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Description
It is commonplace to speak of the present era as an information age in which a globalised media and worldwide communication networks play an unprecedented role in shaping events. However, as historian Robert Darnton has pointed out, 'such statements convey a specious sense of a break with the past'. He argues that 'every age was an age of information, each in its own way, and that communication systems have always shaped events'. He calls for a general attack on the question of how societies in the past 'made sense of events and transmitted information about them', via greater research attention to the history of communication. (1) Similar calls have recently been made in relation to British imperial history. A G Hopkins has argued for a renewed attention to imperial connections, neglected in recent decades because of an understandable emphasis amongst historians on the writing of postcolonial national histories. He notes that contemporary attention to issues of globalisation has highlighted the need for closer attention to nineteenth-century developments in the flow of goods, finance, migrants and ideas. These flows were greatly enhanced 'by technological improvements, notably railways, steamships, submarine cables, telegraph facilities and refrigeration, all of which tied the Empire together more closely than before, cut the cost of transactions and began to create, for the first time, an integrated world market'. (2)
Duncan Bell has also noted how contemporary debate about the global political order has led to renewed interest in the nineteenth-century communication revolution which, he argues, 'impacted not only on the material structures of social and political life but also on the cognitive apprehension of the world', generating, amongst elites at least, a 'new globalising sensibility'. (3) So-called 'new imperial history', writes historical geographer Alan Lester, has focused on 'the material and discursive connections between colonised and metropolitan spaces' in an attempt to tease out the ways in which 'discourses of national identity, gender, sexuality, race and family were all mutually constitutive'. (4) Such work ideally builds upon detailed historical reconstruction of the communication networks of an empire whose elites, as Simon Potter has said, 'interacted through friendship, acquaintance, travel, business, correspondence and, crucially, the sharing of news'. (5)
This paper aims to contribute to the historical reconstruction of the communication networks of the British Empire, particularly as they linked readerships in India and Australia via shared experiences of British news and culture. I have written elsewhere that the communication histories of colonial and postcolonial India and Australia connect and disconnect, and converge and diverge in ways which reflect, on the one hand, their once common membership of the British Empire and their subjection to British commercial and technological influence and, on the other, their very differing cultural, geographic and political circumstances. I have noted that the interconnectedness of these histories is particularly striking with respect to the development of telecommunications systems and international news agencies, particularly Reuters. (6) In this paper, I consider the role of the transoceanic steamship press of the nineteenth century as a major purveyor of British news, literary material and advertising in both India and Australia. My particular focus is on two highly influential newspapers--Home News and the European Mail--each of which was published in both Indian and Australian editions. These newspapers, printed in London on the eve of the departure of each steamship mail service, were published especially for colonial readerships and formed a major cultural link between Britain, India, and Australia.
Steamship newspapers were major business enterprises and were an important news medium of the British Empire, particularly before the use of the telegraph became widespread. Via multiple editions addressed to readerships across the world, the newspapers reflected and helped sustain the idea of a global 'British world' of culture and commerce. (7) Yet these newspapers have been largely forgotten. This important newspapers genre, structured around the periodicity and distribution system afforded by government-subsidised steamship mail services, has been ignored both by press historians and by historians of the British Empire. Virtually nothing has been written about the history and significance of these particular newspapers, nor about the nineteenth-century publishing phenomenon of a transoceanic steamship press of which they were part. (8) With respect to press history, this is partly explained by the fact that most historical studies of the nineteenth-century press have been written as national or regional press histories. Perhaps this focus on the national has contributed to the lack of attention to a thriving international press which also existed in the nineteenth century and to the fact that national and regional newspapers were often dependent on this international press as a major source of news. Perhaps another factor has been the understandable fascination with the way in which the telegraph and the institutions it spawned, such as international news agencies, transformed global communication in the nineteenth century. These dramatic developments may have overshadowed the less dramatic but nevertheless important story of the steamship press. It is also surprising that papers such as Home News and the European Mail have not received attention in standard histories of the British Empire. This reflects the fact that the standard histories have given relatively little attention to the history of the communication networks which actually underpinned the Empire. (9)
There is, however, a growing body of more specialised work which takes the relationship between communication and empire (as well as other kinds of geopolitical formations) as its main subject. This work, often inspired by the work of Canadian economist and historian Harold Innis, foregrounds the role of technologies of communication in social formation and historical change. It argues that the histories of nations and empires are embedded in the histories of the communication and media systems which have shaped and sustained them. As Innis noted, communication 'occupies a crucial position in the organisation and administration of government'. (10) Perhaps more fundamentally, systems of communication construct communities of knowledge and experience and hence shape political and cultural values. Chandrika Kaul has noted that 'communications played a crucial role in creating, mediating and sustaining the evolution of the British imperial experience'. The fast-developing new communication technologies of the nineteenth century and the media they recast, most especially the press, allowed 'ideas and cultural values' to be 'transmitted round the world, linking metropolis and periphery in a dynamic relationship and bringing into existence an informed political opinion on imperial affairs--in the colonies as well as in London'. (11) Innovations in communication, while tending to unify disparate peoples, could also have considerable unexpected effects upon social organisation and the distribution of power. As Kaul notes, 'whilst it is true that the immediate impact of new technology is to consolidate the position of an established elite, other groups will also seek access to that technology and the information and influence it yields'. (12)
In recent years, substantial research attention has been given to the role of technology, including communications technology, in nineteenth-century imperialism. (13) There have also been more detailed studies on imperial press networks and their role in promoting both imperial sentiment and colonial identities, particularly amongst British settler communities. Lester has argued that in the first half of the nineteenth-century, settler newspapers in the Cape Colony, Australia and New Zealand 'became a significant vehicle through which colonial settlers at a number of sites imagined themselves embedded in this trans-imperial British identity'. Furthermore, 'bundles of settler papers were continually sent to subscribers in Britain,... |
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