I

Family history has previously been identified as somewhat of a pariah topic. In other historiographies, families were either conspicuously absent, or featured only as ‘an institution that passively responded to change’ rather than a ‘force for change’.Footnote ⁴ Leonore Davidoff et al. argue that across many fields ‘the family is everywhere and the family is nowhere to be seen’; historians avoid the family, perceiving it as a ‘site of morality’ or a ‘natural entity’ that evades historical analysis.Footnote ⁵ Concepts that had currency in family history were not always deployed in other fields; for example, in a recent article on the changing connotations of favouritism, Joanne Begiato notes that familial favouritism had not been linked to ideas about royal and political favouritism or societal systems of patronage – instead, these bodies of scholarship remained curiously separate.Footnote ⁶ Formerly, imperial history was no different. There was no space for the family in traditional histories of the British Empire, which pursued theories of ‘a single European colonial project’, whether driven by governments, capitalism, or men.Footnote ⁷ But with the advent of the new imperial history, scholars began to see multiple colonial projects and numerous ways that the empire impacted British society, culture, and identity.Footnote ⁸ There was a recognition that empire was a system of exchange embedded deeply within Britain itself, not an entity whereby the metropole exerted one-directional influence over the colonies. Exploring empire through the family supported two key lines of enquiry for the new imperial history: first, recognizing the impact of the empire at home, and second, understanding empire as a series of interlocking networks.Footnote ⁹

To begin with, there was a short route between studying the empire at home and studying imperial families. In At home with the empire, Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose discuss the multiple meanings of the word ‘home’; home could refer to Britain, the nation, the imperial metropole; but it could also refer to the family home, a private space lived in by a group of people ‘related to one another by virtue of kinship’. Footnote ¹⁰ In contemporary understandings, these ideas of home had their opposites in multiple conceptions of what was outside of the home, those who were not family, or Britain’s overseas colonies. However, while the empire was imagined as the antithesis to home, in reality it deeply shaped domestic life, metropolitan culture, and British identities.Footnote ¹¹ Likewise, the family was contained neither by the family home nor the national home, as individuals remained deeply embedded in their family units as they travelled, corresponded, and imagined across empire. Following the activities and movements of imperial families enabled historians to organically bring together the home and away of the British Empire, recognizing the exchange that occurred in imperial contexts; to – as Catherine Hall advocates – place ‘colony and metropole in one analytic frame’.Footnote ¹²

The other significant insight which the study of families brought to imperial history was the interpretation of families as networks that knitted the spaces of the British Empire together.Footnote ¹³ Andrew Thompson and Gary Magee argue for understanding ‘empire as a series of interlocking networks or webs, which impacted as much on metropolitan as on colonial life’.Footnote ¹⁴ These networks were the ‘software of empire’, and through them ‘ideas and information were exchanged, trust was negotiated, goods were traded and people travelled’, while the British state mostly played a ‘limited “guiding” role’.Footnote ¹⁵ David Lambert and Alan Lester call this the ‘networked or webbed conception of imperial space’, which they illustrate in their book Colonial lives across the British Empire by tracing ‘individual trajectories’ of people, ideas, and goods.Footnote ¹⁶ Networks levelled the different spaces of empire, positioning colony and metropole as places of reciprocal influence on one another. Families were an extremely common type of imperial network which connected individuals.

So, families made their entrance into imperial history. The emergence of a defined historiography on imperial families was confirmed in 2013, with the publication of a special issue of the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History titled ‘Imperial relations: histories of family in the British Empire’. The introduction to this special issue – authored by Esme Cleall, Laura Ishiguro, and Emily J. Manktelow – asserted that ‘family and empire were entangled in a wide variety of ways’; ‘in ideal and practice, imagination and experience, duty and emotion, blood and metaphor, family constituted key sinews of empire’, and ‘empire, too, could operate as a key sinew of family’.Footnote ¹⁷ In articles that discussed missionary families, childhood and child-rearing, domestic service, marriage, emigration, and more, the range of the domains in which the imperial family acted began to come to light.

One of the most common familial experiences of empire was the geographical separation of family members, as individuals moved between the metropole and different colonies. Elizabeth Buettner refers to ‘lengthy family separations’ as the hardest ‘price of empire’ to pay, as they caused anxieties, a sense of loss, and fraught emotions.Footnote ¹⁸ In Atlantic families, Sarah Pearsall explores letters written by families who were separated by the Atlantic Ocean, finding that invoking family sentiment and sensibility was a way that contemporaries dealt with the pressure that Atlantic ventures put on family members:

Empire, particularly at its frontiers, could be anxiety-inducing, due to the risks of overseas travel and the physical distance it put between family members. Affectionate family ties could be summoned by those experiencing uncertain imperial contexts as a source of emotional support. Exploring the letters of a married couple, Betsy and Thomas Francis, separated by Thomas’s naval service, Elaine Chalus found that the couples’ correspondence aimed to ‘create a virtual family circle that bound ship to shore, ensuring that Thomas Francis continued to be included in the wider life of the family’.Footnote ²⁰ Even while geographically distant, communication technologies enabled individuals to remain part of their families. Thus, families formed imperial networks of affection and sentiment, maintaining family ties across distance and connecting the disparate spaces of empire.

