The expansion of the British Empire facilitated movement across the globe for both the colonizers and the colonized. Waiting on Empire focuses on a largely forgotten group in this story of movement and migration: South Asian travelling ayahs (servants and nannies), who travelled between India and Britain and often found themselves destitute in Britain as they struggled to find their way home to South Asia. Delving into the stories of individual ayahs from a wide range of sources, Arunima Datta illuminates their brave struggle to assert their rights, showing how ayahs negotiated their precarious employment conditions, capitalized on social sympathy amongst some sections of the British population, and confronted or collaborated with various British institutions and individuals to demand justice and humane treatment. In doing so, Datta re-imagines the experience of waiting. Waiting is a recurrent human experience, yet it is often marginalized. It takes a particular form within complex bureaucratized societies in which the marginalized inevitably wait upon those with power over them. Those who wait are often discounted as passive, inactive victims. This book shows that, in spite of their precarious position, the travelling ayahs of the British empire were far from this stereotype.

About the Author
Arunima Datta is an Assistant Professor at the Department of History, University of North Texas. She is the author of the multiple award-winning book Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya (2021), which received the Sara A. Whaley Award from the National Women's Studies Association, the Gita Chaudhuri Award from the Western Association of Women Historians and the Stansky Award from the North American Conference of British Studies. Her earlier work on the history of travelling ayahs in Britain has also won the Carol Gold Award. She serves as an associate editor of Gender & History, Britain and the World, and as an Associate Review Editor of the American Historical Review. Her works have appeared in scholarly journals, public history journals and magazines, and on BBC4.

Reviews
Waiting on Empire is a landmark book, giving long overdue attention to the most significant population of colonized women workers in Victorian Britain. Ayahs enabled British colonizers to maintain families despite their global mobility, critical to the resilience of British imperial rule. This beautifully written book restores these neglected women to the historical record, offering a sophisticated interpretation of women's agency and deftly recasting traveling ayahs as knowledgeable, enterprising, and resourceful skilled workers. * Laura Tabili, Professor of Modern European History, University of Arizona *
This book forever changes the history of domestic colonial service. Datta argues that traveling ayahs are a prism for the workings of imperial power from both above and below. Readers will be stunned by the photographic archive she has curated and by the way she practices care work for the subjects she so brilliantly moves out of the waiting room of history. * Antoinette Burton, author of The Trouble with Empire *



Book Information
ISBN 9780192848239
Author Arunima Datta
Format Hardback
Page Count 320
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 680g
Dimensions(mm) 240mm * 162mm * 21mm