Abstract
In May 1881, Boyd Cothran and Adrian Shubert write towards the end of their highly readable global history, as the eponymous Edwin Fox approached the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand, a local warehouse ‘proudly announced that it was bringing the community's “first shipment” of John Brinsmead and Sons’ prize medal pianos, an “unrivalled instrument” designed specifically for the “extreme climate” of the colonies’ (179). The newspaper announcement offers Cothran and Shubert the chance to sketch a virtuosic mini-history of the piano in the nineteenth-century world: from its symbolic power among European or North American colonial elites to the supply chains and blood-steeped labour required to transport the keyboard's pristine ivory; from the mass slaughter of African elephants whose tusks supplied that ivory to the advance of the tsetse fly – the biological vector for sleeping sickness – as the parasite's woodland breeding grounds expanded inversely to the elephants’ elimination. The Edwin Fox, the authors offer as a conclusion to this four-page section, ‘connected the Victorian parlor to the African savanna—and thereby linked the colonialization of Aotearoa New Zealand to that of eastern Africa and beyond’ (183).
This potted history of the piano is but one of scores of bite-sized essays that enrich Cochran and Shubert's text within the six broad chapters of their narrative. Each chapter takes a different site and episode in the ship's life, chronologically ordered, to explore one thematic aspect of globalization within the period 1850–1914 – although each then branches off into ever-expanding sub-themes. The main topics range from indentured labour (chapter 2), convict transportation (chapter 3) and colony-bound emigration (chapter 5) to the expansion of transoceanic trade and maritime freight (chapters 1 and 4), and the introduction of transformative new technologies (chapter 6). Perhaps counter-intuitively, the technology in question here is refrigeration – the Edwin Fox's last years were spent as a stationary storage unit for frozen lamb in various New Zealand ports, thus adding a twist of stasis to a story predominantly concerned with long-distance movement – but the technological transformation that hangs over each chapter like an encroaching fog was the emergence of steam-powered shipping. Indeed, what makes the Edwin Fox's surprisingly long-lived career of particular interest to maritime and global historians was its status as the ‘ordinary sailing ship’ of the book's subtitle. This Burmese teak-constructed ship, 150 feet between perpendiculars, was, to borrow a few of the authors’ adjectives, ‘workaday’ (2), ‘old-fashioned’ (13), ‘humble’ (212); it was ‘a small, unadorned slowpoke in the heyday of the age of sail and a weary workhorse in the age of steam’ (3); and yet it was also ‘truly a vessel of globalization’ (12).
Thus, Cochran and Shubert implicitly engage with arguments in David Edgerton's The Shock of the Old (surprisingly overlooked in the bibliography), especially in their welcome focus less on innovation and novelty than on everyday globalization and its oft-deleterious environmental consequences. 1 In their empirical range and conjuring of a multi-faceted world through the journeys of a single vessel, their approach is reminiscent of Robert Harms's The Diligent; 2 and in their breadth of reading and desire to elucidate the nineteenth century also as ‘a story for our times’ (9), Cochran and Shubert follow Jürgen Osterhammel's monumental The Transformation of the World. 3 I can imagine The Edwin Fox appealing to a wide, non-specialist readership, and to all historians interested in the challenges of girding together maritime and global histories.
One of those challenges, indeed, concerns narrative structure. Unlike Harms or other historians who have written single-ship monographs, Cochran and Shubert do not have a centrepiece source at their disposal – be that an annotated logbook or a diary or a post-landfall court case. Their book's deft structure is thus born partly of necessity. Where a source relating to the Edwin Fox survives, they extract every possible meaning from it – such that a newspaper announcement about onboard pianos leads to a thought-provoking consideration of environmental degradation in eastern Africa. Where the British colonial bureaucracy recorded the name of a crew member, a convict, or a New Zealand-bound emigrant, the authors implicitly engage in what Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni called ‘the name and the game 4 – following the nominative thread to spool dozens of mini-biographies of the men and women whose nineteenth-century lives happened to intersect with the Edwin Fox. These biographies are full of wonderful detail for the reader or teacher – although my personal preference, in imagining how to teach the book, would have been for slightly more discussion of the authors’ sleuthing skills. For example, it is clear from the book's endnotes that in addition to prodigious archival work, Cochran and Shubert also used many digitized sources such as the online Old Bailey; presumably, keyword searches in newspaper databases were also central to their methodology – as is hinted in their mention of obituaries as a source for reconstructing the ship's diverse passengers (209).
A few such methodological reflections would have been welcome in helping the reader assess some of the narrative techniques the authors employ. For in addition to the evidence of the Edwin Fox that survives, Cochran and Shubert are also confronted by archival absence: thus, slipped into the chapter entitled ‘Coolies’ is an acknowledgement that when the ship transported 309 Chinese indentured labourers from Swatow (Shantou) to Havana in 1858 (a number reduced by onboard death to 269 by the journey's conclusion), ‘There are no records to tell us what the voyage was like’ (62). This low-key admission is endearingly modest in the sense that Cochran and Shubert never show off the strategies by which they construct an excellent chapter on the horrors of the so-called coolie trade. They do so by contextualization, such that the c. 1860 lithograph of Havana (Figure 2.1, which also appears on the book's cover) offers a tangible sense of the port's sights and sounds as the Edwin Fox docked; they do so by apposite comparison with other, better documented journeys from the period, and in these parallel sources they are equally attentive to silence (as in one ship-surgeon's account, which does not mention the common phenomenon of ‘coolie’ suicide); and they do so by judicious use of adverbs such as presumably or doubtless, and of the conditional tense as an imaginative device for what particular actors would have seen.
I admire these strategies, but I also find them somewhat problematic, for their modesty also overlooks the question of why particular routes in the Edwin Fox's history generated more sources than others – and what this says about the archival legacies of the ‘age of globalization’ in both paper and digital form. One consequence is that, despite the authors’ best efforts to document the ‘coolie’ experience alongside the better recorded convict and emigrant voyages, the reader ends up with a more nuanced understanding of individual contingency in the lives of the Edwin Fox's convict/emigrant passengers (or, indeed, the ship's crew) than in the lives of indentured labourers. That the former were overwhelmingly from Britain and the latter from China raises the related problem of whose world was connected by this ordinary sailing ship, and how the narrative focus on a single vessel might counter-intuitively limit – rather than expand – the reader's understanding of globalization and its actors. In their chapter on Western Australian-bound convicts, moreover, Cochran and Shubert commendably foreground the history of the Nyoongar people, whose Country was invaded to become Swan River, Perth and Fremantle, but they do not employ the conditional tense as a narrative strategy to reconstruct Aboriginal First Nations histories beyond an acknowledgement that Western Australia's ‘rapid expansion, fueled by the influx of convicts, exacted a terrible toll on the Nyoongar people, who had called this land home for millennia’ (98). Perhaps they felt they lacked the appropriate narrative or linguistic skills to do so, but all the more reason, then, for a brief discussion of methodological and narrative choices – the better to help the reader understand the limitations of the ship as a storytelling device, alongside its undoubted value in elucidating quotidian processes of globalization from port to parlour to savanna.