Objects That Built an Empire: A Trunk Bound for Bombay.
As a boy, I recall seeing a battered old trunk relegated to a corner of our back room which rarely saw the light of day. Made of sturdy teak wood, covered in brown leather, it had a handle on each side and two brass locks at the front. I was told it belonged to an Englishman who had left it with my father before returning to England for good. Now, as a grown man, I look back at the trunk and wonder about the history of that humble trunk. How many journeys it had made between England and India, sitting in the hold of a steamship.
When we think of the British Empire, images of grand government buildings, steamships, railway networks, and military parades often come to mind. Yet some of the most revealing stories of empire are told through ordinary objects. One such object is the humble travel trunk—a sturdy wooden chest bound for Bombay that carried far more than clothes and personal belongings. It transported the people, customs, and institutions that helped build and sustain the British Raj.
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, thousands of British civil servants, soldiers, merchants, missionaries, engineers, and their families embarked on the long sea voyage to India. Most travelled with one or more large trunks, reinforced with brass corners and designed to withstand months at sea before continuing by rail across the Indian subcontinent.
For many travellers, Bombay—now Mumbai—was their first encounter with British India. As one of the Empire’s busiest ports, it served as the principal gateway through which people and goods entered the colony. Every arriving steamship unloaded hundreds of trunks destined for government offices in Calcutta, military cantonments in the Punjab, tea plantations in Assam, or commercial houses in Madras and beyond.
The contents of these trunks reveal much about the everyday machinery of empire. They held official uniforms, legal papers, surveying instruments, account books, English novels, school textbooks, family photographs, and silverware. These seemingly ordinary possessions enabled British officials to recreate familiar routines while administering one of the world’s largest colonial territories.
The journey, however, was never one-way. When their owners eventually returned home, the trunks were often filled with tea, spices, silk, carved ivory, photographs, letters, and souvenirs collected during years spent overseas. Merchants also carried business records documenting the movement of cotton, jute, and other raw materials that fuelled Britain’s industries. In this sense, the travel trunk symbolised the constant exchange of goods, wealth, and ideas between Britain and India.
Yet the same object carried a very different meaning for Indians. Many in India resented them because each newly arrived official, merchant, or military officer strengthened the structures of colonial rule.
At the same time, the British depended upon Indian skill and labour. Many trunks were crafted from durable Indian teak by local carpenters and finished with brass fittings produced by Indian metalworkers. Dock labourers unloaded them at Bombay harbour, railway porters hauled them onto trains, and Indian railway workers transported them across the country. The empire’s movement of people and possessions relied upon countless Indian hands whose contributions are too often overlooked.
Today, surviving colonial trunks appear in museums, antique collections, and family attics. Their faded shipping labels and worn leather straps evoke adventurous journeys across oceans, but they also encourage us to ask important historical questions. Who packed these trunks? What ambitions travelled inside them? Whose lives were changed by their arrival? It can be said to be a silent witness to migration, commerce, imperial ambition, and cultural encounter.
Sometimes, the history of an empire is found not in a palace or a battlefield, but inside a weathered trunk waiting to be unpacked.
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