By Dr Ellen Smith, Senior Research Associate, Department of History

Continuing our South Asian Heritage Month focus, Dr Ellen Smith tells us about her project which explores how the personal correspondence of British families in India shaped public opinion of empire during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The project received an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship and runs until October 2025.

On 8^th September 1857, The Times reported on the unfolding events of the ‘mutinies’ in India that had erupted in May. Correspondence from British fugitives in places like Delhi and Sealkote, were sent into the newspaper, which it reprinted. One of these letters came from Wilhelmina Murray, affectionately known as ‘Minnie’, the wife of an officer in the Indian Army in which she provides first-hand accounts of the uprising of one of the ‘native’ contingents in Gwalior, located in one of India’s Princely States, and her escape to a fort at Agra.

Minnie’s letters were highly revealing, and they feature in the book I am currently writing on ‘Imperial Letters’. The book focusses on the letters that British families were writing and sending across the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the embodied experiences of writing letters in the far-flung spaces of empire at this time. The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and South West Doctoral Training Partnership (SWDTP) have generously sponsored me to write this book as part of a one-year postdoctoral research fellowship at Bristol. The book draws on letters from men and women like Minnie who lived and worked on the Indian Subcontinent, separated for years from family and friends in the British metropole.

Letters, I show in the book, were not just a means for individuals to navigate the emotional challenges of these separations and absences, but often these letters contributed to the political, economic, and cultural work of the imperial endeavour itself. Minnie’s letters, for instance, spread news and intelligence, reaching broader readerships through publication in newspapers and other platforms. The contents of the letters fed the ideological machinations of the empire, which had recently proved itself to be occupying an exceptionally fragile position: its subjects had mobilised in resistance against British authority and its cultural interference in local customs and religion. I write more about Minnie’s letters in my recent article for the Journal of British Studies, but in the book I will expand on Minnie’s role in creating narratives about the excessive violence of Indian men, or the valour of British officers.

This summer, I have been lucky enough to have an undergraduate research intern, Sam Hennessy, join the project. He will be helping me expand my investigation into recently widowed women in India, and how their letters explored the contours of imperial masculinity and broader British identity. Sam is in his second year of university at Bristol, studying History. He will be transcribing letters, locating and reading published volumes of letters and hopefully even researching letter collections at archives like the India Office Records and Private Papers at the British Library. Sam offers his thoughts about the project:

“I am so privileged to be able to work on a project such as this. I am interested in public memory, and how several concurrent narratives entangle to form a predominant, collective memory, both historical and contemporary. What really piqued my excitement in this project was how impactful letters, especially attached with heavy emotions such as those surrounding death and mourning, fed into wider social sentiments regarding imperial rule. With newspapers like The Times using these letters as means of coverage, they hint at an overall feeling of discomfort with British imperialism, a sense of vulnerable anxiety.

Much too often, women are left out of history, their role and social impact under-represented. When imperial service carried with it the real possibility of premature death, how did the wives of men in service to the Empire deal with this emotional stress? And how did they react, when their worst fears became reality? How did all these emotions feed into social anxieties towards empire and women, particularly when the monarch at the time (Queen Victoria) was seen as an archetypal widow? These are some of the many questions I’m very much eager and excited to explore in this project.”

Interested in getting involved as well? Have you recently found or inherited letters written by ancestors who went out to India in the 1800s or 1900s? Please get in touch with me if you would be willing to share your family histories or letters, as part of this research project. I’m always keen to hear these stories!

Dr Ellen Smith is an ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Humanities. She is interested in cultures of communication in the British Empire, particularly colonial South Asia, as well as the historical construction of gender, and increasingly, the politics of colonial family history and archiving. She can be contacted at ellen_c_smith@hotmail.com and you can follow her on Bluesky and Linkedin.

By Dr Amy Edwards, Senior Lecturer in the Department of History, School of Humanities

Dr Amy Edwards shares her experience of working with PolicyBristol to turn her historical research on women’s self-employment into clear recommendations for Parliamentary Select Committees. Amy first introduced us to her AHRC project, ‘The Secret of My Success’: Women and Self-Employment in Britain (1970-2000), back in March 2024, and it’s wonderful to see how the project is influencing the decisions of policymakers today.

Over the past 18 months I have been running an AHRC-funded project which focuses on the recent history of women’s self-employment. The aim of the project is to understand the motivations and lived experiences of women who worked for themselves in the closing decades of the twentieth century.

A lot of the work I’ve done for this project has involved familiar historical work. I travelled to archives to consult the records of companies like Avon Cosmetics, who hired thousands of women to work as independent sales representatives. I spent hours sifting through digitized newspapers, looking for reports featuring women entrepreneurs. I also conducted oral histories with women who worked for themselves during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, listening to stories about lives shaped by family obligation, friendship, house moves, illnesses, career breaks, and economic upheaval.

