All studies of empire confront the gap between image and reality, between the propagandist mask and the often fraught face beneath. The very name P&O bears resonances of power, efficiency and regularity, the images of its ships conveying a sense of style and authority, as well as reflecting a more mundane transportation system. Through its own propaganda – in its advertisements, paintings, engravings, and, later, postcards and films – the company has been inseparably bound up with the British empire in the East and in Australia. Even the modern company’s cruise ships (now American-owned) were until recently universally decorated with these reassuring...

Once long-distance steam navigation became a technological possibility, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, there was widespread pressure to develop it: from merchants who wanted it to open up new markets, for example, and from soldiers and civil servants eager for release from their virtual exile in India. But steam was too expensive to be viable as a private commercial proposition, and the industry was able to develop thanks only to government support. This was nowhere more so than in the case of the P&O Company, and its dependence on government finance had a decisive impact on its...

In a world in which man has flown to the other side of the globe in hours, been connected instantly to family, friends and anyone else by telephone, even walked on the moon, we should not forget that things were not always so. In the early years of the nineteenth century, people marvelled at the way steam navigation could shrink the sea-crossing between Dublin and Liverpool to not much more than half a day. Once the technology of steam shipping was established, its development was unstoppable. Improvements in the course of the 1830s made shipowners ready to risk navigating further...

‘It is the business of the Government to open and to secure the roads for the merchants.’¹ The dictum is Palmerston’s, but it could have been a motto for P&O as the company pressed the State to subsidize long-distance steam navigation by presenting the profitable business it ran for its shareholders as a national mission for the public good. The first phase of the company’s operations saw new lines opened to steam first in the Mediterranean, then east of Suez, thereby increasing the mileage covered and the tonnage at work and creating the infrastructure needed for expansion. The three MDs...

Service on the second part of the 1844 contract, the Ceylon–China line, began in 1845 and placed P&O on the trunk routes to the Far East. Further extensions – Bombay–Hong Kong and Calcutta–Hong Kong – were ready in May 1846, and a third line from Hong Kong to Shanghai was in view. P&O regarded all three extensions as ‘absolutely necessaryto protect the interests’ of the company.¹ The 1844 contract also enabled the company to introduce steam transport to the opium trade. Opium played such a significant part in P&O’s history and prosperity in the nineteenth century that the...

In the seven years since its formation, P&O had made spectacular progress on both sides of Suez. With the completion of each stage of its strategy, the company bedded itself the more surely as the sole custodian of the great Eastern trade routes. The very success of this exemplary enterprise made newcomers look enviously at what P& O had achieved and tempted them to emulate it. Though there had always been rumours of competition,¹ from 1847 P& O had to deal with rivals of real substance.

In 1770, Captain James Cook found the east coast of Australia, and by November...

Once East Indian Steam had refused to join Bourne and Williams in creating a new concern, it was left to those two men and their close associates to make their own arrangements for the ‘junction’ of the Peninsular Steam and Transatlantic companies to form P&O. Both companies were ready to contribute capital in ships for the enterprise, but first and foremost a permanent settlement was needed as to the conditions under which the capital was to be put to work and by whom. It was agreed that the merger would take place on condition that each of the two original...

AfterBentinck’slaunch in June 1843, no more ships were built until the MDs were certain that the company would get the mail contract for India and China. When in July 1844 they knew that the India and China contract was theirs, they set about increasing the fleet. George Bayley,¹ principal surveyor for Lloyd’s Register of Shipping, was engaged for three years to give P&O ‘the aid of first-rate professional talent’ and to superintend each new vessel. This mail contract was so important a landmark for P&O that Richard Bourne, in his seventies, seized the chance to make another mark...

As we saw in chapter 5, Anderson weathered the storm in 1854 and emerged with his position in the company enhanced. But the financial difficulties P&O faced from 1853 on give rise to the question whether the company was by this stage being well run.

The 1853 contract for India and China doubled the amount of business in the company, and new vessels were always building. One might have expected to see some new senior employees about the place, especially as Anderson had taken to spending several months of each year in Egypt. Sometimes he needed to negotiate with the...

Freda Harcourt’s account of the formative years of one of Britain’s greatest shipping companies takes us beyond the limits of a conventional business history. As she amply demonstrates, the impossibility of separating P&O’s fortunes from their political and economic context means that this wider environment is central. Government and empire are foreground as much as background. Here, as with P&O’s struggles first to establish and then maintain a privileged position against competing interests, its history provides a route into a better understanding of the challenging conditions shaping mid-nineteenth-century British maritime and commercial imperial enterprise. In the end, of course, the...