Consuming empire: Desire in colonial Britain and India, 1789--1872

In Consuming Empire: Desire in Colonial Britain and India, 1789--1872 , I reorient studies of colonial consumption by adopting a transnational analytical lens that concurrently interrogates the role of Orientalist desires in tempting women to leave Britain for India and shifts consideration solely from women's metropolitan consumer behavior to the understudied question of gendered consumption practices in India itself. I simultaneously widen the scope of postcolonial theories of desire by examining how colonial literature explicitly compares Englishwomen's desires for Indian commodities with those of Eurasian (mixed-race) and Indian women, as well as British men. I make my case by examining a variety of genres, interpreting colonial literature broadly to encompass popular Anglo-Indian epistolary novels, "Mutiny" novels, canonical Victorian novels, travel narratives, and periodical essays. In the popular but non-canonical novels, Hartly House, Calcutta (1789) and Seeta (1872), female desires constitute proof of the subject's sensibility or sympathy. For example, in Hartly House , an Englishwoman's consumption of Indian luxury goods, men, and ultimately Hindu philosophy offers a corrective to the violent greed of British men in late eighteenth-century India. In Seeta, an Indian woman's desire to transcend the Hindu widow's segregated sphere by consuming English cultural values provides a model for interracial cooperation in British India after the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion. On the other hand, Anglo-Indian essays collected in Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan (1835) and Anglo-India, Social, Moral, and Political (1838), and the canonical Victorian novel, Vanity Fair (1848), set out to curtail female consumption, blaming women's limitless luxurious desires for ruining their husbands and thus hindering the establishment of a productive and efficient (read middle-class) colonial government or morally bankrupting English society. In all of these texts, desire and consumption are clearly connected to relationships between genders and races, the search for appropriate marriage partners, and the quality of moral character. Thus, I reveal that colonial desires and consumer practices are also closely related to questions of governance and debates over ideologies of femininity and masculinity in a colonial and consumer age.