Abstract
This impressive volume is the first to bring together historical research on the British Empire – from the late eighteenth century through to the early twentieth century – and mobilities studies. While the significance of transport, travel, communication, exploration, migration, embodied movement and the export/import of commodities may have featured in the work of numerous scholars working on Empire, moving mobility to the centre of such investigations yields valuable new insights: in particular, the way in which mobility practices, discourses, systems and infrastructures work together. As the editors outline in their comprehensive introduction, this systems-based approach to mobility builds upon the work of John Urry, Tim Cresswell and their followers; however, it is notable that it is their key concepts – “mobility/immobility”, “moorings”, “constellations” etc. – that have inspired the scholars here rather than the theories, methodologies and debates which gave rise to them.
Although this juxtaposition of two fields means that this is a volume which will appeal to multiple readerships, for the purpose of this review I shall focus on what it offers scholars working in, or across, the history of transport and mobilities studies. My first observation in this regard is that it sends out a challenge to all those of us who have approached the recent past and/or emerging future of transport primarily through a theoretical and/or speculative lens. The richness of the painstaking historical research represented by every one of the substantive chapters included here is truly humbling for a cultural theorist such as myself, and a timely reminder of how ‘thin’ and hypothetical our observations on contemporary social and cultural trends often are.
While transport is not the singular focus of any of the chapters, it features in all of them - but embedded in the complex interactions of multiple human, economic, discursive and geographical agents. This also relates to the favoured methodology of five of the nine chapters (see Innes Keighton, Sarah Thomas, Natalie Cox, Nuala Johnson and Martin Mahoney) which is to explore the thematic in question (travel writing, colonial art and botany, “easy chair geography”, frontier exploration, colonial meteorology) via in-depth biographical studies of historical personages from the period concerned. In every case, these investigations bring together discussion of the physical mobilities of the figure in question with attention to the transport they used, the mobilities systems they engaged with and/or produced, and the mobility discourses or ideologies by which they were inscribed. By this means, the reader is reminded of the frankly awesome range of facilitations needed to bring new transport technologies into being (Liz Millward’s chapter on “The Limits of British Imperial Aeromobility” remarks upon this explicitly) and the way in which human subjects cannot easily escape the dominant and residual ideologies of their age.
The modes of transport that feature in the chapters are numerous, although - as the editors flag up in the Introduction – there is a bias towards some of the older mobility practices and technologies that have been given less attention by transport historians. These encompass: walking and riding – including its more extreme expressions such as David Livingstone’s intrepid African expeditions (Natalie Cox) and Charlotte Wheeler-Cuffe’s trekking in Burma (Nuala Johnson) – as well as Thomas Mitchell’s eighteenth-century military fieldwork (Huw Davies) and the undesirable “wandering” of European “vagrants” in nineteenth-century New Zealand (Catharine Coleborne); shipping – the “oceanic mobilities” of William Macintosh (Innes Keighton), Australian explorer, Matthew Flinders (together with his expedition artists) (Sarah Thomas) and nineteenth-century merchant seamen (Justine Atkinson); and aviation (Albert Walter’s use of planes in the establishment of the British East African Meteorological Service (Martin Mahoney) and the rise and demise of Imperial Airways (Liz Millward). In the Introduction, the editors nevertheless make clear that one of their objectives in putting the collection together was the “decentring” of vehicles in favour of the “different subjects, objects, ecologies and socio-political structures which are important for the enactment of movements of various kinds” (p. 9). For example, across the chapters particular attention is paid to the crucial role that infrastructures of different kinds have played in the expansion and sustenance of the British Empire, including the “secondary mobilities” needed to facilitate the transport in question (such as the bulk-fuel carriers that were integral to rise of steam-generated technologies, or the landing grounds, fuel supplies, hotels, and teams of mechanics that serviced early aviation). This interest in the weighty infrastructures needed to support transport and travel relates, in turn, to reflections on the interdependence of mobility and immobility in many of the chapters. Indeed, the stories that emerge from the case-studies are graphic, sometimes amusing, reminders that you rarely get one without the other. Empire is seen staking its claim to new territories through objects as sedentarist as David Livingstone’s folding travel chair (British-made and enormously heavy) as well as the prodigious flow of goods and services that linked imperial nations to their colonies.
Taken together, this is a truly engrossing collection and one that certainly enriched my understanding of the ways in which mobilities and mobility technologies come into being. Although I thought some of the historical investigations might have benefited from more engagement with mobilities theory per se (as opposed to its key concepts) – a synthesis exemplified by the publications of the volume’s editors – there is much here that can, and should, be fed back into the somewhat abstract and speculative debates currently being waged over our transport and mobility futures.