Publisher Description

The age of steam was the age of Britain's global maritime dominance, the age of enormous ocean liners and human mastery over the seas. The world seemed to shrink as timetabled shipping mapped out faster, more efficient and more reliable transoceanic networks. But what did this transport revolution look like at the other end of the line, at the edge of empire in the South Pacific?Through the historical example of the largest and most important regional maritime enterprise - the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand - Frances Steel eloquently charts the diverse and often conflicting interests, itineraries and experiences of commercial and political elites, common seamen and stewardesses, and Islander dock workers and passengers.Drawing on a variety of sources, including shipping company archives, imperial conference proceedings, diaries, newspapers and photographs, this book will appeal to cultural historians and geographers of British imperialism, scholars of transport and mobility studies, and historians of New Zealand and the Pacific. -- .

Flap

The age of steam was the age of Britain's global maritime dominance, the age of enormous ocean liners and human mastery over the seas. The world seemed to shrink as timetabled shipping mapped out faster, more efficient and more reliable transoceanic networks. But what did this transport revolution look like at the other end of the line, at the edge of empire in the South Pacific? Through the historical example of the largest and most important regional maritime enterprise - the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand - Frances Steel eloquently charts the diverse and often conflicting interests, itineraries and experiences of commercial and political elites, common seamen and stewardesses, and Islander dock workers and passengers. Drawing on a variety of sources, including shipping company archives, imperial conference proceedings, diaries, newspapers and photographs, this book will appeal to cultural historians and geographers of British imperialism, scholars of transport and mobility studies, and historians of New Zealand and the Pacific.

Author Biography

Frances Steel is Lecturer in History at the University of Wollongong

Table of Contents

List of figures
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Maps
Introduction
Part I Afloat
1. Steam's 'magic touch': routes, rivalries and regionalism in the Pacific
2. A ship of the line: cultures of maritime technology
Part II Aboard
3. Crew culture: maritime men in an iron world
4. Labour, race and empire: debating the 'lascar question'
5. Guardians and troublemakers: confining women at sea
Part III Abroad
6. The tropical challenges of the island trades
7. Sitima days in Suva: wharf labourers and the colonial port
8. Indigenous maritime mobilities under colonial rule
Conclusion
Index

Review

an important and timely contribution to our understanding of the shared histories of New Zealand and the Pacific in the age of Britain's global maritime dominance

'Frances Steel's Oceania under Steam is an outstanding contribution to the social history of the steamship era. Despite the major archives which exist for the world of steam, and the enormous importance of the steamers and their workforces in creating modernity, the period is still relatively unexplored by social historians.'
Jonathan Hyslop, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY, JTH September 2016

'The work is rich in recollections of nautical artefacts and museums, pictures of docksides from Dunedin days, and echoes of the sea and smell of salt. The reader travels almost through a memory lens of the USSCs, analysing steam liners for the ways they developed as emblems of a technological culture, iron transforming the layout of decks, the nautical speed of voyages, and the vision of Pacific travel.'
Matt K. Matsuda, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA, International Journal of Maritime History, September 2016

'Her wide and meticulous archival research forms the basis for a maritime history full of people and their human stories, but threaded together by the overarching structures of empire and colonialism. Moreover, she knits the sea and shore together, and shows the ways in which New Zealand and Australia were intricately part of the Pacific, entwined by the routes, vessels, and kinships of maritime trade and the steam industry in particular.'
Tracey Banivanua Mar, La Trobe University, Australian Historical Studies, September 2016

'Oceania under Steam's sensitivity to issues of race, gender, class, space, affect, and colonialism makes the book a very important contribution to the growing fields of maritime mobility studies, use-centered history of technology, and sub-imperial citizenship and network scholarship. The book will be of interest to historians of empire, maritime historians, and mobility scholars well beyond experts of the Pacific region.'
Heloise Finch-Boyer is Curator of History of Science and Technology at the U.K. National Maritime Museum specializing in the material culture of mobility and empire in the Indian Ocean from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, Transfers Volume 2 Issue 2 Summer 2012

'This book represents a fantastic example of 'new maritime history' that seeks to understand the crucial place that maritime spaces hold in understanding the complex relationships, whether in terms of power, culture, labour, race or sex, that existed in nineteenth-century maritime empires. While it is an impressive step forward in terms of scholarship, it also highlights how many questions about maritime history remain, and how much there still is to do.'
Steven Gray, University of Warwick, The Mariner's Mirror, April 2016 -- .

Prizes

Short-listed for Shortlisted for the Ernest Scott Prize 2012 2012 (UK)

Long Description

The age of steam was the age of Britain's global maritime dominance, the age of enormous ocean liners and human mastery over the seas. The world seemed to shrink as timetabled shipping mapped out faster, more efficient and more reliable transoceanic networks. But what did this transport revolution look like at the other end of the line, at the edge of empire in the South Pacific?Through the historical example of the largest and most important regional maritime enterprise - the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand - Frances Steel eloquently charts the diverse and often conflicting interests, itineraries and experiences of commercial and political elites, common seamen and stewardesses, and Islander dock workers and passengers.Drawing on a variety of sources, including shipping company archives, imperial conference proceedings, diaries, newspapers and photographs, this book will appeal to cultural historians and geographers of British imperialism, scholars of transport and mobility studies, and historians of New Zealand and the Pacific. -- .

