¹ Will of A. Craufurd, 6 Jan. 1782, in Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library (henceforth OIOC), L/AG/34/29/4.

² For the legal norms and conventions of will-making in this period, see When Death Do Us Part: Understanding and Interpreting the Probate Records of Early Modern England, ed. Tom Arkell, Nesta Evans and Nigel Goose (Oxford, 2000); and Morris, R. J., Men, Women and Property in England, 1780–1870: A Social and Economic History of Family Strategies amongst the Leeds Middle Classes (Cambridge, 2005), esp. 79–141CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ Comparable testamentary practices in England are detailed in, for example, Urban Fortunes: Property and Inheritance in the Town, 1700–1900, ed. Jon Stobart and Alastair Owens (Aldershot, 2000); and Pointon, Marcia, Strategies for Showing: Women, Possession, and Representation in English Visual Culture 1665–1800 (Oxford, 1997), esp. 307–400Google Scholar. For the fashionable trade in metal trinkets, see Berg, Maxine, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2005), 154–92Google Scholar. The circulation of such goods as memorial objects among Anglo-Indian kin networks is discussed in Margot Finn, ‘Colonial Gifts: Family Politics and the Exchange of Goods in British India, c. 1780–1820’, Modern Asian Studies, 40 (2006), 203–31.

⁴ Throughout this paper, the term ‘Anglo Indian’ is used in its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sense, to describe persons of British origin in India, rather than in its more modern sense of ‘mixed-race’ or ‘Eurasian’.

⁵ Provisions for Indian concubines in Anglo-Indian wills are discussed in Indrani Chatterjee, ‘Colouring Subalternity: Slaves, Concubines and Social Orphans in Early Colonial India’, Subaltern Studies, 10 (Delhi, 1999), 49–97; Ghosh, Durba, Sex and the Family in Colonial India (Cambridge, 2006), esp. 107–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and C. J. Hawes, Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773–1833 (1996).

⁶ See for example Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492–1800 (1997); and Davis, David Brion, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford, 2006)Google Scholar.

⁷ For useful discussions of the historiographical problems posed by reliance on Atlantic world models of slavery for analysis of Indian Ocean servitude, see Gwyn Campbell, ‘Introduction: Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour in the Indian Ocean World’, in The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia, ed. Gwyn Campbell (2004), vii–xxxii; and Richard M. Eaton, ‘Introduction’, in Slavery and South Asian History, ed. Indrani Chatterjee and Richard M. Eaton (Bloomington, 2006), 1–16.

⁸ Leonore Davidoff, ‘The Legacy of the Nineteenth-Century Bourgeois Family and the Wool Merchant's Son’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, 14 (2004), 27. See also Tadmor, Naomi, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship and Patronage (Cambridge, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Campbell, ‘Introduction’, esp. ix–x, xxv.

¹⁰ Ibid., xiii.

¹¹ William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Islam and the Abolition of Slavery (2006), 14. For the analytical problems posed for comparative history by the relative lack of statistical evidence for Indian Ocean slavery, see Indrani Chatterjee, ‘Renewed and Connected Histories: Slavery and the Historiography of South Asia’, in Slavery and South Asian History, ed. Chatterjee and Eaton, 20.

¹² Eaton, ‘Introduction’, 5.

¹³ D. Banaji, Slavery in British India (Bombay, 1933); Amal Chattopadhyaya, Slavery in Bengal Presidency 1772–1843 (1977).

¹⁴ Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, ‘African “Slavery” as an Institution of Marginality’, in Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff (Madison, 1977), 3–81.

¹⁵ Chatterjee, ‘Renewed and Connected Histories’, 21, 31–2.

¹⁶ For the wider history of this problem in Britain at this time, see Carolyn Steedman, Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England (Cambridge, forthcoming), chs. 1–2.

¹⁷ The chief exception is Chatterjee, ‘Colouring Subalternity’.

¹⁸ For the wider role of record-keeping in the Company's history and identity, see Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago, 2007).

¹⁹ See for example the evidence in the ‘Colonial Possession: Personal Property and Social Identity in British India, 1780–1848’ dataset, UK Data Archive SN 5254, www.data-archive.ac.uk/findingData/snDescription.asp?sn=5254.

²⁰ Inventory of Captain John Hunter, OIOC, L/AG/34/27/3.

²¹ See esp. Johnson, Walter, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 45–77Google Scholar.

²² Durba Ghosh, ‘Decoding the Nameless: Gender, Subjectivity, and Historical Methodologies in Reading the Archives of Colonial India’, in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire 1660–1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge, 2004), 297–316.

