Conquerors of Time, by Trevor Fishlock

How Victorian technology shrank the globe

"The horse is a gentleman but the camel is a boor". So wrote a Victorian transport officer, comparing his baggage animals on the North-west Frontier. However, the camel was a "living automaton" beside the elephant, which needed mollycoddling with chapatis, rice, sugar and two bottles of rum each evening. Oxen were uncouth. The donkey was sturdier, as was the faster mule, whose legendary stubbornness stemmed from ill-treatment.

"The horse is a gentleman but the camel is a boor". So wrote a Victorian transport officer, comparing his baggage animals on the North-west Frontier. However, the camel was a "living automaton" beside the elephant, which needed mollycoddling with chapatis, rice, sugar and two bottles of rum each evening. Oxen were uncouth. The donkey was sturdier, as was the faster mule, whose legendary stubbornness stemmed from ill-treatment.

Here was an account that would not have surprised Hannibal, Genghis Khan or Napoleon, all limited by the pace of their beasts of burden. But the early 19th century saw the beginnings of a revolution in mobility. It resulted in an astonishing shrinkage in space and time, and an expansion of ideas and endeavour.

This is the subject of Trevor Fishlock's enjoyable book, which ranges all over the world. He has an excellent eye for detail, whether describing the sinister panopticon at the British penal colony in the Andaman Islands, or the subversive carvings on Bombay's High Court - wolves in lawyers' gowns and a monkey robed as a judge.

Fishlock begins with the copper-bottoming of the Royal Navy in the 1780s, which made ships faster as well protecting them. Sailing ships, he points out, competed with steamers until the 1880s. They were cheaper, and technical improvements enabled them to navigate windy waters. Similarly, the swift, time-tabled coach, which anticipated the railway, lasted until the coming of the motor-car.

Fishlock charts the course of pioneers from Captain Cook to Thomas Cook. He examines the diaspora of plants and seeds from the days of "his botanic majesty" Sir Joseph Banks. He charts the work of surveyors such as George Everest, whose theodolite became an object of worship in India. He reveals how photographers depicted the Empire with the "pencil of nature". He shows how the earth was "belted with electric current, palpitating with human thoughts and emotions". Most importantly, he tracks the locomotive from Australia to India, from Canada to Kenya.

And here one has to part company with him. For his account of building the permanent way illustrates the fundamental weakness of his book. It covers familiar territory, and offers picturesque views to the exclusion of analytical opinions. There is a colourful description of Bombay's palatial Victoria Terminus; but nothing about more typical stations, such as Lahore, which were built like fortresses. This was because the essential purpose of Indian railways, ignored in Fishlock's vivid story, was to act as British lines of defence.

Fishlock never refers to the historian JR Seeley, who in 1881 advanced the influential thesis that the Empire could expand and survive thanks to modern technology. Steam and electricity could "realise the old utopia of a Greater Britain". So this is a historical travelogue that presents the past in simple Technicolor tones. Still, Fishlock's wide screen sparkles with fun and entertainment.

The reviewer's book 'The Dark Valley' is published by Pimlico