The spread of modern transport technologies such as the steamship, railways, and aeroplane in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries both drove and was driven by imperial expansion. Drawing people, territories, and markets into ever closer asymmetrical relationships of power, global travel in the age of modern imperialism also increasingly commodified the world for metropolitan consumption through the use of new representational technologies, photography and the colonial exhibition foremost amongst them. This seminar will consider the impact of these twin revolutions in travel history, one visual and the other logistical, by looking at four different contexts: Orientalist photography in the Ottoman Empire, colonised peoples on display in Britain, Japanese railway imperialism in East Asia, and the introduction of air travel in colonial Sudan.

Core Readings (pick two)

Ali Behdad, Camera Orientalis: Reflections on Photography of the Middle East (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), Ch. 2: 'The Tourist, the Collector, and the Curator', pp. 41-71. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Sadiah Qureshi, 'Peopling the Landscape: Showmen, Displayed Peoples and Travel Illustration in Nineteenth-Century Britain', Early Popular Visual Culture 10.1 (2012), pp. 23-36. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Kate McDonald, ‘Asymmetrical Integration: Lessons from a Railway Empire’, Technology and Culture 56.1 (2015), pp. 115-149. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Brendan Tuttle, '"As Imposing a Show as Possible": Aviation in Colonial Sudan and South Sudan, 1916-1930', Juba in the Making (2017). Online blogLink opens in a new window.

Primary Sources

Select and browse through one of the photographic albums in the Pierre de Gigord Collection of the Getty Institute Series ILink opens in a new window or Series II. Examples include: "Costumes" (1856); "TurquieLink opens in a new window" (1890), "Constantinople and BosporusLink opens in a new window" (1909). Come to class prepared to speak about one of the images.

Browse the timetables of Imperial AirwaysLink opens in a new window. Examples include the 1931 Empire RoutesLink opens in a new window and the 1931-32 Empire ServicesLink opens in a new window.

Further Reading

Alloula, Malek, Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich (trans.), The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Baranowski, Shelley, et al., 'Tourism and Empire', Journal of Tourism History 7.1-2 (2015), pp. 100-130. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Behdad, Ali, Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). LibraryLink opens in a new window.

Behdad, Ali, 'Orientalism and Middle East Travel Writing', in: Geoffrey P. Nash (ed.), Orientalism and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Bhimull, Chandra D., 'Caribbean Airways, 1930-1932: A Notable Failure', Journal of Transport History 33.2 (2012), pp. 282-242. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Bird, Dúnlaith, Travelling in Different Skins: Gender Identity in European Women's Oriental Travelogues, 1850-1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Brisson, Ulrike, 'Discovering Scheherazade: Representations of Oriental Women in the Travel Writing of Nineteenth-Century German Women', Women in German Yearbook 29 (2013), pp. 97-117. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Chaudhuri, Nupur, and Margaret Strobel (eds.), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Clark, Steve, and Paul Smethurst (eds.), Asian Crossings: Travel Writing on China, Japan and Southeast Asia (Aberdeen and Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Clark, Steve (ed.), Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit (London and New York: Zed Books, 1999). LibraryLink opens in a new window.

Clarsen, Georgine, '‘Australia – Drive It Like You Stole It’: Automobility as a Medium of Communication in Settler Colonial Australia', Mobilities 12.4 (2017), pp. 520-533. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Clarsen, Georgine, 'Machines as the Measure of Women: Colonial Irony in a Cape to Cairo Automobile Journey, 1930', Journal of Transport History 29.1 (2008), pp. 44-63. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Dohmen, Renate, 'Material (Re)collections of the ‘Shiny East’: A Late Nineteenth-Century Travel Account by a Young British Woman in India', in: Mary Henes and Brian H. Murray (eds.), Travel Writing, Visual Culture and Form, 1760–1900 (Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), pp. 42-64. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Farley, David G., Modernist Travel Writing: Intellectuals Abroad (Columbia and London: Missouri University Press, 2010). Link.Link opens in a new window

Farr, Martin, and Xavier Guégan (eds.), The British Abroad Since the Eighteenth Century, Volume 2
Experiencing Imperialism (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Franey, Laura E., Victorian Travel Writing and Imperial Violence: British Writing on Africa, 1855–1902 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Gelvin, James L., and Nile Green (eds.), Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Ghose, Indira, Memsahibs Abroad: Writings by Women Travellers in Nineteenth-Century India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). LibraryLink opens in a new window.

Grewal, Inderpal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). LibraryLink opens in a new window.