Families offered their members other types of mutual assistance, which could travel equally long distances. They often facilitated imperial travel and settlement, through material and financial aid or other means such as reassurance and advice. Thompson and Magee identify the reliability of family networks and kinship support as the most important factor in enabling imperial migration.Footnote ²¹ Even having distantly-related family members living in colonies assured people of support networks once they arrived, while those who ventured out first amongst their kin could rely on the safety net of family funds and influence back home to support them from a distance if needed.Footnote ²²

Families were also imperial networks of patronage. Whether relatives were motivated by sentiment, concern for maintaining family honour, a sense of duty, or the hope of reaping benefits for oneself in turn, most people in positions of power aimed to help their family members secure employment, promotions, business contracts, or political positions.Footnote ²³ Margot Finn has demonstrated the prominence of familial patronage networks in the East India Company (EIC). EIC patronage ‘was especially amenable to female influence, in part owing to the significant proportion of Company stock owned by women’, meaning more family members could be mobilized to participate in patronage.Footnote ²⁴ Finn describes how one Anglo-Indian family undertook a ‘concerted family campaign’ to obtain an EIC position for their family member, orchestrated by a metropolitan cousin of the family, ‘Mrs Chitty’, who appealed to her vast network of contacts and acted as the family’s representative back in Britain.Footnote ²⁵ Chitty made direct appeals for her family member to be granted a position, such as through written requests to a high-ranking official, as well as indirect overtures, including gift-giving, party invitations, and general flattery, targeted not only at people in positions of power themselves but also at their wives and other family members.

Families organized themselves into more formal networks too, such as through establishing businesses. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall identify ‘the centrality of the family enterprise to all economic activity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, although due to the estrangement between family history and economic history, the family business had not received sufficient historiographical attention until more recently.Footnote ²⁶ For families with investments in colonies or who engaged in overseas trade, their businesses were their route to becoming imperial families, providing an example of how individuals were members of multiple overlapping networks of different types.Footnote ²⁷

It is worth noting that family business is a capacious term in this historiography, extending beyond commercial organizations. For example, Finn compares employment in the East India Company to ‘a family business’ in the sense that it ‘required labour from both men and women’, so spouses worked together to achieve objectives.Footnote ²⁸ Hall provides a more detailed analysis of such joint family labour in Macaulay and son: architects of imperial Britain, which explores the political thought of Zachary Macaulay and his son Thomas Babington Macaulay.Footnote ²⁹ Hall identifies the Macaulays as ‘a particular kind of family firm: their capital was cultural, their power lay with words, their capacity to read, write and speak’.Footnote ³⁰ Tracing the links between the ideas of a father and son led Hall to recognize ‘the interconnections between the personal and political’, that are often absent from traditional political and imperial histories; the idea that there are emotional and familial, as well as intellectual, genealogies of political ideas.Footnote ³¹ Hall continues this theme in her more recent work Lucky Valley, arguing that slave-owner Edward Long deployed ideas in his book, History of Jamaica, which sought to achieve not only his own political and economic objectives but to chart his family’s success over several generations and ensure their future standing.Footnote ³² The image of the family firm implies a family acting concertedly in pursuit of profit, whether financial, political, or moral – a potential model for understanding how families function in empire.

The examples discussed so far are by no means exhaustive of the many ways that families could function in empire, but they give a sense of some of the significant developments in the field so far. These have been sketched to give a better understanding of the specific contributions of imperial family biographies to the study of imperial families. Finn identifies the value of ‘exploring empire through collective family biographies’ in allowing historians ‘to view political, economic, social and cultural processes of colonialism within an integrated grid of relations, adding new dimensions to the history of imperialism while locating that history more securely with the domestic history of Britain’.Footnote ³³ Cleall, Ishiguro, and Manktelow follow suit, arguing that these case studies of individual families could ‘push well beyond the “micro”, with biographies of extended families spread extensively across time and space, providing an anchor for wide-ranging explorations of the changing nature of colonialism’.Footnote ³⁴ They continue:

This recognized three key benefits of imperial family biographies: the ability to conceptualize global and longue durée histories; the foregrounding of new voices and perspectives; and a focus on the lived experience of empire.

Indeed, the benefits of biographical methods have been recognized far beyond this specific genre. Caine identifies a ‘biographical turn’ occurring across the humanities and social sciences.Footnote ³⁶ These new biographies represent a significant break with traditional biographical methodologies that have been much criticized by academic historians. Finn identifies the rise of Marxism as the cause of biography’s initial downfall, with its dismissal of individual human agency.Footnote ³⁷ While Lambert and Lester reject the ‘ordered conventions of career-focused, personally coherent Victorian biographical forms’, they argue that newer forms of biography could be consistent with academic methodologies and that biographies are ‘a powerful way of narrating the past’.Footnote ³⁸ Caine points to the rise of collective and group biographies, as opposed to traditional biographies on one person, which avoid ‘the artificial isolation which inevitably accompanies an intense focus on a single individual in which all others become secondary to the main figure under discussion’.Footnote ³⁹ Triumphalist narratives, conventional story arcs, and neat categorizations are avoidable.

A number of recent imperial histories have deployed biographical methods, using either single or multiple individuals to chart wider historical themes.Footnote ⁴⁰ Miles Ogborn argues that biography is an especially compelling way to approach global history – it animates ‘the more abstract processes, histories and geographies’ through individual lives and provides historians with a means to navigate vast geographical distance by following the movements of individuals.Footnote ⁴¹ Imperial family biographies are at the forefront of this new wave of biographical histories. By virtue of being a family biography, they disrupt the laser focus on single individuals, so often ‘great men’. The risk of relapsing into a Victorian-style biography is avoided, as exploring multiple family members through their public and private lives resists coherent, career-focussed histories.

