Cultural, Intellectual and Religious Networks: Britain’s Maritime Exchanges in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

The overall title of the lecture series upon which this book is based is full of clear and striking signifiers: ‘Victorian empire’, ‘Britain’s maritime world’, ‘the sea and global history’. I should like to add another, which is emblematic of the Victorian era and the contemporary British Empire, and that is the bourgeoisie. The nineteenth century in British history is often seen as the period when power passed from an old landed aristocracy to the middle classes, not only the nouveaux riches of the industrial and commercial system, but also higher order professionals, particularly lawyers. In the colonies, bourgeois formation was also taking place throughout the territories of white settlement and only now are these processes beginning to be more fully understood. In India and the so-called dependent Empire, bourgeois officials, merchants and traders, professionals and military officers (though many of the latter also sprang from older gentry and aristocratic families) found a vast new field of endeavour, ensuring that the growth in the bourgeois public sphere, to use the phrase of Jurgen Habermas, was a global phenomenon.¹ It was global in both macro and micro ways: it was occurring on a world wide basis, but it was also a highly instrumental development in each colonial city and town.