Introduction

Taking the British example as his case study, Alan Lester tracks the historiographical approaches to writing about space and place that scholars of empire have developed over the last thirty years.

Frances Steel takes up the theme of imperial networks across terrestrial and oceanic space and asks: what were the channels or routes that made these flows possible in the first place and how are they connected to both economic and cultural expansions? Her enquiry concerns the Pacific World and the history of a key British shipping route in the age of steam, the ‘All Red’ route linking Canada with Australia. For Steel, studying shipping is a way to connect the topics of identity, political strategy and commercial activity. Her work is a reminder of the importance of bringing a material dimension to our studies of the connections that bound empire together.

Jim Masselos’ chapter gives us a history of imperial India viewed through the lens of the city. Despite what demographics might suggest, cities were critical to the functioning of the Indian state. Urban development played central roles within state structures and economies across a range of imperial powers seeking control over the subcontinent. Tracking the theme of empire through the periods of both Mughal and European expansion, Masselos argues that Europeans drew on previous imperial legacies in their city spaces, their architectural styles, their symbolic structures and the way they staged power through urban pageantry.

Space is similarly central to Eric T. Jennings’ wide-ranging study of the connections between health and leisure and the ways in which these interlinked issues expressed them­selves in imperial culture. His chapter sits at the nexus of histories of space and place, environmental history, cultural history and studies of health and disease. By linking fears of fragility with assertions of imperial dominance, Jennings argues that the colonies were viewed as places of both opportunity and danger for Europeans. In British, German, Dutch and French examples, we see how empire-builders tried to resolve this dichotomy by recreating a mirror of the metropole on the periphery through particular kinds of spaces and behaviours.