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Family and Empire Between Britain, British Columbia and India, 1858-1901

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Family and Empire Between Britain, British Columbia and India, 1858-1901 Relative Distances: Family and Empire between Britain, British Columbia and India, 1858-1901 Laura Mitsuyo Ishiguro UCL This thesis is submitted for the degree of PhD. I, Laura Mitsuyo Ishiguro, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 1 Abstract This thesis explores the entangled relationship between family and empire in the late-nineteenth-century British Empire. Using the correspondence of British families involved in British Columbia or India between 1858 and 1901, it argues that family letters worked to make imperial lives possible, sustainable and meaningful. This correspondence enabled Britons to come to terms with the personal separations that were necessary for the operation of empire; to negotiate the nature of shifting relationships across imperial distances; and to produce and transmit family forms of colonial knowledge. In these ways, Britons ‘at home’ and abroad used correspondence to navigate the meanings of empire through the prism of family, both in everyday separations and in moments of crisis. Overall, the thesis argues, letter-writing thus positioned the family as a key building block of empire that bound together distant and different places in deeply personal and widely experienced, if also tenuous and anxious, ways. The thesis follows a modular structure, with chapters that explore overlapping but distinct topics of correspondence: food, dress, death and letter- writing itself. Each of these offers a different lens onto the ways in which family correspondence linked Britain with India and British Columbia through intimate channels of affection, obligation, information and representation. At the same time, this multi-sited study also probes the relationships among these three places during the second half of the nineteenth century. Comparing the writing of families engaged with two very different sites of empire—one, an anxiety-ridden garrison state imagined as the ‘jewel in the crown of empire,’ and the other, a more distant and comparatively unknown settler colony on the ‘edge of empire’—the thesis develops a history of British imperial families that underscores the importance of both specific, local contexts and the wider, partially interconnected world of the British Empire. 2 Table of Contents Abstract.................................................................................................................................2 List of Figures......................................................................................................................4 Acknowledgments...............................................................................................................5 Introduction ....................................................................................................... 7 Beginnings............................................................................................................................8 Intimacy ................................................................................................................................9 The everyday..................................................................................................................... 14 Methods: letters ................................................................................................................ 15 Methods: frames............................................................................................................... 19 Comparison .................................................................................................................. 19 Connections and networks......................................................................................... 21 Thinking comparison and connection together...................................................... 23 Mirrors ............................................................................................................................... 24 Scope and contributions ................................................................................................. 28 Summary of chapters....................................................................................................... 31 A note on terminology and transcription..................................................................... 33 Chapter 1. Setting the Scene: Families in Nineteenth-Century Britain, British Columbia and India ......................................................................................... 35 Britain................................................................................................................................. 35 British Columbia .............................................................................................................. 43 India ................................................................................................................................... 56 Chapter 2. The Family Letter........................................................................... 68 The shape of letters.......................................................................................................... 70 The shape of postal systems........................................................................................... 79 Space and the family letter.............................................................................................. 84 Time and the family letter............................................................................................... 88 Etiquette, expectation and advice in epistolary families............................................. 94 Empire, family, letter-writing ......................................................................................... 98 Chapter 3. ‘The Batchelor Out West’: Letters about Food and Family in British Columbia .............................................................................................103 Conceptualising food..................................................................................................... 104 ‘Fruit that Covent Garden never dreamt of’: producing family knowledge of British Columbian food................................................................................................. 109 Bush cookery and the family: gender, place and changing relationships............... 119 ‘Just like the Xmas dinner of old home’: Christmas dinner and distant family.... 128 Coda: food, family, empire ........................................................................................... 136 Chapter 4. Fashioning Families: Letters about Dress and Appearance in India .........................................................................................................................143 Conceptualising dress and appearance........................................................................ 144 British dress in India: wearing time and place ........................................................... 148 Dress, climate and the everyday in India ............................................................... 151 Advice and the family ............................................................................................... 155 Indian dress and British bodies ............................................................................... 157 Gifts, exchange and the family circulation of clothing............................................. 161 The family likeness: bodily connection, recognition and belonging ...................... 168 Coda: dress, family, empire........................................................................................... 172 3 Chapter 5. ‘One Unbroken Family’: Death at a Distance...............................179 Places of death................................................................................................................ 181 Britain .......................................................................................................................... 181 India............................................................................................................................. 185 British Columbia........................................................................................................ 190 Condolence letters, distance and togetherness.......................................................... 193 Plotting the family: burial and place............................................................................ 199 A changing family, a changing home .......................................................................... 204 Wills, inheritance and conflict...................................................................................... 207 Conclusions..................................................................................................................... 212 Conclusion.......................................................................................................214 Appendix 1: Biographical Notes on Key British Columbian Families.......... 223 Appendix 2: Biographical Notes on Key Anglo-Indian Families.................. 243 Bibliography................................................................................................... 254 Manuscript sources ........................................................................................................ 254 Periodicals ......................................................................................................................
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