For over two decades, Manchester Studies in Imperialism has been a trailblazer in the realm of imperial history. Positioned firmly at the forefront, this series has illuminated the annals of history and transformed our understanding of empire.
Pioneering perspectives
The Studies in Imperialism series has embarked on a transformative journey, reshaping not only British history but also the vast landscape of imperial histories. It has boldly expanded boundaries, delving into uncharted territories, and shining a light on subjects that were once overlooked. More importantly, it has masterfully unveiled the intricate and inseparable relationships between these domains.
A treasury of knowledge
Within the pages of Manchester Studies in Imperialism lies a treasure trove of scholarly exploration. It unveils the rich tapestry of cultural encounters between colonisers and the colonised, shedding light on the intricate web of power that flows through the production and organisation of colonial knowledge. It unravels the complex construction of identity, both at the heart and on the peripheries of empire.
2025 Manchester Studies in Imperialism
Passengers stepping on board the overland route steamship reported their amazement at what they described as a radically new kind of shipboard space. The steamship formalised passenger accommodations on the journey to the East, with permanent cabins and a range of other luxurious dedicated passenger spaces: dining saloons, bathrooms, toilets, ladies’ dressing rooms, smoking rooms. The ship’s deck particularly underwent a transformation, from a space of labour aboard the sailing vessel into a bourgeois social sphere of leisured display and spectatorship, due in part to the decline of the traditional maritime labour practices in this space effected by steam propulsion. Steamship space was distinguished not only by practical changes, but was invested by passengers with the practices and associations of other – specifically modern – spaces from beyond the ship: the factory, the city, the coffee house, the private club, and so on. Steam propulsion also introduced new labour spaces such as the engine room and stokehole to the ship, and the new labour roles of the engineer and stoker. While the sailing ship had for centuries been characterised by rigid forms of discipline, the steamer was more clearly demarcated spatially, in terms of who could access certain spaces, and how they could behave in this space, particularly with regard to the categories of class, race and gender. The chapter culminates in an examination of how the various aspects of steamship space designate it as an idiosyncratically imperial environment.
Chapter 1 explores what exactly was modern about the colonial steamship experience, utilising as an organising principle four key aspects of modernity defined in an 1857 publication eulogising the overland route steamship’s revolutionary impact on the voyage to India. Exploring these themes of ‘bustle, motion, progress and change’, the chapter tests their veracity against the archive of the overland route. Bustle emphasises the texture of modern experience, particularly the sensory overstimulation associated with urban modernity. The steamship voyage was, however, seen as an oasis of calm, only described as overwhelming in the transitions of the external world, the different sights and experiences outside of the ship and the various stops along the way, described as increasingly exotic and ‘oriental’ in character. Motion foregrounds the significance of mobility in the making of the modern world, with accounts repeatedly attesting to shifting conceptions of imperial geographies as a result of the overland route, describing a familiar sensation of the compression of global space. Progress engages with the Victorian preoccupation with technological development’s role in promulgating enlightenment values and societal improvement. Change assesses just what was new about steamship travel to the East. Passengers described a spectacular overcoming of nature which, I argue, was rooted in the steamship’s liberation from the influence of wind and wave. However, this characterisation relied on ignoring both the nascent steamship’s continued reliance upon sail and modern forms of subaltern shipboard labour.
The conclusion consolidates the book’s main contributions, arguing that overland route narratives offered a unified, linear means for coming to terms with and imagining the British Empire, helping to repress difference and diversity, to conceive of it as a coherent totality. The steamship provided a simple organising discourse, emphasising a familiar Britishness rooted in technological prowess, punctuality, comfort and safety, which passengers used to articulate a powerful vision of their place in the imperial world. It goes on to consider the event which brings the overland route’s history to a close, the opening of the Suez Canal. Exhibiting a perhaps more emphatic instance of the logistical modernity which the book documented in the archive of overland route travel, the Canal’s opening provides something of a symbolic culmination of the book’s core themes. The P&O steamship had become by the end of the overland route’s history something of a shorthand for forms of bourgeois imperial sociality and leisure. The imperial travel it had pioneered was increasingly association with a form of touristic jouissance rooted in the kinds of affective investments, experiences and textual valences which passenger narratives had given voice to. The conclusion argues that in the blasé attitude to global mobility found in these texts – in the bathos, the world-weary disappointment expressed by passengers, in their characterisation of overland route travel as banal, boring, uncomfortable, disappointing, they are commenting on the commodification of the global, on an imperial world made both more accessible, and more mundane.
