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The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History
The birth of the modern world as told through the remarkable story of one eighteenth-century family
They were abolitionists, speculators, slave owners, government officials, and occasional politicians. They were observers of the anxieties and dramas of empire. And they were from one family. The Inner Life of Empires tells the intimate history of the Johnstones--four sisters and seven brothers who lived in Scotland and around the globe in the fast-changing eighteenth century. Piecing together their voyages, marriages, debts, and lawsuits, and examining their ideas, sentiments, and values, renowned historian Emma Rothschild illuminates a tumultuous period that created the modern economy, the British Empire, and the philosophical Enlightenment.
One of the sisters joined a rebel army, was imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle, and escaped in disguise in 1746. Her younger brother was a close friend of Adam Smith and David Hume. Another brother was fluent in Persian and Bengali, and married to a celebrated poet. He was the owner of a slave known only as "Bell or Belinda," who journeyed from Calcutta to Virginia, was accused in Scotland of infanticide, and was the last person judged to be a slave by a court in the British isles. In Grenada, India, Jamaica, and Florida, the Johnstones embodied the connections between European, American, and Asian empires. Their family history offers insights into a time when distinctions between the public and private, home and overseas, and slavery and servitude were in constant flux.
Based on multiple archives, documents, and letters, The Inner Life of Empires looks at one family's complex story to describe the origins of the modern political, economic, and intellectual world.
They were abolitionists, speculators, slave owners, government officials, and occasional politicians. They were observers of the anxieties and dramas of empire. And they were from one family. The Inner Life of Empires tells the intimate history of the Johnstones--four sisters and seven brothers who lived in Scotland and around the globe in the fast-changing eighteenth century. Piecing together their voyages, marriages, debts, and lawsuits, and examining their ideas, sentiments, and values, renowned historian Emma Rothschild illuminates a tumultuous period that created the modern economy, the British Empire, and the philosophical Enlightenment.
One of the sisters joined a rebel army, was imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle, and escaped in disguise in 1746. Her younger brother was a close friend of Adam Smith and David Hume. Another brother was fluent in Persian and Bengali, and married to a celebrated poet. He was the owner of a slave known only as "Bell or Belinda," who journeyed from Calcutta to Virginia, was accused in Scotland of infanticide, and was the last person judged to be a slave by a court in the British isles. In Grenada, India, Jamaica, and Florida, the Johnstones embodied the connections between European, American, and Asian empires. Their family history offers insights into a time when distinctions between the public and private, home and overseas, and slavery and servitude were in constant flux.
Based on multiple archives, documents, and letters, The Inner Life of Empires looks at one family's complex story to describe the origins of the modern political, economic, and intellectual world.
496 pages, Paperback
First published May 9, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
October 29, 2019
While the thousands of letters Rothschild perused to create this account did sound interesting, and the family she attempted to focus on had a few moments where they leaped off the page, the book overall I think was a failure in its attempt to convey how global empires invaded the personal lives of every-day citizens in 18th century Scotland. It was top heavy on descriptive evidence used to support wandering analyses, and often read more like an inventory of characters whose names and connections were impossible to remember, performing actions that were equally difficult to care about.
August 27, 2011
The book did not pull me at first. But as I went along, I found myself catching the author's obvious curiosity about and fascination with both the family and the time. As she writes at the conclusion of the book, "I have talked often about 'evidence' and 'information,' and there is an important sense in which historians aspire to the attributes of magistrates, with respect to intentions and truth. But historians have also aspired to the attributes of insight, of being able to see glimpses of distant and forgotten worlds, in 'half-broken, tarnished, hideous things.' [Adam Smith Theory of Moral Sentiments] This sort of history of the inner life is Smithian, in the sense that it is an exercise in observing the moral sentiments of other people. It is Smithian, too, in that it is itself an exercise in moral observation, or in moral imagination." Understanding the world in which the Johnstones lived in the way THEY would understand it is very much an exercise of both insight and imagination.
October 11, 2011
This is history at its best – an insight into the 18th century, the ‘enlightenment’ at home, the empire East and West, exploring how they were related in people’s perceptions then, through the lives of a large Scottish family. “The history of the Johnstones has been in large part about the family’s relationships to Atlantic and Indian Ocean slavery and to individual slaves.”
It is a bit daunting to distinguish and disentangle the 11 Johnstone siblings, their spouses, their fallings out and their travels. The maps are helpful, and a family tree would also have been. Emma Rothschild follows three lively chapters of narrative history with chapters of analysis, exploring the family’s and society’s perceptions of economics, the enlightenment, the empire, slavery and other issues of the day.
It is a bit daunting to distinguish and disentangle the 11 Johnstone siblings, their spouses, their fallings out and their travels. The maps are helpful, and a family tree would also have been. Emma Rothschild follows three lively chapters of narrative history with chapters of analysis, exploring the family’s and society’s perceptions of economics, the enlightenment, the empire, slavery and other issues of the day.
May 30, 2020
Rothschild's idea has a lot of potential: trace a family's involvement with the early British empire. How did imperialism impact their fortunes and their relationships? The family in question, the Johnstones, seems to have a rich history, offering plenty of primary sources and involvement with two interesting court cases -- one in which a slave sues for his freedom and another in which a slave is accused of murdering her newborn. But Rothschild does not make as much as she could of her material. Her account of the Johnstones' family history is dry, often devolving into a simple recitation of facts; and there is little analysis or investigation of the court cases beyond their basics. By the end of the book I felt no closer to understanding the lives and minds of the Johnstones than I did when I began it.
November 1, 2012
However interesting, the structure of this book makes it fall between the chairs of science and historic fiction. Also, the format of embedding all these quotes in the first three chapters were terrible for the reading experience.
May 13, 2018
This is an interesting look at the 18th-century through the perspective of the Johnstone family, who lived throughout the British empire and who were both slaveholders and abolitionists, soldiers and merchants. I'll admit that I struggled to keep all the family members straight (11 children in one family!) and that the most interesting characters were not the Johnstones themselves but those who surrounded them. The story of Bell or Belinda will likely stay with me for quite some time, as will the little tidbits about David Hume and Adam Smith. This is a great book to read for those interested in better understanding the 18th-century British empire.
October 12, 2023
Great way to display The age of enlightenment, as it gives inside view into a colonial family that lived through this era of learning, traveling, business, and family affairs that were changing in this new idea of what Europe can become.
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June 28, 2020I’m not even going to give this a star at all.
June 25, 2013
This work is an excellent synthesis of the fields of intellectual history (i.e. the history of ideas, in this case the ideas of the European Enlightenment), biography (of members of the Johnstone family of Scotland, who were prolific letter writers) and prosopography (i.e. “collective biography”, or examining relationships between members of a historical population by compiling bits and pieces of biographical data into a larger dataset). The “inner life” of the title refers to “the ideas, sentiments, motives, and values” of the Johnstone family members and associates, while “empire” refers to the British empire in which they lived and did business. In a way it is really a work of biography, examining a period of history through the life of one person, or in this case an entire family. Towards the end of the book (pp. 268-269), the author draws attention to the dilemma of studying the Age of Enlightenment using the tools of social history and collective biography:
...if historians ask questions about how it really was in the past, then the answers must be concerned, in part, with the ideas, sentiments, motives, and values of past individuals. But there is very little evidence about the ideas of the vast majority of these individuals. So the dilemma is that there can be a history without ideas and sentiments, or a history without most individuals in it: a history of only the great or the important or the philosophical, the individuals who wrote about their own ideas, or who were written about in their lifetimes. There can be a history of ideas that is no more…than the history of a few men…This is itself a very eighteenth-century dilemma, in the sense that to relinquish the possibility of a history of the interior lives of the uneminent is to relinquish the deepest presumption of the late eighteenth-century enlightenment, which is the presumption of inner equality: that all individuals without exception are discursive and inquisitive, with moral sentiments and ideas about the world.
I came to appreciate the irony of this, while simultaneously being frustrated by its implications. However, I picked up this book with the objective of learning something about the social interaction between African-ancestored slaves and their often Scottish overseers and owners in 18th Century Jamaica. I did not learn much about that, although I did find the story of “Bell or Belinda” interesting. She was a “slave or servant” in the service of one of the Johnstone’s living in Scotland. She was accused of drowning her own infant in the river and sentenced to be sold into slavery in Virginia (then still a British colony). Her case is noteworthy, per the author, because it was the last case in which a British court recognized a person as a slave within the borders of Great Britain. But what I found most interesting about the case was the defendant’s origins. “Bell or Belinda” was described in court documents (or newspaper accounts of the trial perhaps, I don’t remember specifically) as “black” and “Negroe”, words I understand as reserved, at least in the American colonies, for people of African descent; however, “Bell or Belinda” was said to be from India. It’s possible she was born in India to parents of African ancestry (or one African and one Indian), but one of the points the author makes in the book makes this stretched explanation unnecessary. She says that the Johnstones, along with their countrymen and women of the British Empire at that time, saw little difference between the various outposts of empire. The East Indies (e.g. India) and West Indies (the Caribbean) were, afterall, both “Indies”. With that in mind, it is less confusing to hear the Johnstones and contemporaries grouping all “black people” together, whether referring to a Bengali serving a British official of the East India Company or an African or creole toiling on a slave plantation in Grenada or Jamaica. Going back to “Bell or Belinda”, after her trial there are records of her being shipped off to and arriving in Virginia, but after that the trail goes cold. The author was unable to find out what happened to her after arriving in Virginia. It is entirely possible that she lived and died as a slave in the United States. It is also entirely possible that she gave birth again while in Virginia and that she has descendants still living in the United States. These descendants are likely African-American and yet they are unaware (or maybe they have some idea from family lore) that they have East Indian ancestry in their family tree. It makes me wonder whether the story of “Bell or Belinda” is a common one. How many other “East Indians” found themselves in the New World as chattel slaves, working in the fields and big houses alongside African-ancestored people? It is, at least, an interesting question for genealogists researching their ancestors who were enslaved in that part of the world during that time.