Review Text

In Ocean Under Steam Frances Steel explores the impact of the 19th-century sea transport revolution in one of the extremities of the British Empire, the South Pacific Ocean. Published as part of the Manchester University Press ''Studies in Imperialism'' series, under the general editorship of John MacKenzie, this is a self-consciously ''de-centred'' imperial history. It seeks to challenge the traditional emphasis on radiating connections between metropole and periphery, focusing instead on regional or intercolonial ''sub-imperialisms'', the complex webs of economic, social and cultural networks that developed in various parts of the world. Here the Southwestern Pacific, or Oceania, is presented as a transcolonial maritime space in which colonial steamship companies - notably the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand, the largest and most significant regional maritime enterprise - and Australian, New Zealand, and Pacific Island ports played key roles as sub-metropolitan sites of empire.Compared to the Atlantic or Indian Ocean worlds, the scholarship of empire and sea in the Pacific, especially in the age of steam, is distinctly underdeveloped. As Epeli Hau''ofa has argued, outsider academics and writers have too often marginalised or belittled these scattered ''islands in a far sea'', emphasising their isolation, fragility and tiny size, and framing the vast ocean as a barrier.(1) This dominant Western view was reinforced by imperial partition, which reordered the Pacific seascape and often ignored longstanding maritime connections and exchanges between island societies. The majority of earlier works, both academic and popular, that have explored the history of empire and the Pacific have tended to focus on the epic era of European exploration and contact (with Cook''s voyages retaining a particular fascination), early maritime industries (such as whaling) or on the high politics of imperial rivalry, including, in New Zealand''s case, its own colonial ambitions to become the Britain of the South. Even James Belich, who placed a welcome emphasis on the importance of the maritime dimension to New Zealand''s history, privileged the ''giant meat ships'' that connected the Dominion with Britain, tightening the vertical or bilateral links between the metropole and its far-flung periphery. Viewed in this way, the Pacific has often been reduced to an obstacle, a ''mere space'' to be conquered or eradicated by modern maritime technology.New Zealand maritime historians, meanwhile, have produced a valuable body of work, one notable example being Gavin McLean''s lively account of the early years of the Union SS Co., The Southern Octopus.(2) But this field too has been dominated by business histories of shipping companies, their ''glamour ships'' and dramatic events such as shipwrecks, rather than the social and cultural relations of the maritime world.While acknowledging the value of this work, and the significance of the global shipping arteries that linked Australasia with Europe, Steel takes a different tack, broadening the frame of reference and posing questions about issues of race, gender and colonialism. Focusing on the regional maritime connections within Oceania, and in particular on New Zealand''s Union SS Co. and the Fijian port of Suva, she attempts to animate the ''rigid black steamer lines mapped out in the company chart of routes'' (p. 152), connecting the politics and economics of shipping with the more intimate worlds of shipboard and port life, and recovering the experiences of common seamen, stewardesses and Islander wharf labourers. By placing human stories at the centre of this story, the micro-geographies of ships and ports emerge as important sites of social and cultural, as well as commercial, exchange, offering new insights into everyday colonial life in the South Pacific.This is an admirable aim, but achieving it is far from easy. Few working people or steamship passengers left many traces of their lives and travels. The evidence that survives is often filtered through the views of European and/or elite writers, or can only be pieced together from fleeting references in government, company and trade union archives. The archival challenges of silence, exclusion and fragmentation are always present for historians, but are even more acute when dealing with the floating world of maritime labour and indigenous engagement with it. Given such limitations, Steel is to be commended for the way she has weaved together a range of diverse and often fragmentary sources, skillfully drawing the reader in by starting each chapter with an engaging personal story or event that in some way illustrates the larger themes that follow.Oceania Under Steam explores regional shipping connections and cultures across the five decades from the 1870s, when routine steamship operations began and regional trading relationships were consolidated, until the First World War. The book is organised in three parts, grouped under the headings ''Afloat'', ''Aboard'' and ''Abroad''. Each part seeks to engage with the stories of steam from a different angle of enquiry. The two chapters in part one set the economic and political context of Pacific steam shipping, charting the rise of the Union SS Co., teasing out the overlapping and sometimes conflicting maritime agendas of imperial authorities and Australasian political leaders, and exploring the cultural and symbolic power of the steamship. The three chapters that comprise part two seek to bring the story down to a more intimate, human scale, exploring the rhythms and patterns of working life at sea. Chapter three offers a nuanced account of ''crew culture'' during the transition from sail to steam, as technology, managerial capitalism and the concerns of social reformers and unions helped to reshape seafarers'' work, skill and status. The following two chapters focus explicitly on issues of race and gender. In chapter four Steel skilfully examines the ''lascar question'' - a highly politicised issue that for many years dominated the agendas of seamen''s unions and maritime authorities. From the mid-19th century the stokehold of the steamship, a dark, dirty and physically demanding workplace (especially so in the tropics), became the focal point of fierce debates over the employment of ''coloured'' or ''lascar'' seamen. While Australasian companies and unions, reflecting the prevailing political climate, employed racial arguments to enforce a ''whites only'' policy in their coastal, intercolonial and Pacific islands trades, the Union SS Co. recruited lascars for its Asian trades, stressing ''the protection this afforded white men from poor work conditions'' (p. 120). Chapter five seeks to recover the often neglected histories of (white) women at sea, both as Union SS Co. stewardesses and as passengers, revealing how their presence was circumscribed by prescriptive gender ideals and notions of shipboard space and order.Perhaps the book''s most valuable insights are to be found in part three, which explores the Union SS Co.''s island trades and the connections they helped to forge between societies and individuals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Chapter six focuses on the white workers who manned steamers and port branches, making excellent use of the Union SS Co.''s archives to illustrate management''s persistent concerns at the perils their white employees faced in an unruly tropical environment: physical and mental ''slippage'', alcohol abuse and intimacy with ''wrong crowd'' ashore (p. 167).Perhaps the book''s real highlight is chapter seven, ''Sitima days in Suva'', which presents a fascinating micro-history of the early years of Fiji''s capital, at a time when regional steamer services were forging new networks of connection and exchange. In this dynamic littoral world, the Union SS Co.''s successful operation depended heavily on interracial cooperation, creating a web of social and cultural relations that we

