During the past two decades, postcolonial feminist scholarship has brought considerable attention to the centrality of colonial families in the forging of modern empires. Durba Ghosh's Sex and the Family in Colonial India offers a significant addition to this scholarship, focusing on intimate relationships between European men and indigenous women in early colonial India. Meticulously researched and written in unencumbered prose, Ghosh's book not only brings new visibility to the women in these relationships, but also shows how their relationships with European men pushed imperial formations of race, class, and respectability and also impelled new delineations of the colonial state in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British India.

Ghosh's work begins by unsettling long-held scholarly assumptions about what these relationships suggest about contemporary British attitudes toward Indian society. The standard narrative has suggested that in the eighteenth century, the British broadly accepted such relationships between Indian women and East India...

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