This remarkable book describes a remarkable family, in a remarkable world, at a remarkable historical moment. The family circle was an extended one: eleven surviving children (of fourteen), born to an economically precarious couple on a small estate in lowland Scotland, together with their spouses and in-laws, their children, their servants and slaves, their friends and acquaintances. The latter included David Hume, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson (therefore allowing Rothschild some stimulating reflections on the Scottish Enlightenment in its local and global contexts). The world was an exploding one, a rapidly changing theater of military conflict, global commerce, financial speculation, and transatlantic slavery, of shimmering investment opportunities and shifting goods. Across its hazy geographical, political, and institutional boundaries, members of the family scattered to India, the West Indies, and North America in search of the wealth and security that had eluded their parents. The historical moment, too, was a decisive one: it spanned the mid- to late-eighteenth century decades in which a British empire was taking form, the fate of America was at issue, and the practice of slavery was brought into question. A novelist would have been hard pressed to invent a family more intimately woven into the vast fabric of its age. Rothschild has been able to trace the threads of its multiple lives, knitting them back together in a truly splendid work of historical imagination, and illuminating the contexts and implications of its experience.

The four Johnstone daughters stayed relatively close to home (though one was forced into exile in France as a result of her agitation for the Jacobite cause). Not so the sons. One found wealth and influence the old fashioned way, by marrying an English heiress. A member of Parliament for more than three decades, he did not neglect to invest in plantations in the West Indies (or to finance another brother in the same business) while defending slavery against attacks in Westminster. More colorfully, another brother amassed a fortune in Bengal under the umbrella of the East India Company, profiting immensely from the customary gifts he received from local rulers and dignitaries. Ousted when Lord Clive returned to India to reform the gift system from which he himself had once benefited, this brother survived a series of court cases to hang on to his gains. He too served in Parliament, although briefly, opposing slavery as he did so. From Bengal, he brought back a serving girl later tried and deported for infanticide; she was probably the last person to be recognized as a slave by a British court. Within a few months of this same case, another Johnstone servant was the first person in Scotland to sue for his freedom: his case established the illegality of slavery in that country (a year after the Somerset case did so in England).

With support from these two great achievers, the other Johnstone brothers attained varying degrees of success. A sugar plantation in Grenada; an ineffective term as governor of the new British colony established in West Florida; another seat in the House of Commons; military service against and futile negotiations with the rebellious Americans; enterprise and early death in Bengal; marriage into a Liverpool family of slave ship owners: these were among their multifarious activities. Slavery ran as a filigree through all these lives. The family shared in its profits but was deeply divided over its morality.

The early pioneers of microhistory dreamed of discerning vast historical tides flowing through individual lives and communal experience. In one canonical formulation, they urged historians to search the name to find the game, sifting concentrated local archives to discover how individuals and families navigated and shaped the structures that constrained them. Rothschild, in effect, has reinvented microhistory for a digital age. At the heart of her story is the family correspondence. But amazing detective work exploiting the digitization of library collections and archival catalogs (notes account for a third of the book) has enabled her to search the name, and piece together the game, across several continents and from a vastly extended and more complex perspective than early microhistorians could ever hope for. Some of her best pages reflect less on the constraints of the game than on its uncertainties. The Johnstones inhabited an expanding universe of still possible worlds, an “unsettled world of possible empires” (129). They made their choices and placed their bets; the results did not always conform to their anticipations.

The Inner Life of Empires thus looks at great transformations from the inside out: from evidence of individual projects and purposes, of personal dilemmas and inequities. This is an inner history, too, in that it probes for the sentiments that held the global Johnstone family together (with occasional disruptions) and for the often fraught emotions with which individuals charted (or endured) their fates. There is much wisdom and compassion in this gracefully written book.