Table of Contents

Introduction: Thinking Mastery, Thinking Servanthood
1. The Structure of Domestic Service in Nineteenth Century Britain
2. Domestic Service and the Colonial Home in India
3. Intimate Knowledge and the Private Servant/Employer Relationship in Britain
4. Colonising the Private Sphere: The Making of a Home from 'Home' in Colonial India
5. Violence, Domestic Authority and the Politics of Imperial Governance
6. Servants Resistance to Mastery in the Imperial Metropole
7. Servant Agency in Colonial Households
Conclusion

Promotional Information

A study of the relationship between servants and their employers across imperial space, focusing on 19th-century Britain and colonial India.

About the Author

Fae Dussart is Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Sussex, UK. Major themes of her teaching and research include the meaning and constitution of British, imperial and colonial identity, and the intersection of these with the formation of spaces and places. She is the co-author of Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines in the Nineteenth Century British Empire (2014).

Reviews

Fae Dussart’s powerful analysis of master/mistress- servant relationships in the British Empire is essential for understanding the intimacy of colonialism’s racial hierarchies. Dussart shows us how the terms of domestic service were conditioned through a conversation between Britain and India, and how those terms shaped Empire as a vehicle of white supremacy.
*Alan Lester, Professor of Historical Geography, University of Sussex, UK*

In the Service of Empire is a nuanced, sensitive and elucidating analysis of domestic service in the British Empire. Putting India and Britain into the same analytic frame, Dussart skilfully draws out the overriding structures of service and specificities of regional difference in her work, richly demonstrating the prevailing power of race, gender and class in the making of the imperial world.
*Dr Esme Cleall, Lecturer in the History of the British Empire, University of Sheffield, UK*

Dussart's monograph is an excellent contribution to a growing field and adds to the increasingly sophisticated literature of feminist history.
*CHOICE*

In the Service of Empire makes important contributions to the scholarship on British and imperial domestic service, as well as British identity formation through race, class, and gender. It is a valuable book for historians of empire, Britain, colonial South Asia, and for scholars interested in labour, race, and gender more broadly.
*Cultural and Social History*