British Travel Research Articles

Britain and imperial rhetoric of reforms in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Morocco

ABSTRACT Although Morocco was not fully colonised until 1912, the second half of the nineteenth century saw significant changes in the country’s politics, culture, and economy as European colonial powers intensified competition for control of the southern shore of the western Mediterranean. This essay examines the British conceptualisation of social, economic, fiscal, and military reforms that precolonial Morocco tried and/or was wreaked to implement under the auspices of the British. The rhetoric of reform and rescue served as the British Empire’s civilising mission and was complementary to the discourse on supremacy and hegemony. This rhetoric fed into a larger colonial project of domination but also served a more surreptitious purpose of self-fashioning and self-legitimisation. British envoys, officials, and travel writers, the most prominent of whom are John Drummond Hay, Arthur Leared, Walter Burton Harris, Hugh Stutfield, and Budgett Meakin, treated the reform and rescue of Pre-protectorate Morocco as a peculiar and bounden duty of the white race. This essay revisits the representational strategies these writers deployed in their accounts and how they propagated the premise that the implementation of these reforms would enable Morocco to be transformed from a fragmented ‘Sharifian Dominion’ replete with bureaucratisation, embezzlement, and decay into a modern state. In this sense, this essay traces the reciprocal relationships between writing, policy making, capitalism, modernity and the broader European colonialist discourse and zeitgeist of this period.

The Discovery of English Wants: Dearth and Plenty in Early Modern Anglo-Indian Exchanges

English experiences of late-Elizabethan economic crises coincided with national ambition to engage in global trade, marking a shift in the discourse of “needs” and “wants” in the English commonwealth. English travelers and traders documented in different modes of writing the topography, climate, food resources, markets, and roadways of Mughal India to better understand local abundance, needs, and wants. Travel through food insecure regions in India, interaction with local inhabitants, and encounters with famine created hybrid chorographic modes: forms of writing about travel and place within English environments were adapted and applied to Indian regions. By examining the writings of four lesser-known travelers to India in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this article argues that English understandings of nationhood, population, and commonwealth were informed by attempts to comprehend, inhabit, and write the complex, contingent spaces of other populations and their needs, wants, and crises, as well as those of Britain. The English commonwealth was thus reimagined in the context of the wider demographics of plural populations.

‘Carrying it on her shoulder, like an Irish-woman’: early modern English traveller perceptions of women in Ireland, America, and Africa, 1555–1745

ABSTRACT This article compares how early modern English travel accounts to Ireland, America, and Africa portrayed native women. It examines gendered tropes that reoccurred in all these writings, such as ease of childbirth, breast size, and breastfeeding over the shoulder. It argues that many of these tropes that helped shape the racialised thinking of indigenous people in America and Africa first appeared in English-written travel accounts to Ireland. In some examples, English travel writers in America and Africa made direct comparisons to Irish women. Accordingly, the article demonstrates that Ireland is significant for the study of early modern English imperialism. Perceptions of gender were central in formulating English racial perceptions of the Other in the New World, but there was nothing unique about these tropes. In other words, there was nothing particularly ‘African’ about English perceptions of African women. English imperialists perceived Native American, African, and Irish women through the same lens. The article shows that early modern notions of racial difference were constructed less on overt characteristics particular to a geographical zone of contact—for example, the skin colour of Africans—and more on certain transferable gendered tropes that framed perceptions of native women across all three continents.

Abujhmadiya A Primitive Tribe: Their Livelihood

The Indian society is home to various species. There are about 500 tribal groups and their sub-tribal groups in India, who live in remote areas of the country, forests and mountains. With time, other societies and cultures kept getting incorporated. Despite this, most of the tribal communities were successful in preserving their cultural heritage. However, in some tribal communities, the culture of other Indian societies definitely seems to have disappeared, which is a factor in the change in their traditional culture. The study of tribes in India was started by British administrators, missionaries and travellers individually or collectively to know and understand their culture. Research work on tribes started in India after the establishment of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (1974). Sir William Jones (1974) highlighted the importance of tribal chapters in “Nature and Man”. Generally, the general public knows them as Adivasis, Vanvasis, Primitive Tribes, Janjati, Van Jati. In the Indian Constitution, special provisions have been made with the objective of bringing them at par with the main society by naming them as Scheduled Tribes.