Imperial family biographies also provide solutions to several problems faced by the field of imperial family histories. One such problem was that a hallmark of this historiography, as Cleall, Ishiguro, and Manktelow identify, was that ‘family’ and ‘empire’ were ‘contested categories’ – indeed that thinking with these two analytical lenses together prompted such contestation.Footnote ⁴² When families were explored in imperial contexts, membership criteria which sufficed in metropolitan domains fell short, and when empire was understood as a ‘family affair’ it challenged other conceptualizations of it.Footnote ⁴³ Even outside of imperial contexts, family is notoriously hard to define, as a variable entity across time and space. Davidoff et al.’s understanding of the family has significant currency; they view family as individuals tied by ‘blood’ (being biologically related), ‘contract’ (‘contractual arrangements of caring and financial reciprocity’), and ‘intimacy’ (encompassing the ‘private physical, sexual, and emotional aspects of relationships’).Footnote ⁴⁴ A gap in these categories is the home or household; Naomi Tadmor deploys the concept of ‘household-family’ in her history of the eighteenth-century family, arguing that living arrangements were crucial to family membership and thus ‘family’ could include ‘servants, apprentices, and co-resident relatives’.Footnote ⁴⁵ It is not clear to what extent such ideas persisted into the nineteenth century, or even the twentieth.Footnote ⁴⁶ The family – how it was thought about, and who was and was not included within it – evidently changed over the period of the British Empire. Even defining the family at all can be deemed misleading, with the ‘central singular term, the family’ implying a homogeneity that bears little resemblance to the variation between actual families.Footnote ⁴⁷ How can historians studying imperial families work with such unstable definitions to decide who should be included in their histories and how the ties between individuals should be understood? Family biographies – in-depth studies of actual families – establish what is meant by the family on a case-by-case basis. They offer an opportunity to pay attention to such variable individual situations. Notions of family must also be historicized, conforming as much as possible to contemporary understandings of family membership, to facilitate meaningful wider conclusions. While overarching definitions can be useful in establishing norms, exploring how real families conformed or did not conform to such norms can highlight how empire challenged the boundaries and nature of family units.

Empire, too, is a slippery category. Historians have proposed numerous terms to deal with the gradations of imperialism to be found in the British Empire. Empire can refer not only to Britain’s official overseas colonies, but to a much larger ‘informal empire’ of regions over which Britain exerted influence.Footnote ⁴⁸ Additionally, the peripheries of empire, its ‘ragged margins’ and ‘turbulent frontier’, have been recast from irrelevant backwaters to influential places that had significant impacts on the centre.Footnote ⁴⁹ The metropole itself was not a domain above the empire, but a space that was profoundly shaped by its colonies.Footnote ⁵⁰ In imperial family biographies, the movement of family members, their correspondence, and the focus of their attentions tend to define each family’s ‘empire’ idiosyncratically, in a way that can be accommodated by these ascendant paradigms in imperial history. This provides a variable vision of empire as it was lived, travelled, and imagined by people. Thus, applying the biographical method to the study of imperial families can reinforce significant turns in imperial and family history.

A final strength of biographical approaches to studying imperial families lies in their applicability to family archives. Individual documents within a family archive may well broadly make sense to a historian studying them in isolation. However, viewing family letters and papers out of the context of their archive often obscures a significant subtext. Nicknames, in-jokes, and small inferences abound in families – often to a greater extent than in many other networks, owing to the closeness and longevity of the relationships between family members. The meaning of these references is often impenetrable to the outside observer – they may even pass entirely unnoticed. This writing between the lines often contains a wealth of meaning, indicating information the family did not want outsiders to know, special bonds between certain individuals and animosity between others, or family secrets. In-depth, detailed excavation of a single family archive – which the writing of a group biography demands – can make this subtext recognizable and understandable.

II

Having explored the historiography that imperial family biographies intervene in, this review now turns to examine several major works of this genre to see their contributions. Barbara Caine’s route to writing an imperial family biography was explained at the start of this article. In Bombay to Bloomsbury: a biography of the Strachey family (2005), Caine demonstrates how the Strachey family’s experiences in India were central to both their family identity and the political and cultural projects they pursued back home in Britain. For example, through Richard Strachey’s role as a colonial administrator in the Raj, his family gained access to a cross-class social culture that was inaccessible to them back in Britain. Richard and Jane Strachey, ‘an upper middle class professional couple’, found themselves elevated, rubbing shoulders with aristocratic and gentry society.Footnote ⁵¹ Despite the fact that these connections with higher class families withered when the Stracheys returned to the metropole, Caine argues that the ideological impact of such a temporary promotion was more long-lasting, particularly amongst the Strachey women.Footnote ⁵² Jane Strachey’s feminism was influenced by her experience in India, ‘of being close to the centres of power, and indeed of exercising considerable power herself’, over Indian people for example.Footnote ⁵³ Similarly, her daughter Pippa visited India as an adult after growing up there, and Caine argued that ‘imperial life offered her, as it did other feminists, not only adventure and excitement, but also a sense of power and authority’.Footnote ⁵⁴ The ability to wield imperial power and access the upper echelons of imperial society inspired and enabled the Strachey women to demand more rights upon their return to Britain.

Caine demonstrated how the empire brought anxieties as well as assurances to families. While being in India enabled the Stracheys to transcend the boundaries of class to their advantage, other boundaries – that they would have preferred to preserve – crumbled. There was a fallout when one family member married a ‘Eurasian woman’, who, despite having had an ‘English’ upbringing, had an Indian grandmother.Footnote ⁵⁵ Some Stracheys interpreted this match as an incursion into the family unit, that would challenge the family’s whiteness. Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster argue that ‘ideas about what defined the English family were forged during encounters with peoples of different race and religion’.Footnote ⁵⁶ This is upheld in Caine’s history, which saw some Stracheys take to discursively policing the boundaries of their family to guard their racial identity. The Stracheys took pride in their imperial service, which they conceived as ‘bringing civilization and good government to the benighted natives’ – they imagined themselves as racially separate from those they governed, an idea that was challenged by the possibility of intermarriage which would bring such people within the bounds of the family.Footnote ⁵⁷ Caine thus presents a family who conceived of their identity to be sometimes elevated, while at other times challenged, by imperial service.