Something less familiar, has been the experience of translating my historical findings for non-academic audiences – or more specifically, for policymakers. A central aim of the project is to explore the opportunities, barriers, and conditions that affected self-employed women in the past, but to also think about what this can tell us about women’s working lives in the present. As a contemporary historian, I’m inherently interested in solving the puzzle of how we got to where we are today.

To this end, I have recently been working with PolicyBristol, a team based at the university who support academics in using their research to shape policy at local, national, and international levels. With their help, I have been turning my research into a series of Parliamentary Select Committee evidence submissions. Select Committees form part of the daily work of parliamentarians: they launch inquiries into current issues, and gather evidence from members of the public, academics, practitioners, businesses, think tanks, and activists. Committees then report their findings to parliament, who have 60 days to respond. In other words, submitting research to a relevant inquiry is a great way to inform policy development in key areas such as the economy, education, environment, and culture.

‘A central aim of the project is to explore the opportunities, barriers, and conditions that affected self-employed women in the past, but to also think about what this can tell us about women’s working lives in the present.‘

For this project, I identified two active inquiries that were relevant to the research I had been conducting: one for the House of Commons Women and Equalities Select Committee, and one for the House of Lords Home-Based Working Select Committee. I quickly learnt the importance of directly responding to the specific questions that each Committee set out as part of its call for evidence. Submissions also need to be concise, with key findings highlighted at the top: working parliamentarians don’t have hours of free time to read an entire thesis on a topic. They do, however, want specific recommendations – that is, evidence-based suggestions for how a particular issue might be addressed. This requires a knowledge not only of your own research area, but also of the current policy-landscape. It’s important to ask yourself what is the need/ problem that government is trying to address? What policies already exist in this area? Have other stakeholders – advocacy groups, think tanks, charities etc. – already had their say, and if so, what were their recommendations? And ultimately, for a historian, the question is: what can a historical perspective add here? What does placing this issue into a longer context do to change our understanding of it (and how it might be tackled today)?

This was a really different way of writing, or even thinking about, a historical research project. Others have written much more insightfully than I can here, about the benefits and challenges of using historical knowledge to solve present-day problems (something that John Tosh labelled Applied History). Crossing the bridge between academia and policy is tricky work. But it is also rewarding. I found translating my ideas about the relationship between emotions, social relations, time, space, and work into practical, applicable policy recommendations incredibly useful. It pushed me towards really thinking about historical subjects as people living through the historical phenomena I usually try to analyse. I had to consider what might have changed their lives had politicians at the time paid more mind to their experiences.

Most of all it reminded me of one of my favourite quotes from researcher and translator Graham Burchell, when he discussed his ‘experience of not being a citizen of the community or republic of thought and action in which one nevertheless is unavoidably implicated or involved’ – that is, of feeling out of place in society. In such a situation, Burchell reminds us how important it is to reveal ‘the (often quite recent) inventedness of our world’. I think that history is a great tool for doing just that: it shows us that how we organise society, politics, and the economy is neither inevitable nor enduring. As such, using our research to remind those in power that we need more than sheer presentism to tackle the plurality of issues we face today, is work worth doing.

Dr Amy Edwards is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History whose research focuses on cultures of capitalism, investment and enterprise in twentieth and twenty-first century Britain. To find out more about Amy’s research, her first book Are We Rich Yet?, or ‘The Secret of My Success’ project, please contact amy.edwards@bristol.ac.uk. You can also stay up to date through the project’s Bluesky and Instagram accounts.

By Dr Keith Mc Loughlin, Department of History, School of Humanities

Almost twenty-two years after Concorde completed its final commercial flight to Bristol in 2003, a US-made prototype jet, Boom Supersonic’s XB-1, has successfully broken the sound barrier. As a historian of industry, politics and technology in Britain and the wider world, Dr Keith Mc Loughlin considers the significance of the achievement, the challenges facing supersonic transport and the historical lessons to be learnt if it is to succeed.

Last month, a new chapter in the history of transport might have begun. Over the Mojave Desert in California, a small test plane, the XB-1, broke the sound barrier. The company who created the aircraft – Boom Supersonic – seeks to revolutionise civil aviation by halving flight times. If they succeed, you could well see a Boom Supersonic jet on the airport tarmac as you board your considerably slower subsonic jet. But if it fails, billions of dollars would have been wasted and a harsh reality of commercial aviation would have been confirmed – that when it comes down to it, the cheaper the better.

