A visit to the Museum of Immigration and Diversity, 19 Princelet Street

 As part of a course I have been teaching this year on Ethnicity and Immigration in Britain and France at the University of York, some of my students and I recently visited the Museum of Immigration and Diversity at 19 Princelet Street – an intriguing ‘site of conscience’ in the heart of London’s East End. One of my students, Thomas Blampied, has been kind enough to write a guest-blog, or perhaps guest-reflection would be a better word, on our experience there:

The Museum in Your Mind

Every time I visit London, I am awed and overwhelmed by the sheer size and dynamism of the global metropolis.  One of the most wonderful things about London is finding new and interesting things in the most unlikely of places.  Princelet Street is one of these places.

Just one stop east of Liverpool Street on the Tube is a slightly grubby and crowded community of shops and houses focused around Brick Lane in Spitalfields.  For centuries this area grew outside the exclusive boundaries of the City with each successive wave of immigration that came to settle in London.  Huguenots, Irish, Eastern European Jews and now Bangladeshis have all called this area home.  To walk down the streets crowded with a mosaic of people is a pleasure for the senses as different architectural styles, smells of food, styles of dress and manners of behaviour greet you at every turn.

Of course, none of this cultural immersion came as a surprise to me.  As a Canadian studying in Britain, a sense of multiculturalism had been drummed into me from my earliest school days in Canada.  A land of diversity and acceptance may be the Canada’s global brand, but it only works by oppressing native people and having foreign PhDs driving taxis.  I felt a little guilty walking down Brick Lane, camera in hand, the visiting photographer intruding on people’s lives.  Despite my interest in the ambience, that wasn’t the real reason I was there.

I was there to visit 19 Princelet Street, a museum of immigration and diversity tucked in the middle of this rainbow of culture.  Lined with Georgian Terraces, Princelet Street could be anywhere in London, but this particular street was home to London’s first Yiddish theatre and was the birthplace of Miriam Moses, the first female mayor of Stepney (so the blue plaque at number 17 informed me).  The museum itself is housed in a disused synagogue, complete with gallery and stained glass ceiling.

I didn’t really know what to expect in the museum.  I suppose I had expected a collection of artefacts narrating the history of immigration in the East End, but that isn’t what 19 Princelet Street is about.  Instead, it is a museum in your mind.

Spread across three floors, small displays of objects tell the story of displacement and new beginnings through the eyes of modern schoolchildren.  How better to explain these themes to the next generation than by making them feel them?  A cursory glance might brand this museum “arty,” but a closer look will make you confront not only the immigrant experience, but your own opinions too.  See how straightforward children make such supposedly complex issues as persecution or famine as they write letters from the point of view of refugees past and present.  Strip away the complexity which clouds adult judgement and you are left with bare human emotions: fear, sadness, hope.  It is hope that compels generation of newcomers to forge new lives in new lands.

There are several places in the museum where you are forced to consider your own thoughts.  The volunteer guides will ask you to fill out a small tag, listing what you would put in a suitcase if you were forced to leave home forever.  This request is met mostly with awkward laughter and assessing how many mobile phones one could fit in a bag.  After some thought, my tag read: “I would take my camera, as many books as I could carry and my ideas.”  Not really practical, but to me hope is kindled by thought and creative expression.

Upstairs, an art installation takes a critical stab at the myth of “Cool Britannia” by covering a Union Jack cushion with pins – a metaphor for immigrants trying to make a new life in Britain.  Later, you are invited to try and match opinions regarding asylum seekers with photos of people in an attempt to identify who said what.  Some people see it as a game, others feel it enforces stereotypes.  I think I see what it really says: it forces you to confront the snap judgements we all make when interacting with other people.  Psychologists would see this as how we determine the best way to interact with other people.  It doesn’t make you a bad person, but it is important to realise that we do judge and to confront our prejudices.

My visit over, I reflected on what it all meant.  People often describe 19 Princelet Street as feeling “like home” and I agree.  I have two passports, two identities and don’t feel fully at home with either one.  To walk into this museum of the mind and realise that other people are searching too is a comforting thought – and one I can take wherever I may go.

