Steamships
The introduction of steamship technology has traditionally been described as revolutionizing nineteenth-century shipping and maritime transportation. More recently, historians have begun to question this narrative of untrammelled progress, reminding us of the continuing importance of sail, as well as steamships’ early associations with technical difficulty and disaster. In this session, we will evaluate the impact of the growing numbers of steamships which plied the oceans and examine changing experiences of living and working at sea in the age of steam.
Presenters — Ruth Bradbury and Elliott Almeida
Seminar Questions
- To what extent did the steamship introduce greater connectivity?
- How did the introduction of steam change the experience of shipboard labour?
- Did the introduction of steam result in widening opportunities for travel and mobility?
- What do you think Frances Steel means when she talks about ‘imaginative geographies’?
- In what ways might the introduction of ocean-going steamships have reconfigured the relationships between places?
Essential Reading
- Ewald, Janet J. ‘Crossers of the Sea: Slaves, Freedmen, and Other Migrants in the Northwestern Indian Ocean, c. 1750-1914’. American Historical Review 105, no. 1 (2000):69-91.
- Balachandran, G. ‘Indefinite Transits: Mobility and Confinement in the Age of Steam’. Journal of Global History 11, no. 2 (2016): 187-208.
- Steel, Frances. ‘Re-routing Empire? Steam Age Circulations and the Making of an Anglo Pacific, c. 1850-90’. Australian Historical Studies 44, no. 3 (2015): 356-373.
Primary Source
- Haliburton, Thomas. The Letter Bag of the Great Western; or, Life in a Steamer. London, 1840. No III, Letter from Captain Haltfront of the —th Regiment of Foot to Lt. Fugleman.
Further Reading
- Ahuja, Ravi. ‘The Age of the Lascar: South Asian Seafarers in the Times of Imperial Steam Shipping’. In The Routledge Handbook of the South Asian Diaspora, edited by Joya Chatterji and David Washbrook. London: Routledge, 2013.
- Anim-Addo, Anyaa. ‘The Great Event of the Fortnight’: Steamship Rhythms and Colonial Communication’. Mobilities 9, no. 3 (2014): 36-383.
- Balachandran, G. Globalizing Labour? Indian Seafarers and World Shipping, c. 1870-1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, and roundtable in International Journal of Maritime History 2, no. 5 (2013).
- Dharmasena, K. ‘Colombo: Gateway and Oceanic Hub of Shipping’. In Brides of the Sea: Port Cities of Asia from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries, edited by Frank Broeze. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989.
- Frost, Diane. ‘Diasporan West African Communities: The Kru in Freetown & Liverpool’. Review of African Political Economy 29, no. 92 (2002): 285-300.
- Goodall, Heather, Devleena Ghosh, and Lindi Renier Todd. ‘Jumping Ship: Indians, Aborigines, and Australians Across the Indian Ocean’. Transforming Cultures eJournal, 3, no. 1 (2008).
- Green, Nile. ‘Spacetime and the Muslim Journey West: Industrial Communications in the Making of the ‘Muslim World’.’ The American Historical Review 118, no. 2 (2013): 401-429.
- Green, Nile. ‘Maritime Worlds and Global History: Comparing the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean through Barcelona and Bombay’. History Compass 11, no. 7 (2013): 513-523.
- Hyslop, Jonathan. ‘Steamship Empire: African, Asian, and British Sailors in the Merchant Marine c. 1880-1940’. Journal of Asian and African Studies 44, no. 1 (2009): 49-68.
- Lynn, Martin. ‘Technology, Trade and ‘A Race of Native Capitalists’: The Krio Diaspora of West Africa and the Steamship, 1852-95’. The Journal of African History 33, no. 3 (1992): 421-440.
- Pietsch, Tamson. ‘A British Sea: Making Sense of Global Space in the Late Nineteenth Century’. Journal of Global History 5, no. 3 (2010): 423-446.
- Steel, Frances. ‘Suva under Steam: Mobile Men and a Colonial Port Capital 1880s-1910s’. In Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire, edited by Antoinette Burton and Tony Ballantyne. Urbana, ILL: University of Illinois Press, 2009.
- Wenzlhuemer, Roland. ‘The Ship, the Media, and the World: Conceptualizing Connections in Global History’. Journal of Global History 11, no. 2 (2016): 163-186.