If Boom Supersonic is to be successful, something very significant needs to happen, something largely beyond its control: the business culture of online meetings will need to revert to an older corporate ethos of in-person interactions. Boom Supersonic has made a bold claim to make supersonic flight affordable to the masses. Its in-production passenger jet, the Overture, will seat 80 paying passengers at most, with each set to command prices considerably higher than equivalent subsonic fares offered by its competition. Nonetheless, there is evidence to suggest that supersonic transport is worth a roll of the dice. Some prominent airlines have advanced orders, including American Airlines. Despite the significant savings offered by online interactions during the pandemic, industry heavyweights have turned away from remote working and reinstated office culture. Many thought that the pandemic had revolutionised the workplace; but such conclusions have been exposed as misplaced, with ‘business as usual’ preferred over sterile, impersonal online meetings. In the current, strained economic environment, meeting in person has assumed a currency of its own.

For all its apparent futurism, Boom Supersonic is, of course, not the first venture into commercial supersonic flight and has much to learn from history if it is to succeed. In the heady era of early 1960s techno-politics, President John F. Kennedy pledged not only to put mankind on the Moon but also to begin funding a supersonic passenger aircraft that could fly at speeds beyond Mach 3 – that is 2,301 mph. But the project did not venture far beyond a wooden mock-up as the giant Boeing SST was cut off at the knees by a sceptical Congress. The Soviet Union also had a go at supersonic flight for the masses; while its Tupolev got off the ground, it fatally crashed at the Paris Air Show in 1973 and was retired as a commercial and technological failure.

President John F. Kennedy announces plans for a new supersonic civilian aviation programme at the U.S. Air Force Academy graduations in Colorado Springs, Colorado. 5 June 1963.

If there is an obvious historical precedent, it is Concorde, the supersonic aircraft designed, built and operated by the United Kingdom and France. Conceived in the early 1960s to rival the big Cold War powers, Concorde was a political machine from its inception, a machine to give the Europeans a world lead in an emerging technology. The engineering project was second in scale only to the American space programme. Employing thousands of workers in Britain and France – not least in Bristol where it was partly assembled – Concorde hurtled its fare-paying passengers at over twice the speed of sound. It remains a feat of outstanding technological cooperation barely a generation after the invention of the jet engine in the 1940s. It is a design icon and, in Bristol, among other places, a heritage site.

In their designs and marketing to the higher end of the corporate market, Boom Supersonic have heeded the historical legacy of Concorde. But we should not make too many historical comparisons; as Mark Twain said, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. For all the physical similarities, Boom Supersonic is avowedly targeting an elite social group; it is an aircraft built for capitalists, for capitalists. By contrast to Concorde, Boom has availed of automation and AI which means its ‘super factory’ in North Carolina can function with the minimum of human involvement. This is a far cry from the analogue age of the 1960s and 1970s, in which Concorde was designed with pencils and slide rules and built with rivets and welding irons by thousands of workers. In its early incarnation, advocates of Concorde boasted with an optimism very much in the spirit of techno-boosterism of the ‘white heat’ of the scientific revolution. They spoke of ‘hundreds’ of Concordes, and by the early 1970s there were scores of tentative purchases from airlines around the world.

But the seismic oil crisis of 1973 – and the economic shock thereafter – put paid to Concorde as the governments in London and Paris had to absorb not only all the research and development costs, but the operating cost as well. For all its glamour, Concorde struggled to return a profit until it was retired in 2003, at which point it was evidently clear that slower, but cheaper, mass-produced subsonic flight, such as the Boeing 747, had thoroughly ‘democratised’ air transport.

If Boom Supersonic succeeds, it will have done so by focusing on an elite clientele; if it is to lose, it will be at the cost of elite investors. Even though the American government is taking more interest in the company by applying its technology to military aircraft, it remains largely in the domain of the private sector. In this respect, it is again much different to state-supported Concorde, who constantly contended with the claim that it was a waste of taxpayers’ money. It is always difficult to predict the future, not least when it comes to technology. While many thought that supersonic flight was consigned to history when Concorde had its last flight to Bristol in November 2003, Boom Supersonic has shown that commercial flight faster than the speed of sound is still a commercial possibility. But it will be so only for the select few, and only if corporate culture returns to a pre-pandemic setting of ‘in person’ interactions. In this sense, Boom Supersonic looks ahead to the future, but with the weight of historical experience bearing down.

Dr Keith Mc Loughlin is a Lecturer in the Department of History. He is interested in the history of technology and currently researching the history of Concorde and its impact on Bristol. To find out more about Keith’s research and how to get involved, please contact keith.mcloughlin@bristol.ac.uk.