With striking frequency, passenger descriptions of the maritime landscape viewed from the steamship employ the popular Victorian entertainment form of the panorama as a means of framing and articulating their perception of the Eastern landscape. P&O’s steamship service to the East was represented in one of the nineteenth century’s most successful spectacles of this type, the 1851 Overland Mail panorama. The popularity of this panorama was testament to the overland route’s place in the Victorian popular imagination, particularly situating the steamship line in relation to Britain’s global empire. While the Overland Mail panorama presented an aesthetic mode of engaging with the geographies of global space that had been made possible by P&O’s introduction of steam to colonial shipping, it also fed back into passengers’ experiences of the overland route itself. The mechanical form of vision facilitated by the panorama not only offered passengers a means of representing their experience of steamship travel, but also, I argue, presented a Western mode of viewing the Eastern landscape in which representation came to precede reality – travellers reported that the Eastern landscape viewed from the steamer resembled the panorama, rather than the other way round. Furthermore, passenger descriptions of these landscapes compare favourably with their accounts of disembarking and experiencing the imperial world first-hand, an experience often met with disappointment. This phenomenon supports the notion that the steamship offered Western travellers a means for viewing the Eastern landscape in a way that they found comprehensible.
Imperial Steam engages with an untapped wealth of nineteenth-century accounts of travel aboard the vessels of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, or P&O, as the steamship line responsible for connecting Britain with its Eastern empire was known. It employs the subjective experiences of imperial mobilities found in these sources to explore the history of steam’s introduction to the sea voyage to the East through the cultural attitudes and experiences, shifts in perception, and social and material practices they give voice to. These sources exhibit a persistent concern with what can only be considered the steamship’s modernity: in perceptions of global geography; in the social life of the ship and its spatial organisation; in the temporal rhythms of shipboard life; in the steamer’s luxurious domesticity; and in descriptions of maritime landscapes, travel accounts are marked by attempts to articulate an idiosyncratic newness that characterised the steamship and its mobility. Marrying the most modern technological innovation with the workings of Britain’s expanding Eastern empire, P&O’s steamships provided a ready spectacle for the Victorian public imagination. The steamship provided a vantage point – both literal and literary – from which to view the imperial world. It was significant not just as a functional means to reach the East, but as a key discursive site for engaging with and encountering Victorian globalisation.
The introduction engages the reader with the book’s main themes, contributions and methodology, and gives some historical background on the steamship route to the East. It proposes that the wealth of texts which documented the overland route voyage to India provide a distinctive perspective on the history of Britain’s imperial world, an approach which is indebted to developments in imperial history which focus on ego documents and their insight into the subjective, imaginative aspects of life in the British Empire. It argues that the steamship provided a means for both passengers, and those who read their accounts, to encounter the imaginative geographies of British imperialism. Exploring the affective engagement with the logistics of imperial mobilities contributes to the important debates regarding the relationship between metropole and periphery. Establishing the breadth and tenor of the corpus of texts drawn upon, the introduction explores the nexus between steam’s mobilities at sea, travel writing and the imaginative geographies of imperial space, drawing attention to the vicarious nature of Victorian practices of textual consumption. Furthermore, it highlights the extent to which this discourse operated through the diverse imaginative investments associated with an idiosyncratic modernity which was ascribed to the steamship. It emphasises that the preoccupation with this modernity found in the archive of imperial steamship travel is at the heart of the book’s contribution to the historiography of the British Empire.
