Abstract The British interdiction of the slave trade in 1807 and the abolition of slavery in the British empire in 1833, and the simultaneous exponential expansion of plantation agriculture, especially sugar, generated the need for a new source of cheap labor. Indentured labor was the answer, and between 1840 and 1920 more than two million men and women signed contracts of indenture to work in the expanding plantation economies of Mauritius, the British West Indies, Guyana, and Cuba, as well as in the booming guano industry in Peru. Planters and imperial authorities found indentured laborers around the world, but the two main sources were India and China. This chapter explores indentured labor, or coolie, trade between China and Cuba. It discusses how the trade was organized; why Chinese men were open to migrating for work; how they were recruited; their experience on the voyage; and what happened to them after they arrived in Cuba.

Abstract This chapter explores the story of the Edwin Fox since it was abandoned in Shakespeare Bay in 1963. It was subsequently purchased for a nominal amount by a local heritage organization, and eventually towed to a purpose-built dry dock near the ferry terminal in Picton harbor. Initial plans to restore the vessel were abandoned and the decision was made to preserve it as it was. In 1990 it became the centerpiece of the Edwin Fox Ship and Visitor Centre and receives some 15,000 visitors each year, the vast majority of them from outside Aotearoa New Zealand. Even as a hulk, the ship continues to play a role in globalization, in this case as a modest component of one of the signature industries of contemporary globalization: tourism.

Abstract Between 1871 and 1885, some 280,000 immigrants, the vast majority from the United Kingdom, went to New Zealand. Most travelled under the audacious and controversial assisted immigration and economic development policies introduced by the flamboyant and visionary colonial politicians Julius Vogel. This chapter discusses the four voyages the Edwin Fox made carrying immigrants to New Zealand between 1873 and 1880. It examines who they were and the process of recruitment and selection; the regulations the government imposed for the immigrant voyages; key figures such as the surgeon superintendent and the matron; what the immigrants experienced on the three-to-four-month voyage; disease and death; and the subsequent lives in New Zealand of some of them. The ship also carried a vast range of consumer goods for New Zealand shops that made possible the recreation of a familiar society. One of these, a piano, is the basis for the exploration of an unusual and hidden aspect of globalization that connected the colonization of New Zealand to that of eastern Africa and beyond.

Abstract The 1850s were a time of extraordinary change on a global scale as a variety of forces reshaped the world. The East India Company, which had long held a monopoly over trade with British India, had given way to the emerging dynamics of global free trade and global migrations that would characterize the second half of the nineteenth century. But trade was not the only force driving globalization. The increasingly colonial nature of relationships between European and other powers and Indigenous societies in the mid-1800s also drove the world closer together even as imperial struggles for control of the eastern Mediterranean brought them into conflict. This chapter explores these dynamics through the story of the construction of the Edwin Fox and its maiden voyage from Calcutta to London. It also examines the Edwin Fox’s first career as a troop transport vessel for the British Army during the Crimean War.

Abstract The Prologue sets the scene and tone for the book by introducing readers to the work’s main character: the India-built British merchant vessel, the Edwin Fox. It then establishes the major themes of the work, explaining how it tells the story of globalization between the years 1850 and 1914 through the voyages of a single, work-a-day merchant vessel. It contends that a microhistorical approach to the history of globalization highlights the local and human agency at work and creates opportunities to explore the myriad complexities and the intimate and unexpected interconnections that really were the stuff of globalization. The Prologue also situates the work within the relevant historiography and provides a brief overview of the book’s structure.

Abstract The 1860s were a period of dramatic change both for the Edwin Fox and for the world. Steam-powered shipping was coming into its own as a truly globalizing force just in time to take full advantage of physical improvements to the world’s transportation infrastructure, chief among them the Suez Canal. At the same time, vital political agreements such as the Cobden–Chevalier Treaty deepened and solidified relations between Britain and its most important political and economic allies, setting the stage for the next forty years of increasing interconnectivity. This chapter explores this emerging world of steam-power of free trade by investigating the various commodities the ship carried including cotton, coffee, tea, and many others. It discusses how traditional wind-powered vessels such as the Edwin Fox had to adapt to this changing economic reality by changing their customary practices, their routes, and usual ports of call, and even their rigging.