²³ Inventory of Thomas Jones, OIOC, L/AG/34/27/3.

²⁴ Inventory of Joseph Cooper, OIOC, L/AG/34/27/2.

²⁵ Inventory of William Spencer, OIOC, L/AG/34/27/3.

²⁶ Will of Mrs Spencer, 1 Dec. 1795, OIOC, L/AG/34/29/6.

²⁷ Slavery in India: Report of the Law Commissioners (henceforth Report of the Law Commissioners (1841)), Parliamentary Papers (House of Commons), xxviii, 262 (1841), 39–40.

²⁸ For bequests of clothing to English servants, see for example Anne Buck, ‘Buying Clothes in Bedfordshire: Customers and Tradesmen, 1700–1800’, Textile History, 22 (1991), 228; and Finn, Margot, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge, 2003), 30, 82–4Google Scholar.

²⁹ Female slaves occupied an especially paradoxical position in eighteenth-century property debates. See for example Teresa Michaels, ‘“That Sole and Despotic Dominion”: Slaves, Wives and Game in Blackstone's Commentaries’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 27 (1993–4), 195–216; and Carolyn Steedman, ‘Lord Mansfield's Women’, Past and Present, 176 (2002), 105–43.

³⁰ These statistics have been extracted from the ‘Colonial Possession’ dataset, cited in n. 19 above.

³¹ OIOC, L/AG/34/29/4.

³² OIOC, L/AG/34/29/4.

³³ OIOC, L/AG/34/29/4.

³⁴ OIOC, L/AG/34/29/4. For similar practices of concubine emancipation and inheritance in the British Caribbean, see Christer Petley, ‘“Legitimacy” and Social Boundaries: Free People of Colour and the Social Order in Jamaican Slave Society’, Social History, 30 (2005), 481–98.

³⁵ OIOC, L/AG/34/29/4. The telling of precise and strategic life stories was an integral part of the process of extracting maintenance from the English poor law authorities in this period; Grant's codicils suggest that Anglo Indians may have transferred these narrative strategies to the subcontinent when seeking to dispose of their domestic slaves – many of whom had entered servitude through poverty – through the Company's probate processes. For English narrative strategies, see Carolyn Steedman, ‘Enforced Narratives: Stories of Another Self’, in Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Methods, ed. Tess Cosslet, Celia Lury and Penny Summerfield (2000).

³⁶ OIOC, L/AG/34/29/4. For the challenges of writing Indian life stories in the colonial era, see esp. Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography and Life History, ed. David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn (Bloomington, 2004).

³⁷ Ghosh, Sex and the Family, 112. Visual images of Anglo Indians’ Indian concubines are documented in Mildred Archer, India and British Portraiture 1770–1825 (1979).

³⁸ Ghosh, Sex and the Family, 113–16.

³⁹ See ‘Colonial Possession’ dataset.

⁴⁰ OIOC, L/AG/34/29/185. Chatterjee, ‘Colouring Subalternity’, 78–84, analyses such testamentary gifts as integral mechanisms by which even deceased Anglo Indians exercised ‘disciplinary regimes of rewards and punishments’ over their slaves (citation 79).

⁴¹ OIOC, L/AG/34/29/185.

⁴² OIOC, L/AG/34/29/36.

⁴³ Albeit, as Davidoff has abundantly demonstrated in ‘The Legacy of the Nineteenth-Century Bourgeois Family’, Western families themselves were far more baggy than conventional models would suggest.

⁴⁴ Steedman, Labours Lost, details the English context of these debates.

⁴⁵ For Minto, see Michael Duffy, ‘Kynynmound, Gilbert Elliot Murray, first earl of Minto (1751–1814)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); online edn, January 2008 www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/8661, accessed 23 Jan. 2009.

⁴⁶ Lord Minto in India: Life and Letters of Gilbert Elliot, First Earl of Minto from 1807 to 1814 while Governor General of India, ed. Countess of Minto (1880), 266–7, 334–5.

⁴⁷ For Minto's intellectual formation, see Jane Rendall, ‘Scottish Orientalism: From Robertson to James Mill’, Historical Journal, 25 (1982), 43–69, esp. 45, 48, 50–1.

⁴⁸ Lord Minto in India, 268–9. Nicholas Hudson has noted that such comparisons to animals were, in this period, intended as commentary on perceived levels of cultural and historical attainment, rather than as assertions of fixed biological difference. Hudson, ‘From “Nation” to “Race”: The Origins of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 29 (1996), 250.

