The scholarship of domestic service for this reviewer, an Australian First Nations woman and family historian, is recounted through my own knowledge of domestic service within my own family. My grandmother, as an Australian First Nations woman, was one of many First Nations people who provided European settlers with essential labor across Australia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is from this perspective that I understand domestic service in colonial settings, its changes throughout history, and its links to larger political and economic transformations. I recognize that it has been enriched by feminist and historical scholarship.
Colonialism and Male Domestic Service across the Asia Pacific, by four Australian academic authors, is an important contribution to understanding about an unknown topic. Julia Martínez, Claire Lowrie, Frances Steel, and Victoria Haskins give an account of male servants and their work from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s through a multisited historical narrative based on the written record and other archival documents.
Martínez, Lowrie, Steel, and Haskins emphasize transcolonial employment practices. They describe how, in some circumstances, these domestic workers are vulnerable and forced into labor domestic work, including how this type of work was maybe unpaid. While there are many characteristics that domestic workers share, one of them is that their employee status is invisible because they work inside the household. The four authors relate the experiences of houseboys, as they are almost universally referred to, and by doing so take them out of obscurity. These men, predominantly Chinese and Indian, served not only in official and private Asian Affairs households but also in trading houses, steamships, and hotels. The gendered ideologies of professionalism and skill link the practice of houseboys to the ways employers in different locales collectively believed in the importance of male servants to their colonial projects. By discussing why domestic work is undervalued in monetary terms and how it is most often informal and undocumented, the authors reveal it as something other than regular employment, as not fitting the general framework of existing labor laws despite the fact that its origins go back to the master-servant relationship. It is in this way that the book raises readers’ consciousness on how colonialism speaks to a system in which race and its intersections with gender and other hierarchies underpins foundational hierarchies that perpetuate unjust divisions of labor.
The first three chapters focus on household service and summarize in great detail a fascinating ensemble of the experiences of domestics, mostly sourced from their employers’ recollections. These stories point the reader's attention toward the colonial prestige gained from employing servants, which buttressed employers’ representation of and access to nobility. Of particular note are the chapters written by Lowrie and Haskins, who bring an extensive knowledge of domestic service and colonization to the book. They assert the importance of historical context in increasing one's understanding of the factors contributing to changing trends in domestic service or indeed, changes in forms of master-servant relationships.
The authors also elaborate on how these male domestic workers actively sought to resist exploitation and domination to improve their working conditions, and to maintain their self-respect. All cultures use imagery to tell stories. My ancestors have been telling stories with images since the beginning of time as a way to inform generational narratives. Stories are integral to human culture and storytelling is timeless. The authors were extremely generous in providing visual sources for analysis throughout the book. The use of images suggests that considerable effort has been made to locate worker's voices from within the colonial archive.
Nonetheless, those images do not necessarily provide the voice of the person captured within the image. Does a picture really say a thousand words? In future work, in order to give an understanding of male domestic service that elucidates the experiences and perspectives of the men themselves, a more broadened approach to historical material may be required. This history would be enriched through finding and accessing private archives or locating and talking with descendants about their personal memories.
Collectively, the authors have shown that domestic work is not always confined to the home, nor were the definition of work roles as clear-cut as often assumed. They pay close attention to variations in class, character of household, and employer-servant relationships. They bring to the reader's attention the patterns of transcolonial domestic labor mobility, and they highlight instances of servants challenging employer controls and seeking out more autonomous futures. By the turn of the twentieth century, the steamship, along with the railroad and telegraph, stood as the emblem of a new stage of colonial progress and the authors usefully interrogate the work of domestics on steamships and hotels. The chapters relating to this area explore the transfer of culture as people, products and literature moved along the steam ship lines between the two colonies and across the tropical colonial world. In all, the book describes how colonial cultures were produced by a complex process of interaction between colonizers, colonial migrants, and First Nations people.
Martínez, Lowrie, Steel, and Haskins present a comprehensive initial study that has many strengths and takes the understanding of male domestic service well beyond what is currently known. Colonialism and Male Domestic Service across the Asia Pacific leaves the reader wanting more, stimulating the appetite for further exploration of this important and interesting area.