- Thomas Blampied

(via Emily Manktelow)

Thomas’s website, including links to his publications, can be found here: thomasblampied.blogspot.ca

New publications and a CFP of interest

This Sunday, I’d like to highlight three new ‘happenings’ in the field of colonial family history:

First, we are delighted to announce the publication of a special journal issue on families in the British Empire — the recent Spring 2013 issue of the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History — which was co-edited by network administrators (Esme Cleall, Laura Ishiguro, and Emily Manktelow). This issue contains five articles that emerged from our 2011 conference, Imperial Relations, and that collectively prompt us towards a rethinking of family and its relationship to empire. These are:

• Rhonda A. Semple, ‘Christian Model, Mission Realities: The business of regularizing family in mission communities in late nineteenth-century north India’
• S. E. Duff, ‘”Unto Children’s Children”: Clerical families and childrearing advice in the Cape Colony’
• Fae Dussart, ‘”To Glut a Menial’s Grudge”: Domestic servants and the Ilbert Bill controversy of 1883′
• Chie Ikeya, ‘Colonial Intimacies in Comparative Perspective: Intermarriage, law and cultural difference in British Burma’
• Andrew J. May, ‘Exiles from the Children’s City: Archives, imperial identities and the juvenile emigration of Anglo-Indians from Kalimpong to Australasia’

The journal is behind a paywall, but you can find the issue’s table of contents, abstracts, and (if you have access) the articles and our introduction here.

Second, a colleague alerted me to a relatively new book published by Leilani Holmes, Ancestry of Experience: A Journey into Hawaiian Ways of Knowing (University of Hawaii Press, 2012). This looks to be of interest to readers interested in family, genealogy, and ancestry; Indigenous experience, scholarly methodologies, and ways of knowing; and the relationship between colonialism and intimacy, and past and present, more generally. The book will be followed by a website (http://www.ancestryofexperience.com/) with supplementary material.

And finally, for those of you who may be in London this summer, I just came across this call for papers for a half-day symposium, ‘Making a Scene: Networks of Intimacy‘ (19 July, 1:30 pm – 7 pm, Institute of Psychoanalysis, Maida Vale, London). Follow the link for the full CFP, but in short: it’s an opportunity to meet, discuss research, network, and foster collaboration with a cross-disciplinary group of people interested in the study of intimacy, broadly defined. Participants are invited to speak for ten minutes about their research and/or field, and the day will end (6-7 pm) with a book launch for the recent Scenes of Intimacy: Reading, Writing and Theorizing Contemporary Literature. Advance registration is required, and cost (£7.50, payable on the day) includes afternoon tea, coffee, and biscuits, and wine at the launch. Contact Dr. Jennifer Cooke, Loughborough University, to register or for more information, and if you would like to give a paper, then send a 150 word description and a 50 word biography to writingsofintimacy@lboro.ac.uk.

Happy reading and proposing!

REVIEW: Thicker Than Water: Siblings and their Relations, 1780-1920 by Leonore Davidoff (Oxford University Press, 2012)

‘Until the final decades of the twentieth century social scientists, historians, and intellectuals, like the general public, have tended to take for granted the family as either part of the material order and the heartland of accepted morality or as a problem area best left to policy makers and social workers’ (p. 13). Why? Mainly, according to Leonore Davidoff in her latest book Thicker Than Water: Siblings and their relations, 1780-1920, because the family ‘has long been a stand-in for women and children, groups already defined on the periphery of social action’ (p. 13). The family has been taken as a passive back-drop to the “real” preoccupations of history – politics, economics, wars and elite intellectualism.

Clearly, and thankfully, times have changed, and the family has become a sustained site of historical, sociological and psychological analysis. Nonetheless, it remains the case that the way the historiography about family has developed through various disciplines ( including anthropology, sociology, social policy, systems-theory, demography, psychology, and history) has been at the expense of attention to sibling (and broader familial and household) relationships. For example, anthropology has focused on ‘blood’; sociology on the nuclear family; demography on the home; and psychology on the mother-father-child triptych. Within history too, the field has developed in such a way as to obscure these more expansive family relationships – and attention to husband-wife/parent-child relationships or relationships that deviate from this so-called “norm” (homosexual, extra-marital etc.) have remained primary.

