Forging Global Networks in the Imperial Era: Atiya Fyzee in Edwardian London

Abstract

This chapter examines the global networks forged by South Asians in Edwardian Britain through the eyes of Atiya Fyzee, a Muslim woman from Bombay.¹ This era is perhaps the least well- served in existing literature on Indian travellers, students and settlers in Britain despite its depiction as the apogee of British imperialism before the First World War began the process of decline. The Edwardian era is often seen as the ‘apogee of Empire’, but actually it may not have been quite so as support for empire was ‘frothy rather than deepseated’.² Nevertheless Edwardian London remained a great imperial city at the heart of an equally great empire; the nexus of the empire’s political authority, financial power and commercial dominance over approximately one- quarter of the Earth’s population and one- quarter of its land mass.³ London was thus the meeting point for an impressive slice of humanity from across the globe: not just native Britons local to the city or visiting from the provinces, but also colonial subjects lured to the imperial ‘centre’ from British territories in Asia, Africa and the Americas. As one Indian traveller, A. L. Roy, wrote: ‘London means the centre of a world- wide empirechrw… a repository of wealth and a reservoir of energychrw… a whirlpool of activity and a deep sea of thought, a point where the ends of the world may be said to meet.’⁴ Census figures for the period suggest that, at a time when Bombay, for instance, boasted less than a million people, the population of greater London was nearly seven million, making it the largest metropolis in the world.⁵