News of the Imperial World: Popular Print Culture, the News of the World and India in the late Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The News of the World (NOTW) was born into, and incubated within, a cultural environment infused with imperial rhetoric and tales of overseas exploits. From the middle decades of the nineteenth century, and especially following the Great Rebellion in 1857–58, the Indian subcontinent became a key constituent of the British imperial experience. Technological and institutional developments facilitated greater access to the East: the inauguration of the Suez Canal in 1869, the Establishment of Reuters news agency bureaux in India from the late 1860s and the opening of direct telegraph links between Europe and the subcontinent during the 1870s made news more accessible, albeit it remained relatively expensive to procure in both time and money. In recent decades, centripetal, centrifugal and transnational perspectives on empire have gone hand in hand with an emphasis on multi-disciplinarity in pedagogic approaches to its study. Further, it is widely accepted that empire, in its complex and varied manifestations, had a seminal impact upon the socio-cultural milieu of Britain, although there is debate about the nature and extent of such influence. This micro-study aims to situate the NOTW and its Indian coverage within the wider discussion on imperialism and popular culture in late nineteenth-century Britain.