Англоязычный авторский трэвел-блог: жанровые, структурные и прагмастилистические особенност

The aim of the article is to identify genre, structural, pragmatic and stylistic features of English travel blogs. Travel blog as a genre is a form of Internet communication that combines elements of different registers; it is marked by its dialogic, interactive and polycode features, that is a combination of verbal and non-verbal components serving informative, appealing and persuasive purposes. The article uses discourse, pragmastylistic and contextual analyses. It is obvious that the genre features of analyzed messages of the travel blog are speech forms combining neutral and colloquial registers. The blog structure is horizontal with themes arranged in line with posts links behind them. The posts themselves have no rigid structure, the mandatory parts are headlines and subheadlines – rubrics and the final part containing either impressions of the trip, advertising a certain destination and sponsor, or appeal to the readers to discuss the contents and persuade them to go to the described places. The main part of the blog can have rubrics (tips or description of sights and their evaluation); it can be the interchange of trip experiences with their evaluation and photos for each of those. The pragmastylistic features of the narrative are the syntactic means serving expressiveness and stimulating interest in the blog content, as well as in future trips: parallel constructions, inversion, parcellation. Lexical means create an atmosphere of real communication and trustworthiness: the use of abbreviated morphological and grammatical forms, words formed by conversion, idioms, interjections; phonetic-graphic means include graphon, emoticons, multiplication, capitalisation to accentuate certain parts of the utterance and convey emotions. The paper concludes that both linguistic and extralinguistic means reflect the key genre features and serve the author’s purpose – to get and keep the readers interested, to persuade them to act. The research material were 113 pragmastylistic language units from 15 posts of an English travel blog, where the author shares with the subscribers her impressions of travelling in Europe, Asia and Latin America. The American blogger and freelance journalist Ciara Jonson was chosen due to her blogs being ranked as one of the best travel blogs by travel editions and other bloggers.

A “Fanatic in Morality”: The “Native” Question, Revisions, and Emotional Intensity in Anthony Trollope’s South Africa (1878)

ABSTRACT This article compares the manuscript and two published editions of Anthony Trollope's understudied travelogue South Africa (1878), exploring the affective impetus driving the inconsistency and revisions in his articulations concerning the “native” question in South African colonies. It argues that Trollope's inability to fully legitimise Britain's colonisation of South Africa through conventional discourses stems from the profound impact of his immediate affective responses to the atrocity of colonialism. Trollope wrote with great haste as he travelled, in order to preserve his immediate emotions and thoughts experienced during his travels. In the travelogue, his scepticism of British colonialism ebbs and flows as he vacillates between moral scruples and conservatism during the writing and revision process. This article illuminates a neglected facet of nineteenth-century British travel writing: the travellers’ fluctuating emotions contributed to the subtle fluidity of their narratives of colonialism, complicating their complicity in perpetuating racial and colonial ideologies.

“My Fellow-Creatures”? Empathy for Slaves in 19th-Century British Travel Writing about America

“My Fellow-Creatures”? Empathy for Slaves in 19^th-Century British Travel Writing about America

The Portrayal of the Polish-Lithuanian Peasantry in the Memoir Accounts of British Travelers (1764-1795)

The article analyzes the descriptions of Polish-Lithuanian peasants found in travel literature penned by British visitors to Poland during the reign of Stanisław August Poniatowski. It aims to present the literary image of peasantry and comment on the Britons’ attitude towards the problems they faced. The authors whose works are analyzed are William Coxe (historian and tutor), John Lind (associate of a Polish king), Nathaniel Wraxall (traveler and ex-merchant), James Harris (a future diplomat), Joseph Marshall (a mysterious figure, probably a merchant) and John Williams. Villagers are generally described as miserable human beings struggling with poverty, cruelly exploited by their lords in a condition resembling slavery. The authors’ attitude is sympathetic to the difficulties of peasant lives. Britons appreciated attempts to extricate them from their plight in the belief that emancipation was ethically desirable and would render their work more productive.

