“Thence to the River Plate”: steamship mobilities in the South Atlantic, 1842-1869

This article engages theories of mobility to examine the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company’s 1851 expansion into South America. Through a focus on cooperative strategies and trans-oceanic connections, the article also considers the interplay between Atlantic and wider world shipping networks. The first part of the paper compares the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company’s (RMSPC’s) South American branch to the more established West Indies route, and probes the significance of the Company’s expansion into the South Atlantic in light of the RMSPC’s perceived national and imperial role. The second part of the paper turns to the RMSPC’s cooperative strategies and connections between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. Considered as a case study, the RMSPC indicates that the boundaries of British imperial influence incorporated a degree of flexibility during this period, pointing to a need to revise rigid conceptualisations of empire. An argument is also made for the continuing relevance of the Atlantic as a spatial unit during this era, despite the increasingly global connections of the nineteenth-century world.