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- Title
The Female World of Love & Empire: Women, Family & East India Company Politics at the End of the Eighteenth Century.
- Authors
Finn, Margot
- Abstract
In a pioneering feminist article of 1975, US historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg described middle-class American women’s relations prior to the twentieth century as a ‘female world of love and ritual’ focused on social reproduction in the domestic sphere. This article explores the roles played by the female world of love and ritual among propertied women in British society and culture, but argues that female sociability – far from being restricted to the private sphere – was integral to the making of empire in India. The intertwined histories of a spinster in Bloomsbury and two married mothers in Inverness and Madras in the late eighteenth century illuminate the instrumental function of love and domesticity in forging imperial rule under the aegis of the East India Company. They also underline the extent to which the Indian Ocean and Atlantic worlds overlapped in this period, providing a transnational imperial domain – stretching from the Caribbean to China – within which British women crafted imperial careers for themselves and their children.
- Subjects
UNITED Kingdom; WOMEN; IMPERIALISM &; society; EAST India Co.; FEMALE friendship; WOMEN'S conduct of life; WOMEN'S history; BRITISH colonies; FAMILY history (Sociology); MODERN history
- Publication
Gender & History, 2019, Vol 31, Issue 1, p7
- ISSN
0953-5233
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/1468-0424.12416