Review Quote

"Frances Steel's Oceania under Steam is an outstanding contribution to the social history of the steamship era. Despite the major archives which exist for the world of steam, and the enormous importance of the steamers and their workforces in creating modernity, the period is still relatively unexplored by social historians." - Jonathan Hyslop, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY, JTH September 2016 "The work is rich in recollections of nautical artefacts and museums, pictures of docksides from Dunedin days, and echoes of the sea and smell of salt. The reader travels almost through a memory lens of the USSCs, analysing steam liners for the ways they developed as emblems of a technological culture, iron transforming the layout of decks, the nautical speed of voyages, and the vision of Pacific travel." - Matt K. Matsuda, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA, International Journal of Maritime History, September 2016 "Her wide and meticulous archival research forms the basis for a maritime history full of people and their human stories, but threaded together by the overarching structures of empire and colonialism. Moreover, she knits the sea and shore together, and shows the ways in which New Zealand and Australia were intricately part of the Pacific, entwined by the routes, vessels, and kinships of maritime trade and the steam industry in particular." - Tracey Banivanua Mar, La Trobe University, Australian Historical Studies, September 2016 "Oceania under Steam's sensitivity to issues of race, gender, class, space, affect, and colonialism makes the book a very important contribution to the growing fields of maritime mobility studies, use-centered history of technology, and sub-imperial citizenship and network scholarship. The book will be of interest to historians of empire, maritime historians, and mobility scholars well beyond experts of the Pacific region." - Heloise Finch-Boyer is Curator of History of Science and Technology at the U.K. National Maritime Museum specializing in the material culture of mobility and empire in the Indian Ocean from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, Transfers Volume 2 Issue 2 Summer 2012 "This book represents a fantastic example of 'new maritime history' that seeks to understand the crucial place that maritime spaces hold in understanding the complex relationships, whether in terms of power, culture, labour, race or sex, that existed in nineteenth-century maritime empires. While it is an impressive step forward in terms of scholarship, it also highlights how many questions about maritime history remain, and how much there still is to do." - Steven Gray, University of Warwick, The Mariner's Mirror, April 2016

Description for Reader

The age of steam was the age of Britain's global maritime dominance, the age of enormous ocean liners and human mastery over the seas. The world seemed to shrink as timetabled shipping mapped out faster, more efficient and more reliable transoceanic networks. But what did this transport revolution look like at the other end of the line, at the edge of empire in the South Pacific? Through the historical example of the largest and most important regional maritime enterprise - the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand - Frances Steel eloquently charts the diverse and often conflicting interests, itineraries and experiences of commercial and political elites, common seamen and stewardesses, and Islander dock workers and passengers. Drawing on a variety of sources, including shipping company archives, imperial conference proceedings, diaries, newspapers and photographs, this book will appeal to cultural historians and geographers of British imperialism, scholars of transport and mobility studies, and historians of New Zealand and the Pacific.

Description for Sales People

The first extended study of the Pacific World in the age of steam, combining perspectives from imperial, transnational, cultural and maritime history.. Shows how colonial livelihoods and identities were formed as much through transoceanic networks as through the land-based establishment of settler societies.. Brings together macro- and micro-history to connect the lives of everyday people to the global context of imperialism in an industrial age. Complicates earlier narratives that celebrated the friction-free 'collapse of distance' and the transformative power of steam by highlighting the unevenness and difficulties inherent in steamshipping at the turn of the twentieth century.. Demonstrates that new imperial shipping networks altered the precolonial seaborne mobilities of indigenous communities in the Pacific, yet it also highlights the ways in which Islanders localised imperial technologies and incorporated them into existing cultural world views.

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