In British colonial imagination, the Indian ayah was idealized as an inherently nurturing, maternal figure, selflessly devoted to British women and children. The ayah archetype was not just a comforting construct, but morally legitimized British colonialism. Legal and medical archives, however, provide stories of individual ayahs facing financial and sexual abuse, caste-loss anxieties, and abandonment, which are occluded in the highly sentimentalized British literary and visual archives. The cultural veneration of the ayah, the Introduction argues, erased the vulnerabilities of real-life colonial caregivers. The Introduction situates the history of colonial care work in the historiography of domestic labor in South Asia, Britain, and colonial empires more broadly. It emphasizes the importance of bringing together the gendered domestic histories of race and caste, which historians typically study separately. The Introduction furthermore explains how the book draws theoretical and methodological inspiration from South Asian postcolonial subaltern studies and African American black feminist intersectionality to decolonize the history of domestic labor in the British Empire.

This final chapter offers reflections on the implications of the book’s findings. It argues that the history of modern China’s struggle with extradition sheds an important light on the changing concept of “political crimes” as well as the Nationalist and Communist governments’ approaches to political crimes in the 1930s and beyond.

In the early 1900s, elite Indian families started employing the ayah as a symbol of domestic modernity. Chapter 6 shows how the ayah’s intimate labor enabled the emergence of the “modern” Indian wife, who left the multigenerational joint family to live with her conjugal family. Deploying Aryan race theories, “upper”-caste Hindu, Muslim, and Parsis racialized their “low”-caste, “low”-class, and “tribal” ayahs. The racialized mistress–maid relationship was transposed to ancient Indian history, when fair-skinned Aryan invaders (supposed ancestors of “upper” castes) enslaved dark-skinned indigenous Dasas/Dasis (supposed ancestors of “low”-caste servants). South Asian elites sentimentalized the ayah, just like the British did. However, newspapers and official archives reveal cases of Indian elites financially and sexually abusing their ayahs. Some elite Indians took ayahs to Britain and abandoned them, just like British families did. Despite growing anti-colonial nationalism, Indian elite nationalists forged transracial alliances with British employers in India and repeatedly blocked legislation that sought to empower domestic servants and make employers accountable.

The book concludes with a summary of the domestic and moral labors of the ayah from the mid 1700s to the mid 1900s. The Conclusion explores the transformation of the ayah’s role from a child’s nurse and ladies’ maid in the colonial era to elder-care and patient-care responsibilities in contemporary India. More broadly, the Conclusion traces the nonregulation of domestic labor from colonial capitalism to today’s neoliberal capitalism and its impact on the lives of India’s care workers and domestic workers, who form the largest section of the informal female workforce. Finally, the Conclusion discusses how the increasing gig-ification of domestic labor, the rise of digital platforms and placement agencies, and increased mobility of domestic workers serving elite urban and transnational Indian families, has increased the precarity of South Asian care workers and domestic workers in recent years.

This chapter provides an introduction to the book. It sets the stage by highlighting contrasts in India’s economy, democracy, and society. It then discusses the main topics covered in the book – democracy and governance, growth and distribution, caste, labor, gender, civil society, regional diversity, and foreign policy. The chapter also outlines the three themes that comprise the main arguments of the book. First, India’s democracy has been under considerable strain over the last decade. Second, growing economic inequalities that accompanied India’s high-growth phase over the last three and a half decades are associated with the country’s democratic decline. Third, society has reacted to changes from below but there are limits to societal activism in contemporary India.

Ayahs provided care labor to British families on the transoceanic voyages between India and Britain. In British cultural representations, mobility endowed ayahs with wealth and agency. This chapter, by contrast, argues that the lives of peripatetic ayahs were quite precarious; they had no legal protection from abuse and abandonment. While the East India Company had instituted a bond system for the repatriation of ayahs to India, the British state from 1858 formulated the domestic labor of ayahs as a “private” issue beyond state intervention, thereby upholding the privileges of British employers and providing no solution for the abandonment of ayahs in Britain. An Ayahs’ Home was set up in London, providing boarding for ayahs and allowing London missionaries the opportunity to proselytize the captive group of “heathen” women. Using petitions by ayahs, vernacular sources, newspapers, and documents from the Ayahs’ Home and the India Office in London, this chapter highlights the experiences of traveling ayahs from ship voyages to London courtrooms, their gendered attempts to preserve their caste purity – deemed lost for crossing the ocean – and their desperate attempts to return home to India.