Picturing the flora of China

Abstract This paper traces the provenance of some 2,400 plant paintings obtained by early British commercial travellers to Xiamen 廈門, long pre-dating the later ‘export trade’ in Chinese botanical art. Nine principal sets of paintings form five ‘assemblages’ across the British Library and Oak Spring Garden Foundation in Upperville, Virginia. Each painting, in one of two styles, depicts a single plant labelled with its Chinese name. The first style (‘boneless’) either deploys limited outlines to denote form or lacks outlines altogether, and incorporates resemblances to traditions of bencao 本草 (materia medica) illustration and huaniaohua 花鳥畫 (flower-and-bird) painting. The second uses prominent inked outlines and more firmly resembles bencao illustrations. Two merchants, James Cuninghame and Christopher Brewster, are identified as purchasers of some paintings, and their acquisitions entered the metropolitan collections of James Petiver and Sir Hans Sloane. A single Chinese actor, ‘Dr Bun-ko’, is named in an annotation on 309 ‘Bunko–Brewster Paintings’ which have newly been shown to encompass holdings at the British Library and Oak Spring.

A cross-cultural comparison of island vacation experience: empirical evidence from the Maldives

ABSTRACT This study compares the characteristics of Chinese and Western island vacation experience. Social network analysis was performed with 30 Chinese travel notes and 30 English travel notes, respectively. The results include: (1) The density and centralization of the Chinese island vacation experience network are lower than those of their Western counterparts; (2) Natural resources, tourism services, and recreational activities are the key dimensions of Chinese and Western island vacation experience, and seven common core experience elements exist; (3) The combination of “seascape-wild animals and plants-people” is preferred by both Chinese and Western tourists. Differences, however, exist between the two groups.

WILLIAM GELL'S ENCOUNTERS WITH ISLAMIC SPAIN, 1808–36

The British antiquary William Gell (1777–1836) is known for his work on ancient Greece and Rome, which he based on a lifetime of Mediterranean travel and two decades of residence in Italy. This article uses a remarkable notebook held at the British School at Rome to explore his unheralded interest in Islamic Spain (al-Andalus), which emerged from his Iberian travels of 1808–11 and took up much of his energy in the early 1830s, the final years of his life. As such, the notebook shows how engagement with other cultures might continue well beyond an initial encounter through travel. It brings together Gell's on-the-spot sketches and descriptions of the Alhambra, his copious later reading on the Emirate of Granada and evidence that he was teaching himself Arabic, offering a case study of early nineteenth-century scholarship that straddles the transition between eighteenth-century antiquarianism and Romantic, Orientalist approaches. The materiality and the contents of Gell's notebook chart the changing ways in which British travellers and writers incorporated al-Andalus into their understandings of Europe and the Mediterranean.

The Baron von Münchhausen of British Travel Writers: Edmund Spencer and his Travels in Circassia