The following year, S. D. Smith published Slavery, family, and gentry capitalism in the British Atlantic: the world of the Lascelles, 1648–1834 (2006). Following the Yorkshire-based, mercantile Lascelles family and their associates over three centuries, Smith explores a family who contributed to empire through their business and trade activities. By the mid-eighteenth century, Smith argues, Caribbean colonies and transatlantic trade were controlled by ‘networks of kinship and regional affiliation, matrimonial alliances, mercantile expertise, and public service’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Smith’s imperial family biography provides an example of a real family’s lived experience, which testifies to Davidoff and Hall’s assertion that family enterprise was central ‘to all economic activity’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote ⁵⁹ Family networks were particularly valuable when it came to imperial business ventures, which tended to take place over vast distances; the Lascelleses found that ‘confining business to kinsmen or to well-connected groups of individuals helped reduce the enormous risks of long-distance commerce’.Footnote ⁶⁰ The durability (or perceived durability) of family ties meant that they functioned more effectively than non-family businesses over imperial distance, reassuring customers and investors that their trading partners were reliable individuals.

Smith chose the Lascelleses as the subjects for his history following an approach by Harewood House Trust, the heritage organization managing the family’s ancestral seat. The Trust had found several folders and manuscripts at Harewood House, detailing the Lascelleses’ involvement with the slave trade and their ownership of several West Indian plantations. Smith speculated that these papers may have become lost during a conscious ‘drawing of a discreet veil over links with slavery’, particularly post-1922, when the reputation of the Lascelles family became a matter of national importance following their marriage into the British royal family.Footnote ⁶¹ This was an imperial family that had tried to censor their archive, hiding papers that might cause embarrassment or shame to later generations. Smith’s findings were recognized by the Harewood House Trust as part of their efforts to acknowledge the legacy of the Lascelleses’ activities in the Caribbean, enabling them to provide visitors to Harewood with a more balanced, diverse history which highlighted some of the exploitative practices which funded the Harewood estate, exemplifying the importance these histories might hold for the heritage sector.Footnote ⁶²

Emma Rothschild’s The inner life of empires: an eighteenth-century history (2011) follows the eleven children of the Johnstone family, from their origins in Scotland to various places across the empire, ‘in imagination or in reality’.Footnote ⁶³ The work makes the case for the interiority of empire – that is, recognizing the influence of empire on the ‘inner life’, both the interior of the ‘mind’ and of the ‘household’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Thus Rothschild’s history blends a history of emotions approach with a focus on material culture and domesticities.

Rothschild confronts the unstable identity of the imperial family, which Caine began to engage with, placing at the centre of her history a figure who held an uncertain status within the family. Referred to throughout as ‘Bell or Belinda’ (her name was not known for certain), this figure was not a ‘Johnstone’ as such, although she was probably the mother to James Johnstone’s illegitimate child.Footnote ⁶⁵ She was a ‘native of Bengal’ and an enslaved woman (or possibly a servant) owned (or employed) by John Johnstone.Footnote ⁶⁶ She stayed on her own for some time in John’s wife’s bedroom, indicating a level of intimacy with the family.Footnote ⁶⁷ While Bell or Belinda may have been considered a member of the household and may have mothered a Johnstone child, her race and lack of marriage contract precluded her from membership of the family. Rothschild makes the case for including in imperial family biographies individuals who did not meet the criteria for family membership, to enable an understanding of the concerns families felt while navigating empire. Finn’s research has shown that there was no set rule for who was and was not allowed into the family on the grounds of race, through exploring the case of two brothers, one who married a woman with Irish ancestry and one who married a woman with Indian ancestry; the latter was quickly accepted into the family, while the former was subjected to much more suspicion.Footnote ⁶⁸ In that family, ‘the image of the vulgar, lower-class Irish adventuress loomed far larger’ than fears of non-white women.Footnote ⁶⁹ Families did not negotiate these moments of membership tension in a uniform way. Recognizing these moments necessitates including individuals who were excluded from the family, as well as those who successfully gained entry. Rothschild identifies these concerns with boundaries, family membership, and identity as symptomatic of uncertainties generated by empire.Footnote ⁷⁰

F. R. H. Du Boulay’s Servants of empire: an imperial memoir of a British family (2011) and Andrea Stuart’s Sugar in the blood: a family story of slavery and empire (2012) are two imperial family biographies written about the authors’ own families.Footnote ⁷¹ Both works demonstrate the indebtedness of the field to genealogical methods pioneered by researchers studying their own family history. Relatedly, the widespread interest in researching family history shows this to be an entry point for more people to engage in the writing and researching of imperial history. There are benefits from these insider perspectives. For example, Du Boulay’s sources were not in a publicly-accessible archive; rather, they consisted of bundles of letters cared for by successive generations of his family. He presented these letters ‘as eyewitness reports of lesser servants of empire, at a period of crucial change, taken from a level somewhat nearer the ground than that of commanders-in-chief, high commissioners and the like, and thus sharp in ground detail’.Footnote ⁷² Without the family’s private archival undertaking, these perspectives might never have been preserved, and without Du Boulay’s work they would remain inaccessible to scholars outside of the family.

