First published in 1928, this volume examines the routes to India which originated as a means of communication and casual trading voyages in the late 18th century but which evolved under European imperialism, adding vast significance and definite lines of access alongside economic and social uses in times of peace, strategic access in times of war and acting as political objects on all occasions. Halford Lancaster Hoskins responded to the solicitude of the Powers of Europe in relation to countries in the eastern Mediterranean, which had been a conspicuous feature of international relations since the rise of the Eastern Question.
Britain's overseas Empire pre-eminently involved the sea. In a two-way process, ships carried travellers and explorers, trade goods, migrants to new lands, soldiers to fight wars and garrison colonies, and also ideas and plants that would find fertile minds and soils in other lands. These essays, deriving from a National Maritime Museum (London) conference, provide a wide-ranging and comprehensive picture of the activities of maritime empire. They discuss a variety of issues: maritime trades, among them the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Honduran mahogany for shipping to Britain, the movement of horses across the vast reaches of Asia and the Indian Ocean; the impact of new technologies as Empire expanded in the nineteenth century; the sailors who manned the ships, the settlers who moved overseas, and the major ports of the Imperial world; plus the role of the navy in hydrographic survey. Published in association with the National Maritime Museum. DAVID KILLINGRAY is Emeritus Professor of Modern History, Goldsmiths College London; MARGARETTE LINCOLN and NIGEL RIGBY are in the research department of the National Maritime Museum.
In Defence of British India (1984) illustrates the problems arising from the British need to defend an Indian empire against the fluctuations in the European balance of power, preferably by isolating the empire from the European political system. The strategies devised by Britain to forestall and later to counter the expansion of European empires into the Middle East are known as the Great Game, which began in 1798 in response to the French invasion of Egypt. Later, the British planned an offensive in the Middle East itself as a means by which to defend their Indian empire.
The “Middle East” has long been an indispensable and ubiquitous term in discussing world affairs, yet its history remains curiously underexplored. Few question the origin of the term or the boundaries of the region, commonly understood to have emerged in the twentieth century after World War I. Guillemette Crouzet offers a new account in Inventing the Middle East. The book traces the idea of the Middle East to a century-long British imperial zenith in the Indian subcontinent and its violent overspill into the Persian Gulf and its hinterlands. Encroachment into the Gulf region began under the expansionist East India Company. It was catalyzed by Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and heightened by gunboat attacks conducted in the name of pacifying Arab “pirates.” Throughout the 1800s the British secured this crucial geopolitical arena, transforming it into both a crossroads of land and sea and a borderland guarding British India’s western flank. Establishing this informal imperial system involved a triangle of actors in London, the subcontinent, and the Gulf region itself. By the nineteenth century’s end, amid renewed waves of inter-imperial competition, this nexus of British interests and narratives in the Gulf region would occasion the appearance of a new name: the Middle East. Charting the spatial, political, and cultural emergence of the Middle East, Inventing the Middle East reveals the deep roots of the twentieth century’s geographic upheavals.
Flagships of Imperialism is the first scholarly monograph on the history of the P&O shipping company, and the first history of P&O to pay due attention to the context of nineteenth century imperial politics which so significantly shaped the company’s development. Based chiefly on unpublished material from the P&O archives and the National Archives, and on contemporary official publications, the book covers the crucial period from the company’s origins to 1867. After presenting new findings about the company’s origins in the Irish transport industry, the book charts the extension of the founders’ interests from the Iberian peninsula to the Mediterranean, India, China and Australia. In so doing it deals with the development of the necessary financial infrastructure for P&O’s operations; the founders’ attitudes to technical advances; the shareholding base; the company’s involvement in the opium trade, and with its acquisition of mail, Admiralty and other government contracts. It was the P&O’s status as a government contractor which, above all else, implicated its fortunes in the wider politics of empire, as illustrated by the book's concluding account of the company’s rescue from the edge of a financial precipice by the award of a new government mail contract prompted, among other things, by the Abyssinian expedition of 1867. Flagships of Imperialism will be of interest to transport and company historians and to historians of the British empire alike, as well as to anyone interested in the history of British ships and shipping in the nineteenth century.
