Introduction: Commerce, Society and the Sea Voyage

Abstract

Eighteenth-century British travellers have been much talked about in recent decades. The journal records of, among others, merchants, explorers, pirates, ordinary seamen, press-gang victims, slaves, slave dealers, passengers, indentured servants and convicts have provided a rich archive for investigating the discursive character of colonial relationships and of imperial expansion in the period of Britain’s rise to global commercial pre-eminence. Many of these studies have shown how metropolitan identities are shaped by exchanges, observations, misperceptions or acts of resistance that take place in ‘peripheral’ regions of the globe. They have argued that imperialism has not simply been a matter of a powerful culture exploiting, eradicating or transforming a less powerful one, but rather that cultural and political transformations take place on both sides of the colonial equation. Travellers — those who literally stand between cultures and places — can therefore be seen either as agents of or as antagonists to the technologies of imperialism. Sometimes they assist and sometimes they confound the commercial aspirations of colonizing states. They can belong to what Paul Gilroy, following Deleuze and Guattari, has identified as a ‘rhizomorphous’ transnational community, as they form subterranean lines of connection and modes of collective organization that defy the social hierarchies determined both by states and by the world economy.