“Home Allies”: Female Networks, Tensions, and Conflicted Loyalties in India and Van Diemen’s Land, 1826–1849*

Using two women and their private social networks as a case study, this article expands the scope of the well-established field of Anglophone networks by considering the role women played in forming and operating within them. The reasons for including and excluding others in and from these networks illuminate these women’s highly personalized and politicized ideas about belonging, loyalty, and affiliation to home. Ultimately, this article suggests that while they operated alongside—but outside—of male-centered official and elite networks, these women and their networks still played a role in strengthening or severing particular discourses, connections, and alliances at the local and global level and that they did so in a way that warrants further attention from scholars of the British world and beyond.