⁴⁹ Lord Minto in India, 334–5. Chatterjee adduces Minto's renaming of his manumitted slaves to illustrate the politics of dispossession inherent in British emancipation, but their subsequent incorporation into his household suggests the need to expand the parameters of this interpretation. Chatterjee, ‘Colouring Subalternity’, 69–70, 72.

⁵⁰ Countess Minto to First Earl Minto, 4 Mar. 1814, National Library of Scotland (henceforth NLS), MS 11083, fo. 250r–v.

⁵¹ Countess Minto to First Earl Minto, 5 June 1814, NLS, MS 11083, fo. 252r–v.

⁵² For the education of Eurasian children at the Calcutta orphanages, see Hawes, Poor Relations, 23–32.

⁵³ John Elliot to Second Earl Minto, 5 Mar. 1820, NLS, MS 11753, fo. 125v.

⁵⁴ Sir William Jones, charge to the Grand Jury, June 1785, in Slavery in India: Correspondence and Abstract of Regulations from 1772, Parliamentary Papers (House of Commons), iv, 125 (1826), 9–10. Jones, of course, was Welsh.

⁵⁵ Cornwallis to the Court of Directors, 2 Aug. 1789, in ibid., 13.

⁵⁶ Linda Colley, Britons: Forging a Nation 1707–1837 (1996), details the operation of this stereotype within Britain itself. Nationalist tensions with both the French and the Americans were played out globally through abolitionist debates and policies in this period. See esp. Mason, Matthew, ‘The Battle of the Slaveholding Liberators: Great Britain, the United States, and Slavery in the Early Nineteenth Century’, William and Mary Quarterly, 59 (2002), 665–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Allen, Richard B., ‘Licentious and Unbridled Proceedings: The Illegal Slave Trade to Mauritius and the Seychelles during the Early Nineteenth Century’, Journal of African History, 42 (2001), 91–116Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ Slavery in India: Papers Relative to Slavery in India (henceforth cited as Papers Relative to Slavery in India (1834)), Parliamentary Papers (House of Commons), 128 (1834), 22.

⁵⁸ Report of the Law Commissioners (1841), 241.

⁵⁹ Papers Relative to Slavery in India (1836), 41.

⁶⁰ Report of the Indian Law Commissioners (1841), 98. The role of gender stereotypes in emancipist rhetoric in India thus presents a radical contrast to the dominant Atlantic world paradigm, in which opponents of slavery underlined its fundamental incompatibility with appropriate gender relations and the privacy of the domestic sphere. See esp. Diane Paton and Pamela Scully, ‘Introduction’, in Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World, ed. Diana Paton and Pamela Scully (Durham, 2005), 12; and Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867 (Oxford, 2002), 134–5.

⁶¹ Slavery in India: Return to an Address of the Honourable House of Common, Dated 13^th April 1826, Parliamentary Papers (House of Commons), 125 (1826), 2.

⁶² Papers Relative to Slavery in India (1834), 30–1.

⁶³ Report of the Law Commissioners (1841), 30.

⁶⁴ Slavery (East Indies). A Copy of the Letter from the Governor-General of India in Council, Parliamentary Papers (House of Commons), 54, session 2 (1841), 2.

⁶⁵ Report of the Law Commissioners (1841), 166.

⁶⁶ Report of the Law Commissioners (1841), 171.

⁶⁷ See especially Masters, Servants and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955, ed. Douglas Hay and Paul Craven (Chapel Hill, 2004); and Peter Karsten, Between Law and Custom: ‘High’ and ‘Low’ Legal Cultures in the Lands of the British Diaspora – the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, 1600–1900 (Cambridge, 2002).

⁶⁸ Ahuja, Ravi, ‘Making the Empire a Thinkable Whole: Master and Servant Law in Transterritorial Perspective’, International Review of Social History, 52 (2007), 288CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁹ Ahuja, Ravi, ‘The Origins of Colonial Labour Policy in Late Eighteenth-Century Madras’, International Review of Social History, 44 (1999), 186–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁰ For a brief survey, see Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labour versus Slavery in British Emancipation (Oxford, 2002), esp. pp. 6–7.

⁷¹ The legislative history of attempts to abolish slavery in India is told in Howard Tempeley, ‘The Delegalization of Slavery in British India’, Slavery and Abolition, 21 (2000), 169–87. Peter Marshall offers an alternative explanation for British abolitionists’ blindness to Indian slavery, grounded in imperial politics, in ‘The Moral Swing to the East: British Humanitarianism, India and the West Indies’, in P. J. Marshall, ‘A Free though Conquering People’: Eighteenth-Century Britain and Its Empire (Aldershot, 2003), 69–95.