Imperial Travellers

In a global maritime empire, travel was intrinsic. As sailors and slavers, traders and hunters, Europeans traversed colonized space and literacy gave them the power to record what they saw and found. In their mapping and classification of lands and peoples, many of these travellers helped to commodify and package the resources of empire. In their fulsome descriptions of the riches of overseas territories, they made these lands and all that they contained desirable to prospective hunters, settlers, speculators, and administrators. The direct uses that imperial powers made of traveller’s accounts were hinted at in 1887 by British explorer and geologist Joseph Thomson, in a note to the second edition of his best-selling Through Masai Land. “Then [1885] Masai land was for the first time made known to the world; now it has come within the “sphere of British influence”—a delicate way, I suppose, of saying that it now practically forms a part of our imperial possessions.’ In fact British East Africa, of which Maasailand formed a large part, was not established for another eight years, in 1895. But Thomson anticipated accurately: having ‘discovered’ and mapped a direct route from the coast to Lake Victoria, which cut right across Maasailand to Uganda, and described the rich pickings (including fertile land, valuable pastures, water sources, timber, and game animals) that lay along the route, he had paved the way for European trade and takeover. Sir John Kirk, British agent and consul at Zanzibar, wrote that Thomson’s ‘admirable description is the only reliable one we yet possess of the region thus secured to us, if we choose to avail ourselves of the opportunity’. Britain, anxious about Germany’s competitive ambitions, duly took it. From the mid-eighteenth century a particular kind of traveller did more than most to promote the natural potential of empire: those who combined touring with botany and other scientific, or quasi-scientific, enquiries. The avid collection of specimens—from fauna and flora through, in some cases, to human body parts—had become an adjunct to the European adventurer’s taxonomy of the natural world. Since European expansion coincided with the development of print, as illustrated in our chapter on hunting, the production and publication of texts became a by-product of travel.

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