137Markets and consumer cultures organisations, patent systems, Chambers of Commerce and international exhibitions. These ‘arteries of empire’ expanded rapidly after 1850, facilitating the spread of business information, consumer fashions and technological know-how.
Professional diasporas Professional people were highly mobile across an English-speaking world. Their mobility was, however, less a by-product of imperial policy, and more the result of individuals acting on their own initiative to build careers abroad.59 At home, expanding education coupled with relatively inexpansive professions ensured that there was keen competition for jobs; many people therefore turned to the colonies instead. Professional knowledge and skills were readily transferred to the dominions, which had yet to train their own citizens in sufficient numbers to supply a growing demand for chemists, doctors, engineers, patent agents, lawyers, teachers and the like. Some of the professionals who left Britain were peripatetic, moving around (and sometimes beyond) the British World, while others settled permanently in their new place of abode. Nor is it simply a case of professional people contributing to, and gaining greatly from empire.60 In Britain itself, key characteristics of professionalism – trained expertise, disinterested public service and selection by merit – were developed and defined through empire; the aspirations and agendas of professional bodies increasingly reflected their overseas colonial membership; and the voluntary activity of the professional classes was readily transferred on to an imperial stage, deepening its sense of purpose and enhancing its prestige in the process. Take, for example, engineering. Victorian notions of technological development were closely tied to ideas of moral progress. Armed with a ‘civilising’ ideology, and sensing economic opportunity, increasing numbers of British engineers ventured abroad from the 1840s, without the
59 For the imperial reach of British scientists, see, for example, the meetings of the
British Association for the Advancement of Science, which spread to the settler empire
in Montreal (1884), Toronto (1897), South Africa (1905), Winnipeg (1909) and
Australia (1914); J. Morrell, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association
for the Advancement of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 412, 493;
B. Marsden and C. Smith, ‘Introduction: Technology, Science and Culture in the Long
Nineteenth Century’, in Marsden and Smith (eds.), Engineering Empires: A Cultural
History of Technology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2005), p. 231.
60 A. S. Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the
Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2005), pp. 17ff.
138need of government support.61 The first markets for their expertise were in Europe and the USA, but these countries were anxious to build industries and infrastructures of their own. It was in the colonies that British engineers had their greatest impact. Projects ranged from the mining of minerals, to railway, harbour and canal construction, to bridge and dam building. By the turn of the century, the two main professional bodies of engineers had a fifth of their membership – over a thousand people – based in the colonies.62 We can explore the experience of engineers by honing in on two important branches of the profession – railways and mining. The importance of the engineering profession rose to new heights during the railway ‘boom’ or ‘mania’ of the 1840s. The main lines of Britain’s railway system were mostly complete by the 1870s, after which British engineers became increasingly occupied with constructing and promoting railways in Britain’s expanding empire.63 ‘Overseas, almost all of the early railways relied on British engines and expertise; conceived in the interests of trade, railways themselves became the great British export.’64 Orders piled in for equipment and stores – coal, rails, spikes, signals, iron for bridges, pumps, rolling stock and locomotives; even basic items – picks, hammers, buckets, wheelbarrows and small tools – were exported from Britain. The majority of the railway engineers who supervised construction had received their training in England and Scotland. It was they who surveyed the terrain, drew up drawings and specifications for bridges and stations, liaised with contractors and ensured that work was done according to their requirements. Crucially, it was they who decided where the materials for the railways should be procured, and they naturally favoured familiar products. Railway locomotives, for which the settler colonies provided a major export market, are a case in point.65 Several large locomotive firms
61 See, especially, the work of R. A. Buchanan: ‘The Diaspora of British Engineering’,
Technology and Culture 27 (1986), 501–24; The Engineers: A History of the Engineering
Profession in Britain, 1750–1914 (London: Kingsley, 1989); and The Life and Times of
Isambard Kingdom Brunel (London: Continuum International Publishing, 2002),
pp. 83–102.
62 T. Johnson, ‘The State and the Professions: The Peculiarities of the British’, in A. Giddens
and G. Mackenzie (eds.), Social Class and the Division of Labour: Essays in Honour of Ilya
Neustadt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 199.
63 A. Burton, The Railway Empire (London: John Murray, 1994), p. 249; N. Faith, The
World the Railways Made (London: Bodley Head, 1990), p. 146.
64 S. Garfield, The Last Journey of William Huskisson (London: Faber, 2003), p. 211.
65 Thompson and Magee, ‘A Soft Touch?’, p. 698. The exception here is Canada, where the
big Montreal foundries, which had grown up on the demand for marine engines, had lit-
tle difficulty making new steam engines. Already, by the 1850s, the Kingston works were
building engines, as was James Good of Toronto. See Bliss, Northern Enterprise, p. 239.
