Provincial Society and Empire: The Cumbrian Counties and the East Indies, 1680–1829 by K. J. Saville-Smith (review)

Histories of British expansion in Asia in general, and of the East India Company (EIC) in particular, have typically been framed through either a national or a global lens. Excepting some works that have explored the Scottish and Irish (and less often the Welsh) dimensions of British imperialism, historians have hitherto largely steered clear of any systematic analysis of the provincial or regional roots and consequences of the EIC’s activities in Asia. With roughly half the Company’s stockholders living in London or the home counties, and with most of the Company’s metropolitan officials, Parliament, and the Court also situated in London, the capital has not surprisingly come to dominate our historical positioning of the EIC, so much so that London and Britain have become arguably synonymous insofar as the history and historiography of it is concerned.

Provincial Society and Empire is a timely, insightful, and rigorously researched study that calls those assumptions into question by using a prosopographical study of more than four hundred mainly male Cumbrians who sought service with the EIC over the course of the long eighteenth century (1680–1829). Saville-Smith persuasively challenges the prevailing image of Cumbria as both largely untouched by the social and political reforms sweeping through Britain, due to its geographical isolation and limited industrialization, and westward focused in terms of its outward orientation. Instead, through the scrutiny of individual life stories that Saville-Smith has recovered, we can clearly see how Cumbrians responded to opportunities such as those afforded by the EIC. Moreover, despite or perhaps even because of its relative poverty and isolation, Cumbria was overrepresented in it. Cumbrians made up less than two per cent of the population of England in 1801 yet Cumbrians comprised four per cent of the Company’s English servants and soldiers. The good reputation of Cumbria’s schools, particularly their focus on the acquisition of practical knowledge and skills, and arguably the absence of much by way of respectable local employment, propelled ambitious Cumbrians toward the EIC. Education and the cultural capital that was facilitated by kinship networks carefully delineated here are shown to have created Indian opportunities for Cumbrians which in turn helped shape Cumbrian society. But the impact was neither simple nor direct—the author wisely avoids treating this community as monolithic in its constitution or hegemonic in its impact.

The focus is in the first instance on Cumbria, secondly on Britain, and only peripherally on India, and how the identified individuals, juggling risk and reward, looked to employment with the Company to gain security, respectability, and stability for themselves and their families. Over time the anticipated rewards changed. The prospect of windfall fortunes in India, which so permeated much of eighteenth-century political culture, had by the end of that century yielded to hopes of respectable and well remunerated salaried positions. There is little evidence here of individuals drawn to India for patriotic, imperialistic, or adventure-seeking reasons. Their motives were much more prosaic: through India they hoped to improve their situation at home in a region very much on the political and economic margins of Britain. As the author pointedly observes, “the point of the passage to India was success in Cumbria.”

Six chapters logically break down the Cumbrian relationship with the EIC. Not surprisingly given its roots as a doctoral dissertation, the first two chapters signpost the author’s objectives and methodically set out the relevant historiography as well as sketch in the Cumbrian context. Subsequent chapters use details of specific individuals and families to illuminate the motives that impelled them to seek service with the EIC, their departure for and experience in India, and finally the return and impact of those who had not succumbed to disease. An impressively diverse set of archives from across the UK were sampled for this study, including the records of the Company (notably appointment and...