Flagships of Imperialism

Freda Harcourt's long labours in the P&O archives are known to maritime historians from a succession of articles which have appeared in specialist journals. Elements of this work have now been drawn together, and made available to a wider readership, in a history of the Company between its earliest days and the renewal of its mail contracts for India and China in 1867. There appears to have been some compromise in bringing the work to publication, for the main body of the text is accompanied by an introduction (apparently in a hand other than the author’s) which summarises the principal findings, and with an afterword by Professor Sarah Palmer which places Harcourt's work within the context of the academic literature on the development of Britain's oceanic steamship lines. These are useful tools in helping the reader to navigate through the tides and eddies of the main text, where details of

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