Abstract The article is devoted to a critical analysis of the legacy of Edmund Spencer – a nineteenth century British travel writer and author of numerous books and articles on Circassia and the Caucasus. The widespread use of Spencer’s work by historians notwithstanding, until now there has been no published biography of the author, which led to a proliferation of claims about his background and the timing and circumstances of his visit to Circassia. This article contributes to the correction of this omission by presenting the results of the latest biographical research on Edmund Spencer, based on manuscript and printed primary sources. Despite doubts expressed by some historians about the existence of such a person, the article conclusively proves that Edmund Spencer was indeed a real historical personage. Furthermore, since until now no attempt has been made to evaluate the reliability of Spencer’s works on Circassia as historical sources, the article examines references to Spencer in contemporaneous manuscript sources, such as the British, French and Russian diplomatic, military and intelligence correspondence and reports, finding that available documentary evidence refutes the author’s claim of a visit to the interior of Circassia. The attitudes of Western scholars of the period and of foreign visitors to Circassia raise further serious doubts about the authenticity of Spencer’s travelogues. The article calls into question Spencer’s account of his travels in Circassia as a source of geographic, ethnographic and sociological knowledge, concluding that it was a nothing more than a fabrication.

Development of English Travel Guide for Improving Local Tourism Services in Ollon Valley Tourist Attraction, Tana Toraja

Development of English Travel Guide for Improving Local Tourism Services in Ollon Valley Tourist Attraction, Tana Toraja

Bayesian networks for inferring the relationship between individual behavior and social influence: A case study of early 20th century British travels in China

This study investigated the possibility of applying the Bayesian networks (BNs) in analyzing the relationship between individual behavior and social influence among early 20th-century British travelers in China. While historical studies have provided valuable details about social interactions, existing research using such studies has shown limitations in quantifying and analyzing complex relationships. This study attempts to address this gap by employing Bayesian networks (BNs) to construct a framework for modeling the probabilistic relationships between various factors influencing the travel patterns of British travelers in China in the early 20th century. These factors include political climate, economic considerations, and cultural interactions, which are sourced through historical studies, travel diaries, and other contemporary sources. The performance of the proposed Bayesian network model is evaluated using established statistical methods, including confusion matrices, cross-validation, and sensitivity analysis (SA). The results have shown the significance of the chosen model in analyzing the complex relationship selected analysis.

Christian European Travelers' Views on Nawab Bahawal Khan III, the Muslim Ruler of Bahawalpur State

This article delves into the unique perspective of Christian European travelers on Nawab Bahawal Khan III, offering direct insights into their views on the Muslim ruler of Bahawalpur State. Other sources fail to provide a comprehensive portrayal of Nawab Bahawal Khan III's personality. These travelers encountered the nawab at various times and documented their observations about his personality, court, habits, and way of speaking in their travel accounts. Despite the predominant motive of British travelers being missionary work during that era, they surprisingly held favorable opinions about the nawab. While these travelers did forge political connections, their underlying agenda also included the propagation of Christianity. Hence, it is intriguing to note their positive opinions about a Muslim local ruler along with his generosity and delightful hospitality.

Timescapes, subjectivity and emotions after the India–Tibet earthquake, 1950

Abstract Scholarship on historical temporality has explored what time meant to people in the past. Going further, how did historical actors’ perception of time shape their experience of events? Jean and Francis Kingdon-Ward, two British travellers, lived through a major earthquake on India and Tibet’s mountainous frontier in 1950. Their numerous published and unpublished narrative accounts showed that the earthquake severely disrupted their physical environment, inducing powerful emotions and changing their sense of the passage of time. Comparisons with other accounts by British and some Indian survivors of mid twentieth-century earthquakes in South Asia showed that others, too, felt that earthquakes disrupted their sense of linear, well-ordered time. This article develops Barbara Adam’s concept of timescapes to emphasize how a temporal subject-position is made up of feelings and thoughts. It draws on psychological research on the relationship between emotion and time-perception to reveal a temporal subjectivity that extended through and beyond a moment of extreme stress, and was closely connected to place. New insights are offered for scholarship on the histories of emotions, subjectivity and the environment, putting emotions more firmly into our understanding of historical time.

