in twentieth-century Britain. He has also undertaken research on theories of space and spatiality, Welsh nationalism and national identity, and port histories and heritage. His books include Driving Spaces (2007); Mobility, Space and Culture (2012); and Space (Routledge, forthcoming) as well as the edited collections Geographies of Mobilities (2011); The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities (2014); Space – Critical Concepts in Geography (2016); and Mobility and the Humanities (2018).

Liz Millward is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Manitoba, Canada. Her book Women in British Imperial Airspace, 1922–1937 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008) was the winner of the 2010 Canadian Women’s Studies Association Annual Book Prize and received an Honourable Mention from the Canadian Historical Association for the 2009 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize. Her work has been published in the Journal of Transport History and the T2M Yearbook, and she is currently writing a book about British women’s aviation groups during the interwar period.

Sarah Thomas is Lecturer in History of Art and Museum Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She was formerly a curator in Australian art museums, and in 2002 she curated a major international exhibition, The Encounter, 1802: Art of the Flinders and Baudin Voyages (Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide). Her current research interests focus on the art history and museology of the British Empire, the iconography of slavery and the cultural legacies of British slave-ownership. Her book, Witnessing Slavery: Art and Travel in the Age of Abolition, was published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press in 2019. Other publications include: ‘The Spectre of Empire in the British Art Museum’ (Museum History Journal, 2013) and ‘Violence and Memory: Slavery in the Museum’, in World Art and the Legacies of Colonial Violence, edited by Daniel Rycroft (Ashgate Publishing, 2013).

Acknowledgements

This collection started life as three paper sessions convened by us at the International Conference of Historical Geographers, held at the Royal Geographical Society (with the IBG), London, 5–10 July 2015. We would like to acknowledge the conference organisers (especially the local organising committee, chaired by Felix Driver) for their hard work in putting together such a fantastic event, and to thank all of the participants in our sessions for their scholarly contributions. While not all of the participants were able to contribute to this volume, they all played an important role in ensuring the success of the sessions. As editors we have benefited from the intellectual support of colleagues in our respective universities and beyond. David would like to acknowledge Frances Steel and Miles Ogborn in particular. Pete would like to acknowledge the support of colleagues in the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences at Aberystwyth University, particularly Sarah Davies, Hywel Griffiths, Jesse Heley, Gareth Hoskins, Rhys A. Jones, Rhys D. Jones, Sinéad O’Connor, Mark Whitehead and Mike Woods. During the editing process, we have benefited greatly from the editorial guidance and advice of the series editors Andrew Thompson and Alan Lester, and staff at Manchester University Press, particularly Emma Brennan and Paul Clarke. A final thanks should go to our friends and families. David would like to thank Carolyn, Alex and Tilly, and Pete would like to thank Liz, Eiry and Fflur for their love, support and distractions from matters of empire (and mobility).

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, missionaries and scientists, and, as the nineteenth century wore on and travel became more routine, they were joined by tourists.²³ Unsurprisingly, travel has been a persistent theme in work on empire, not least the role played by travel writing in the articulation of colonial discourses of difference.²⁴ Of course, it was not only Europeans who moved across empires, and while many accounts of non-European mobilities have been in aggregate, more individuated studies are increasingly common.²⁵ This relates to a wider shift toward biographically orientated work in order to explore the subjective experience of trans-imperial movement.²⁶

Within studies of imperial migration, a persistent concern has been with the encounters that occurred between people in different places. While often moments of conquest and violent imposition, they were sometimes characterised by resistance and failed efforts to impose metropolitan patterns on the sites of colonisation. Such encounters could also have transformative effects on migrant populations themselves. The interplay of encounter as a locus of imposition and resistance, preservation and change in cultural-historical work on empire has been explored through concepts such as ‘transculturation’, ‘creolisation’ and ‘hybridity’.²⁷ The notion of ‘diaspora’, though more prominent in postcolonial studies than imperial history per se, is perhaps the dominant one, be it the ‘black’ diaspora created by the trans-Atlantic slave trade or the ‘green’ diaspora associated with Irish emigration, both forced and voluntary.²⁸ Accounts of singular diasporas have also been replaced by more complex histories of the interplay of multiple ethnicities, both ‘foreign’ and ‘indigenous’, dominant and subaltern, in specific colonial sites.²⁹ Finally, it is important to recognise that imperial encounters with unfamiliar lands and their inhabitants did not only occur after migratory arrivals. Geographical imaginations about distant sites, including the opportunities they might offer to settlers – many of which were utterly misinformed and based on wishful thinking – were also forged prior to emigration.³⁰

As well as the mobilities of people, including the ideas they expressed and the identities they articulated, the movement of commodities and goods has also been central to much work in imperial history. Such mobilities are sometimes assumed to be an intrinsic aspect of long-distance trade and thus not always addressed directly, but there has also been a rise of more explicit treatments focusing on the circulation of individual commodities – albeit sometimes under the sign of global rather than imperial history.³¹ Objects also moved across empires for reasons other than trade, though economic motives often remained central. For example, there were specimens and artefacts associated with scientific expeditions and exchange. Their circulations were central to the establishment of scientific ideas that drew authority from the collection, organisation and analysis of human remains and artefacts, as well as their display in museums and other sites. Such topics have been of major concern to historians of science and empire.³² The collection and transference of objects to the imperial centre were also associated with practices such as hunting, looting or the seizure of war reparations, while others were simply purchased as souvenirs, something entwined with the development of leisured travel and tourism.³³

While collecting was central to the movement of objects, artistic and visual practices such as sketching, painting or