Military officers were an integral part of Britain’s imperial expansion in the eighteenth century. Colonial knowledge was one aspect of a knowledge network that helped drive military innovation and adaptation. In the place of formal education, British military personnel read books broadly related to their profession. Military history was popular in the first half of the century, as officers basked in the reflected glory of Marlborough. Mid-century military defeat, however, brought a new focus on continental military theories and treatises. At the same time, military personnel frequently visited the sites of past military campaigns. In this sense, officers learnt quite literally from the terrain on which battles, campaigns and wars had been fought. In combination, military print culture, colonial knowledge and terrain were the components of a military web, a collection of knowledge networks which catalysed the transmission and exchange of military knowledge throughout the empire. These were the means by which knowledge about war was generated and transmitted, and it is to these that we must look in order to understand British military success and failure in the eighteenth-century empire.

Lady Charlotte Wheeler Cuffe was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in April 1922. This honour was in recognition of her contribution to studies in natural history, accumulated during the twenty-five years she spent in Burma with her husband, as part of the colonial service. During those years she travelled extensively around the colony, exploring relatively unknown terrains, and gathering knowledge about the country’s botanical and anthropological make-up. Moreover, she and her husband were variously posted in different locations, from Rangoon in Lower Burma to Mandalay in Upper Burma. In 1903 the Wheeler Cuffes were transferred from Toungoo to Mandalay, giving her new opportunities for plant-hunting and botanical painting. Drawing on her private letters, day diaries and botanical illustrations, this chapter will focus on the practices of journeying during her first year in Mandalay (1903–4). It will consider the zones of contact, routes of mobility and mechanisms of inclusion or erasure that went into the making of knowledge about the region’s natural history during this period. Thereby this investigation will open up new dimensions to the project of reconstructing the geographies of colonial knowledge, gender and scientific inquiry, and the role of the visual in scientific communication.

Nineteenth-century projects of exploration came to be defined by the practical experience of moving across unknown spaces. However, the place of exploratory travel within the newly emerging science of geography was the focus of heated debates throughout the nineteenth century. The purpose of this chapter is to engage with these discussions and examine the different practices of mobility apparent in making geographical knowledge in the mid-nineteenth century. It introduces the ‘easychair geographer’ as an overlooked, yet important, aspect of the Victorian culture of exploration. Despite not physically going to the places they wrote about, these sedentary practitioners explored by reading, collating and synthesising texts. The chapter addresses the experiences of imperial mobility through a critical study of two seemingly contrasting figures: the sedentary geographer William Desborough Cooley, who compiled a map of Eastern Central Africa while remaining in London, and the missionary-explorer David Livingstone. In reconstructing these experiences, it is shown how their bodies became bound up with meanings of action and stasis. These discussions are further animated by a personal dispute between Cooley and Livingstone, expressed in Livingstone’s 1856 letter, titled ‘Easychair geography versus Field geography’.

This chapter is the interwar period and argues that various promoters of British imperial aviation tried to turn national airmindedness into a notion of imperial aeromobility. In 1927 the Air League of the British Empire was restructured in order to work towards a strong air force, the full development of British civil and commercial aviation, and to promote research into aeronautics, that together would provide security and prosperity within the British Empire. The Women’s Engineering Society held speakers’ series on the idea of a new, mobile, airborne empire that provided opportunities for particular women. Imperial aeromobility promised to reorient relations of time and space as well as deliver air control, new forms of tourism, international harmony and even white women’s independence. However, these dreams were undercut by the messy materiality of flights, pilots and passengers being ‘grounded’ in two senses: they could be prevented from flying and they were embedded in ground-based networks. These ‘groundings’ illustrate Saulo Cwerner’s (2009) point that aeromobilities are interdependent with other networks and complicate the illusion of freedom through flight.

The afterword takes the British Empire and mobility in the long nineteenth century as the launching-off point for considering the mobility practices, forces and relations that underpinned the territorialisation of what is arguably the most powerful ‘imperial’ state in the world today, the United States of America. It discusses the importance of western movements to visions of a new American empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, examining a range of representations from political essays to painterly representations of the westward course of empire by horse, wagon and railroad. The focus is on the years surrounding the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 – one of the key infrastructural developments at the centre of the book’s chronological focus on the ‘long’ nineteenth century.