This chapter introduces the key research questions of the book and outlines a theoretical framework for studying political crimes as a comparative concept. It highlights the significance of understanding political crimes as a transborder phenomenon and argues that the Qing state confronted serious challenges from the mid nineteenth century onward in handing fugitive renditions, as they became regulated by treaties whose implementation was often subject to the discretion of foreign diplomats, colonial officials, and municipal councils.

This chapter explores the relationship between the sharp rise in banditry, rebellion, and mixed crimes along the Qing Empire’s southern borders in the mid 1880s, and the responses of local administrators in Hong Kong and Canton to the challenges of extraditing fugitives. It traces the concurrent emergence of two contrasting discourses on justice: one framing justice as a system of legal protections against Qing law (prevalent across the Canton–Hong Kong border and increasingly within foreign concessions in treaty ports), and another asserting that foreign interference undermined the traditional justice system (notably along the Yangzi River and in missionary enclaves). This chapter argues that both discourses were strategically adopted by anti-Qing rebellions in the 1890s.

This chapter examines the Chinese government’s approach to political crimes and extradition procedures from the treaty ports during the first two decades of the Republic in the 1910s–1920s. It seeks to understand how the ideas of extradition and the POE changed in this period as a result of both domestic and global political processes: the growth of nationalism and communism, the strengthening and consolidation of the political parties, the increased professionalization of Chinese lawyers and judges, and the emergence of critical voices among foreign powers on the institution of extraterritoriality. The chapter presents a legal and transnational view of the Chinese Revolution in the first two decades of the Republic, illuminating the profound impact of extraterritoriality and changing extradition rules on China’s political trajectory.

Chapter 2 discusses how India’s rulers have used state power to promote economic development, both growth and its distribution. While India’s growth record is relatively impressive, it is also the case that this growth has not been accompanied by the creation of well-paying jobs, and economic inequality in India has increased sharply.

Chapter 5 brings together a range of “voices” of Indian ayahs – ventriloquized voices, epistolary voices, and juridical voices – which provide rich first-person insights into their lives and perspectives. Indian ayahs’ care labor involved entertaining British children with fairy tales, which this chapter uses as an archive of the worldviews of ayahs. This chapter reproduces some rare unpublished handwritten letters from ayahs to their British employers, to let the voices of ayahs speak for themselves. The letters reveal how ayahs cultivated intimate epistolary relationships across imperial hierarchies of race and class. The letters also show how ayahs reiterated the British narrative of their fidelity and cannily deployed their own precarity to appeal to the sentiments of British employers, thereby securing monetary gifts during their old age. Inevitably, only voices that upheld the idealized ayah archetype were preserved by British employers in private archives. Voices of ayahs complaining about financial and sexual abuse, however, survive in the form of petitions and testimonies in official archives, which this chapter uses to provide a different side of ayahs’ experiences.

This chapter shows how the revolution which overthrew the Qing did not happen in a legal vacuum but had interactions with changing legal and extraterritorial institutions on political crimes. It traces how the Qing’s judicial and political institutions for dealing with political crimes gradually unraveled through a series of political crises. The debates on extradition treaties and the application of the POE on rebels, which had mostly affected the colonial borders in South China, began to take on a national dimension in the aftermath of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. As the revolutionary fervor intensified in the last years of the dynasty, new laws were passed to treat political crimes in ways more compatible with international standards. Japan’s role in this process was not only limited to being a place of refuge and a destination for Chinese political offenders but also to the influence of its legal scholars and political advisors upon Qing’s constitutional reform.