Douglas R. Burgess's book, Engines of Empire: Steamships and the Victorian Imagination, is both entertaining and scholarly; its narrative provides an interesting journey of historical discovery, unlike the steamships it describes, built to provide mass transportation in a comfortable, familiar environment, on routes already well known. The book opens with a celebration marking the completion of the first transatlantic crossing by Brunel's vessel the Great Western in the spring of 1838 in New York. At the time, the Great Western was the largest and fastest ship ever constructed. A quotation from the speech of American senator Daniel Webster, included in the text, not only is apt for the occasion when it was made—the celebration on board the vessel of the ship's first voyage, of only two weeks, across the ocean—but sets the tone and context for the book itself: “We behold two continents approaching one another. The skill of your countrymen, sir, and my countrymen, is annihilating space” (p. 7). Burgess's text demonstrates admirably the skills and ambition of entrepreneurs and engineers who used the latest technologies available to them in the nineteenth century to cut the length of time it took to travel across the Atlantic, between the United States and Great Britain, from weeks to days and from Britain to the far flung corners of the empire, to India and even further to Australia, from months to weeks.

Webster's speech, although referring to travel across the Atlantic Ocean, was reminiscent of words used to describe the application of steam to railway travel during the previous decade. Steam power applied to shipping had a massive, yet now often unacknowledged, impact on the world as a whole, bringing benefits to travelers, tourists, trade, industry, individual wealth, and national economies, but also misery to millions of indigenous people around the globe. Distance had always been an obstacle to imperial dominance that had previously kept traffic between Europe and Asia to a trickle, enough to transfer goods but not to transport and maintain an army (p. 9). This barrier was overcome by designing and constructing vessels that were large enough to carry not only hundreds of people but also enough provisions and coal to provide fuel for a long voyage without having to make frequent and lengthy stops at refueling depots on the way. Loading coal manually into a ship's bunkers could cause considerable delays and add many days to the ten-thousand-mile journey to India. Faster transportation of supplies, soldiers, and colonial administrators in great numbers meant that large steamships made imperialism possible and practical. Likewise, in the United States, the application of steam to paddle-driven river boats made the broad and lengthy rivers crossing the North American continent, like the Mississippi, navigable in both directions, upstream as well as going with the flow downstream. This facilitated not only colonization of new territories by immigrants and migrants, but the movement and deployment of troops and the wholesale removal of Native Americans from the lands of their forefathers in mass deportations culminating in genocide.

As well as a history important to the study of conquest and colonization, Burgess explores themes that will be of interest to business historians. He is particularly interested in the idea of spectacle and the promotion of new steamships, not just as machines that moved, but as things of wonder—attractions in their own right to be marveled at by spectators, who could buy tickets to board and look around. Shipping companies competed to build the biggest, fastest, and most luxurious vessels, which captured the imagination of the public in Europe and the United States. This promotion of ships, almost as celebrities, has importance in the study of the histories of marketing, journalism, and the media, as well as of travel and technology.

Competing companies, such as Cunard, White Star, P&O, and North German Lloyd, developed their own brands and styles of design and interior decoration. In studying this, Burgess adds to existing understanding of histories of consumption. Ships were socially segregated by class, with different standards of decoration and accommodation for first-, second-, and third-class passengers, who never mixed while on board, each class being a closed community. During lengthy journeys, often to a new life or imperial posting, passengers would mix with those already familiar with the destination and its ways. This would help socialize and educate the migrant or new recruit in preparation for their new situation. Lack of space to move around freely or exercise encouraged travelers to invent new games and sports, or versions of familiar ones, that could be played on the deck. Burgess investigates the cultural history surrounding steam shipping: how passengers behaved as masses of them were able to apply their tourist gaze to exotic destinations as sightseers and their attitudes—not always positive, and often condescending—to the local people they encountered on Grand Tours or cruises that could now be undertaken from the comfort of a ship, from which they could look down on the people whose home and countries they came to look at.

The rapid pace of development and evolution of design, from paddle-driven to screw propeller–powered vessels, with ever-expanding capacities and increasing speed really did make the world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seem a smaller place: people could travel to distant lands and could also return in a relatively short time, making not only international business but tourism a more reasonable possibility and emigration a less traumatic prospect. Entertainers, writers, and public figures, such as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, could cross the ocean to spread their fame and facilitate transfer of popular culture and ideas to new shared audiences. In this way, as Burgess shows, steamships began the process of globalization so important to any study and understanding of modern society.