Post-emancipation in/security: A working paper

In the first working paper of this series, Patricia Noxolo outlined the research network’s perspective on security as created across different scales and by bottom-up as much as top-down processes. Equally, the project’s recognition of the history of in/security in the Caribbean over a longue durée, and particularly the significance of slavery within this longer history, calls for some engagement with the postemancipation period. With the advent of emancipation, followed by the slower process of changing socio-economic relations within plantation societies, the nineteenth century proved an important testing ground for everyday struggles

Steaming between the Islands: Nineteenth-Century Maritime Networks and the Caribbean Archipelago

Recent scholarship, particularly in “new” imperial studies, has underscored the role of networks in shaping imperial projects. A networked approach offers a useful lens through which to analyse nineteenth-century steamship services, and in this paper I draw on such a perspective to focus on the operations of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company (RMSPC). Importantly the RMSPC, unlike some of the other British Government mail-contract holding lines, operated across an archipelago as well as an ocean. In probing the significance of the RMSPC’s archipelagic context for the maritime network, this paper draws on a theoretical intersection between networked approaches to empire and island studies. I suggest that an examination of the maritime network through an archipelagic lens brings to the fore colonial priorities, imperatives and hierarchies that can appear flattened out through a networked approach alone. I argue for an archipelagic framing of analysis in order to heighten the local and regional significance of this transportation infrastructure, in effect foregrounding the relationship between the maritime service and mobilities in the Caribbean

Place and Mobilites in the Maritime World:The Royal Steam Packet Company in the Caribbean, c. 1838 to 1914

The empirical subject of this thesis is the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company (RMSPC), a British-based steamship company that served the Caribbean from 1842, and extended operations into South America in 1851. I construct a postcolonial historical geography of the RMSPC as it operated in the 'expanded' post-emancipation Caribbean. By analysing the steamship service as a network rather than as a 'tool' of empire, I foreground the mobilities constructed by this Company, and explore how these mobilities impacted upon maritime places in the Caribbean. In so doing, I develop a 'tidalectic' approach to the RMSPC's past, by expanding upon Kamau Brathwaite's concept. I argue that tidalectics, in intersection with the 'new mobilities 'paradigm', contributes to an advance in understandings of maritime history, since together they facilitate mobile examinations of the relationship between sea and shore. To develop analysis of the RMSPC's maritime mobilities, four substantive case studies are presented. The first case study focuses on the RMSPC' s ports-of-call, as mapped by the scheme of routes. The second such chapter considers the steamship itself as place, particularly with reference to social and cultural dynamics. The coaling process is the focus of the third case study, and in the final chapter I add to the analysis the RMSPC's two main tourist routes through the Americas. The thesis proposes that steamship mobilities in many ways escaped and exceeded the original intentions of company directors and managers. As complex networks rather than straightforward imperial 'tools', steamship mobilities were subject to the influence of multiple places. In the case of the RMSPC, Caribbean influences overlooked in previous studies have been reconstructed and offered on the basis of archival research.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

"The Great Event of the Fortnight”: Steamship Rhythms and Colonial Communication

This paper engages with Tim Cresswell’s ‘contellations of mobility’ in order to contribute some understanding of historical maritime rhythms. The empirical focus is upon a steamship mail service in the post-emancipation Caribbean. In examining this communications network, it is stressed that while those managing the network valorised predictable efficiency, ‘friction’ was prized by mercantile groups at the steamers’ ports of call. Thus, the different aspects of mobility signified differently across the network, and this historical case study reinforces the resonance of slowness and stoppage time. The synchronisation of steamship arrivals with sociocultural norms in the Caribbean colonies also necessitated the adaptation of mail service rhythms. Through a focus on shipping operations, this paper proposes to temper our understanding of the role of steamship technology in empire. The influence of colonies on the metropole encompassed an alteration of the rhythms of imperial circulation, and it is within the maritime arena that these realities came into sharp focus

“Thence to the River Plate”: steamship mobilities in the South Atlantic, 1842-1869

This article engages theories of mobility to examine the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company’s 1851 expansion into South America. Through a focus on cooperative strategies and trans-oceanic connections, the article also considers the interplay between Atlantic and wider world shipping networks. The first part of the paper compares the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company’s (RMSPC’s) South American branch to the more established West Indies route, and probes the significance of the Company’s expansion into the South Atlantic in light of the RMSPC’s perceived national and imperial role. The second part of the paper turns to the RMSPC’s cooperative strategies and connections between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. Considered as a case study, the RMSPC indicates that the boundaries of British imperial influence incorporated a degree of flexibility during this period, pointing to a need to revise rigid conceptualisations of empire. An argument is also made for the continuing relevance of the Atlantic as a spatial unit during this era, despite the increasingly global connections of the nineteenth-century world