Date Awarded
2022
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Department
History
Advisor
Nicholas S Popper
Committee Member
Karin A Wulf
Committee Member
Gerard L Chouin
Committee Member
Simon P Newman
Abstract
This dissertation focuses on how seventeenth-century imperial and trading company administrators in England, the American colonies, and on the African coast constructed their authority during a period of rapid imperial expansion. It argues that officials must be understood as heads of what I call ‘administrative households’. In these organisations of power, one man held the position of secretary or its equivalent and was assisted by a cadre of others over whom he exercised authority modelled on the domestic household but rooted in the techniques of administration. Within these households, officials’ reliance on servants of lower social standing, clients, members of kinship networks, women with family ties to the administration, religiously heterodox or non-European men, and even enslaved children meant that administrative households were not homosocial spaces filled with a ‘professional class’ of modern civil servants. Instead, they had more in common with domestic households made up of a diverse group of people with differentiated social statuses. As a result, officials, their administrative households, and the imperial state itself depended upon ongoing performances of class, gender, and race as the basis of the hierarchical system they established to oversee the British Empire throughout the following centuries.
DOI
https://dx.doi.org/10.21220/s2-7bpj-sh31
Rights
© The Author
Recommended Citation
Emanuel, Phillip Louis, "'Great Weights Hang By Small Wires': Households And The Making Of The British Empire, C.1650-1713" (2022). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. William & Mary. Paper 1673281580.
https://dx.doi.org/10.21220/s2-7bpj-sh31
