Aidan Forth
Aidan Forth (PhD, Stanford) is an Associate Professor of history at MacEwan University, Canada. His teaching and research explore European empires as venues of violence and warfare, humanitarian intervention and the rich cross-fertilization of cultures, identities and ideas that have shaped the modern world. His prize-winning first book Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876-1903 (University of California Press, 2017) reveals a global but hitherto unexplored network of refugee and concentration camps established by Britain in the late nineteenth century. Based on archival research on four different continents, Barbed-Wire Imperialism pioneered an interdisciplinary, comparative and transnational approach to trace a genealogy of the camp as an institution deeply embedded in the politics and culture of the Euro-American world. Globalizing these interests, Dr. Forth’s second book, Camps: A Global History of Mass Confinement (University of Toronto Press, 2024), traces the history of camps and other enclosures from slave plantations, native reservations and penal colonies in the nineteenth century to Uyghur concentration camps in China, filtration camps in occupied Ukraine and refugee camps across the global south today. Along the way, Dr. Forth places the infamous camps of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union within larger global narratives while highlighting lesser-known episodes of encampment in colonial and postcolonial regimes.
Dr. Forth is now embarking on a new book-length project titled Empires in Motion: Transport, Technology, and Global Connectivity, 1815-1914, which examines the technologies and ideologies of migration and cross-cultural interaction as they developed globally in the long nineteenth century. Funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant, along with funding from the Royal Historical Society, the Huntington Library (Los Angeles), and the Newberry Library (Chicago), Empires in Motion explores how technology both connected and disconnected travelers in an age of globalization.
MacEwan University
Session
The nineteenth century was a period of rapid acceleration, globalization, and technological change. In particular, steamships, canals, and railways “opened” new areas of imperial interest and rule, transforming global geographies. Drawing on travel narratives, letters, diaries, and official correspondence, this paper examines how western officials, soldiers, and tourists—both men and women—experienced travel through Egypt, a critical fulcrum of global connectivity, between the 1820s, with the emergence of the first overland routes between Europe and Asia, and the 1870s.
Even before the epochal changes inaugurated by the Suez Canal (1869), new infrastructure such as the Maḥmūdiyya Canal (1820); desert rest stations for relays of horse-drawn caravans (1837); and, crucially, the Alexandria–Suez railway (1858), displaced earlier modes of travel like Nile feluccas and desert camel treks along established Hadj pilgrim routes. In doing so, these infrastructural interventions physically altered the terrain and transformed the experience of travel through foreign landscapes, reconfiguring relations between European travelers and local Egyptian communities. New technologies facilitated global mobility and fostered cosmopolitan identities, while simultaneously narrowing the terms of cross-cultural contact by reducing reliance on local knowledge, expertise, and native intermediaries. While forging unprecedented global connections, Western modes of transport often disembedded travelers from local social and cultural milieus. And as Europeans traversed Egypt with greater speed and security, they increasingly articulated hardened racial and xenophobic worldviews.
At a moment when borders are hardening, and international cooperation under an America-led rules-based order appears increasingly fragile, this paper turns to an earlier era of global connectivity under the banner of Pax Britannica, assessing both the opportunities it enabled and the imperial violence, racism, and xenophobia it sustained.