Grundy, Isobel, '"The barbarous character we give them": White Women Travellers Report on Other Races', Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 22 (1993), pp. 73-86. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Hackforth‐Jones, Jocelyn, and Mary Roberts (eds.), Edges of Empire: Orientalism and Visual Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Hight, Eleanor M., and Gary D. Sampson (eds.), Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Hom, Stephanie Malia, 'Empires of Tourism: Travel and Rhetoric in Italian Colonial Libya and Albania, 1911–1943', Journal of Tourism History 4.3 (2012), pp. 281-300. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Imada, Adria L, 'Transnational "Hula" as Colonial Culture', Journal of Pacific History 46.2 (2011), pp. 149-176. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Keck, Stephen L., 'Picturesque Burma: British Travel Writing 1890–1914', Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 35.4 (2004), pp. 387-414. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Kerr, Douglas, and Julia Kuehn, Century of Travels in China : Critical Essays on Travel Writing from the 1840s to the 1940s (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Khan, Aisha, 'Portraits in the Mirror: Nature, Culture, and Women's Travel Writing in the Caribbean', Women's Writing 10.1 (2003), pp. 93-117. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Khazeni, Arash, 'Across the Black Sands and the Red: Travel Writing, Nature, and the Reclamation of the Eurasian Steppe Circa 1850', International Journal of Middle East Studies 42.4 (2010), pp. 591-614. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Kingsley, Mary H., Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (London: MacMillan and Co, 1897). LinkLink opens in a new window. (also available in modern edition as library hard copyLink opens in a new window).

Lawrence, Karen R., Penelope Travels: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), Ch. 5: '"The African Wanderers": Kingsley and Lee', pp. 103-153. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Lewis, Reina, Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel, and the Ottoman Harem (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004). LinkLink opens in a new window

McDonald, Kate, Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Micallef, Roberta (ed.), Illusion and Disillusionment: Travel Writing in the Modern Age (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). LibraryLink opens in a new window.

Mills, Sara, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women's Travel Writing and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1991). LibraryLink opens in a new window.

Murray, Brian M.,'Introduction: Forms of Travel, Modes of Transport', in: Brian H. Murray (eds.), Travel Writing, Visual Culture and Form, 1760–1900 (Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), pp. 1-18. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Nambula, Katharina, 'Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa (1897) and West African Studies (1899)', in: Barbara Schaff (ed.), Handbook of British Travel Writing (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2020), pp. 411-432. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Newby, Laura, 'Evolving representations of Xinjiang in Chinese travel writings', Studies in Travel Writing 18.4 (2014), pp. 320-331. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Nussbaum, Felicity A., 'British Women Write the East after 1750: Revisiting a ‘Feminine’ Orient, in: Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan (eds.), British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship, Politics and History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 121-139. LinkLink opens in a new window.

O'Cinneide, Murreann, 'Oriental Interests, Interesting Orients: Class, Authority, and the Reception of Knowledge in Victorian Women's Travel Writing', Critical Survey 21.1 (2009), pp. 4-23. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Pirie, Gordon, 'Incidental Tourism: British Imperial Air Travel in the 1930s', Journal of Tourism History 1.1 (2009), pp. 49-66. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Porter, Dennis, Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), esp. Ch. 6: 'The Perverse Traveler: Flaubert in the Orient', pp. 164–184. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Prasad, Ritika, Tracks of Change: Railways and Everyday Life in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Reed, Charles V., Royal Tourists, Colonial Subjects and the Making of a British World, 1860–1911 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), Ch. 5: 'The Empire Comes Home: Colonial Subjects and the Appeal for Imperial Justice', pp. 162-190. Link.Link opens in a new window

Reese, Scott, 'The Myth of Immobility: Women and Travel in the British Imperial Indian Ocean', Journal of World History 33.2 (2022), pp. 301-320. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Robinson, Jane, Unsuitable for Ladies: An Anthology of Women Travellers (2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Siber, Moloud, 'Female Colonial Travel Writing as a Critique of Victorian Gender 
Stereotypes and Roles: A Case Study of F.D. Bridges’s Journal of a Lady’s Travels Round the World (1883)', Anglica: An International Journal of English Studies 28.1 (2019), pp. 63-76. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Simour, Lhoussain, 'Gendered Eyewitness in Narration: Imagining Morocco in British Women Travel-Inspired Narratives in Late Nineteenth Century', Anglo-Saxonica 17.1 (2020), pp. 1-11. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Sinha, Nitin, 'Histories of Transport and Communication in South Asia: A First Review', Journal of Transport History 42.1 (2021), pp. 142-169. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Sivasundaram, Sujit, 'Monarchs, Travellers and Empire in the Pacific's Age of Revolutions', Transactions of the RHS 30 (2020), pp. 77-96. Link.Link opens in a new window

Thompson, Carl (ed.), Women’s Travel Writings in India 1777–1854, Volume I: Jemima Kindersley, Letters from the Island of Teneriffe, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope and the East Indies (1777); and Maria Graham, Journal of a Residence in India (1812) (London: Routledge, 2020). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Turner, Lynette, 'Mary Kingsley: The Female Ethnographic Self in Writing', in: Alison Donnell and Pauline Polkey (eds.), Representing Lives: Women and Auto/biography (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2000), pp. 53-62. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Tuttle, Brendan, 'A Trip to the Zoo: Colonial Sightseeing and Spectacle in Sudan (1901–1933), Journal of Tourism History 11.3 (2019), pp. 217-242. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Wells, David N. (ed.), Russian Views of Japan, 1792-1913: An Anthology of Travel Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). LinkLink opens in a new window. [Primary source texts].

Wisnicki, Adrian S., Fieldwork of Empire, 1840-1900: Intercultural Dynamics in the Production of British Expeditionary Literature (New York: Routledge, 2019). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Youngs, Tim (ed.), Travel Writing in the Nineteenth Century: Filling the Blank Spaces (London: Anthem Press, 2006). LinkLink opens in a new window.