The idea of families drawing together the different spaces of empire emerges centrally in Adele Perry’s Colonial relations: The Douglas-Connolly family and the nineteenth-century imperial world (2017). Perry identifies the Douglas-Connolly family as ‘emphatically colonial relations’, linking ‘together a series of places that are routinely and revealingly described as “distant”’.Footnote ⁷³ Following the Douglas-Connollys through their involvement in the fur trade to their administrative positions in the British colonies of Vancouver and British Colombia, Perry tracked their upward socio-economic trajectory through empire.

Perry builds on Caine’s feminist approach to imperial family biographies, writing that ‘feminist scholars have shown us how attending to questions of gender, family, and sexuality prompts us to excavate different histories of empire, ones that tell different stories about imperial power, its authority, and its limits’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Studying families offers an opportunity to centralize the histories of women; while their voices may remain in the minority in family archives, women were integral to families in countless ways, as wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, archivists, home managers, correspondents, caregivers, and by undertaking a myriad of other types of (often unpaid) labour to support family enterprises. Thinking about these roles as manifestations of involvement in empire takes inspiration from historians who have excavated women’s political roles through widening the definition of politics beyond parliamentary politics, which necessarily excludes women.Footnote ⁷⁵ As Elaine Chalus writes, ‘it is not necessary to look behind the scenes to discover women in eighteenth-century political life; as soon as our focus is adjusted to include social politics and patronage, and to look at the electoral process holistically, they appear openly’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Similarly, exploring military, parliamentary, or formal business networks across the British empire has often portrayed an almost exclusively male imperial enterprise. However, tracing family networks reinstates women as agents of empire. Until recently, many feminist authors were reluctant to engage in this reinstatement as it ‘might be misconstrued as glamorization of imperialism’; but ignoring women’s roles and presence provides a skewed vision of how the British Empire operated.Footnote ⁷⁷

Feminist thinkers have also theorized methods of resisting the patriarchal structures that family units often upheld. Perry’s nomenclature of the Douglas-Connolly family reinstates Amelia Connolly’s maiden name to elucidate kinship connections hitherto obscured by patriarchal naming practices.Footnote ⁷⁸ Perry advocates for including figures, such as Amelia Connolly, in histories of empire, despite there only being fragmentary archival evidence available about their lives (as Rothschild did through ‘Bell or Belinda’).Footnote ⁷⁹ While it is impossible to deliver full biographies of such people, a fuller family biography is enabled by their inclusion, however fleeting.

Acknowledging the creation process behind a family archive – particularly the influences that led to gaps and silences over certain parts of family history – became a key concern. In The bonds of family: slavery, commerce and culture in the British Atlantic world (2020), Katie Donington explores the records of the Hibbert family, noting how ‘damage, loss, destruction and how a family perceives and values its own history’ all affected the contents of the archive.Footnote ⁸⁰ Especially given that family history is ‘bound up with a sense of both memory and identity’, gaps in the archive might appear over uncomfortable aspects of the past that the family did not want to preserve – in the Hibberts’ case, this obscured the extent of their slave-owning in the Caribbean.Footnote ⁸¹ Recognizing these gaps where they appear, recourse to other sources of information, and careful excavation of the family archive are required to uncover these histories that might have been suppressed because they invoked family shame, sorrow, or were considered irrelevant or unnecessary to preserve.Footnote ⁸² Family archives require reading against ‘the archival grain’, to explore their conditions of production alongside merely extracting information.Footnote ⁸³

Remaining alert to the nature of family archives as an expression of family identity is essential.Footnote ⁸⁴ Donington found that the Hibberts – as a family both in business and in politics – were concerned with projecting certain images of their family at different times and in different contexts. As Smith found with the Lascelles, Donington attributes part of the Hibberts’ commercial success to their business being family-run: ‘family and kin provided a sense of security based on shared endeavour and collective responsibility. … The Hibberts enjoyed a reputation for solidity and probity precisely because their business was managed by a single extended family operating on both sides of the Atlantic’.Footnote ⁸⁵ The Hibberts, with their representatives in the Caribbean and Britain, were keen to emphasize their family connections when doing business. However, at other times, individuals were equally keen to downplay their family background. Divides could appear between metropolitan and settler-colonial branches of families. The Hibberts’ opinions differed on how best to oppose abolitionism and uphold slavery. Member of Parliament George Hibbert’s ‘distinctly metropolitan mercantile position’, which was ‘attuned to the political temperature at the imperial centre’, put him at odds with the ‘colonial plantocracy’ in Jamaica, including his brother Robert, who tended to be more unapologetically pro-slavery.Footnote ⁸⁶ At times, George actively wanted to distance himself from his colonial relations, such as when he sought to counter abolitionist criticism of slave owners. George’s own domestic life included churchgoing, philanthropy, and a public image of himself at the head of a good Christian family, thus resisting the abolitionist ‘depiction of the slave owner as a Creolised tyrant’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Donington explores how the purchase of a country house and assuming an associated societal role allowed the Hibberts to distance themselves from the origins of their wealth in slavery and provide an inheritance for their children that would facilitate a permanent route to social elevation.Footnote ⁸⁸ It was sometimes important for imperial families to appear distinctly non-imperial.

Therefore, paying attention to the way that familial ties were variously invoked and suppressed by family members navigating their way through the British imperial world can reveal their concerns and ambitions in empire. Emphasizing family ties lessened the impact of the geographical distance over which empire operated, serving as support and assurance to Britons, navigating either their emotions or business enterprises. Suppressing family ties might give the appearance that such assurances were no longer required or provide a means for one to distance themselves from colonial relations for political or status reasons. Crucially, the same family or individual might invoke or suppress familial ties at different times and in different contexts, and these impulses led to contours in the archives, where information on certain topics abounded while other topics proved elusive.

