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This chapter details the origins of the East India Company’s network of fortified settlements in Asia and South Atlantic, beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, ultimately establishing outposts at Madras, St. Helena, and Bombay. It argues that the Company conceived of these settlements not simply as trading posts or factories but as colonies and plantations, modelled upon and sometimes in competition with other such European efforts in the Atlantic and Asia. Company leadership was concerned with attracting immigrants and settlers to these colonies and establishing effective legal and political institutions to govern them. The chapter further explores how Company governments sought to establish a system of circulation amongst these settlements and represented their aspirations to political power and authority through a variety of instruments, such as the planning of urban space, coins and mintage, and political ceremony and display.

The introduction starts by offering a portrait of St Helena, describing its history, climate and natural environment. Little has been published about the island, and existing impressions have been strongly (and falsely) coloured by St Helena’s reputation as Napoleon’s bleak place of exile. The need to offer a more positive impression of the island is crucial to later parts of this book. While it is undeniable that the slaves brought to St Helena’s Liberated African Establishment died in large numbers – and in part unnecessarily – this had little to do with the character of the place itself. Later chapters will show that the causes of mortality were far more complex and mainly due to human factors. The remainder of the Introduction sets out the academic context of the research, and discusses the content of the chapters to come.

The author leaves the Cape and embarks on board the Britannia. He describes the ship and the character of its captain; discovers St Helena and describes the island, town, and fortifications, as well as the hospitable and friendly conduct of the Governor. He leaves St Helena, passes the Ascension Island, recrosses the equinoctial line, sees the polar star, passes a fleet of outward-bound Indiamen, passes the Canaries and the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea, and arrives at the mouth of the English Channel. The captain decides to enter the Cove of Cork.

This epilogue sheds new light on a famous case. Napoleon was labelled in 1815 as a permanent prisoner of war, an individual at war against the civil society of European nations, even though France was then at peace with the rest of Europe. This status of the prisoner of the international community was a novelty. It also drew on eighteenth-century discussions, and it established a precedent. The status of Napoleon in St Helena was never settled, because the famous captive always refused the label that was assigned to him. Around Napoleon, a miniature and inverted society of prisoners took shape on St Helena, a society that was structured by his presence and that of his small retinue.

The islands of the mid-Atlantic played crucial roles in forging and maintaining Britain’s empire in the age of sail. They were strategic hubs defending trade routes and offering benefits to military forces. Many provided opportunities to resupply ships and to recuperate men. For seafarers, Atlantic islands also acted as psychological and cultural acclimatisation stations. Finally, these islands offered opportunities for men of science to collect, to hypothesize, and to experiment. Taking these themes as its basis, this chapter demonstrates how Atlantic islands acted as ‘gateways’ to British imperial activities elsewhere in the world. By focusing on the part played by mid-Atlantic islands, it argues that the East India Company’s empire of trade, the Enlightenment empire of science, and the British Empire of colonies and fortified factories overlapped, coincided, and coexisted in the islands of the Atlantic. Ultimately, the islands of the mid-Atlantic were fulcra around which Britain’s global world turned.

During the 1950s and early 1960s, the fortunes of the Bahá’í Faith in South Carolina mirrored to some extent those of the state’s civil rights movement. After the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board decision, a new campaign by white political and civil leaders sought to dismantle South Carolina’s NAACP, and in this context, an interracial Bahá’í community could do little more than hold itself together. During the early 1960s, however, as the civil rights movement began to register more gains and white leaders attempted to ease the transition to desegregation, the Bahá’ís secured additional legal protections, became bolder in their public outreach, and sought increasingly to influence the course of social change in the state. In a revived Greenville community as well as in new outposts in Florence and on St. Helena Island, developments seemed to vindicate Shoghi Effendi’s insistence on the importance of teaching African Americans.

This chapter looks at Kingsley’s post-mortem legacy: most immediately how her concern for Boer POWS was translated by her friend Alice Stopford Green into an investigation of the dire conditions in which exiled Boers were held on St Helena. Journalist E. D. Morel was a great admirer of Mary Kingsley and her ideas on indirect rule lay behind his creation of the Congo Reform Association, which campaigned vigorously against the atrocities visited on the people of the Congo by the regime of Leopold II of Belgium. Kingsley’s friends Alice Stopford Green, John Holt and Roger Casement were also closely involved with the Congo Reform Association. Kingsley’s critique of cultural imperialism was the inspiration for the African Society, which promoted the kind of ethnology she had championed, while her researches into the terrible mortality of Europeans in West Africa inspired the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine’s Mary Kingsley Medal.

Successful transoceanic voyages relied on networks of islands. Some provided places where crew and passengers could rest; where ships could replenish their supplies of fresh food and water; and where dockyards allowed vessels to be repaired. Islands were thus often employed as way stations in this world of maritime endeavour. St Helena, in the South Atlantic Ocean, was one of the first islands to be put to such use in the burgeoning English overseas empire of the seventeenth century. Other islands were of value for what they could produce. They were not acquired to facilitate or protect British operations elsewhere; they themselves were the prizes. The contribution of islands to the geography of the British Empire in the age of sail was significant, and certainly of more importance than their mere physical size would suggest.