| Zusammenfassung |
Imperial Letters explores the possibilities that letter-writing, and the various economies of which letters were a part, could offer British families to actively participate in the colonial project in South Asia. Many scholars have reconstructed the socio-cultural, political, and economic significance of writing letters in personal, business, and public or professional spheres of activity within British metropolitan contexts (Whyman, 2011; Earle, 2016; Harvey et.al, 2023). As the first comprehensive study of the 'imperial letter', this project ascertains the economic and social influence that letters could wield within societies in empire at the height of its power (c.1857-1930). It establishes letter writing as a form of 'labour' that held potential economic and social value. It asks, in what ways were 'imperial' letters different to British metropolitan writing and communicating? How did personal letters, as core features of imperial communication networks, undergird and shape the everyday economic and social operations of the British Empire, as well as the ideological foundations on which they rested? If we accept that the personal letters of British families were integral to the imperial project and its daily operations, does this allow for a necessary rethinking of the centrality of the family and its role in empire? To illustrate the colonial legacies of imperial letter writing, the project reconceptualises writing as 'labour' that can be newly valued in economic and social terms. It applies and expands work that sociologists have been producing since the 1980s to understand the subtle gradations between 'visible' and 'invisible' work on the scale of quotidian or routine labour (Hochschild, 1983; Daniels, 1987; Whittle, 2019), but this is rarely explored in historical contexts. It applies Arlie Russell Hochschild's early pioneering studies in sociology which mapped the gendered patterns of labour distribution, beginning with 'emotional labour' that women shoulder in familial and professional settings (1983). By surfacing and validating 'hidden' forms of labour, we can recover the varied contributions of actors or activities previously underweighted or unrecognized. Part of thinking about letter writing as a form of 'epistolary' or 'textual labour' is evaluating how far the work of families succeeded in building networks of 'trust', whether interpersonally, economically, or politically, and how these networks facilitated imperialism (Magee et.al, 2012). Through qualitative (discourse, text and literary analysis) and quantitative (social network analysis) methods, the project offers historical applications of sociological models of 'invisible labour' to the analysis of imperial correspondence. The key outcome of this fellowship is to publish my first monograph on imperial letters. Five core chapters of the book will utilise archival collections of specific imperial families for the first time, as focused snapshots into the broader experiences of British society in a range of nineteenth and twentieth-century South Asian sites. Each illustrates how these families navigated their official and unofficial roles in the colonial regime at these sites through text. How was empire, the book asks, sustained by family- communities of letter-writers? Secondly, a public open-source repository, 'Writing Experiences' will also arise from the project. It will compile sources relating to the experiential, embodied, social and contextual nature of writing for individuals across the long nineteenth century. These activities will prompt new and extended conversations around writing as an economic and social 'practice' and its significance for empire in this period (Barton & Hall, 2000). |
