A New Atlas of the British Empire

Digitization makes it possible, for the first time, to calculate statistically how much of parliament’s time was spent on each region, nation, and city around the world, allowing the scholar to study the pulse of interest that typified the management of parliamentary affairs. The propsed paper will share new work from a research project that began with extracting from the titles of nineteenth-century parliamentary debates the counts of words in a controlled vocabulary of nation-names, city-names, major issues and organs of British government to produce a statistical overview. Preliminary results demonstrate a steep downward trend in how much time was allocated to discussions of empire relative to other subjects, over the course of the century. The article then characterizes the particular words or phrases most likely to be used in parliamentary speech to describe issues pertaining to three major regions of nineteenth-century empire: Africa, the Pacific, and India. Finally, the paper highlights the issues of scale, and asks about the places that perennially occupied the parliamentary imagination versus places that occupied political discourse for a single decade, year, month, or day.

The results of this process are presented with a series of synoptic diagrams that dramatize the power of “distant reading” to simplify and distill major trends in imperial history from the viewpoint of parliamentary speech. The results are critically tested against existing historiography, highlighting how the new atlas of empire underscores relatively recent discoveries about the role of the prison in empire, as well as underscoring new directions for research. On a broader methodological level, the paper raises questions about how to perform a "distant reading" of states and empires, and the kind of comparative issues that may be highlighted by digital comparisons.