1330. Homes in the Empire – re-presenting empire in the home?

This presentation examines whether homes in the British empire were representing the empire overseas and argues that homes were not purely neutral domestic spaces but rather places in which imperial values were absorbed and replicated. Using interviews with two groups – separated by geography but linked through imperial connections – southern Irish Protestants and the British community in India – this paper looks at the physical space of home, relationships with servants, gender, and the connection to the external environment – to suggest that for both groups, home had various, and sometimes ambivalent meanings. For the British in India, this meant being rooted physically in India, but imaginatively located in Britain.

Dr Niamh Dillon is Project Director at National Life Stories at the British Library, and leading a corporate oral history of one of the UK’s leading civil engineering firms. She previously worked in television, most notably on the Academy Award winning, Into the Arms of Strangers at Warner Bros. She is particularly interested in questions of migration, empire and identity. Her recent book, Homeward Bound: return migration from Ireland and India at the end of the British empire (NYU Press, 2022) is a comparative study that uses first-hand testimony to investigate individual and collective narratives of belonging in the late British Empire.

1430 – 1500. Tea break.

1500 – 1600. Sources for tracing military ancestry in India

A guide to exploring published, unpublished and visual sources held in the British Library to discover the lives and careers of officers, N.C.O.s and private soldiers who served in India before independence in 1947.

Dr Hedley Sutton is a professional librarian who has spent a forty-plus year career in the British Library, having managed the team that provides the reference enquiry service within the Asian and African Studies Department since 1999. He has been a FIBIS