Sophie Cairns

This project proposes an analysis of British travel accounts from the late eighteenth to mid nineteenth century concerning three eventual sites of British imperial occupation: the Indian-Himalaya, Hudson’s Bay Company Territory in North America, and West Africa. My project will question how the imperial gaze manifests and evolves in travel narratives through an examination of their engagements with imperial discourse, knowledge gathering, representations of indigenous peoples, and the construction of landscapes through the language and style of the Romantic picturesque and sublime. This project will highlight and further understanding of the role that practises of gathering and sharing knowledge played in bringing about the occupation and exploitation of the regions, and reveal the ways in which travel narratives worked to both promote, and undermine, the British imperial project in an age of rapid global imperial expansion.