In Writing the empire: the McIlwraiths, 1853–1948 (2021), Eva-Marie Kröller continues this approach, interpreting the documents in family archives as an expression of how ‘individuals articulated their identity as imperial subjects over time’.Footnote ⁸⁹ She highlights the variety of different types of writing that perform this identity-work found in the McIlwraith family archive: ‘published and unpublished literary and scholarly works … personal letters, diaries, logbooks, memoirs, estate papers, as well as business and scientific correspondence’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Such rich and diverse source material lends itself to biographical writing. Kröller explicitly aligns her imperial family biography with the networked view of empire, finding that ‘the concept of networking could have been invented by the McIlwraiths’.Footnote ⁹¹ As part of their success they carefully nurtured connections within their own expanding family and with their associates as they ‘careered’ through Canada, Australia, Britain, and continental Europe.Footnote ⁹² Kröller connects the disparate histories of the McIlwraiths that arose in settler-colonial contexts, as individuals became geographically scattered from each other and their origins.

Kröller uses the material written by and for children in the McIlwraith archive to illuminate some childhood experiences of empire, a perspective often obscured in other types of archive.Footnote ⁹³ The McIlwraiths – both the children and adults – underwent one of the most common experiences of empire – familial separation – which generated correspondence between parents and children.Footnote ⁹⁴ It was common for parents to reside in colonies while their children remained in (or were sent to) Britain, revealing a preference for raising and educating children in the metropole.Footnote ⁹⁵ Children might be sent to the metropole in times of crisis; Kröller describes how the McIlwraiths mobilized their transimperial network to send their children from Australia back to Scotland to be cared for by their grandparents while their mother struggled with alcoholism.Footnote ⁹⁶ Kröller’s account aligns with others that highlight parental aspirations for children to return to Britain, whether for educational, practical, moral, or other reasons.Footnote ⁹⁷

Separation from parents was just one possible childhood experience of empire, but it reveals a wider pattern that shows how the care of the next generation often indicated the foremost concerns of an imperial family.Footnote ⁹⁸ This lived experience fed into metaphors and conceptualizations of empire; Hall argues that ‘colonies were children, with all the meanings of connection and separation carried by that familial trope’.Footnote ⁹⁹ It followed that Britain had a parental responsibility to its colonies as the ‘mother country’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Ideas of family were used symbolically to invoke the cohesiveness of the empire over vast distance, as well as the expected responsibilities and roles of each part. Kröller identifies an example of how the Australian colonies were referred to as siblings in a highly gendered way, with ‘sister’ colonies being ‘wayward and backward’ while brother colonies were the ‘vigorous sons’ of the metropole.Footnote ¹⁰¹ While lived familial experience fuelled some of these metaphors, imperial family biographies can show how, in turn, actual families responded to and sometimes resisted them. For example, this submission of feminine characters to masculine ones was resisted by individual female McIlwraiths, namely by Jean McIlwraith’s construction of ‘articulate and fierce’ female characters in her writing.Footnote ¹⁰² Real families combatted imperial-familial metaphors, showing that the gulf between real and metaphorical ideas of family was neither impassable nor a one-way flow of influence.

A final imperial family biography is Elizabeth Elbourne’s Empire, kinship and violence: family histories, Indigenous rights and the making of settler colonialism, 1770–1842. Elbourne takes a different approach, exploring three different families across the British imperial world – the Brants, the Bannisters, and the Buxtons – charting different forms of family governance and biopower from early America to West Africa. Elbourne treads a well-established path in acknowledging families as ‘networks, broadly defined, [that] enabled people to communicate and act across imperial spaces. Distance might be shrunk by letters, news and personal visits, by small or large financial transactions, by relationships of trust or exchanges of gossip’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Elbourne also builds upon research that highlights the uneven nature of the family archive. Rather than focus on the gaps, Elbourne observes the opposite phenomenon, where histories that might have upheld family honour, status, or probity are foregrounded in family records. The Buxtons were keen to memorialize their commitment to the cause of antislavery and preserve information about their involvement in the exploratory Niger Expedition of 1841 – that is, at least, before the expedition emerged as an abject failure, at which point such recording of Buxton involvement promptly stopped. However, before this ‘the Buxton circle took ownership of the Expedition [by] chronicling it’, for example through a scrapbook made by Charlotte Upcher, a close family friend, which compiled positive press cuttings and reports of the planning of the expedition.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Additionally, Elbourne argues that ‘recording was an activity that was gendered as female’; Sarah Maria Buxton and her partner Anna Gurney were in charge of maintaining the family archive for a time, and Priscilla Buxton used her letters to record her family’s progress in the abolitionist movement.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This recognizes women’s work in the production and maintenance of not only the family archive but also family memory and tradition; it is an example of female domestic labour which supports the family unit and shows the importance imperial families attributed to intergenerational connection and legacy-building.

Where Elbourne forges the newest ground was the emphasis on family individuality in shaping imperial family governance. This marked families out as different from other types of imperial networks. For Elbourne, ‘family cultures’ dictated the opportunities an individual had in their life, especially ‘in determining the possibilities open to women’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ These family cultures might be generated by the religious, political, or social networks that a family circulated in, but also by identity-shaping events that happened to the family as a unit. For the Buxtons, Elbourne suggests that ‘tragedy intensified a family quest for meaning’; six out of the eleven Buxton children died during childhood, while other family members suffered from severe illness, which could have inculcated a ‘sense of obligation to carry out service’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The remaining Buxton children felt a duty to their parents to achieve something for their family. This led them to commit to the ‘family project’ or ‘family enterprise’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Family culture and identity thus motivated individual Buxton involvement in imperial issues.

