452
Networks and the British World
Introduction
The idea that social connections matter, and can be thought of in networked terms, should startle few scholars. Dubbed a ‘metaphor for our times’,1 networks are currently given a prominent role in historical and contemporary social analysis, as well as in debates about globalisation.2 Yet the term ‘network’ tends to be employed rather casually. The technological and social aspects of networks are not always sufficiently differentiated, while networks seemingly encompass an ever-wider range of human activities and forms of interaction. At worst, the network concept serves as little more than a shorthand for human behaviour deemed too collective to be determined by pure individual choice, yet too diffuse and personal to be taken up by formal state or market institutions. There is clearly a danger here. If networks can be taken to mean almost any kind of informal set of interpersonal connections, the term is likely to be too imprecise to have much purchase. As one commentator warns, ‘if everything is a network then nothing is’.3
1 R. Robertson and J. A. Scholte, Encyclopedia of Globalization, 4 vols. (New York,
2007), Vol. III, p. 868.
2 For important historical studies of the network concept see T. Ballantyne, ‘Empire,
Knowledge and Culture: From Proto-Globalization to Modern Globalization’, in
A. G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History (London: Pimlico, 2002), pp. 115–40;
F. Cooper, ‘Networks, Moral Discourse and History’, in T. Callaghy, R. Kassimir and
R. Latham (eds.), Intervention and Transnationalism in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), pp. 23–46; R. Holton, ‘The Inclusion of the Non-European
World in International Society, 1870s–1920s: Evidence from Global Networks’, Global
Networks 5 (2005), 29–59, esp. pp. 246–55; A. Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating
Identities in Nineteenth Century South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 2001);
and the introduction of D. Lambert and A. Lester (eds.), Colonial Lives across the
British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
3 G. F. Thompson, ‘Is All the World a Complex Network?’, Economy and Society 33
(2004), pp. 411–24 (quotation from p. 413). See also Holton, ‘The Inclusion of the
Non-European World’, p. 247 and ‘Network Discourses: Proliferation, Critique and
Synthesis’, Global Networks 5 (2005), 209–15.
45 Hence great care is required in assessing the importance of networks as agents of historical change. In the following chapters we explore how a variety of social networks created links between individuals and groups, and how these links in turn facilitated the movement of commodities, money, information and people across national or, more accurately, colonial borders. That said, it must be emphasised at the outset that causative relationships between two phenomena cannot be inferred from spatial and temporal co-existence alone. The fact that people join networks at a time when the economy is growing rapidly does not in itself prove that the two events are related. They may be, but before such a claim can be substantiated an analytic framework linking networks to material culture and economic behaviour needs to be elaborated and tested against the evidence.
46The current chapter presents such a framework. We contend that much can be learned about the British World by perceiving it as a species of global networking, that is, as a system that was sustained and animated as much by personal connections as official policy. But how did such an atomistic, unco-ordinated and trans-national system func-