139Markets and consumer cultures in Britain benefited from colonial demand, the most important being the North British Group, which built locomotives ‘for the entire empire’, a connection ‘proudly displayed’ in its histories.66 British superintending engineers were tough taskmasters, however. They designed precisely what they wanted, visited suppliers prior to their departure from the UK to approve designs and to place provisional orders, and were not slow to relay their views on the shortcomings of existing engines to British manufacturers.67 Engines were often substantially modified to meet the requirements of colonial topography and climate.
The early history of railway building in Australia is instructive here.68 Largely built by British engineers, it was not surprising that Australia’s first railways used British practices and British equipment. In 1854, the first steam-operated railway opened in Victoria. It ran a distance of twoand-a-half miles from Flinders Street to Port Melbourne. Owned and operated by the Melbourne and Hobson’s Bay Railway Company, the railway placed orders for locomotives, rolling stock and other equipment with Robert Stephenson and Company in England, although exceptionally, and owing to a delay on delivery, a locally built engine had to be ordered from Robertson, Martin and Smith of Melbourne. This engine was delivered in ten weeks with the help of Langland’s Port Phillip foundry, which constructed the boiler.69 For the most part, however, the materials required for railways in Australia, including iron and steel rails, were shipped from Britain – Australia lacked the manufacturing capacity to cope with large orders. John Whitton, for example, arrived in 1856 as chief engineer for the New South Wales lines.70 Born in Yorkshire, the son of a Wakefield land agent, he gained his experience working on the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire railways, and then on the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton line. During his thirty-two year term of office in New South Wales 2000 miles of track were laid down. These included two remarkable zig-zags by which the main line westwards from Sydney crossed the Blue Mountains and the great Hawkesbury River Bridge, opened in 1889. To build at this rate, Whitton turned to Thomas
66 J. M. MacKenzie, ‘The Second City of the Empire: Glasgow – Imperial Municipality’
in F. Driver and D. Gilbert (eds.), Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 223.
67 For example, see J. Brunton, John Brunton’s Book: Being the Memories of John Brunton
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), pp. 82–3.
68 See especially here Burton, The Railway Empire, pp. 226–48.
69 R. Testro, A Pictorial History of Australian Railways, 1854–1970 (Melbourne: Lansdowne
Press, 1971), pp. 16–17.
70 I. Brady, G. Johnson, S. Sharp, G. Smith, R. Taaffe and A. Watson, New South Wales
Railways: The First Twenty-Five Years, 1855–1880 (Broadmeadow, NSW: Australian
Railway Historical Society, 1980).
140Brassey for skilled railway labourers, and to a variety of British companies for cheap and reliable equipment and supplies.
Certainly, the colonial construction of goods vehicles was encouraged early on. Yet not until the 1880s did New South Wales railways begin to look to a mix of locally manufactured and British engines. Even then, imported engines remained cheaper, and the larger works in Britain maintained the upper hand over local manufacturers because of their economies of scale. The same was true of rolling stock. The construction of the first passenger vehicles for New South Wales was entrusted to the prolific rolling stock manufacturer, Wright and Son of Birmingham. It was not until 1877, when a series of longer-term contracts were introduced, that local builders of rolling stock were able to establish a secure base for their business. The experience of South Australia was very similar.71 During the first decade of the Southern and Western line – the ‘Pony railway’, as it was sarcastically called by its critics – seven types of engine were tried, all of which were ordered from British firms, among them Avonside (Bristol), Neilson (Glasgow), Cross (St Helens) and Kitson (Leeds). Only in 1876 were instructions issued to build a locomotive locally at the Ipswich government shops – a further five were constructed there the following year.
Overseas mining enterprises also created lucrative opportunities for British engineers and major markets for British firms. Melbourne, for example, became a boom-town during the gold rush of the 1850s, the base for many mechanical engineers ‘who established flourishing enterprises in Australia’.72 Some of the business these engineers generated went the way of local firms. But expatriate mine managers and engineers put considerable amounts of business the way of companies ‘back home’. In South Africa, as we have seen, there were a large number of Cornish miners, engineers and mine managers employed on the Rand. They opened up opportunities for Cornish engineering companies to sell rock drills, beam engines, compressors, pumping and lift equipment, and a whole variety of other goods. Yet rather than encouraging complacency, Cornwall’s close links to South Africa frequently led to technical innovation and better design. A good example would be Holman Brothers – ‘the Camborne firm that laid the foundations for Cornwall’s world class export market in mining machinery’.73 Holmans had stores in
71 J. Armstrong, Locomotives in the Tropics, 2 vols., Vol. I: Queensland Railways, 1864–1910
(Brisbane: Australian Railway Historical Society, 1985).
72 R. A. Buchanan, ‘The British Contribution to Australian Engineering: The Australian
Dictionary of Biography Entries’, Historical Studies 20 (1993), 401–19 (quote from
p. 406). See also G. Blainey, The Rush that Never Ended: A History of Australian Mining
(Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1963).