Some Passages from British Diplomat Augustus Henry Mounsey's Trip to Georgia

Georgia, because of its strategic location and importance, have always been under the special interests of the foreign visitors. One of those persons was a British diplomat and traveler Augustus Henry Mounsey (1834–1882). During his career, Augustus Henry Mounsey served as a diplomat in Portugal, Germany, Austria, and Japan.
 He visited our country in the winter of 1865-1866. He described impressions of this journey in his book “A Journey Through the Caucasus and the Interior of Persia, which was published in London in 1872. Besides this, that he traveled around almost whole Georgia, he did not give us the detailed information about cities and regions of our country.
 As it known, Augustus Henry Mounsey’s above-mentioned book is not widely studied for the researchers of the history of Georgia. That is why, we can say, that the author’s description and opinions are very valuable for the study of the history of that period of our country.

Representations of Global Civility: English Travellers in the Ottoman Empire and the South Pacific, 1636–1863 by Sascha R. Klement (review)

Representations of Global Civility: English Travellers in the Ottoman Empire and the South Pacific, 1636–1863 by Sascha R. Klement (review)

Prince Dmitry Golitsyn’s Program Speech “On Drawing” (1769): The Origin of the Text and Its Historical and Aesthetic Significance

The article is dedicated to the speech “On Drawing” by the honorary member of the Imperial Academy of Arts, Prince Dmitry Alekseevich Golitsyn (1734–1803), which he delivered in July 1769 at a solemn public meeting of the Academy. Its text was discovered in the Russian State Historical Archive in the middle of the 20th century and was long considered his original work, written first in French and then translated into Russian. The main outcome of the research conducted by the authors of this article was the discovery of the original source of this text by Golitsyn, namely the beginning of the dialogue of the same title from the French edition of the book by the English traveler and writer Daniel Webb “Recherches sur les beautésde la peinture” (1765). Since the Englishman’s book was the result of his tour to Rome, where he has met the scholar J. J. Winckelmann and the painter A. R. Mengs, an amateur art historian, Webb, retelling in his essay the thoughts of German theorists about imitation of ancient artists, unwittingly became a transmission link in the arrival of neoclassical ideas to Russia. Denis Diderot got acquainted with the French translation of Webb’s book before Golitsyn, wrote an essay about it for F. M. Grimm’s “La Correspondance littéraire” and, apparently, recommended it to the prince. However, Golitsyn did not copy word-for-word Webb’s text, but adapted it for his purpose — to compose a program speech to the high assembly of Russia’s main educational institution in the field of fine arts, which is gaining strength. Unlike Wincklemann and Webb, who appealed exclusively to the past, the Russian aristocrat, following Diderot, saw the future progress of modern art not in blind imitation of ancient masters, but in the revival of the emotional and intellectual power of ancient art through the efforts of free artists. The political conditions of the Russian Empire during the reign of Catherine II predetermined the laudatory tone of his speech in the spirit of the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV.

Megtartó hagyomány vagy a kirekesztés eszköze?

Gypsies, Roma and Travelers are often classified under the term “Roma” in Europe and under the acronym “GRT” in Great Britain. These communities and other nomadic groups, such as Scottish and English travellers, the so-called “show people” (traveling entertainers) and new travellers share many common characteristics: the importance of family and/or social networks; nomadic lifestyles, propensity for self-employment, disadvantage and the worst health outcomes in the UK. Irish Travellers are traditionally a nomadic people group in Ireland, but have a distinct identity, heritage and culture from mainstream society. The presence of Irish travellers can be traced back to 12th century Ireland. The community has been recognized as an ethnic minority in Ireland. They are not related to the Roma either in origin or in their history, but the similarity of their way of life is often a basis for the “conflation” of the two groups, and their mostly identical discrimination. Travelers provide a particularly interesting surface for examination because they do not differ markedly from the Irish majority population in appearance, so they could easily blend in to make it easier to assert themselves. However, the traditions that ensure community cohesion and identity at the same time prevent assimilation. The paper is about such a tradition that simultaneously provides identity and causes exclusion: women’s hairstyle.