The revolution in global mobility facilitated by steam was repeatedly characterised by passengers as ordinary, everyday, articulated specifically through a distinctive homeliness ascribed to the steamer. Chapter 4 explores this domesticity as a set of social, material and representational practices which helped passengers to identify the steamship as a distinctly modern (Western) environment, acting as a corrective to the dislocation inherent in imperial mobilities. The steamship’s domesticity can be seen as a kind of cushioning of the passenger from both the industrial production of mobility (and the associated labour practices), the tribulations of travel at sea, and the unfamiliarity of the imperial world. Accounts of the steamship’s domesticity exist in a state of tension between descriptions of interior decoration and concerns regarding the level of comfort on board. Steamships featured opulent interior decoration, whose familiarity appealed to an increasingly discerning bourgeois consumer. Florid papier mâché ornamentation, oil lamps, walls hung with paintings and gilded mirrors produced luxurious shipboard interior spaces which helped to mask the trials of life at sea. Yet this décor was often seen by passengers as superfluous, inappropriate to the gravity and potential dangers of maritime travel, and to an imperial climate which tested the very limits of comfort. Descriptions of the inevitable discomforts of life on board foreground the embodied experience of steamship travel, for both the bourgeois consumers of mobility and the subaltern workers who made the ship’s mobility possible.
Chapter 3 focuses on a striking concern in source materials with the steamship’s temporality: on passengers’ preoccupations with the passage of time, with temporal precision, and with the rhythms of shipboard life. The steamship had injected a new temporal urgency into the sea voyage to the East: no longer reliant on the whims of nature, steamships were not just faster than sailing vessels, but could travel to precise, repeatable timetables, unprecedented in global travel. This bureaucratic precision, temporal discipline and repetition which governed the steamer’s mobility was echoed in the passenger experience. From the steamer’s mealtimes to the popular pastime of gambling on the steamer’s insignificant deviations from its schedule, passengers appeared to be obsessed with the temporality of shipboard life. Yet while the steamship was lauded by contemporary commentators for the radical temporal abbreviation of the journey to the East, overland route narratives are marked by repeated references to the monotony of the voyage. These claims emphasise an acute sense of the passengers’ separation from the flow of time associated with their everyday lives on land. Suspended between the temporalities (both real and perceived) of the British and imperial worlds, this dislocation contributed to a sense of being ‘outside’ the passage of time in the modern world. The chapter engages with this shipboard phenomenon in the context of the wider rationalisation of the temporality of everyday life which characterised Western modernity.
Anthropology struggled to escape its colonial heritage and find a place for itself in the era of decolonisation. Faced with losing access to colonial field sites, anthropologists at the University of Manchester sought to establish the applicability of anthropological theory to modern Britain throughout the 1950s and 1960s. They aimed to demonstrate how their expertise, which was derived from the study of Africa and other colonial regions, could be applied to labour, community or social relations in Britain. This work sought to position anthropologists as social scientific observers who could use their knowledge of different societies to provide guidance to the British government and public in a period of social change, industrial unrest and shifting ideas about national identity. It also reveals how the end of empire and the loss of the privileges of ‘colonial science’ forced scholars to find new ways to justify their expertise and to adapt their practices to win support from new patrons. This chapter focuses on the work of anthropologists based at the University of Manchester, analysing their research into factory-floor dynamics and rural communities. It connects recent historiography on ‘post-colonial careers’ and the links between imperial and domestic intellectual practices with work on the construction of knowledge within the social and human sciences, in order to highlight how social scientific ideas about modern Britain could make use of models developed to explain the social dynamics of the Empire.
On 10 June 2020, three days after #BlackLivesMatter protesters toppled the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race topped the UK non-fiction bestseller chart. It brought with it a wave of books marketed as guides for readers – especially white readers – wishing to educate themselves about the effects of structural racism on individual lives. Many of these titles place notable emphasis on the value of personal anecdote and experience, blending memoir with often detailed and cogent anti-racist critique to create a kind of anti-racist life writing that has a long history in African American literary culture. While the genre is less widely known in Britain, this chapter argues that a similar suturing of individual biographies into the structural contours shaping social, cultural and institutional life in Britain after empire has been deployed by a number of Black writers in recent years, often to persuasive and powerful effect. This 'anti-racist non-fiction’ genre blends memoir with social and historical commentary to build similar connections between individual experiences and structural conditions, often (though not always) without conforming to the individualising inclinations of identity politics that are otherwise so pervasive in our neoliberal era. To demonstrate its arguments, the chapter focuses on two of the most rigorous and best-selling of Britain’s anti-racist non-fiction titles: Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking and Akala’s Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire.