Anglo-Indian lives in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries

This essay explores the utility of individual and family biographies for British imperial and global history-writing. It begins by outlining social historians' ambivalent attitude to biography as a genre and then deploys a case study of the family of Sir Thomas Munro (1761-1827) to illuminate the demographic forces that drove propertied families into imperial ventures. It argues that malleable marital stratagems and collective social aspirations, rather than rigid political or racial ideologies, provided the primary impetus for British engagement with empire on the subcontinent under East India Company rule