ABSTRACT
In the final imperial moment, Prince Charles sailed out of Hong Kong Harbor on the royal yacht Britannia after the handing over ceremonies in 1997. It did not matter that he left the ship in Manila to make the rest of the voyage to Great Britain swiftly by air. The point is this: by the sea the British came; by the sea they departed. Colonial empire was a maritime enterprise. It was also one laced on land by railroads and strung over with telegraph wires. It was a vast communications system extending from port to port and then into the hinterland, the largest the world had yet known – and the swiftest. The letters RMS that preceded the names of such ships as the Titanic and Lusitania stood for royal mail ship, a global reaching communications carrier. Today, port and carrier have become terms concerning the Internet and cyberspace, the invisible space of electronic communication in no way related to the ocean depths over which the ships of empire plowed. Simply put, overseas empires suited, if at all, an economy and a communications system now obsolete. Queen Victoria made the first transatlantic telegraph message in 1858; it took sixteen hours to be received. News of the death of Princess Diana in 1997 traveled around the world on television in seconds. Comparable dramatic changes exist between freight delivered by ocean liner or steam train and that delivered by jet aircraft.