...if historians ask questions about how it really was in the past, then the answers must be concerned, in part, with the ideas, sentiments, motives, and values of past individuals. But there is very little evidence about the ideas of the vast majority of these individuals. So the dilemma is that there can be a history without ideas and sentiments, or a history without most individuals in it: a history of only the great or the important or the philosophical, the individuals who wrote about their own ideas, or who were written about in their lifetimes. There can be a history of ideas that is no more…than the history of a few men…This is itself a very eighteenth-century dilemma, in the sense that to relinquish the possibility of a history of the interior lives of the uneminent is to relinquish the deepest presumption of the late eighteenth-century enlightenment, which is the presumption of inner equality: that all individuals without exception are discursive and inquisitive, with moral sentiments and ideas about the world.
I came to appreciate the irony of this, while simultaneously being frustrated by its implications. However, I picked up this book with the objective of learning something about the social interaction between African-ancestored slaves and their often Scottish overseers and owners in 18th Century Jamaica. I did not learn much about that, although I did find the story of “Bell or Belinda” interesting. She was a “slave or servant” in the service of one of the Johnstone’s living in Scotland. She was accused of drowning her own infant in the river and sentenced to be sold into slavery in Virginia (then still a British colony). Her case is noteworthy, per the author, because it was the last case in which a British court recognized a person as a slave within the borders of Great Britain. But what I found most interesting about the case was the defendant’s origins. “Bell or Belinda” was described in court documents (or newspaper accounts of the trial perhaps, I don’t remember specifically) as “black” and “Negroe”, words I understand as reserved, at least in the American colonies, for people of African descent; however, “Bell or Belinda” was said to be from India. It’s possible she was born in India to parents of African ancestry (or one African and one Indian), but one of the points the author makes in the book makes this stretched explanation unnecessary. She says that the Johnstones, along with their countrymen and women of the British Empire at that time, saw little difference between the various outposts of empire. The East Indies (e.g. India) and West Indies (the Caribbean) were, afterall, both “Indies”. With that in mind, it is less confusing to hear the Johnstones and contemporaries grouping all “black people” together, whether referring to a Bengali serving a British official of the East India Company or an African or creole toiling on a slave plantation in Grenada or Jamaica. Going back to “Bell or Belinda”, after her trial there are records of her being shipped off to and arriving in Virginia, but after that the trail goes cold. The author was unable to find out what happened to her after arriving in Virginia. It is entirely possible that she lived and died as a slave in the United States. It is also entirely possible that she gave birth again while in Virginia and that she has descendants still living in the United States. These descendants are likely African-American and yet they are unaware (or maybe they have some idea from family lore) that they have East Indian ancestry in their family tree. It makes me wonder whether the story of “Bell or Belinda” is a common one. How many other “East Indians” found themselves in the New World as chattel slaves, working in the fields and big houses alongside African-ancestored people? It is, at least, an interesting question for genealogists researching their ancestors who were enslaved in that part of the world during that time.
August 7, 2013
It is my plan to convey a tripartite understanding of this book in the three senses of topic, prose style, and philosophizing which can be intercalated (177) from “marginalia and notes” (246) in this modern historiography of the discussion of my book club, (“a society of endless interest and endless prudence…not to be dazzled by splendid theory”(150); not unlike David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and William Cullen…members of the discussion club called the “Select Society,” which was the founding instance, as recounted in multiple histories, of the Edinburgh Enlightenment”(220)), regarding this work. All citation numbers refer to pages in the kindle edition. Caution: Be sure you read this one yourself before you recommend it to your book club based on a review you read in the WSJ!
January 29, 2014
Lovely way to learn about empire and enlightenment. Wasn't thrilled with the organization, but I liked the way she analyzed how knowledge worked, the way letters and print helped an early "information age" and how people against slavery could be in business with those in favor of slavery. Lots of nuance, and the beauty of family relationships. From Florida to India, West Africa to Scotland, these Johnstones were everywhere.
Want to Read
September 2, 2011KOBOBOOKS
Reviewed by The Independent
Reviewed by The Independent
Want to Read
August 6, 2011Review at New York Review of Books: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archi...
September 9, 2011
The lives of the Johnstones was quite interesting. I hope Emma Rothschild writes other similar books in future.
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September 8, 2012This would be have been better if it was called "The Inner Life of Vampires".
September 18, 2014
Interesting premise, but the way in which Professor Rothschild organizes the book makes it difficult to follow at times.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews