Connecting Empire: A Case of British Imperial Careering in the Age of Revolution

This paper traces a biographical trajectory of one agent of British imperial expansion.  It explores sources of personal experience, commitment, and ideology, operating at the intersection of the geographical and biographical. William Fullarton’s life as a Scottish careerist, MP, military commander in India, colonial reformer, agricultural improver, and man of letters produced a specific conception of ruling-class authority. His career was global in reach and ambition; his personal history reproduces in condensed form a complicated matrix of power moving between metropolitan and colonial sites. Fullarton’s career exemplifies the interactions, the flows across space and time, reshaping individual lives across a global field – networked space structured in terms of a geographic hierarchy.  In 1802 he was appointed to head the three-man commission to administer the newly ceded island of Trinidad along with a mandate to devise the most promising means of developing the colony resources.  Yet his concept of the responsibilities of empire and the basis of authority reached back to an earlier moment of imperial crisis and his experience in India twenty years earlier.  In stressing the interplay between the geographical and biographical, the fluid interactions between place and subjectivity, my approach follows that of historians and geographers who have rejuvenated the study of imperial “careering.” In fact, Fullarton pursued a number of “careers”; his direct involvement as an agent of empire was intermittent.  Nonetheless, for a man who saw himself as an improver of the world, different imperial and domestic sites presented a multitude of possibilities, providing testing grounds for technologies of knowledge and rule, as well as for projections and constructions of the self.