Museum of Consumption: The Archives of Mass Culture in Argentina (1880-1930)

Abstract

scholarship. One aspect that could be qualified about domestic service in the Indian colony is that British households were not the only employers of domestic servants. The vast majority of domestic servants in South Asia worked for South Asian elite and eventually middle-class households, as Swapna Banerjee’s work on Bengal, for instance, shows. South Asia had a long tradition of domestic service and Anglo-Indians in fact emulated the servant hierarchies and servant nomenclature of Mughal aristocratic households in order to make their new-found affluence and power legible to their colonial subjects. Readers would have gained from a more rigorous engagement by Dussart with the scholarship on domestic labour in pre-colonial and colonial South Asian households. In the Service of Empire makes important contributions to the scholarship on British and imperial domestic service, as well as British identity formation through race, class, and gender. It is a valuable book for historians of empire, Britain, colonial South Asia, and for scholars interested in labour, race, and gender more broadly. Dussart’s innovative model of bringing the metropole and colony in the same frame can be productively transposed to other imperial contexts, and can be an inspiration for French, Dutch, American, and Japanese Empire historians, working not just on domestic labour, but any aspect of cultural and social history.