“Typical” sibling relationships remain secondary, assumed absences (as Juliet Mitchell would say). This methodology has been supported (and created) by the types of sources used in family history, and the social, institutional and legal frameworks they represent – patrilineal naming systems, primogenitive inheritance patterns, census data organised around the male-led household etc. Yet the nineteenth century is ‘”kinship hot”, featuring extensive, reliable, and well-articulated structures of exchange among connected families over many generations’ (p. 21). Nonetheless, ‘the way the central building blocks of kin networks – sibling ties – originated and their extension into following generations has [still] to be investigated in detail’ (p. 28).

* * *

This is where Davidoff’s excellent book comes in, seeking to explore and analyse the world of sibling relationships in the nineteenth century. More than a book on family and childhood, this book seeks to clearly and stringently interrogate the sibling relationship across the life-cycle and the generations, exploring its importance throughout life and throughout families. The book is helpfully divided into three clear sections: Part I: Exploring kin and their kind; Part II: The lattice of kinship: a historical case study; and Part III: Life’s longest relationship: essays on sibling themes.

Thus, Part One investigates the historiographical and theoretical context of sibling relationships in academic discourse and literature.  While these expressed ‘multiple, sometimes contradictory, views about kinship, family and siblings’ (p. 44), this more than anything makes the case for a sustained historical analysis of siblinghood across the nineteenth century – rooting representation in lived experience.

Part Two thus explores the complex networks of kin that individuals inhabited in the nineteenth century, peopled by siblings, cousins, parents, aunts and uncles (single and married), nephews, nieces, grandparents, great-aunts, great-uncles, relatives-in-law and step-relatives. These networks were constant in their presence, but shifting and changing in their significance. And their significance was both huge and multi-faceted. Older siblings could care for younger siblings; younger siblings could care for parents, or nephews and nieces; aunts and uncles (married or single) could host nephews and nieces (and vice versa), could take on roles of mentorship and guardianship, and/or could contribute crucial capital, activate vital business connections, or provide emotional support in lieu or in addition to parental love. Networks and their roles changed as people lived, loved and died; and connections could equally remain significant throughout one’s life.

Part Three fleshes this out with a series of thematic essays on siblinghood, covering intimacy and incest, close marriage, gender, age and authority and sibling loss – rooting them in finely observed case studies (the Gladstones and the Freuds in particular).

* * *

Part Two was definitely my favourite section of the book, and Davidoff does an exceptionally good job of evoking the chaos of homes with 8-12 children: the order needed to feed, clothe and entertain them; the divergent, but must-be-met demands of a babe-in-arms, toddlers and young children, and older children requiring education and attention. ‘In Britain one-third of married women born in the early 1850s had at least seven live births; 10 to 15 per cent had ten or more children and these families contained a quarter of all children… If the perspective shifts to the individual child, then a larger proportion grew up surrounded by numerous siblings than the demographer’s snapshot implies. In other words, ten families containing a single child give ten children the experience of being an only child. But ten families with ten children in each produced 100 childhoods lived within a larger family type’ (p. 79). In short, for the middle classes ‘large surviving families were the experience of many people; either being a child in such a family or as parents of such numerous offspring – or both’ (p. 79).

Such (nuclear) families could span over twenty years of time – giving ample opportunity, therefore, for even more complex kin networks to develop between generations, with uncles/aunts and nephews/nieces of similar ages to each other, and with definite slippage between parent and sibling. Sibling relationships slid between being brotherly and sisterly, motherly and fatherly; while large kin networks were ‘activated’ by the emotional and material requirements of large families. All of this was of course further complicated by death, re-marriage, reconstituted families (consisting of step-fathers, step-mothers and step-siblings), and second families (‘yours’, ‘mine’, ‘ours’). The idea that the so-called ‘broken family’ is something new is clearly wildly fallacious.

