On board French imperial liners: Four transformative shades of intimacy in the Age of Steam

This article explores how ocean liners operated by the Compagnie des Messageries Maritimes became critical yet underexplored spaces where colonial and personal intimacies were renegotiated among first-class passengers. Positioned as imperial interstices, these ships served as liminal spaces where dominant social norms were tested and personal boundaries redefined. Drawing on travel accounts and company archives, the study reveals how the constrained environment of maritime crossings disrupted passengers’ sensory experiences and reshaped their intimate relationships – with themselves, each other and colonial hierarchies. Ships were arenas for voyeurism, political manoeuvring, and the reinforcement of racial and social divisions, functioning as both schools of domesticity and introductions to the colonial Other. They were also sites of health anxieties and mental distress, where practitioners diagnosed ‘anxious melancholy’ linked to the colonial journey. Ultimately, these crossings profoundly transformed passengers’ private lives, preparing and altering them long before they reached colonial shores.