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Reviewed by:
  • Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India
  • Nancy Fix Anderson (bio)
Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India, by Elizabeth Buettner; pp. xii + 310. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, £40.00, £16.99 paper, $59.50, $29.95 paper.

Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India is a thoroughly researched, persuasively argued, and imaginatively constructed study that expands our understanding of the [End Page 328] complex history of the Raj. Although writing in a crowded field of burgeoning scholarship, Elizabeth Buettner takes a fresh perspective. Examining the experience of mainly affluent British families who resided in late-imperial India, she links imperial and family history and makes an important contribution to the history of education, women's history, and, most intriguingly, the history of emotions. She also provides a strong argument in the current historiographical debate over the relationship between domestic and imperial history, convincingly showing the integral connection of metropole and empire.

Buettner focuses on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, after the invention of the steamship and the building of the Suez Canal allowed for easier travel between Britain and India, facilitating the establishment of British family life in India. Families who had the means to journey back and forth to Britain lived, she argues, in a state of "permanent impermanence" (1), residing in a colony that was not intended for permanent white settlement, always thinking of Britain nostalgically as "home," and keenly concerned with maintaining their identity as British. She styles this group "British-Indians," a term not commonly used at the time, but which she thinks is more inclusive of the Celtic populations in Britain and useful in differentiating this group from the "Anglo-Indians," a term used in the twentieth century to describe people of mixed race. (The use of the two ethnic categories, however, has the unfortunate and unintended implication that in India only the English, and not Scots or Welsh or Irish, had mixed-race children.)

What makes this book such an important contribution to historical scholarship is Buettner's analysis of how the British-Indians, through family strategies, maintained their British identity and their very "whiteness." Showing the extent to which race is a social and not purely biological construct, she argues that the British in India maintained their ethnic identity as "white" by sending their children, particularly sons, back to Britain to be educated. Analzying the prescriptive literature that emphasized the dangers to health of raising children in India, Buettner tends to dismiss these fears as rationalizations for the underlying social and cultural need to send children back to Britain to maintain that link. She shows, for example, the contradictions and fallacies of the medical opinions, such as the common advice that only older children, not infants or young children, had health risks in India.

Some of the health concerns do seem legitimate—for instance, the concern that Indian servants mixed unboiled water with milk for the children. It would be interesting to compare British infant/child mortality figures in Britain and India to better understand how legitimate such health fears were. Although this study is thoroughly grounded in the archival and historical scholarship of late-imperial Britain and India, there is no discussion of the fears of racial degeneration that so haunted late Victorians and their successors. Nevertheless, Buettner's argument about "whiteness" being maintained by sending sons back to Britain to be educated is insightful and convincing.

Buettner also analyzes the advice literature warning against the moral contamination that might come from too much contact with Indian servants, and that might result in British children speaking in the "chi-chi" Indian-English dialect (arguments not so unlike warnings in Britain against the influence of lower-class servants on young children). Public schools in Britain particularly recruited British-Indian sons; interestingly, schools such as Cheltenham College sought to foster aspects of Indian life and culture in their schools even as they aimed at saving the boys from the corruptions of India. These [End Page 329] schools educated boys who in adulthood commonly would return to India to work, which explains the continuity across generations of British families in India.

If the British-Indian families had...

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