In the British empire engineers were important agents, and this is a book about them. More specifically it is a study of the imperial diasporas, identities and networks that developed as the British engineering profession established connections on the African continent in the period 1875–1914. The book combines and integrates in new ways perspectives from the fields of imperial history and history of science and technology with the purpose of analysing the imperial connections of the engineers. The methodological approaches employed in the six chapters of the book are introduced in the opening sections of the individual chapters, while it is the purpose of this introduction to establish the overarching historiographical frame of the book and to explain what the main issues that it addresses are.

The Empire at Home and its Connections

The last quarter of the nineteenth century was a period in which the boundaries of the British empire widened drastically, including in the African continent, which was divided in a scramble spurred by economic and strategic rivalries among the European powers. Technologies in the form of medicine, improved military equipment and infrastructural systems such as harbours facilities, railways and telegraphs were important factors in this process. These infrastructural technologies provided the muscle for conquest and were actively employed in strategies for formal empire-building. Moreover, they also served as a ‘main generator of those insidious partnerships of imperial, financial, and commercial interests that go into the making of “informal empires”’.