It is little wonder then that uncles, aunts and cousins were drafted in, and that children were often drafted out – to kinfolk or older siblings. Meanwhile, large families inevitably led to multiple overlapping internal groups (such as sibling clusters) and complex power hierarchies (dictated by gender, birth-order and personality). Siblings could have very different financial, material and emotional experiences of their own family; and of course where there is intimacy, there is also discord and oftentimes resentment. All of this led to crowded, busy, bustling houses filled with children, adults (including extended kin – aunts, uncles etc.), and servants. When Eliza Branfill shut her 5-year-old daughter Leila in the closet for her ‘obstinate temper’, and tied her 4-year-old Atty to a chair for an hour for her ‘wicked temper’ (p. 93) I could almost (almost!) understand! ‘I am often well-nigh overwhelmed seeing my impotence, my ignorance, my weakness and my carnality’ she wrote in 1828. Well, quite.

This book is thus richly peopled – illustrated with anecdotes from across the social range, and across the manifold connections explored. Its vivid detail cannot be praised enough. To say that you get a real feel for what life could be like for the nineteenth-century middle classes is not to do its beautiful evocation of everyday life – as well as the long duree – any kind of justice. Exasperated mothers, domineering older brothers, and wayward younger sisters are all brought to life, and contextualised within the demographic and hierarchical context of nineteenth-century Britain. Extended families had a huge influence on people well into the twentieth century – and particularly the middle classes who tended to have long-lasting material, emotional and even residential links with extended kin. Large kin networks may have declined as the century progressed, and birth-rates fell, but their ramifications were long felt, as children from even ‘small’ families existed within the larger networks of their parents’ generation.

* * *

So where does all of this take us? Underpinning this book is an understanding of ‘family as a process, rather than a more static blueprint of relationships or pre-given roles’ (p. 16). They are the locus of early identity formation, the arena for continued relational identity dynamics (that is, the way identities, particularly – but not only – gender identities, evolve in relation to one another – and often in competition with one another), and sites of ‘labour, material, and financial organisation, not only emotional interaction’ (p. 17). They are threaded together by webs of social, moral and contractual obligations – of dependency, responsibility and intimacy. In the nineteenth century in particular they were interwoven with business, civic and political relationships. As Adam Kuper has so evocatively demonstrated, this was the era of the kinship web: the family dynasty that influenced business practices, marital choices and moral identities (including religious affiliations). Family dictated class position, economic agency and social standing. It was at once firm and inextricable, and fragile, partaking in a constant process of boundary definition in order to delineate its limits (particularly important due to its undercurrent of obligation).

Family was thus both “natural” and dependent on recognition. ‘It should be kept in mind… that identification is a two-way process. Belonging to a group necessitates recognition by its members that the applicant has a legitimate place within the group’ (p. 8). Having said that, underpinning the ‘cultures of relatedness’ are ‘the facts of human physiological life – the rates at which people are born and the length of their life span’ (p. 17). This of course has particular resonance in colonial families where recognition across the boundaries of legitimacy and social acceptability (particularly in mixed-race births) could be a complicated matter with very real emotional and material consequences.

Unsurprisingly, given Davidoff’s intellectual background, this is at heart a book about gender, which, like family, can also be seen as a process – and one of mutual and interactive construction. It is not really until Chapter Ten that this becomes explicit (though it is implicit throughout) when William Gladstone’s life is juxtaposed against that of his sisters Anne and Helen. The way that gender identities shaped the real lives of embodied beings is indeed perhaps best illuminated with siblings – individuals from the same socio-economic and cultural background whose differing life trajectories speak more to the power and consequences of gender difference than any other factor. This despite the fact that ‘birth order, personality, and life events may have cross-cut masculine advantage’ (p. 250).

Essentially, this book is a call for attention to extended families and their complex role and significance in nineteenth-century life (and beyond). After all, ‘it is still the fact that, for many people, siblings provide the place where physical and emotional contact has been closest’ (p. 338). It is primarily through sibling relationships that children learn ‘directly about differently sexed bodies as well as the rules and boundaries of consequent gender assignments’, about social interaction, hierarchy and loyalty, and how to identify with a group, through the cultural currencies of speech, dress and behaviours. It is often through siblinghood that we first experiment with boundaries, are exposed to (and fight against or conform to) gender roles, and learn about  competition, co-operation and negotiation. ‘In youth and beyond, sisters and brothers can be some of the fiercest to enforce gender, ethnic, national, and moral codes on each other and to pass judgement on their siblings’ lifestyles’ (p. 339). Meanwhile extended families often still oil the wheels of family economics, materiality and emotional intimacy. In absence and presence, families continue to shape everyday interactions and relationships. It is through those first interactions with siblings that we learn how to be collective individuals. Even more than that, siblings are, in the words of Douglas C. Breunlin (cited on p. 308), ‘the living remnant of our past, a buffer against the loss of our own history.’

