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Imperial Steam: Modernity on the Sea Route to India, 1837–74 by Jonathan Stafford (review)

2023; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 64; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tech.2023.a911018

1097-3729

Tommy Jamison,

History of Science and Medicine

Reviewed by: Imperial Steam: Modernity on the Sea Route to India, 1837–74 by Jonathan Stafford Tommy Jamison (bio) Imperial Steam: Modernity on the Sea Route to India, 1837–74 By Jonathan Stafford. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023. Pp. 264. Scholars from Karl Marx to Eric Hobsbawm—or more recently, Jürgen Osterhammel—have rightly centered steam power as the literal engine behind the "Age of Empire" and Industrial Revolution. For historian Jonathan Stafford, the steamship was certainly that—a tool for the logistical maintenance of colonies—but it was something more besides: a subjective experience of mobility and temporality that "normalised" the exotic and in doing so brought the British empire closer to home practically and psychologically. In Imperial Steam, Stafford makes a valuable contribution to the study of technology and its implications for cultures of empire and modernity. [End Page 1312] Imperial Steam details the history of the "overland route" of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O), mostly c. 1840–70. P&O steamships ran from Britain through the Mediterranean, across Suez (by land in the years before the canal, hence the route's name) to the Red Sea, and on to India. Stafford mines an impressive array of travelogues, guidebooks, and promotional materials to better understand how travelers experienced this artery of imperial transport and the technology that made it possible. Divided into five chapters, Imperial Steam is organized around themes of modernity, space, time, domesticity, and panoramas of the "East." Stafford's chapter outline in the introduction does a model job of framing this content at the wavetop level for the reader—though that same introduction would have benefited from a map. For historians of technology, the book is most successful in complicating our understanding of the steamship as both a symbol and an experience. The steamship in some "technophilic" accounts is a heroic, whizzbang avatar of all that is modern and powerful (p. 12). Stafford acknowledges the startling modernity of steam travel but is more interested in how passengers and crew responded to the technology by disciplining space, social interaction, and even decor. The book is especially successful in documenting the steamship as a space for imperial acclimatization. En route to the empire, passengers got used to subaltern labor and the regimes of segregation that would insulate them overseas. All the while, they endured miserable heat in the tropics and often the nauseating smell of bulk traffic opium wafting up from the cargo holds (p. 152). More pervasive still was the monotony of the voyage. As opposed to the harrowing sailing journey around the Cape of Good Hope in an East Indiaman, the overland P&O route was dull by design. "Regular repetition and temporal discipline" were profitable for companies and predictable for passengers (p. 126). Modern-day air travelers funneled through airport security and packed aboard planes can empathize. The sourcing is at once a strength and a limitation. Stafford has an almost literary eye for nuance in the travelogues mustered here into evidence. Still, as Stafford acknowledges, it remains difficult to assess the reception and representativeness of these "ego documents" (p. 8). The sources are also prudishly mum on all sorts of shipboard diversions—notably sex, though gambling was apparently a respectable way to pass the time—that surely existed on the overland route but hide in the blind spots. Considering how devices like queer theory opened up new vistas on Moby Dick, perhaps the P&O's travel literature conceals hidden stories as well? The book wholly succeeds on its own terms. Going further, it would be worthwhile to consider whether the P&O was particular or representative of other maritime cultures and steamship lines. In the Pacific, analogies could be made to the Pacific Steamship Navigation Company, Pacific Mail Steamship Company, or even Compañía Sud Americana de Vapores. These [End Page 1313] companies are, of course, outside the scope of Stafford's study. But a dose of comparative perspective, even if only in a stand-alone chapter, could go a long way toward contextualizing the claims in Imperial Steam. On another tack, scholars of navalism will be quick to see parallels to the contemporary fetish for battleships...