III

Imperial family biographies have made significant contributions to our understanding of families and empires. They have answered the demands of the new imperial history and solved several methodological and conceptual problems faced by global historians and historians of imperial families. They have helped to end the marginalization of family history, and the sheer diversity of the histories that have resulted from this approach – in subject matter, setting, and approach – show their importance to a wide array of adjacent fields.

This genre also has the capacity for further insights as it develops in new directions. So far, this review has intended to illustrate that imperial family biographies inherited a disparity from the historiography on imperial families out of which they arose; namely, that they tend to be more concerned with intervening in imperial history rather than in family history. The field remains dominated by historians who are first and foremost historians of the British Empire – while these historians are attentive to theoretical insights that families can offer, the field’s foremost findings relate to the functioning and nature of the empire. How the empire impacted the family – not just the specific family at hand, but the broader concept of the family – has tended to remain a secondary concern, as has engagement with and interventions in the historiography of the family alone.

This is beginning to be addressed by further emphasis on how families functioned in empire not merely as networks of individuals, or conduits for individual action, but as historical actors themselves. The networked view of empire excels at highlighting the role of individuals – both those with and without power – in constructing and sustaining empire through their connections. The family case study offers a set of individuals to trace across empire and provides bounds to a history that can be as wide-ranging as the movement and thought of the family members in question. But in this view, what distinguishes family networks from other types of webs with which they overlapped and intersected, such as political, business, religious, sentimental, and associational networks? There is an opportunity to take the analytical power of the family case study further. The family as business model, as a way of understanding how families functioned as units, is one example of how historians might understand families as imperial actors, but this is an area that could be developed. Families do not just provide impetus for historical change through the networks they comprise, but through concepts intrinsic to each family. These concepts might be family identity or family culture: beliefs, practices, and ideas that govern how family members act in the world. Alternatively, they might be family function and family structure: how the family operated and organized itself across time and space. A potential criticism of foregrounding the individuality of families is that it gives rise to insular histories that do not aim to make wider historical claims. Yet, if family was ‘the building block’ of society, as Hall claims, then placing these family characteristics centre stage is also essential.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Family can be acknowledged as a motor of history, but one that can only be perceived through microhistory.

Some imperial family biographies, most notably Elbourne’s, identify the specific identity, tradition, and values of the family they explore, and how this influenced and motivated its members’ actions. Christopher Tolley calls this a family’s ‘corporate ethos’; in his study of four evangelical families, he argues that families were able to sustain their ethos over ‘several generations by family biographies and collections of documents, despite the ebb and flow of individual changes in outlook and belief’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Identity was sustained and transmitted by families in multiple ways. Tolley argues that the ‘tradition of biography’, accounts of individuals’ lives written by their family members, was a way of communicating the legacy of evangelicalism, ‘pride in the family name’, and ideas about the importance of home life.Footnote ¹¹¹ Religious ideas, pride, and domestic practices amongst families were transmitted in less self-conscious ways too. Anthony Fletcher shows how symbolism in portraiture represented elite family relationships, hierarchies, and parental roles (although he also notes the gap between representation and reality).Footnote ¹¹² Pearsall points to correspondence as a way that late eighteenth-century families self-fashioned their relationships around familiarity and sensibility, rejecting older models of family relationships based around deference.Footnote ¹¹³

Imperial family biographies have explored some of these ways that family identity was constructed. Most comprehensively, they have illustrated the ways that the family archive performed such identity work, as family members consciously curated the contents of their archive and existing power dynamics within the family dictated which materials were discarded and which were preserved. Other ways of constructing or expressing identity could be explored further. The family home is one of the most important spaces for understanding material expressions of family identity, culture, structure, and function, and is closely tied to class identity. One type of elite family home, the country house, has received significant attention from imperial historians. The country house has long been perceived as a national heritage institution, symbolizing both the domestic family home and a traditional local centre of power.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Material culture studies have led the charge in excavating country houses as global centres of power too, especially through their role in international and imperial trade networks.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Donington’s imperial family biography offers a sustained analysis of how country house ownership could augment an imperial family’s status. The Hibbert family bought their country house using wealth earned in the slave trade, allowing them ‘to lay claim to the permanence traditionally associated with the gentry and the aristocracy’; to obscure their imperial connections with the specific ‘Englishness’ associated with country houses; and to assume responsibility of the welfare of their estate, which ‘offered a means of repairing their tarnished reputation and a buttress to the rhetoric of planter paternalism’.Footnote ¹¹⁶

The extent to which other types of family homes, particularly the homes of non-landed families, were impacted by and interacted with empire requires further research. Family historians have done significant research on the homes of the middle and lower classes, which provides a valuable base.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In Material relations, Jane Hamlett assesses how a broad spectrum of middle-class families ‘imagined, described and used rooms, furnishing and domestic ephemera, and the role these objects played in family life’ in the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Hamlett demonstrates how ‘rooms were used in a way that allowed social separation and the construction of household hierarchies’, and how ‘ideas of class and gender’ were reinforced through material objects, reflecting specifically middle-class concerns.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Hamlett’s approach is particularly useful in moving away from ‘the moment of consumption’ to examine ‘the life cycle of the object as it was used in the home after it was purchased’.Footnote ¹²⁰ Often imperial material histories are most focussed on buying and selling, or on tracing the global trade networks that characterized empire. A focus only on goods traded for profit obscures other types of material exchanges prevalent amongst families, such as gift-giving.Footnote ¹²¹ An imperial family biography that features the family home and its contents centrally would advance imperial history’s engagement with material culture and domesticities.

