The Inner Life of Empires

"That’s right and we are talking about an earlier period than Ronald Hyam’s main area of concern, which tends to be the 20th century. This is an example of a genre which has become prevalent in recent years. It is this idea of trying to tie together individual lives with global history. What Emma Rothschild has done in this book is to trace the lives of this extraordinary Johnstone family – seven brothers and four sisters who live across the 18th century. They are the products of a poor Scottish landowning family and like many poor Scots are obliged to try to earn their living and make lives for themselves elsewhere, and that tends to be within the British Empire. In this case America, the Caribbean and India. Emma Rothschild explores their extraordinary lives while they journey around the world, sometimes making money in terms of private enterprise, sometimes involved in public service. They were also in the army, the navy and the East India Company. Some of them were involved in the slave trade and some protested against the slave trade. So as you can see they were involved in many facets of the Empire. In terms of what they believed there is this curious combination of belonging to an expanding Empire and yet also in some sense believing in the values of the Scottish Enlightenment, which is the pervasive mindset of the country that they had left. Emma Rothschild manages to juggle all these rather complicated pieces of the jigsaw very deftly so that we never lose the thread of the lives that she is describing. And she manages to set them against these extraordinary global episodes, such as the American War of Independence and the advance of British dominium in certain parts of India . So it is at one and the same time a family history, but also a kind of transnational history of the 18th century world which this family inhabit. They had to do that, and what is interesting is that after the Act of Union in 1707 we have this global stage on which they can live their lives – which brings me to my next choice."