Ben Marsden

Power and Wealth: Reputations and Rivalries in Steam Culture

‘Labour’, asserted the Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith in his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), ‘is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities’. As such, labour was the key to understanding the wealth of nations since the total ‘annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes’. Moreover, the wealth of a nation was regulated on the one hand by ‘the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which its labour is generally applied’ (Smith’s famous ‘division of labour’) and on the other by ‘the proportion between those who are employed in useful labour, and that of those who are not so employed’. Reversing Thomas Hobbes’s seventeenth-century dictum that ‘wealth is power’, Smith effectively made ‘useful labour’ or ‘power’ the basis of ‘real’ wealth for nation and empire.2

Conclusion: Cultures of Technological Expertise

Preceding chapters have explored steam power, steamship, railway and telegraph technologies in the making (chs 2–5). These chapters have focused on the cultural construction of empires: usually built as personal and business empires but often closely interconnected one with another and in relation to the larger geopolitical empires of the nineteenth century. In this concluding chapter we expand upon several cultures of technological expertise, already touched upon in our specific investigations of the new technologies. These cultures, we suggest, played fundamental roles in generating, promoting and sustaining many of the engineering projects with which we have been concerned.

‘Objects of national importance’: Exploration, Mapping and Measurement

Leading geologist and gentleman of science Roderick Murchison’s words expressed a mapping imperative widely shared by European cultural elites since at least the eighteenth century. From the point of view of an imperial power, ‘spaces yet vacant on the map’ — especially within existing British territories — meant that ‘possession’ was incomplete, that control, if any, still resided with other forces, and that ‘civilisation’ — in the form of Western ‘rationality’ and ‘discipline’ — had yet to be introduced to that region. For Murchison, the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) — then still in its infancy — could and should serve as a principal agent for securing such British power, both on land and sea, and above all in ‘filling the void still existing in the southern hemisphere’.

‘The most gigantic electrical experiment’: The Trials of Telegraphy

In the frantic debates of the spring and early summer of 1858, prior to a renewed attempt to establish a submarine telegraph line between Britain and North America, Scientific American told its readers that once the cable was ‘successfully laid down’ it would ‘remain the most gigantic electrical experiment ever made’.2 The ambivalence of that statement — the telegraph as a robust product of electrical science, or as vast but fragile innovation — seemed to be justified by the events of the late summer. On 6 August 1858 Ireland and Newfoundland were in electrical communication; by 20 October 1858 telegraphic communication between Britain and her North American empire totally ceased.

Building Railway Empires: Promises in Space and Time

For some three weeks in 1898 construction stopped on one of the British Empire’s most ambitious railway projects, linking the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa with the eastern shore of Lake Victoria in Uganda. Neither tribal opposition nor engineering problems played any part in this brief pause in the onward march of imperial civilisation. Yet before progress recommenced, ‘twenty-eight Indian coolies and an indefinite number of African natives’ had lost their lives, not as a consequence of any internal labour dispute or as a result of technological failure, but from a cause which spread fear across the workforce and which would feed the insatiable appetite of readers back home for heroic tales of empire-builders. As that most imperial of prime ministers, Lord Salisbury, informed the House of Lords: ‘The whole of the work was put a stop to for three weeks because a party of man-eating lions appeared in the locality and conceived a most unfortunate taste for our porters. … Of course it is difficult to work a railway under these conditions, and until we found an enthusiastic sportsman [Lieutenant-Colonel J.H. Patterson, D.S.O., who commanded the Indian navvies] to get rid of these lions our enterprise was seriously hindered.’2 In such contemporary readings of the episode, placing minimal value on the lives of imperial subjects, the power of the iron horse, aided by the ‘noble’ actions of the gentlemanly officer, triumphed over the king of beasts.

Introduction: Technology, Science and Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century

Engineers are empire-builders: active agents of political and economic empire, they have worked to build and expand personal and business empires of material technology founded on and sustained by durable networks of trust and expertise. It is our aim in this book to re-examine, from within, the cultural construction of the large-scale technologies of empire. Beginning with an analysis of collective adventures in exploration, mapping and measurement, we consider technologies of power (especially steam), the recruitment and refinement of these powers in steamships and in railways, and the mechanisms of communication (especially electrical telegraphy) by which those powers, and their applications, were surveyed and controlled.

Belief in Steamers: Making Trustworthy the Iron Steamship

Carnot’s optimistic appraisal of the civilising and enlightening power of steamships serves as an appropriate epigraph for a chapter on steam at sea in an age of Victorian empire. Thirty years on, however, his faith that steam-powered vessels ‘lessened the dangers of voyages’ would have rung hollow. The year 1854 was a disastrous one both for transatlantic steamships and for iron sailing ships out of Liverpool. On 1 March the iron screw steamer City of Glasgow, constructed on the River Clyde by Tod & Macgregor four years earlier to their own account and now owned by the ambitious Inman Line of Liverpool, left her home port with some 480 passengers and crew bound for Philadelphia. She never arrived. No trace was ever found of a vessel much admired as the exemplar of progress and economy compared to the generously subsidised wooden paddle steamers of the Collins and Cunard lines. Six months later, her larger consort, City of Philadelphia, ran ashore near Cape Race, Newfoundland, on her maiden voyage from Liverpool, leaving Inman with just one ship. Then, on 27 September as the BAAS was in full session in the fresh neoclassical splendour of St George’s Hall, Liverpool, the Collins Line steamship Arctic foundered with the loss of perhaps as many as 350 passengers and crew after colliding with a small French steamer near the same cape.2