- Emily Manktelow

Legacies of British Slave-Ownership Project – the database has gone live, plus conference announcement!

Last spring, we had the pleasure of two guest posts from Kate Donington, a researcher on the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership Project at University College London. You can read her discussions of the project here, and of her research here.

This is just a quick update to say that the project database went live this week, and it’s already making waves. For just some of the media responses, see the following:

• ‘Britain’s colonial shame,’ from the Independent.
• ‘Britain’s massive debt to slavery,’ from the Guardian (written by Principal Investigator, Professor Catherine Hall).
• ‘George Orwell family among 3,000 slave-owners who received compensation,’ from the BBC.
• ‘Site traces huge payouts slave owners received after abolition,’ from Wired.
• ‘Slavery payouts fuel reparations debate,’ from the Voice.

Congratulations to the research team for this very important and exciting work!

Readers who are interested in this research might also want to know about a conference that Kate is organising, along with Jessica Moody (York) and Ryan Hanley (WISE, Hull). Called Little Britain’s Memory of Slavery, the conference will bring together researchers thinking about ‘the smaller-scale specifics of Britain’s memory of slavery in more “local” projects, looking at case studies of places, the lives and memory of individuals, networks and organisations across a broad span of time, from the 18th century to the present day.’ Keynote speakers will be:

• Professor Catherine Hall, University College London
• Dr. Madge Dresser, University of the West of England
• Plus an Artists in Conversation Event, chaired by Professor Alan Rice, University of Central Lancashire
• Welcome Address by Professor John Oldfield, Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation, University of Hull.

Little Britain’s Memory of Slavery will be held on 13-14 September 2013 at UCL. See the conference website for more details, including the call for papers. Abstracts are due by 31 May.

Recent publications (February 2013)

Those of you interested in demographic and social histories of families, especially in early America, might be interested in the latest issue of The History of the Family, which includes a section on colonial families. This includes Kate Fawver’s introduction, and three articles: John J. Navin’s “‘The time of most distress’: Plymouth plantation’s demographic crisis,” Ross W. Beales Jr.’s “A minister’s bereavement and remarriage: Ebeneezer Parkman of Westborough, Massachusetts,” and Kate Fawver’s “Neolocality and household structure in Early America.”

Other recently released advance access publications include:

• Jane Berney, “Writing women’s histories: women in the colonial record of nineteenth-century Hong Kong,” Women’s History Review (advance access).
• Michèle Barrett and Peter Stallybrass, “Printing, Writing and a Family Archive: Recording the First World War,” History Workshop Journal (advance access).
• Christine Weir, “‘Deeply Interested in These Children Whom You Have Not Seen’: The Protestant Sunday School View of the Pacific, 1900–1940,” Journal of Pacific History (advance access).

Happy reading!

REVIEW: Incest and Influence: the private life of bourgeois England by Adam Kuper (Harvard University Press, 2010)

In July 1838 Charles Darwin, recently returned from his voyage on the Beagle, found himself contemplating marriage. ‘The arguments in favour were solid if unromantic. “Children – (if it Please God) – Constant companion, (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one, – object to be beloved & played with. – better than a dog anyhow. – Home, & someone to take care of house – Charms of music & female chit-chat. – These things good for one’s health. – but terrible loss of time-“.’  So begins Adam Kuper’s Incest and Influence, setting the tone for what turns out to be a fascinating book on the influence of cousin-marriage in the ‘higher bourgeoisie’ of nineteenth-century England. The title is therefore somewhat misleading (though who could have passed up such an opportunity?) as although cousin-marriage would certainly be considered incest now, in the nineteenth century it was considered quite acceptable – if not preferable (the argument of this book, among others) in the context of limited social interaction for young single people, high business liability (enforcing the need to trust completely one’s business partners), and middle-class patterns of inheritance.

