Imperial Relations: Histories of family in the British Empire (original) (raw)

Abstract

In early 1860, Mary Moody gave birth to a daughter, Susan, at the Royal Engineers camp in New Westminster, British Columbia, where her husband was stationed as detachment commander, chief commissioner of lands and works and lieutenant governor of the colony. Writing to her Newcastle family, she longed for the emotional and practical support that her sister Emily could have offered in person in the immediate post-partum period, concluding that -[o]ne really needs relations in a Colony.‖ While rooted in her own concerns and experiences in New Westminster, Moody's sentiment resonates more widely: family connections were often critical to securing a new immigrant's position in an unfamiliar context, and more generally to navigating colonial configurations of power, identity and everyday life for men, women and children across the British imperial world. 1 Indeed, as a rich and growing scholarship suggests, family and empire were entangled in a wide range of ways. Familial connections could be vital elements in networks of political patronage and power, while the family also worked as a site of economic strategy and capital accumulation; colonial employment and enterprise, for example, often supported the flagging fortunes of metropolitan relatives. Ideas about marriage, gender, sexuality, childrearing and domesticity both shaped and were shaped by configurations of imperial power and identity, while family communication also helped to produce personal forms of colonial knowledge for those who remained in the metropole. In these ways, the British Empire became a -family affair‖ or an Notes

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References (20)

  1. idea of -stolen generations‖ across the empire. For a recent example see Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting indigenous families 1800-2000 (Freemantle, Western Australia: Freemantle Arts Centre Press, 2000). See also Elizabeth Harvey, -Philanthropy in Birmingham and Sydney, 1860-1914: gender and race‖ (Ph.D. thesis, University College London, 2010). More recently Kathryn Bridge has looked at children's voices themselves: -Being Young in the Country: Settler children and childhood in British Columbia and Alberta, 1860-1925‖ (doctoral thesis, University of Victoria, 2012).
  2. For example, Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire; Buettner, Empire Families.
  3. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 112.
  4. Ondina E. González, -Introduction,‖ in Raising an Empire: Children in early modern Iberia and colonial Latin America, ed. Ondina E. González and Bianca Premo (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007), 7.
  5. Zoe Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, 1815-45: Patronage, the information revolution and colonial government (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005);
  6. Sarah Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and letters in the later eighteenth century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An eighteenth-century history (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011).
  7. While families were (or are) by no means necessarily characterized by love, Matt K. Matsuda's Empire of Love: Histories of France and the Pacific (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) offers a thought-provoking imperial history of emotion with important implications for the colonial family, particularly when considering those times when affectivity and legality (or social practice) came into conflict. See also Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds., Moving Subjects, and Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire: geographies of intimacy in North American history (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2006).
  8. Ann Laura Stoler, -Tense and Tender Ties: The politics of comparison in North American and (post) colonial studies,‖ Journal of American History 88/3 (2001): 829-65. See also Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers.
  9. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families, 15, 17.
  10. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families, 17.
  11. Finn, ‗Anglo-Indian Lives.'
  12. See for example, F.R.H. Du Boulay, Servants of Empire: An imperial memoir of a British family (London: Tauris, 2011).
  13. For example, Barbara Cain's Bombay to Bloomsbury: A biography of the Strachey family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), Emma Rothschild's The Inner Life of Empires and Adele Perry's most recent work on the Douglas-Connolly family, including -Historiography That Breaks Your Heart.‖
  14. Finn, ‗Anglo-Indian Lives,‖ 50.
  15. See explicit discussions of biographical approaches in colonial history in Margot Finn, -Anglo-Indian Lives,‖ and Clare Anderson, -An Introduction to Marginal Centers: Writing life histories in the Indian Ocean world,‖ Journal of Social History 45/2 (2011): 335-44. See also Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of colonialism in the Indian Ocean world, 1790-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1-23, and David Lambert and Alan Lester, eds., Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial careering in the long nineteenth century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 16-21.
  16. Lambert and Lester, Colonial Lives, 17.
  17. Finn, -Anglo-Indian Lives,‖ 49-50.
  18. Matsuda, Empire of Love, 19. On familial language as metaphor for empires, see also Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, especially 150-51. Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998), 216-17. Also in Buettner, -Fatherhood Real, Imagined, Denied,‖ 181-82.
  19. Antoinette Burton, -Introduction: The unfinished business of colonial modernities,‖ in Burton, ed., Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities, 8.
  20. Finn, -Anglo-Indian Lives,‖ 50.