In the first chapter of Emma Rothschild's rich and complex book on The Inner Life of Empires, the author tells the story of an East India Company servant named John Johnstone, who was sent to India's interior provinces in the mid-eighteenth century. Leaving his family behind in order to live among the two million women and men of Burdwan, Johnstone wrote of his abandonment and utter solitude. Rothschild makes note of the contradictions in Johnstone's perceptions, remarking that he “was alone, and he was at the same time surrounded, in a vast and strange world” (49). This anecdote speaks to one of the most thought-provoking aspects of Rothschild's important book: the conflict between the values of the empire and those of the family in the eighteenth-century British world.

Rothschild tells the story of the sprawling and often cantankerous Johnstones, seven brothers and four sisters from Dumfriesshire, Scotland. She is careful to define “family” broadly, and therefore readers learn about the Johnstone siblings, as well as their parents, children, marital partners, cousins, servants, and slaves. Some of the most poignant, and also the most noteworthy, parts of this book describe the experiences of “Bell, or Belinda,” a Johnstone slave purchased in Calcutta and brought to Scotland, where she was tried for infanticide before being transported to Virginia. Rothschild shows that all of the Johnstones, in their own various ways, were active and enthusiastic citizens of the British Empire. The Johnstones sailed around the world, traveling from Florida to France, Calcutta to Grenada. They worked for important colonial institutions, such as the East India “Company-State,” and they owned property in territories across the Atlantic and the Pacific. They invested in and avidly consumed foreign goods such as spices, silks, tea, Madeira, and porcelain, and they were inculpated in the enslavement of women and men. The Johnstones also participated in the most important philosophical and cultural developments of the British Enlightenment, both “high” and “low,” by purchasing books and pamphlets, attending lectures, and engaging with men such as David Hume and Adam Smith. Rothschild discusses these interactions impressionistically, loosely merging and melding the Johnstones' experiences with key eighteenth-century events, institutions, and ideas. In this analysis, Rothschild adeptly demonstrates how British Enlightenment and British Empire were lived and experienced by eighteenth-century Britons themselves. But she also shows that the imprecise, unstable, and unreliable nature of these ideas and practices—many of which were contradictory, such as the rights of man and the institution of enslavement, or the uneven and haphazard application of “free market” experiments within a financial system dependent upon patronage—threatened or damaged the Johnstones in various ways.

The Johnstones were not, at least by eighteenth-century standards, a truly “successful” family. We know that enormous value was placed upon family in the eighteenth century. Both women and men turned to family in times of war, political turmoil, and financial crisis; they relied upon family for advice; they sought succor and care from family when ill or injured. Particularly among the British elite, mothers and fathers, siblings and cousins, grandparents and godparents were the living framework that structured eighteenth-century experience. But the Johnstones, despite the blessing of a large and influential family, suffered constant disappointment and failure. They fought constantly, nurturing feuds with those whom they were expected to love best. Several members of the family endured horrible tropical diseases without cure or comfort. Their servants and slaves broke laws and were imprisoned, causing humiliation and embarrassment to the Johnstones, who were expected to govern the members of their households. Some of the Johnstones made fortunes—most notably William (Johnstone) Pulteney, who married an English heiress—but others died in penury after loaning their money unwisely or failing to properly convert foreign assets into British sterling. This meant that although some of the siblings enjoyed periods of wealth, as a whole the family was frequently unable to provide aid to its members if and when disaster struck. Even the most stereotypical and traditional center of eighteenth-century family life—the Johnstone home in Westerhall, Scotland, where all eleven children were born and raised—was lost, sold when debts against the estate grew unmanageable.

In this engaging and innovative book, Rothschild offers many new and important insights into the lives of eighteenth-century Britons. The Inner Life of Empires is masterfully researched, providing a truly incredible level of detail about the Johnstones and their alliances. In addition, Rothschild's method, in casting her work as a series of interconnected microhistorical studies, is especially effective, as are her arguments about the utility of this style. But in some ways, The Inner Life of Empires is a study of family members rather than a family history. Rothschild predominantly grounds her work in the historiography of eighteenth-century philosophy and economics. This book certainly represents a valuable contribution to those fields, but useful comparisons and contributions could also have been made by more explicit reference to studies on the history, formation, and paradigms of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century family (including books by Jenny Davidson, Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, Su Fang Ng, and Naomi Tadmor, as well as Daniel Livesay's forthcoming Children of Uncertain Fortune: West Indians of Color and the Atlantic Family, 1750–1820 [Chapel Hill, NC]). These works could have provided context for the complex and often uneasy relations between the Johnstones themselves. Rothschild remarks, for example, on the strangeness of the relationship between Betty Johnstone and her mother, Barbara, whose bitter, years-long feud was precipitated by a disagreement over a gift of Indian muslin. Closer examination of the social expectations surrounding the exchange of presents in eighteenth-century families could have yielded some interesting insights into why this fight occurred and the ways that exotic, imported goods from the empire revalued and refigured traditional family relationships in metropolitan Britain. The empire placed strains upon the sentimental and philosophical inner lives of eighteenth-century Britons, but it also wrought changes upon the inner lives of eighteenth-century British families. In these families of empire, patrimony could be remade, mixed-race children could become kin, and individuals like John Johnstone, thousands of miles away from the women and men who helped to define him, could feel utterly alone amid crowds of people.