"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

Simón Bolívar's Republic: a bulwark against the "Tyranny" of the Majority

Based on Bolívar's speeches, decrees, and correspondence as well as on Gran Colombia's constitutions and laws, this essay examines the tensions within Bolívar's vision of Venezuela's and New Granada's society produced by his republican, yet authoritarian and hierarchical ideas, his concern for keeping the lower classes of African descent in check, and his denial of Indian agency. It shows that even in Peru, Bolívar's main concern was to prevent the racial war and social disintegration that allegedly slaves and free Afro-descended people would bring to the newly independent nations. To prevent such an outcome, he advocated all along legal equality through the abolition of the colonial privileges and, since mid-1816, the abolition of slavery, but simultaneously the preservation of the monopole of power by the white creole elite. He secured the perpetuation of the socioracial hierarchy inherited from Spain by a two-edged citizenship: an active citizenship restricted to a tiny literate and skilled minority and an inactive citizenship for the immense majority of (mostly nonwhite) men