Abstract

In Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), Elizabeth Hamilton champions attention to family and immediate neighbours, yet she also advocates universal benevolence, which she aligns with local affections against selfishness. Her praise for the British in India suggests the difficulties of this alliance, for her love for her deceased brother, an East India Company employee, apparently distorts the understanding of the East that it inspires her to seek. She implicitly warns her readers of her own weakness, however, by showing her rajah progress from loyal naïveté to disillusionment, and she asks her readers to follow him in recognizing British faults. Satirizing British cruelty in the Western Hemisphere, in the East, and at home, she contrasts this cruelty with the universal benevolence that the British owe to all people, and she seeks to inspire such benevolence by engaging readers’ sympathy for characters unlike themselves. Defining people of all nations as brethren and neighbours, Hamilton especially warns her women readers against too narrow a devotion to their immediate families, encouraging them instead to expand their service into the public realm.

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