In the summer of 1894, Claud Cardew, then at British Central Africa, asked his brother in England to send him a violin. In tracing the violin's trajectory from metropole to colony, this article combines two inquiries. It probes, firstly, the emotional vocabulary surrounding Claud's request, and secondly, the technology underpinning the British Empire mail. Closely reading the Cardew family letters alongside postal documents, the author argues that for Claud, the violin's delayed arrival triggered a tangled nexus of anxieties, stemming from both the colonial racial hierarchy and the changing expectations surrounding modern technology. Much like the cultural connotations carried by the violin itself, efficient mail delivery denoted racial superiority. Furthermore, the empire mail gained significance in the minds of British users for its racially loaded function as potentially mitigating colonizers’ anxiety in the face of outnumbering locals. Yet the violin's failure to arrive when expected led to mounting anxiety, as claims for colonizers’ dominance cracked in the face of unstable postal communications. The story of Claud Cardew's violin thus offers a framework that may be used to unravel similar emotional entanglements surrounding Western technologies set to work within empire.

1894 年夏天，当时在英属中非的克劳德·卡杜 (Claud Cardew) 要求他在英国的兄弟送他一把小提琴。在追踪小提琴从大都市到殖民地的轨迹时，本文结合了两个探究。它首先探讨了围绕克劳德请求的情感词汇，其次是支持大英帝国邮件的技术。作者仔细阅读了 Cardew 的家庭信件和邮政文件，认为对于克劳德来说，小提琴的延迟到达引发了一种纠结的焦虑，这既源于殖民时期的种族等级制度，也源于对现代技术不断变化的期望。就像小提琴本身所承载的文化内涵一样，高效的邮件传递意味着种族优越。此外，帝国邮局在英国用户的心目中获得了重要意义，因为它具有种族负荷的功能，因为它可能减轻殖民者在面对人数众多的当地人时的焦虑。然而，小提琴未能如期到达导致了越来越多的焦虑，因为面对不稳定的邮政通讯，殖民者统治的主张破裂了。因此，克劳德·卡杜的小提琴故事提供了一个框架，可以用来解开围绕在帝国内部运作的西方技术的类似情感纠葛。