In the Service of Empire

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.

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).

Introduction: Thinking Mastery, Thinking Servanthood 1. The Structure of Domestic Service in Nineteenth Century Britain 2. Domestic Service and the Colonial Home in India 3. Intimate Knowledge and the Private Servant/Employer Relationship in Britain 4. Colonising the Private Sphere: The Making of a Home from 'Home' in Colonial India 5. Violence, Domestic Authority and the Politics of Imperial Governance 6. Servants Resistance to Mastery in the Imperial Metropole 7. Servant Agency in Colonial Households Conclusion