Prashant Kidambi, Cricket Country: An Indian Odyssey in the Age of Empire, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019, xv + 423pp., £25, 9780198843139 hb

Abstract

with surrounding and relatively small market towns, such as Brigg, Caistor and Market Rasen. The seven chapters that follow are broadly chronological and person-centred. They locate a number of key members of the Dixon family in their times and places, social, economic and cultural. An account of the life of William Dixon (1697–1781), ‘Grazier’ and Senior, describes the arrival of the family into a somewhat unpromising parish, and the commencement of steady processes of local property accumulation, generally piecemeal from existing owners and tenants, whether absentee or resident, and the extension and deepening of social position. Progress in these regards meant that this particular William, dying in his eighty-fourth year, would see recognition of his status as that of ‘gentleman’. The two chapters that appear subsequently take readers into the nineteenth century, to the lives of William’s son Thomas (1729–1798), ‘tenant farmer’, and grandson William Junior (1756–1824), ‘old-style farmer’, and their further consolidation of property ownership and middling-sort position. The later William receives a second chapter, as ‘philosopher and philanthropist’, and the book turns more fully towards the social and cultural. An opportunity is taken here to explore belief, to an extent, but even more so charitable, friendly society, and local relief activities. Thomas John Dixon (1785–1871), from a generation on, also attracts the attention of a pair of chapters, as ‘man of business’ and then as ‘man of property’, and through an overview of his fortunes into the third quarter of the nineteenth century. The chapter that completes the chronological sequence focuses on the ‘ladies of Holton’, and the roles of some of the daughters of Thomas John with regard to estate management and community leadership up to 1906. However, their story is set against a background of more challenging economic and financial times, and a weakening of the local social and institutional fabric. Chapter Nine takes a different methodological approach, and places the Dixons in a comparative context, seeing how their progress aligns with that of some of their north Lincolnshire peers. The determinants of family size, inheritance customs and the availability of non-landed resources are recognised by Olney to be decisive. The Dixons were relatively unusual in acquiring property in a piecemeal manner, and wholly within their home county and district. It is also clearly evident how individual members of the family and their personalities had an important influence in sustaining, if not in all cases growing, the estate and its wealth, and achieving this over the life courses of more than a couple of generations. Chapter Ten, meanwhile, examines the degree to which the Dixons assumed and expressed a sense of social class, for example through ambitions for their children, material accumulation and display, and local position and leadership. The Dixons were typical of their ‘sort’ for the area, relatively conservative and unpretentious. This is a very illuminating study of both regional and much wider importance. It is a searching and successful exploration of a rural district and a social tier, enabled by the availability of papers for a family who reached lesser gentry rank. Illustrations amplify and enrich the work, with the reproduction of a number of manuscript sources, historical portraits, and scenes as they appear in the present day. The research is also of deep scholarship, well grounded in leading and influential writings on local and regional history, and in the Lincolnshire-specific literature.