Mapping Britain’s “imperial” past

Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days is a well know literary work that is set in 1872. In the book, Phileas Fogg and his companion Passpartout cross many of the cities and countries of that time. I thought it would be interesting to check how many of these were, at that point in time, in a dependence relationship of some sort to the British crown and empire.

Listing the crossed countries

For the sake of simplicity, one way of approximating the list of crossed countries without having to analyze the whole book is to check out the itinerary table on the book’s Wikipedia page in English

The itinerary (as originally planned). Source: Wikipedia (CC-BY-SA 3.0)
stretch details days
London to Suez, Egypt Rail to Brindisi, Italy, via Turin and steamer (the Mongolia) across the Mediterranean Sea 07 days
Suez to Bombay, India Steamer (the Mongolia) across the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean 13 days
Bombay to Calcutta, India Rail 03 days
Calcutta to Victoria, Hong Kong with a stopover in Singapore Steamer (the Rangoon) across the South China Sea 13 days
Hong Kong to Yokohama, Japan Steamer (the Carnatic) across the South China Sea, East China Sea, and the Pacific Ocean 06 days
Yokohama to San Francisco, United States Steamer (the General Grant) across the Pacific Ocean 22 days
San Francisco to New York City, United States Rail 07 days
New York to London, United Kingdom Steamer (the China) across the Atlantic Ocean to Liverpool and rail 09 days
Total Total 80 days

From that table, we can extract the following list of countries, which are either mentioned explictly, logically crossed, or desumed from the following itinerary map from the same Wikipedia page:

Itinerary map

We associate to each country their present day’s ISO-3166-1 alpha-3 country code:

List of crossed countries deduced from itinerary table and map
country isocode
United Kingdom GBR
France FRA
Italy ITA
Egypt EGY
Yemen YEM
India IND
Singapore SGP
Hong Kong HKG
China CHN
Japan JPN
United States USA

Visualizing the crossed countries on a map of the itinerary

We then reconstruct the itinerary and the crossed country on a map:

(To be continued…)