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

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