‘A Solar Emperor’: Robert Byron Flies East

In 1929 Robert Byron flew to India to report on the new Indian Air Mail service for Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express. This chapter traces Byron’s journey via France, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Iraq and Iran, as told through the newspaper articles and his travel books An Essay on India (1931) and First Russia, Then Tibet (1933). These writings display an airborne variant of what Edward Said has described as the ‘consolidated vision’ of the Victorian and Edwardian imperialist, and show how travel by aeroplane further elevates and mobilizes this perspective, as the machine and eyes of the imperial agent traverse the colonized and newly consolidated landscape.