Expanding the Webs of the Metropolitan/Colony Binary: The London Regent Street Polytechnic and Its “Poly Boy” Networks, 1880–1914

When Charlie Finger left London for Chile in 1890, joining a ship’s crew headed for Valparaiso, he left without a clear plan for what he wanted to do with his life.  But, he did know that wherever he might land (he jumped ship), he would likely find someone to help him secure work or assist him on his journey to new destinations.  This assurance derived from his membership at the Regent Street Polytechnic. An educational and social institution for London’s wage-earning youth, many reportedly from the “submerged tenth,” the Polytechnic trained its working-and-lower-middle-class students to exercise imperial power and deliberately fostered an institutional ethos and identity that encouraged thousands to occupy the British world as a right, as a duty, and as an opportunity to globalize the Polytechnic’s civilizing mission. Indeed, key to the perceived success of the Polytechnic’s civilizing mission were its networks of social and economic relations that sustained satisfying connections between “Poly boys” at home and abroad. Finger could therefore count on meeting alumni in his travels, many of whom formed clusters dubbed “Poly colonies” in diverse locations, from Singapore to the Klondike.  As such, “Poly” networks provide an ideal vehicle for expanding the colony/metropolitan binary.  In refuting the contention that “ordinary Britons” were “indifferent” to empire, scholars of the “new imperial history” have emphasized the impact of the British Empire on the metropole.  The Polytechnic, however, allows us to examine the potential of networks to reshape practices and beliefs at multiple sites simultaneously.  Through an analysis of the Polytechnic Magazine, private letters, and diaries, this paper will explore the traffic of ideas and practices across localized clusters and with the metropole.  As this analysis will demonstrate, “Poly boys,” such as Charlie Finger, were anything but “indifferent” to the webs of empire.