Empires Awheel: Fanny Bullock Workman, American Transimperial Travel, and Temporal Fantasies of European Empire

This article follows the bicycle journeys of Fanny Bullock and William Hunter Workman as they cycled through the imperial spaces of Algeria, Sri Lanka, and India between 1894 and 1899. It thinks through how a new technology of personal mobility shaped the Workmans’ experience of the world and seeks to better understand the ways the forces of empire both produced and influenced their outlooks. In these spaces of European empire, Fanny Bullock Workman crafted a sense of New Womanhood rooted in the politics of gendered ability and racial superiority that was given intense meaning by a technology socialized as a way to gain authentic experiences of both the past and present. By looking at the ways people moved through overlapping imperial modalities, this article argues, historians can better access the American experience of the world at a granular level.