The types of family explored in imperial family biographies vary in terms of the nature of their engagements with the British Empire, as well as the time periods in which they were active. They do not vary when it comes to class. The ‘middling sorts’ dominate the genre of the imperial family biography currently – more specifically, an upwardly-mobile upper-middle class, that had political, professional, mercantile, religious, or military investments in empire. Upper-class families – perhaps those who already owned a country estate, as opposed to acquiring one through imperial profits – undoubtedly encountered experiences in empire that challenged or shaped their class identity too. Smith’s work on the Lascelles family illustrates a gentry family who forged a global trade network, augmenting their status with income from the empire, notably from slave owning, as well as income from their estates back in Britain. But what of non-mercantile landed families? Or, more broadly, those families that did not directly profit financially from empire? Where financial benefit – whether through employment, land settlement, or direct investment – was not a motive, it is less immediately clear why families became involved in imperial issues, careers, or travel. Exploring such families reveals an important story about the cultural and social profits of empire.

My own research investigates such a family, the Aclands of Killerton. By the nineteenth century, the Aclands were an extensively landed family whose family identity was deeply tied to their estates in Devon, their role as landlords, and their domestic home life.Footnote ¹²² Yet they were also invested in many imperial issues, including the antislavery movement, missionary work, global exploration voyages, and church and school building overseas.Footnote ¹²³ Imperial service offered a means for the Aclands to resist critiques of ‘Old Corruption’, positioning themselves as gentry leaders of Britain’s colonial enterprise, rather than as an unnecessary and outdated drain of resources on the country.Footnote ¹²⁴ Acland family members pursued this mission in different ways and were variously invested in it; for example, successive heads of the family were MPs, several younger sons joined the military, while daughters maintained familial links via global correspondence networks. These activities refashioned the Aclands as global leaders, alongside a more traditional sense of themselves as local leaders, predicated on a deeply held sense of their identity as a public service family. The Aclands were not made by empire, but remade.

Family history, reputation, and legacy were deeply important to individuals, even as they ventured out beyond the family circle. To provide just one example: there are several possible ways of understanding Captain Charles Acland’s (1793–1828) decision to go beyond the demands of his orders from the Admiralty, as he not only cruised off the east coast of Africa, waiting to intercept ships carrying enslaved people, but also entered harbours and ports, actively seeking these ships out, performing his service with a zeal that went far beyond the call of duty.Footnote ¹²⁵ It certainly should be understood, in part, as an indicator of his genuine commitment to antislavery principles, buoyed by his evangelical beliefs and his dedication to naval service. But it should also be understood in light of his eldest brother’s campaign against slavery as a member of parliament, and his family’s connections to networks of missionaries who could use information that Acland sent back about Africa.Footnote ¹²⁶ It should be seen in the context of Acland having achieved his position through high-ranking family members in the Navy, his desire to set an example to his fourteen-year-old nephew, who now accompanied him on his ship, and his distancing himself from his middle brother, who had a limited relationship with the family after leaving the Navy against their wishes. And it should be understood as being enabled by the support from his wife, who visited him at the Cape of Good Hope naval station; the overseas assistance provided by his wife’s EIC-employed relations; and the pride of his Devon-based family who – after Acland’s death on active service – erected a local memorial to him, praising how ‘to save the captive’s life from bonds thou freely gav’st thine own’.Footnote ¹²⁷

An obvious gap in the types of family analysed in imperial family biographies are working-class families. Given the disparity in the volume and type of source material, the methodologies for researching working-class families are different. Sources are more likely to be from parochial records which provide only local context and are more likely to be quantitative than qualitative, when compared to elite sources.Footnote ¹²⁸ This makes the biographical form of history writing even more challenging. Due to source availability, working-class imperial family history has overwhelmingly focused on convicts.Footnote ¹²⁹ Perry McIntyre’s work on Irish convicts who were forcibly transported to Australia refutes the assumption that working-class individuals were not able to maintain contact with their families from overseas, as they overcame limited resources and adverse conditions.Footnote ¹³⁰ Alexandra Lindgren-Gibson’s Working-Class Raj offers a sustained analysis of another type of working-class family, those living in British India, demonstrating ‘the significance of family formation to the empire and the role the empire played in shaping British family life in colony and metropole’.Footnote ¹³¹ Working-class imperial family history is a promising area of future study that would develop understandings of how family identity and connections were maintained and how class identity was mediated through the family. Whether enough material could be gathered about a working-class family to write a family biography might be a question of interest to future scholars.

Numerous other types of family warrant further exploration, including Indigenous or colonized families, which feature only once in the works reviewed in this article (the Brant family, written about by Elbourne). Furthermore, as the field grows, a larger corpus of biographies will enable firmer conclusions to be drawn about imperial families as they changed over time and space. To conclude, imperial family biographies constitute a burgeoning field that bridges family history and imperial studies, has made valuable contributions to several historiographies, and holds much promise for further research. By positioning family units, as well as the individuals they bind together, as active historical agents and engaging more deeply with existing scholarship on the family, future studies can underscore the unique way that families operated as imperial networks. The family is not simply a type of network like any other, but neither is it an untouchable concept that evades historical analysis. Families can be more than frameworks to examine the British Empire; they can be crucial actors in driving imperial construction and maintenance.