travel Archives

Imperial Science, the Organic Movement and the Path to Shangri-La, 1900-1969

Imperial Science, the Organic Movement and the Path to Shangri-La, 1900-1969 investigates scientific studies undertaken in British India by Robert McCarrison and Albert Howard in the 1920s, and how this research was later adapted in Britain and the USA. It examines how imperial agendas and colonial stereotyping shaped McCarrison’s dietary laboratory experiments and Howard’s development of the Indore Composting Process. Ashok Malhotra reveals how Indian scientists and Indian Princes contributed to the research culture in the institutes that were founded by these two British scientists, and in so doing, he draws attention to figures whose contributions have previously been overlooked by scholars. Malhotra demonstrates how McCarrison’s and Howard’s research was interpreted by British and US-based organic farming advocates to advocate for agricultural methods which returned organic matter to the soil and rejected chemical fertilisers.

It discusses how organic advocates on both sides of the Atlantic deployed the Hunzas, a community in British India (later Pakistan), as an example of a ‘tribe’ whose vigour could be ascribed to their farming techniques and diets. The narrative concludes by demonstrating how US travel writers in the 1950s and 1960s represented Hunza as a Shangri-La – a paradise whose inhabitants lived prolonged lives in blissful contentment.

No Country for Travellers?

No Country for Travellers? explores the rise and nature of British travel to Spain and Portugal between 1760 and 1820, across a region that is conventionally overlooked in studies of British travel to Europe. Drawing on extensive archival and printed sources left by travellers in the period, Rosemary Sweet and Richard Ansell reveal the unheralded significance of the two countries to eighteenth-century British culture, and their attraction as destinations long before the Peninsular War and nineteenth-century romanticism. Along the way, the book’s compelling narrative reveals the realities of Iberian travel, the different itineraries that travellers followed, the place of Spanish and Portuguese cities in the British imagination, and the importance of mediators in cultural exchange, on the Iberian side as well as the British. The travellers’ memoirs reflect changing perceptions of Spain and Portugal as modernisation raised new hopes that vied with pessimism and ancient prejudice, and also the persistence of cultural stereotypes, while the counterintuitive relationship between civilian travel and armed conflict emerges through a case study of the Peninsular War. Finally, focusing on contemporary fascination with the Alhambra in Granada, the authors examine the rise of British interest in Iberia’s Islamic history, with its significance for contemporary understandings of ‘Europe’.

Antarcticness

Antarcticness joins disciplines, communication approaches and ideas to explore meanings and depictions of Antarctica. Personal and professional words in poetry and prose, plus images, present and represent Antarctica, as presumed and as imagined, alongside what is experienced around the continent and by those watching from afar. These understandings explain how the Antarctic is viewed and managed while identifying aspects which should be more prominent in policy and practice.

The authors and artists place Antarctica, and the perceptions and knowledge through Antarcticness, within inspirations and imaginations, without losing sight of the multiple interests pushing the continent’s governance as it goes through rapid political and environmental changes. Given the diversity and disparity of the influences and changes, the book’s contributions connect to provide a more coherent and encompassing perspective of how society views Antarctica, scientifically and artistically, and what the continent provides and could provide politically, culturally and environmentally.

Offering original research, art and interpretations of different experiences and explorations of Antarctica, explanations meld with narratives while academic analyses overlap with first-hand experiences of what Antarctica does and does not – could and could not – bring to the world.