Mobility was central to the construction, maintenance and dissolution of empires. This book reflects on the social, cultural and political significance of mobile subjects, practices and infrastructures to the British empire from the 1750s through to the 1940s.

1 Empire and mobility: an introduction – David Lambert and Peter Merriman2 Military print culture, knowledge and terrain: knowledge mobility and eighteenth-century military colonialism – Huw J. Davies3 A contested vision of empire: anonymity, authority, and mobility in the reception of William Macintosh’s Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa (1782) – Innes M. Keighren4 The art of travel in the name of science: mobility and erasure in the art of Flinders’s Australian voyage, 1801–3 – Sarah Thomas5 ‘On their own element’: nineteenth-century seamen’s missions and merchant seamen’s mobility – Justine Atkinson6 ‘Easy chair geography’: the fabrication of an immobile culture of nineteenth-century exploration – Natalie Cox7 Consorting with ‘others’: vagrancy laws and unauthorised mobility across colonial borders in New Zealand from 1877 to 1900 – Catharine Coleborne8 Trekking around Upper Burma: Charlotte Wheeler-Cuffe’s exploration of the frontier districts, 1903 – Nuala C. Johnson9 Reading the skies, writing mobility: on the road with a colonial meteorologist – Martin Mahony10 Grounded: the limits of British imperial aeromobility – Liz Millward11 Afterword: westward the course of empire takes its way – Tim CresswellIndex

Mobility was central to imperialism, from the human movements entailed in exploration, travel and migration, to the information, communications and commodity flows vital to trade, science, governance and military power. While historians have written on exploration, commerce, imperial transport and communications networks, and the movements of slaves, soldiers and scientists, few have reflected upon the social, cultural, economic and political significance of mobile practices, subjects and infrastructures that underpinned imperial networks. Neither have they examined the qualities of movement valued by imperial powers and agents at different times. This collection explores the intersection of debates on imperial relations, colonialism and empire with emerging work on mobility. In doing this, it traces how the movements of people, representations and commodities helped to constitute empires. Empire and mobility in the long nineteenth century examines things that moved across the British Empire, including objects and ideas, as well as the efforts made to prevent and govern these movements. It also considers the systems, networks and infrastructures that enabled imperial mobilities to happen and things that went wrong. The volume covers the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, a period that witnessed the eclipse of the ‘first’ British Empire in North America and the Caribbean, and the expansion of an imperial presence in Asia and Africa, and ends withthe empire at its greatest extent in the interwar period. Geographically, it encompasses much of the territorial breadth of the British Empire in Africa, Asia, Australasia and the Caribbean. It also ranges off-shore and into the air.

'Written in a highly accessible style, Lambert and Merriman finely point out the interconnections between research on mobilities and imperial histories. Through such positioning, the book argues that rigorous historical research can advance mobilities scholarship and shows that there is already much that mobility scholars may learn from histories of the empire. [...] I do hope that the volume finds its way to the hands of many students of history and geography as well as those of scholars of mobility more generally.'Johanna Skurnik, Journal of British Studies