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Steaming between the Islands: Nineteenth-Century Maritime Networks and the Caribbean Archipelago

Recent scholarship, particularly in “new” imperial studies, has underscored the role of networks in shaping imperial projects. A networked approach offers a useful lens through which to analyse nineteenth-century steamship services, and in this paper I draw on such a perspective to focus on the operations of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company (RMSPC). Importantly the RMSPC, unlike some of the other British Government mail-contract holding lines, operated across an archipelago as well as an ocean. In probing the significance of the RMSPC’s archipelagic context for the maritime network, this paper draws on a theoretical intersection between networked approaches to empire and island studies. I suggest that an examination of the maritime network through an archipelagic lens brings to the fore colonial priorities, imperatives and hierarchies that can appear flattened out through a networked approach alone. I argue for an archipelagic framing of analysis in order to heighten the local and regional significance of this transportation infrastructure, in effect foregrounding the relationship between the maritime service and mobilities in the Caribbean.