In the Service of Empire: Domestic Service and Mastery in Metropole and Colony

(Hardback)

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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.

Reviews

Fae Dussarts powerful analysis of master/mistress- servant relationships in the British Empire is essential for understanding the intimacy of colonialisms 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 *

Author Bio

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).