Indeed, one imagines cousin-marriage to be of high incidence in the nineteenth century. The most famous is probably between Queen Victoria and her first-cousin Albert Saxe-Coberg. It is fairly common knowledge that Charles Darwin married his first cousin (Emma Wedgewood) – and that his sister Caroline did the same, marrying Emma’s brother Joe Wedgewood. As the rich, and often deeply confusing, family trees in this book demonstrate, cousin-marriage was also a feature of the Wedgewood family more generally, of the Clapham Sect, the Rothschild family, the Barclays, Gurneys and Freames. Cousin marriage, meanwhile, was only one manifestation of tightly-knit ‘clan marriages’, whereby communities of close friends, religious associations and business contacts would intermarry – both within and outside of what we would now consider incest. Most famous of these were of course the Bloomsbury Group whose manifold overlapping sexual relationships formed the undercurrent (or indeed, ‘over-current’) of intellectual association. Cousin-marriage in particular was a constant preoccupation of literature and romance – as were the sometimes blurry boundaries between kin and non-kin (take Jane Austen’s Emma in which the title character’s love for Mr. Knightly is obscured by their in-law and apparent emotional connection as siblings – until the last possible moment: ‘Brother and sister – no indeed!’)

Charles and Emma Darwin

It is Kuper’s contention that cousin-marriage was a particular characteristic of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie (a contention opposed by Leonore Davidoff in her book on siblings Thicker Than Water, p. 61 – but more on that another time). ‘Among people born into the great bourgeois clans of nineteenth-century England, like the Darwin-Wedgewoods, more than one marriage in ten was with a first or second cousin’ (p. 18). Within that class, according to George Darwin (Charles and Emma’s fifth child), ‘cousin marriages are at least 3 times as frequent in our rank as in the lower!’ (quoted on p. 18). Figures for cousin marriage in the population at large are much more difficult to come by. In the late nineteenth century George Darwin went about what he considered a fairly systematic study (though I don’t think we would consider it so now!) and found that among the upper classes 4.2% of marriages were with first cousins (p. 97). He put the figure at 3.5% for the middle classes, 2.25% in the rural population, and 1.15% in London (p. 97).

George’s aim here, one close to his heart considering his own origins, was to discover whether there were any detrimental physical or psychological effects to cousin marriage. He concluded there was not; but nonetheless by the end of WWI cousin marriage was significantly on the decline – down from 1 in 25 marriages (among the upper middle classes) in the nineteenth century to 1:6,000 in the 1930s and 1:25,000 in the 1960s (p. 251). The reasons for this were not compellingly medical, according to Kuper, but reflected the liberalisation of the business environment (particularly the introduction of limited liability in the 1850s and 60s), the devastating demographic effects of the First World War, and the declining number of children per family (reducing, therefore, the pool of eligible cousins). ‘In the middle of the nineteenth century a person might have around forty first cousins. By the end of the century, the average number of cousins would be only about a dozen. Only half, of course, were of the right sex, and a number were disqualified by age difference. In the first decades of the twentieth century most young women would have had only a couple of marriageable first cousins, and the chances of these men surviving the war were not good’ (p. 253).

The Rothschild Family Tree

But why was cousin marriage such a compelling option in the nineteenth century then? ‘My argument in this book is that marriage within the family – between cousins, or between in-laws – was a characteristic strategy of the new bourgeoisie, and that it had a great deal to do with the success of some of the most important Victorian clans’ says Kuper (p. 27). Indeed, ‘the leading bourgeois clans played a great role in the history of this industrial and imperial Britain. Their preference for marriages within the family circle was a crucial factor in their success. The marriage pattern of the English bourgeoisie therefore played a significant part in making the nineteenth-century world’ (p. 27). While I’m not sure Kuper manages to completely convince on that claim, he certainly does show that in certain pockets of middle-class England, webs of marriage held together complex religious, business and intellectual networks. This was not always without its problems – sibling rivalry, resentful in-laws and family squabbles could have dire financial implications for families whose commercial interests were interwoven with family ties; and the hot-house atmosphere of closely intertwined families could be suffocating for some. But when it worked, it worked well, keeping money, reputation and connections within overlapping and mutually reinforcing family structures. This should not obscure the sense in which cousin marriage could also be preferable on an emotional level (something I think Kuper could have spent more time on), and ‘material considerations were not necessarily decisive, even in commercial families’ (p. 135), but certainly cousin marriage could be deeply beneficial to individuals and families – on a financial, emotional and cultural level.

