Overview

Despite recent research, the 19th-century history of domestic service in empire and its wider implications is underexplored. This book sheds new light on servants and their masters in the British Empire, and in doing so offers new discourses on the colonial home, imperial society identities and colonial culture. Using a wide range of source material, from private papers to newspaper articles, official papers and court records, Dussart explores the strategic nature of the relationship, the connection between imperialism, domesticity and a master/servant paradigm that was deployed in different ways by varied actors often neglected in the historical record. Positioned outside the family but inside the private place of the home, ‘the domestic servant’ was often the foil against which 19th-century contemporaries worked out class, race and gender identities across metropole and colony, creating those places in the process. The role of domestic servants in empire thus lay not only in the labour they undertook, but also in the way the servant-master relationship constituted ground that helped other power relations to be imagined and contested. Dussart explores the domestic service relationship in 19th-century Britain and India, considering how ideas about servants and their masters and/or mistresses spanned imperial space, and shaped peoples and places within it.

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9781350121164

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Reviews

Fae Dussart’s powerful analysis of master/mistress- servant relationships in the British Empire is essential for understanding the intimacy of colonialism’s racial hierarchies. Dussart shows us how the terms of domestic service were conditioned through a conversation between Britain and India, and how those terms shaped Empire as a vehicle of white supremacy. * Alan Lester, Professor of Historical Geography, University of Sussex, UK * In the Service of Empire is a nuanced, sensitive and elucidating analysis of domestic service in the British Empire. Putting India and Britain into the same analytic frame, Dussart skilfully draws out the overriding structures of service and specificities of regional difference in her work, richly demonstrating the prevailing power of race, gender and class in the making of the imperial world. * Dr Esme Cleall, Lecturer in the History of the British Empire, University of Sheffield, UK *

I immediately felt that considering the place of servants in the colonial encounter would be the perfect means by which to start fulfilling the planned monograph series' remit of recovering neglected voices. [This book] promises to add an important element to our understanding of the bases upon which imperial authority was imagined and constituted. * Chris Prior, University of Southampton, UK * This is a book that I am interested to read and which brings a new dimension to the existing literature on domestic service and empire. It would appeal to multiple audiences - those interested in British histories of domestic service, those focused on colonialism and domestic service, audiences interested in colonial India, scholars exploring the everyday workings of empire. * Claire Lowrie, University of Wollongong, Australia * Dussart's book will be the pioneering volume to document master-subaltern connection across countries and cultures in the context of the British Empire. I would enthusiastically describe this book as a rich addition to the current literature. It will be a work that will enhance our understanding of an important yet neglected aspect of British imperial social and cultural history. * Swapna M. Banerjee, Associate Professor, City University of New York, USA *

Fae Dussart’s powerful analysis of master/mistress- servant relationships in the British Empire is essential for understanding the intimacy of colonialism’s racial hierarchies. Dussart shows us how the terms of domestic service were conditioned through a conversation between Britain and India, and how those terms shaped Empire as a vehicle of white supremacy. * Alan Lester, Professor of Historical Geography, University of Sussex, UK * In the Service of Empire is a nuanced, sensitive and elucidating analysis of domestic service in the British Empire. Putting India and Britain into the same analytic frame, Dussart skilfully draws out the overriding structures of service and specificities of regional difference in her work, richly demonstrating the prevailing power of race, gender and class in the making of the imperial world. * Dr Esme Cleall, Lecturer in the History of the British Empire, University of Sheffield, UK * Dussart's monograph is an excellent contribution to a growing field and adds to the increasingly sophisticated literature of feminist history. * CHOICE * In the Service of Empire makes important contributions to the scholarship on British and imperial domestic service, as well as British identity formation through race, class, and gender. It is a valuable book for historians of empire, Britain, colonial South Asia, and for scholars interested in labour, race, and gender more broadly. * Cultural and Social History *

Author Information

Fae Dussart is Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Sussex, UK. Major themes of her teaching and research include the meaning and constitution of British, imperial and colonial identity, and the intersection of these with the formation of spaces and places. She is the co-author of Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines in the Nineteenth Century British Empire (2014).

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