Last Friday, I represented the Snapshots team at the ‘Filing Empire’ workshop at Columbia University. The questions the workshop was designed to address are ones we’ve often tried to approach in our own work: how was empire constructed by and…
Blog Archives
Worldlets: Pitcairn, Wrangel, and the ragged margins of Empire
A few months ago, the Snapshots team attended a one-day workshop on “islands in history” at the University of Leicester. The range of viewpoints and methodologies on display was slightly dizzying, but we came away with some fairy niggling questions:…
Fantasies of the Past, Fantasies of the Future: George Birdwood, Clements Markham, and how the shape of your archive determines the reach of your power
One of the things we’re trying to get a sense of in this project is governmentality as something ‘more-than-human’; a close-grained understanding of how power moves, and the colonial state constitutes itself, through the networks, technologies and instruments of imperial…
Snapshots of Empire September Workshop – audio recording
We here at Snapshots of Empire are glad to report that our workshop on September 2nd went swimmingly: thanks to all our participants, both on the panel and not, we ended the day inspired, fired up, and alive with new ideas…
Posted in Public Engagement
Mobilising an Empire: Part 2 – “Not Calculated to Attract Any Particular Attention,” Or, How to Smuggle an Army Through Someone Else’s Country Without Anyone Making a Fuss
In 1857, as the Indian Uprising threatened the stability and integrity of the British Empire, the British Government and the East India Company engaged in a massive smuggling operation. The cargo was people: armed men, shuttled en masse and in disguise,…
“You should try having an email inbox”: 1857, power/knowledge and the imperial state
A couple of weeks ago the Snapshots of Empire team were very kindly invited to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, to take part in a panel discussion as part of a History Week the FCO were running for their staff.…
Posted in Communication, Public Engagement
1857: Managing imperial crisis
In our last blog, we looked at some of the ways in which the events of 1857 played out in one nodal point of the network of empire: how colonial administrators, as they went about the business of moving goods,…
The Centre for Postcolonial Studies
Alan, our project leader, has been writing about our project on the blog of the Centre for Postcolonial Studies, a new(ish) initiative of the School of Advanced Studies at the University of London. Led by Professor Andrew Hussey, the CPS…
Posted in Public Engagement
Under Pressure: steamships, global power and communications, and the East India Company — Part 2
Infrastructure, engineering, incidents and accidents In the last blog, I discussed how steam navigation promised to change the East India Company’s ways of operating – its trade and communicational networks, its geostrategic presence, and its procedures of government and administration…
Under Pressure: steamships, global power and communications, and the East India Company — Part 1
One of the advantages of what we’re doing on this project is that we get to see how large-scale shifts in colonial governmentality played out in the daily business of the offices at the nominal centre of empire. In the…
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