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Anglo-worlds in transit: connections and frictions across the Pacific*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2016

Frances Steel
Frances Steel*
Affiliation:
University of Wollongong, School of Humanities and Social Inquiry, Wollongong, NSW 2500, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

The emerging cultures of late nineteenth-century steamship mobility can be distinguished broadly by ocean basin and by specific route. In the Pacific, a steamship connection between Sydney and San Francisco was envisaged to forge and sustain strong bonds between regional ‘branches’ of the Anglo-Saxon race. This article moves beyond the rhetorical purchase of assumed affinities, to explore the more layered ways in which difference was articulated in transpacific encounters, and the attendant uncertainties and frictions in these evolving relations. When compared to routes bridging the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, with familiar imperial hierarchies and formalities behind them, British and colonial travellers in the Pacific were frequently unsettled by the more democratic and republican attitudes of the American crews and passengers they encountered. At the same time, Britain’s long-standing supremacy on the high seas provided a benchmark against which American enterprise and power in the Pacific could be assessed and found wanting.

Keywords

AustralasiaBritish empirePacificsteamship routeUnited Stateswhiteness
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , July 2016 , pp. 251 - 270
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

*

Research for this article was supported by the Australian Research Council (project DE120101731). I would like to acknowledge the organizers and attendees of the symposium ‘Being in transit’, held at the University of Heidelberg in April 2013, where I presented an early version of this article, and to Martin Dusinberre and Roland Wenzlhuemer for bringing this collection together. My thanks to Helen Bones for research assistance, and to G. Balachandran and Julia Martínez for helpful feedback on previous drafts. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Global History for their constructive critical feedback, and to the editors for their advice and assistance.

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