73 S. P. Schwartz, ‘Cornish Migration to Latin America: A Global and Transnational
Perspective’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Exeter (2003), pp. 231–2. On
141Markets and consumer cultures Johannesburg, British Columbia and Coolgardie in Australia. Facing considerable competition from American manufacturers in South Africa,74 the company’s directors travelled between Cornwall and Johannesburg on a regular basis, meeting mine managers and supervisors. They were well aware of the different working conditions in the Transvaal mines, and well acquainted with the important figures in the mining industry. The free flow of people and information between Cornwall and the Rand helped to build the experience and expertise of Cornish engineering firms that was crucial to their success. Although Holmans exported mining machinery around the world, the goldmines of the Witwatersrand remained among its best customers; the company’s rock drills won several competitions there, and employees at its ‘No. 3 factory’ could often be seen working overtime to meet South African orders.
If the situation in South Africa was different from Britain’s other dominions it was partly because of the way in which imperial patriotism intruded into debates about manufacturing as a result of the South African War (1899–1902). Alfred Milner’s drawing of the Transvaal more firmly into Britain’s orbit led to the imposition of a special ‘permit system’ on interior travel for non-British citizens, one effect of which was to impede the return of American mining engineers and entrepreneurs to the Rand. The permit system helped to stem the expansion of American trade in South Africa, as did strict inspections of incoming American products, delays to and cancellations of official contracts, a lack of local credit, high freight rates (combined with the rebates to British shipping firms mentioned previously), and new preferential customs duties.75
American exports to South Africa had grown at an alarming rate in the later nineteenth century, especially stores and equipment for the extractive industries. Although in 1870 America’s trade with the region was meagre, this changed with the discovery of gold. By 1896, American mining managed approximately half of all mines on the Rand. Like the British engineers, they tended to direct contracts for equipment to their
Holman’s involvement in South Africa, see C. Carter Holman, Cornish Engineering,
1801–2001: Two Centuries of Industrial Excellence in Camborne (Camborne: CompAir,
2001), pp. 29, 30–3, 41–9.
74 Many of the capital goods required by the growing mining industry (including elevators,
skips and stamp batteries) came from the United States, which provided keen compe-
tition in the sales of rock drills too. See J. T. Campbell, ‘The Americanization of South
Africa’, in R. Wagnleitner and E. T. May (eds.), ‘Here, There and Everywhere’: The Foreign
Politics of American Popular Culture (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England,
2000), p. 39.
75 A few US firms were able to by-pass these measures by incorporating themselves in
Canada. See Campbell, ‘The Americanization of South Africa’, p. 40; R. W. Hull,
American Enterprise in South Africa: Historical Dimensions of Engagement and Disengagement
(New York: New York University Press, 1990), pp. 70–7.
142own nationals, with the Ingersoll Drill Company a leading beneficiary.76 Thus, by the end of the century, America had become the largest supplier of heavy equipment and electrical equipment to South Africa’s goldmines, and the second largest supplier of all South African imports.
All this revived British fears of American economic influence. In the words of Henry Birchenough, a special British commissioner sent to report on South Africa, ‘America is undoubtedly our most formidable rival present and future.’77 Three influential books appeared during the South African War to alert people to the threat, one by Stafford Ransome (a former British mining engineer in South Africa), one by F. A. Mackenzie (The American Invaders), and another by W. T. Stead (The Americanization of the World). These publications set the scene for a campaign to weaken American commerce. After 1903, there were far fewer American mining engineers employed on the Rand. ‘Even those who retained their positions lost their powers of purchase and control of personnel.’78 By the end of 1904 American imports to South Africa had halved, and the decline continued for four more years. The winner was Britain, whose exports increased throughout this period, amounting to some 60 per cent of the total South African market by 1913.
British firms did not have it all their own way, however. Of particular interest is the Transvaal’s electricity industry, where pro-British sentiment was vigorously asserted during and after the reconstruction era.79 By 1907, the three main power companies operating on the Rand had been consolidated into a new operation, the Victoria Falls Power Company. The German banks and the German industrial giant Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG) bought their way into a British colony by paying a British-controlled ‘African Concessions Syndicate’ an exorbitant price for its shares.80 Their clear intention was to monopolise the South African market for steam-powered electricity-generating machinery. Predictably, the Transvaal Institute of Mining Engineers protested strongly against AEG’s tactics. On two separate occasions the Institute’s British professionals drew on deep-seated anti-German sentiment among
76 T. J. Noer, Briton, Boer and Yankee: The United States and South Africa, 1870–1914 (Kent,
OH: Kent State University Press, 1978), pp. 30–2; Campbell, ‘The Americanization of
South Africa’, pp. 38–9.
77 Quoted in Campbell, ‘The Americanization of South Africa’, p. 93.
78 Ibid., p. 98.
79 Our analysis of this industry draws on N. L. Clark, Manufacturing Apartheid: State
Corporations in South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); R. Christie,
Electricity, Industry and Class in South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
80 For the role of German entrepreneurs, bankers and industrialists in the economic devel-
opment of modern South Africa, see J. D. F. Jones, Through Fortress and Rock: The Story
of Gencor, 1895–1995 (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1995).