A BARCELONA STAGE DESIGNER IN COLONIAL INDIA: CATALAN TRAVELLERS, TRANSIMPERIAL MOBILITY AND THE BRITISH RAJ IN SPAIN, C. 1908

In 1908, two travellers from Barcelona embarked on a year-long world tour. Stage designer Oleguer Junyent and textile heir Maria Recolons' trip was extraordi-nary by the standards of the metropolitan Spain of their time. A great portion of their tour took them across the British empire, with India emerging as one of their most significant stops. The article examines three major macrohistorical issues that arise from their experience in colonial India: the consolidation of a global tourism industry, the making of metropolitan understandings of European imperialism and anti-imperialism, and the production of colonial knowledge for metropolitan consumption. The article explores these issues through microhistory, with an in-depth examination of the written and visual sources produced around the tour -a travelogue, letters, articles, drawings, paintings and photographs. Through these outputs, Recolons and Junyent presented a vision of an all-powerful yet flawed British empire in colonial India. The article argues that the tour produced a rare and original body of knowledge on colonial India in early-twentieth-century Spain, where it was eagerly consumed by metropolitan audiences.