Abstract:

“Space is killed by the railways,” Heinrich Heine wrote in 1843, but the annihilation of space observed by nineteenth century commentators applied no less to steamships and the sea than to railways and the countryside. The spread of steam technology shrank the great Atlantic “to half its breadth” and dried “the great lakes of the world” to ponds. As this annihilation was more than metaphysical, its drying-up of oceanic space was more than metaphorical: steamships altered the oceanic landscape by transmuting life at sea to something much more like life on land. Increased regulation of shipboard life partially accomplished this, but the perceived annihilation of the previous way of life – exclusive to sailing ships – completed it. For the British Empire, as steam helped power the expansive imperialism of the late-nineteenth century, it finalized a century-long process through which shipboard space became an extension of imperial space.
This extension of imperial space shifted the foundations of the empire. The Second Empire began a maritime empire, built by iron men and wooden ships. The death of the Age of Sail initiated a cultural crisis that would see the sea recast from a male-dominated but ultimately natural environment into an exclusively masculine crucible for a specific kind of British virtue. Thus the mythology born of this crisis wrote women out of maritime history. Women had, however, always gone to sea – much as had men – as necessity dictated. The nineteenth century would see women to go to sea in ever-greater numbers, and with ever-greater visibility. What changed was not their presence, but how their presence became problematized, not only by a legal regime increasingly concerned with propriety, but by a national imaginary challenged by a change in its foundational technology. Examining women’s work at sea, its cultural impact, and legal scaffolding reveals the Second Empire’s shift from a maritime to a terrestrial empire.