Settlers and Expatriates: Britons Over the Seas (review)

This fine addition to the Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series examines communities of Britons who worked and lived abroad, particularly those outside the dominions and apart from the official colonial and military services. The chapters focus not only on countries in the Empire, but also on countries in which Britain exerted informal influence. Robert Bickers states in his introduction that the people at the heart of this volume generally defy fixed categorization as either “colonists” or “sojourners” (15, 16). They were dynamic and adaptable. The collection presents a menagerie of imperial communities that often bucked against the policies of London and generally resented being penned, misunderstood, and proverbially bored to death in Britain itself. Yet as first-time visitors or repatriates, all of these imperial subjects described their journeys to Britain as “coming home,” at least until they found home to be an unpleasantly foreign country (303). In this regard, the collection casts new light upon the large body of scholarship that has chronicled Britain’s imperial identity. According to Elizabeth Buettner, the overseas British communities, and especially repatriates, commonly “resented what they viewed as contemptuous and ignorant metropolitan responses to the imperial world” (309). In a concluding, synoptic essay, John Darwin observes of the 1950s and 1960s: “The values shared in the imperial age between Britons at home and Britons abroad either disappeared altogether or could no longer be expressed, at least not in public” (344). In retrospect, it appears that these children of empire were destined to become orphans.

One cannot offer a comprehensive characterization of the communities examined in this collection, a point that Bickers and the other contributors rightly emphasize. Indeed, it is difficult to see common ground between the cosmopolitanism of the British in Egypt and the insularity of the British in China. James Whidden observes that marriages between Egyptian men and British women were uncommon but not unheard of, whereas Bickers observes that the British in Shanghai had virtually no social relations with the Chinese and detested Chinese culture. As the title of the volume suggests, there are also major differences between settler communities, as in Rhodesia, and communities of expatriate businessmen and officials, as in Ceylon. Donal Lowry notes that the white population in Rhodesia grew from 1,500 in 1891 to 277,000 in 1977, seven years after independence. By contrast, Margaret Jones explains that the British in Ceylon never numbered more than about eight thousand and began their exodus soon after independence in 1948. In some cases, it is problematic even to refer to a single British community in a single country. As David Washbrook observes in his essay on India, “there was less a British community in India than there were multiple social arenas in which people who came (at some point) from the British Isles variously participated” (186).

One can speak of a few things that these children of empire shared, more often than not. From David Rock’s essay on Argentina to Tim Harper’s essay on Malaya one finds references to the importance of sport in occupying and defining British communities. The two world wars further enabled far-flung Britons to affirm their identities and loyalties in a common cause. Turning from activities to the composition of these communities, one finds, unsurprisingly, that there were disproportionately more British men than women, with the conspicuous exception of Rhodesia, where the numbers of British men and women began nearing equality as early as the 1920s. Two more commonalities are the hierarchical order of British communities and an aversion to “poor whites” (87), who presumably undermined the prestige of the British in the eyes of indigenous societies. The importance of hierarchy extended from the clubby British community in Malaya to Kenya, where settlers tried to establish “an equatorial England deferential to the officer class” (85).

Bickers should be commended for the coherence and uniformly high quality of this collection. The essays all provide...