Cumbria was a remote region in the eighteenth century—by many measures the poorest part of England, which shed population to industrializing districts elsewhere in the North, to London, and to America. Its west-facing coast encouraged an engagement with North America. Atlantic trade opened up the economy from the later seventeenth century, when the port of Whitehaven was built on a grid-plan with a church at its center—just like colonial settlements. Whitehaven exported cloth and coal while handling tobacco imports on a scale that exceeded Liverpool for much of the eighteenth century, and it even witnessed the only shot fired within the British Isles during the war that lost America. Cumbria's engagement with imperial activity in Asia, by contrast, has hitherto been obscure. K. J. Saville-Smith's study demonstrates that a number of well-born Cumbrians went east instead of west in search of betterment. Their motivations and frame of cultural reference, she argues, was provincial not national.

Saville-Smith systematically explores the connections between Cumbria and the East Indies. “Cumbrian counties” refer to Cumberland and Westmorland together with Furness in Lancashire, while “East Indies” refer to the area of operations of the East India Company in Asia, especially India. These parameters frame a search of documentary sources for Cumbrians connected to the East India Company. This approach encourages an Anglo-centric focus, and there is limited attention paid to geographical dynamics. The language of regions is deployed, but there is no developed consideration of regions as a key dynamic in the processes under study in Europe or Asia. A more analytical approach to regional context would provide the key to unlocking relationships at a series of scales in Cumbria, the London region, and Asia. Data presented for kin and friendship ties, and county origins of persons engaged in the Company, hint at regional dynamics within Britain. It is less clear how regionalization played out in diverse Asian contexts, and the book is largely silent on European-Asian relations.

Saville-Smith identifies 421 men and 23 women with connections to Cumbria who were active in the East Indies between 1680 and 1829. This enumeration is largely achieved by matching East India Company records with digitally available birth and death records. In addition to this robust data (well presented in appendices), qualitative analysis of surviving correspondence—along with attention to newspapers, wills, and memorials—provides the core of the study. Archival research underpins an exploration of social status, consumption practices, family ties, and friendships. Those who left Cumbria for the East Indies were overwhelmingly sons of the gentry and middling sort. Saville-Smith points to their high levels of educational attainment, sometimes gained in southern public schools and at Oxford, and the strength of Cumbrian networks in London. Disappointingly, there is only limited information on the Asian experience of these sojourners. Even evidence for marriage or cohabitation with Asian women, and the lives of their offspring, is dealt with very briefly. The book focuses instead on the correspondence documenting relations with the family and friends of those who left, how they reached India, and what the “nabobs” achieved on their return.

The crux of Saville-Smith's argument is that pressures for “success” drove certain sons of the gentry and middling sort to seek their fortune in the East, and that a disproportionate number of well-educated men with Cumbrian connections did so compared to other counties. Ambition was not aimed at escape or settlement, but a youthful adventure followed by returning home with enhanced status and resources. As Saville-Smith makes plain, economic and social capital were key. Friends and family supported each career, sometimes making sacrifices in the expectation of triumphs. Returns in capital and social standing were deployed in houses and gardens, and proved a launch pad for politics and philanthropy. The intriguing suggestion that Indian garden house architecture informed Lake Villas is less fully developed. Indeed, the book seems to argue that experiencing the other side of the world had remarkably limited impact on men, women, and even mixed-race offspring. Instead, the pursuit of “success” resulted in returning to enhance Cumbria.

Saville-Smith wisely avoids explaining consumption patterns in terms of emulation, and eschews the marginalization of provincial society. London emerges in this account as a node within larger interactions—another region, in fact. The book also claims that a closer appreciation of the East Indies dimension would revise understandings of provincial society in England over the long eighteenth century, particularly the consolidation of gentry and middling sorts into a hard class, and provide a new perspective on the “urban renaissance.” Tantalizing as these suggestions are, they are not the subject of detailed analysis. Comparisons with nabobs in other settings, such as around London or Bristol, are not made. More successfully, Saville-Smith's conclusion that provincial society was appreciated on its own terms by contemporaries, and that the mirroring of provincial society in colonial contexts should be recognized not as a disappointment but a conscious recreation of European society, is well-made. Saville-Smith thus succeeds in making provincial society a positive category of analysis, and a positive frame for certain privileged life experiences. For the genteel, it was the satisfactions of provincial social and political standing that drove individuals, with the encouragement of families and friends, to search for success in their own communities via the East Indies. In addition to gender, the sociological and racial dimensions of this phenomena deserve to be analyzed further.

Boydell has produced a handsome book, but the copyediting is inadequate. The glossary at the start could have been dispensed with—better to explain terms at first mention in the prose—and aspects of the argument needed to be elucidated. For instance, the Lowthers are presented as a dominant political force that sojourners to the East Indies apparently resisted throughout their careers, but neither Lowthers’ standing nor reasons for resistance to its sway are well explained. Minor quibbles aside, Saville-Smith has written a robustly researched and stimulating study, with a spirited argument for the importance of archives in understanding a multilayered world.