Enthusiasm for the connective power of aeroplanes and airships between the two world wars saw aerial mobility rise to prominence as a British imperial project, yet little attention has been paid to the practices, technologies and ‘moorings’ by which the atmosphere was rendered a medium of imperial mobility. One of the most significant parts of this infrastructure was the knowledge and predictive potential provided by meteorology. In order to make sense of how emerging practices of colonial meteorology and imperial aviation were changing conceptions of colonial space, this chapter explores one meteorologist’s own forms of mobility as journeys by car and aeroplane were undertaken to develop and inspect the infrastructural moorings of emergent imperial mobilities. Making use of the memoirs of Albert Walter, government statistician and meteorologist in British East Africa, along with colonial and metropolitan government archives, the chapter examines how mobilities were recounted through narrative forms which called forth older modes of imperial travel writing which Mary Louise Pratt (1992) has analysed as a window onto the ‘anti-conquest’ of scientific knowledge-making and colonial administration.

This introduction outlines how the foregrounding of a critical perspective on mobility and movement can reinvigorate histories of imperialism, outlining the different practices, subjects and things which have moved or have enabled or constrained imperial mobilities. It sets out the interdisciplinary, conceptual and historical context for the volume, providing an overview of imperial histories which have focused on movement, migration, travel and trade, before outlining how a new and emerging field of mobility studies has focused attention on the distinctive qualities of movement, past and present. The chapter argues that the fields of imperial history and mobility studies can usefully learn from one another, before providing an overview of the chapters comprising the book.

Through an attention to the life and work of William Macintosh – a Scots Caribbean plantation owner, travel writer and political commentator – this chapter considers the significance of individual mobility and the circulation of ideas to Britain’s imperial project in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. It begins with the emergence of Macintosh as a political actor and pamphleteer and his efforts to shape imperial policy from the Caribbean. It then examines the significance of his personal mobility between the West Indies and the East Indies as he completed a journey narrated in his 1782 book Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa. The circulation of the ideas contained in Travels will be examined for what it reveals about the uneven mobility of knowledge in print. Macintosh’s status as an authoritative commentator on the empire will, moreover, be shown to depend in important ways upon his individual mobility. Overall, the chapter will offer a new perspective on the circulation of seditious print in the Age of Revolution and demonstrate the crucial role Travels played in the trial of Warren Hastings and British governmental efforts to restrict the authority of the East India Company.

In the early nineteenth century, evangelical seamen’s missions began to appear in Britain, tending to the spiritual and material needs of the sailor class. Fundamental to the movement’s belief in the seaman’s potential to demonstrate British and Christian values to non-Christian exotic communities was the assumption that sailors were a transient people, considered most useful to the empire when travelling ‘on their element’, the sea. Sailors’ behaviour on shore, however, could be detrimental to the empire’s image, often impacting on both settled and indigenous communities. Attempts by colonial missionaries and merchants to direct the sailor’s movements while in port sought to allay local anxieties by reaffirming his place on the sea. The mobility of seamen in China’s Guangdong Province and efforts to provide them with spiritual welfare reveal the anxieties of colonists where the British Empire was yet to have a firm foothold. Over the course of the nineteenth century, attitudes towards the permanence of sailors changed as the relationships between British traders and Chinese authorities shifted, demonstrating conditional acceptance as colonies became more self-assured of their place within empire, or came to regard the presence of seamen as confirmation of their own right to occupy a peripheral space.

Historically, vagrancy is defined by the problem of those unwelcome transients who ‘stopped’ in places. Coerced to ‘move on’, these mobile people were among those whose mobility was not celebrated. The central objective of this chapter is to examine the regulation of mobility through its different registers in the legal records of nineteenth-century New Zealand vagrants. Specifically, the chapter provides an account of mobility witnessed through prosecutions for vagrancy. It argues that the ‘politics of mobility’ was produced through power relations: in this case, those relations of power inherent to the laws of a settler colonial mobility within a wider framework of Britain’s Pacific empire. There was one very specific difference which set the colonial legislation apart from its imperial model from the 1830s: the Vagrant Act contained a provision to prosecute vagrant Pakeha/Europeans who were viewed to be consorting with M?ori or ‘aboriginal natives’. This chapter proposes that the vagrancy law was a ‘central mechanism’ of the colonial project, and integral to the creation of knowledge about people and populations, allocating control and constructing social difference.

This chapter is an introduction to the concept of political gardening; it aims to inform the reader of the political turn in the urban gardening movement. It begins by contextualising the re-evaluation of ‘everyday space’ through the neoliberal processes of privatisation, devolution and entrepreneurialism. It then marries together these processes with the rise of academic interest in urban gardening and more recently the political aspect of this movement. The chapter then conflates the ideas of political gardening with injustice based on Rawls’ theory of social justice. Case study examples are then used to unpack the process of political gardening – in six iterative stages – in dealing with these injustices, arriving at a working definition of what political gardening is and that it is not just a term but also a process which participants undergo towards becoming engaged ‘democratised’ citizens.