Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India, and: Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600-1857 (review)

When George Orwell famously described himself as a member of the British lower-upper-middle class in The Road to Wigan Pier (London, 1937), he noted that he had gone to work as a colonial official in Burma as a member of this socially anxious, upwardly aspiring group. As he wrote, "the attraction of India (and more recently Kenya, Nigeria, etc.) for the lower-upper-middle class . . . [is that] in India, with cheap horses, free shooting, and hordes of black servants, it was so easy to play at being a gentleman" (123). Indeed, in pursuit of gentility, respectability, and social status, many Britons throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries found their way to the Indian subcontinent. The story of these largely middle-class Britons' families and childhood experiences in India is the subject of Buettner's thoughtful and carefully researched book.

Empire Families adds complexity to the widely circulating image of British children being sent "home" for their education. Empire Families examines how colonial service in India was an opportunity for many "upper-middle-class" families to live better abroad than they might have at home. Through discussions about education, family, and self- representation, Buettner shows how questions of class, race, and gender were negotiated by the families of Britons living and working in India.

The specific need of colonial families to improve their social status was supported by an infrastructure of schools and relatives in India and in Britain to educate and Anglicize the children of middle-ranking civil servants, soldiers, missionaries, and other professionals. The members of this in-between group had to be careful to distinguish themselves from the mixed-race populations in India among whom they lived or attended school (74–97), preferring to receive their educations in Britain as a sign of their whiteness and wealth. Yet these colonial employees were not rich; they had to be more practical, if only because they could not afford the kind of schooling and training that the upper middle classes in Britain could (163–175). Because employment in imperial enterprises was actively encouraged, schooling for colonial children became a feeder system for supplying colonial labor. To support and supervise young children who were separated from their parents, a network of relatives and "aunts for hire" emerged to service the familial needs of children whose parents were stationed in India.

One of the most intriguing arguments in Buettner's book is that the vision of ideal middle-class family life in an appropriately appointed house and surroundings, whether it was a memory or an aspiration, sustained the traffic of young British children leaving their families and homes in India to attend schools in Britain. The story of the Talbot family epitomizes some of the strains and demands that the empire's families faced 118–120, 131–136, 192–196, 245–251). Alienated both from Britain and from their families in India, white colonial children could imagine only a peripatetic life for themselves and often tended to return to imperial vocations as adults and recreate similar situations for their children.

One of the book's major interventions is in examining the disjunctures between textual discourses and archives of everyday practice. Although various prescriptive texts warned that the tropics were dangerous places for small children, many participants remembered childhood with great fondness, rarely recording the physical and social threats to which children were exposed (45–62). Buettner returns to the impact of hegemonic imperial narratives on colonial subjects in later chapters, in particular when examining the shadow that Rudyard Kipling's writings cast on the ways in which lesser-known figures wrote about their childhoods (121–130).

Buettner is respectful of her subjects, using oral histories, memoirs, family papers, and literature to examine how British men and...