In the Service of Empire: Domestic Service and Mastery in Metropole and Colony (Empires Other Histories)

In recent years scholarly interest in domestic service has expanded. Nonetheless, it still remains one of the key under-explored areas of history, which is surprising given its critical importance in the making of modern industrialized societies. If we want to understand properly the modern society we live in today, we need better knowledge of the cultural, political and economic significance of the servant-master relationship in its development. To that end, this book concerns the relationship between domestic servants and their British employers in metropole (Britain) and colony (India) in the nineteenth century and seeks to locate domestic service within a metropolitan, colonial and an imperial context. It explores how discourses of race, gender and class intersected to shape the relational construction of the identities and roles of servant and master/mistress, and the ways in which that relationship was negotiated in Britain and colonial India respectively. It argues that the relationship between domestic servants and their employers was crucial to the structuring of social identities and relations across imperial space, and was an important part of place-making. In certain circumstances the servant-employer relationship could take on political significance, with 'servant' and 'master' performing a metonymic role in elite imaginings of the ideal relations of social hierarchies, particularly those of race and class, which interacted with each other, and were always gendered. Via relations with servants across imperial space, white Britons were able to imagine themselves as both 'a race of masters and a master race' . 1 Bringing the servant-master/mistress relationship in Britain and in India into the same analytic frame adds an important dimension to understanding the complex ways in which differences between categories of people were empowered during the nineteenth century. 2 Relations with servants were integral to shaping the sense of an English 'middle class' and the gender norms that so defined the men and women of that class. The servant-employer relationship was also important within the conceptualization and execution of the imperial project, which in the nineteenth century involved the acquisition and settlement of vast swathes of the globe by white Britons. The development of this project shaped the ways in which servant/master/mistress identities were constructed. An ambivalent rhetoric of immaturity was adapted to connect servants with putatively inferior 'Others' , whether lower class or of colour. This process was heterogeneous, uneven and contradictory, and the identities of servant/master/ mistress became sites upon which notions of class, gender and racial difference were consolidated and contested. Paid domestic labour was, and continues to be, the oil that greases the machinery of industrialized, capitalist societies. It is labour that is necessarily defined as low skill and low status, because it must always be worth less than the other work it releases members of households to do. The value of this transaction cannot always easily be measured. The association of domestic labour with pollution and tedium shapes its ostensible worth: its low social value allows it to be under-priced in economic terms despite its critical importance in the functioning of modern societies. This means that often the financial cost of outsourcing domestic work is outweighed by the earnings of family members who would otherwise be cooking, cleaning and caring. However, at times this is not the case -the work that family members are released to do by paid domestic workers might be unremunerated, voluntary and/or charitable. It may not be obviously work at all, but could look like lunching, or shopping. But being a person who 'lunches' when other people do the domestic work that could otherwise occupy that time is an existence with significant connotations of social and cultural power. What it means to be a person who lunches, often assumed to be 'a lady who lunches' , is informed by and informs powerful, historically rooted ideas about gender, class and, as this book argues, race. Man's Place. Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 4. 20 See Leonore Davidoff, Worlds Between, chapter 4 for a case study exploring linkages between class, gender and sexuality; See also Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class, Part 2 for a collection of essays which consider gender, class and the relation of these axes of power to ideas about work, family and politics; See also Theodore Koditschek,'The Gendering of the British Working Class' , "Despite recent research, the 19th-century history of domestic service in empire and its wider implications is underexplored. This book sheds new light on servants and their masters in the British Empire, and in doing so offers new discourses on the colonial home, imperial society identit ies and colonial culture. Using a wide range of source material, from private papers to newspaper articles, official papers and court records, Dussart explores the strategic nature of the relationship, the connection between imperialism, domesticity and a master/servant paradigm that was deployed in different ways by varied actors often neglected in the historical record. Positioned outside the family but inside the private place of the home, 'the domestic servant' was often the foil against which 19th-century contemporaries worked out class, race and gender identities across metropole and colony, creating those places in the process. The role of domestic servants in empire thus lay not only in the labour they undertook, but also in the way the servant-master relationship constituted ground that helped other power relations to be imagined and contested. Dussart explores the domestic service relationship in 19th-century Britain and India, considering how ideas about servants and their masters and/or mistresses spanned imperial space, and shaped peoples and places within it"-- Provided by publisher Cover Contents Acknowledgements Introduction 1 The structure of domestic service in nineteenth-century Britain 2 Domestic service and the colonial home in India 3 Intimate knowledge and the servant-employer relationship in Britain 4 Colonizing the private sphere: Making 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 Conclusion Bibliography Index