Alexander Heritage Talk: The Edwin Fox

Alexander Heritage Talk for April:
The Edwin Fox: How an Ordinary Sailing Ship Connected the World in the Age of Globalization 1850-1914.
With Emeritus Professor Adrian Shubert and Associate Professor Boyd Cothran. York University, Canada.

The team at the Alexander Heritage and Research Library is very excited to present a talk given by visiting Canadian historians Adrian Shubert and Boyd Cothran from York University in Toronto. The pair will be talking about their new book The Edwin Fox and how studying it has revealed some surprising Whanganui connections...

The Edwin Fox began as small and slow sailing vessel. Yet its story reveals how an everyday merchant ship drew together a changing world and its people in an extraordinary age of rising empires, sweeping economic transformation, and social change. The Edwin Fox connected the lives and histories of millions, though most never even saw it. Built in Calcutta in 1853, it was chartered by the British navy as a troop transport during the Crimean War. In the following decades, it was sold, recommissioned, and refitted by an increasingly far-flung constellation of militaries and merchants. It sailed to exotic ports carrying luxury goods, mundane wares, and all kinds of people: not just soldiers and officials but indentured labourers brought from China to Cuba, convicts and settlers being transported from the British Empire to western Australia and New Zealand—with dire consequences for local Indigenous peoples—and others.