Abstract In 1858, the Edwin Fox departed Gravesend with a shipment of 280 convicts bound for a penal colony in Western Australia. Penal colonies have a long global history stretching back into the eighteenth century. Indeed, after the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the transportation of indentured laborers, the transportation of prisoners to various penal colonies throughout the world was the third largest form of unfree migration in human history. This chapter tells the story of this global system of punitive mobility, which sought to punish perceived criminals, extract valuable labor from unwilling bodies, managed populations both in the homeland and in sites of incarnation, and propelled imperial expansion and colonization. This chapter explores the background of the convicts onboard the Edwin Fox and traces their experiences after arriving in Western Australia. It situates these penal colonies within the story of nineteenth century globalization. It argues that remote colonies like Western Australia turned to penal colonialism as a strategy for integrating itself into global networks of trade, knowledge, and governance and that the nineteenth century carceral state reinforced and advanced the larger project of settler colonialism throughout the antipodes, with dire consequences for Indigenous populations there.

Abstract It began as a small, slow, and unadorned sailing vessel—in a word, ordinary. Later, it was a weary workhorse in the age of steam. But the story of the Edwin Fox reveals how an everyday merchant ship drew together a changing world and its people in an extraordinary age of rising empires, sweeping economic transformation, and social change. This fascinating work of global history offers a vividly detailed and engaging narrative of globalization writ small, viewed from the decks and holds of a single vessel. The Edwin Fox connected the lives and histories of millions, though most never even saw it. Built in Calcutta in 1853, the Edwin Fox was chartered by the British navy as a troop transport during the Crimean War. In the following decades, it was sold, recommissioned, and refitted by an increasingly far-flung constellation of militaries and merchants. It sailed to exotic ports carrying luxury goods, mundane wares, and all kinds of people: not just soldiers and officials but indentured laborers brought from China to Cuba, convicts and settlers being transported from the British Empire to western Australia and New Zealand—with dire consequences for local Indigenous peoples—and others. But the power of this story rests in the everyday ways people, nations, economies, and ideas were knitted together in this foundational era of our modern world.

This article explains how the melding of microhistory and maritime history through the career of the Edwin Fox, an unexceptional British sailing ship that was active between 1853 and 1905, provides an innovative approach to understanding some of the myriad complexities that characterized the globalization of the period 1850 to 1914, and thus the complex and contradictory inner workings of staggering and unprecedented change on a global scale. Such an approach makes it possible to write a history of globalization on a human scale, highlighting local conditions and human agency at work, as well as decentring the Atlantic world. The article uses the story of the pianos that the ship carried from Great Britain to New Zealand in 1881 as an example of the intimate, unexpected, and otherwise invisible interconnections of globalization that this approach can reveal.

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This article considers the event of a single year, 1873, to explain how President Ulysses S. Grant’s federal Indian policy led to the Indian wars of the late nineteenth century. Some historians have argued that Grant’s so-called Peace Policy failed due to systemic mismanagement and corruption; others have suggested it was due to administrative incompetence or ambivalence, while still others have accused the administration of cynicism in its approach to Indigenous affairs. This article argues that the Peace Policy reflected the unresolved tensions inherent in the era’s zeitgeist and that it failed to usher in a lasting peace because it did not account for the enmeshed reality of life in the American West where the boundaries and borders between Indian reservations and settler communities were entangled to say the least. The article begins with a detailed consideration of the Grant administration’s Indian policy as articulated by Francis Amasa Walker in the winter of 1872–73. Largely overlooked by historians of post–Civil War Indian policy, Walker was an influential thinker in his day whose policy recommendations emphasized the moral necessity of proprietary individualism and racial segregation on isolated reservations. The article then turns to the unfolding drama of the Modoc War (1872–73) to explore why the federal government abandoned the project of peacefully incorporating Indigenous people into the body politic, leading to a harsher and more militant approach to Indian affairs. By focusing on the nexus of ideas and events as they played out at this critical historical juncture, this article argues that the Modoc War was the precipitating event that marked the end of Grant’s so-called Peace Policy and the resumption of the Indian wars in the decades following the Civil War.