Kuper’s book, then, makes for a fascinating read. It traces the literary (ch 1), legal (ch 2), theological (ch 2) and scientific history (ch 3) of ideas relating to incest; explores the business (ch 4), religious (ch 5), and emotional (ch 6) characteristics of the Victorian bourgeois ‘clans’ he defines by their propensity for intermarriage; and traces those clans’ descent into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the ‘bourgoise intellectuals’ of the mid-late nineteenth century (ch 7) and the famously louche world of the Bloomsbury Group (ch 8). More than an historical analysis of cousin marriage, however, this is a history of selected industrial, evangelical and intellectual clans who became important (and prolific) partakers of the practice – thereby solidifying their intellectual, evangelical and business connections – as well as reinforcing their particular emotional and cultural mores.

That is not to do the book down, however. This book is extremely enjoyable to read. Well-written, filled with fascinating (and sometimes hilarious) detail, fluid and compelling, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in nineteenth-century history – or family history more generally.

- Emily Manktelow

Slavery, Family and Empire, some reflections on Andrea Stuart’s Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire (Portobello, 2012).

Andrea Stuart’s Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire takes the reader on a fascinating journey through many of the key issues we’ve been thinking about in this network: the interconnectedness between issues of empire and issues of family; families which span the globe; slippages between domestic politics and global international relations; local histories embedded in the economic, psychological and social structures of empire; family history and genealogical research; uneven power dimensions within families; and unequal inheritance.

I had the pleasure of hearing Andrea Stuart, a biographer and critic, along with Alison Light, an historian and scholar of English literature and culture, talking about their experiences researching family histories and their efforts to bridge what is often thought of as a ‘gap’ between ‘family history’ and ‘academic history’ at a conference on Emancipation, slave-ownership and the remaking of the British imperial world. Stuart had traced her family back to George Ashby, an English migrant who, in settling in seventeenth-century Barbados, planted the seeds of a plantation economy that would become dependent on slave-labour, and a family that would grow to encompass both slave-owners and the enslaved. Alison Light was researching her family of ‘ordinary people’, which, whilst mostly confined within the British Isles, was nonetheless one structured around migration, movement and rupture. Both writers spoke of the complex work needed to unravel layers of familial, personal, national and transatlantic histories; asked questions about how better to understand the interconnectedness of British History and its imperial past; the new questions posed if we take migration as the norm whether that be intra-national or transnational rather than the exception; and the need to move beyond the limitations of bloodline and build inclusive conceptions of family. The questions raised in this session have remained with me over the months that have followed and, having just finished Sugar in the Blood, I’ll take the opportunity to reflect on them here.

Discovering the name of George Ashby, Stuart’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather in the Barbados Museum, intrigued Stuart and sharpened her interested in genealogy. Her experience of tracing family tree, characterised sometimes by ‘elation’ and sometimes by ‘sorrow’ and ‘fury’, was one filled with the emotions described by many family historians. So too, one imagines, was her experience that, having built up an unbroken family tree reaching back to 1620, her initial sense of triumph soon faded into one of anticlimax. ‘What did my neatly formatted family tree really mean?’, she asks in the opening pages of Sugar in the Blood. ‘It was, after all, just names on a page.’ In fleshing out the skeleton of this family tree, Stuart opened up, at a highly personal level, questions that link disparate continents and experiences, conjoin ‘black’ and ‘white’, and histories of the enslaved and the free.

