Book Review: David Lambert and Peter Merriman (eds.), Mobility and Empire in the Long Nineteenth Century

This impressive volume is the first to bring together historical research on the British Empire – from the late eighteenth century through to the early twentieth century – and mobilities studies. While the significance of transport, travel, communication, exploration, migration, embodied movement and the export/import of commodities may have featured in the work of numerous scholars working on Empire, moving mobility to the centre of such investigations yields valuable new insights: in particular, the way in which mobility practices, discourses, systems and infrastructures work together. As the editors outline in their comprehensive introduction, this systems-based approach to mobility builds upon the work of John Urry, Tim Cresswell and their followers; however, it is notable that it is their key concepts – “mobility/immobility”, “moorings”, “constellations” etc. – that have inspired the scholars here rather than the theories, methodologies and debates which gave rise to them. Although this juxtaposition of two fields means that this is a volume which will appeal to multiple readerships, for the purpose of this review I shall focus on what it offers scholars working in, or across, the history of transport and mobilities studies. My first observation in this regard is that it sends out a challenge to all those of us who have approached the recent past and/or emerging future of transport primarily through a theoretical and/or speculative lens. The richness of the painstaking historical research represented by every one of the substantive chapters included here is truly humbling for a cultural theorist such as myself, and a timely reminder of how ‘thin’ and hypothetical our observations on contemporary social and cultural trends often are. While transport is not the singular focus of any of the chapters, it features in all of them but embedded in the complex interactions of multiple human, economic, discursive and geographical agents. This also relates to the favoured methodology of five of the nine chapters (see Innes Keighton, Sarah Thomas, Natalie Cox, Nuala Johnson and Martin Book Reviews