Whilst encompassing the lives of eight generations, the book is organised around three main periods. The first section, ‘The Pioneer’, traces the life of the aforementioned English settler,  George Ashby, his decision to emigrate, the perilous journey into the unknown it entailed, and his arrival in an island that was largely uncultivated and, whilst promising profits, was slow to deliver them. She then moves to explore the life of ‘The Plantocrat’, Robert Cooper Ashby (George’s great-great-great-grandson), who transformed the family fortunes by marrying upward into the upper echelons of Barbadian society; managed a brutal and successful plantation regime during the turbulent years of abolition; and whose relationships with enslaved women (how coercive or abusive it is difficult to determine) created new generations of Ashbys. Finally, Stuart focuses on ‘The Legacy’ of slavery, the continued economic inequality and racial hierarchies that characterise both Barbadian society and its relationship with Britain, and the lives of slavery’s descendents, from her grandfather Edward Everton Ashby, who like many of his generation left Barbados for the states, to her own Transatlantic career.

In each chapter Stuart weaves what can be found about the specific experiences of her own ancestors into a broader historical context. The undocumented lives of her early black ancestors, for whom often only names and prices remain documented, are brought to life with vivid accounts of the Middle Passage and life on slave plantations, generated through wider research. The arduous processes of sowing and harvesting sugar cane, and the mechanics of sugar refinement within inferno-like distilleries, for example, are powerfully brought to life. Stuart is sensitive to the methodological challenges of this kind of work, not least the uneven holdings of the colonial archive in which white ancestors are easy to find and black ancestors all too often hidden. ‘I have been very aware’, she writes in her preface, ‘of the tensions between letting stories to be told, without abusing the limitations of historical record, and allowing myself to interpret and comment while acknowledging the silences of the undocumented past’ (xviii).

The Barbadoes Mulatto Girl, 1764, by Agostino Brunias.

Stuart raises the difficult question as to what constitutes a family which I have discussed on this blog before. Writing of her great-great grandfather, John Stephen, a man whose father was a rich white plantation owner and his mother an enslaved black woman, she writes:

‘John Stephen had a number of other half-brothers and half sisters. But it is unlikely that they considered themselves a family. The very concept of family had been so fractured and debased by plantation culture that one slave noted: “Brothers and sisters we were by blood; but slavery had made us strangers. I heard the words brother and sister, and knew they must mean something, but slavery had robbed these terms of their true meaning.” Many slaves found it hard to generate any positive feelings for their siblings and fell instead into bickering and open competition.’ (248)

Perhaps one of the starkest manifestations of these unrecognised siblings (also present in Stuart’s own family) occurs when siblinghood crossed the divide between enslaved and free, placing brothers and sisters in positions of legal, economic and social servitude and mastery. How might such relationships shape the way in which we explore what it means to be a colonial family? A family with rights as colonisers? A family exploited by the dynamics of colonialism? A family only in existence, only even conceivable, because of the structures generated by colonialism?

Writing the history of rape, abuse, enslavement into the history of the family may be troubling, but it is also essential. Stuart captivates the intimacy of the lived experience of slavery, ‘Slavery did not exist just on Robert Cooper’s land’, she writes, ‘it permeated the intimacy of his home, his family and his bed’ (227). The history of the family is intimate but its concerns are global. The family could both harbour and generate the complicated and exploitative power dynamics of colonialism itself.

But there is also something hopeful about Stuart’s findings. When speaking at the conference on Emancipation, slave-ownership and the remaking of the British imperial world, last March, Andrea Stuart discussed the way in which she has used her own family history to challenge the idea that families were themselves ‘abolished’ by slavery – she argued that although her family is very complex, this is still a sense of family, a constant recreating of the family and a desire to create familial networks, despite all the pressures.

Whilst this is a highly personal account of one individual family, the stories Stuart tells have far wider resonances. As she writes in her introduction, her family ‘is just one of millions across the globe that were forged by sugar and slavery’ (xvii). In thinking about the history of the colonial family, and all that that slippery concept may entail, we can perhaps take this further to use the superficially ‘unusual’ dynamic of families structured around migration and slavery to think more widely about how we disaggregate what we mean by family, how we can use family history to alter the stories we tell about national history, and the radical potential of family to remind us of the fluid constitution of identity.

Esme Cleall, University of Sheffield, January 2013.