Fae Dussart. In the Service of Empire: Domestic Service and Mastery in Metropole and Colony Empire's Other Histories. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. Pp. 256. $115.00 (cloth).

We know now that the employment practices of white households and the introduction of capitalist wage relations reconfigured existing cultures of servitude in colonies in Asia and Africa.Equally, analyzing domesticity, with an emphasis on the intersections of class, race, and gender, was central to the renewal of imperial history in the 1990s.Fae Dussart's In the Service of Empire: Domestic Service and Mastery in Metropole and Colony makes a crucial contribution to this body of scholarship.In most studies of imperial domesticity, an implicit link is made between the emergence of the bourgeois domestic sphere in the metropole and its re-scripting in the colonies.Dussart makes this link explicit.The book compares the employment of domestic workers by Britons in Britain and India.This comparative framework has lent considerable power and depth to her analysis of imperial domesticity, throwing into sharp relief the significance of racial hierarchies and colonial difference.The book helps us understand the centrality of domestic service not only in the British Raj but in Britain as well-in the "British imperial world" (209).It shows the complex layering of categories, such as gender, race, class, and caste, in domestic relations across the metropole and the colony, feeding into each other, and giving coherence to the ideology and management of empire.Three chapters are focused on nineteenth-century Britain, two on India, and one is comparative.Of these, I found the chapters analyzing the "tensions of intimacy" (109-121)-the complexity of combining bodily proximity with social hierarchy and subordination-particularly fascinating.In the context of India, Dussart shows, practices of domestic intimacy were complicated by caste.The fourth chapter explores stereotypes and power asymmetry, arguing that ambivalent and racialized notions of Indian character produced by white employers became influential across the British Empire.The spread of the notion of a "servant problem," (58) explored in the opening chapter, is viewed from both ends.A signal achievement of the book is to bring forth the servants' voice, heard most systematically in the last chapter, which explores political mobilization of domestic workers in nineteenth-century Britain.Dussart records several fragmentary attempts at unionization, mostly short-lived, but indicating growing discontent.This account, which can be read as a failure of organization, is nevertheless evocative of some major themes of the book.Dussart makes the point that domestic workers in India did not-or could not-access similar political resources because of colonial subordination.This brings to fore one of the challenges of this study.Historical research in and on domestic work is virtually non-existent in South Asia, especially compared to Britain, where there is a rich vein of such research.There is only one monograph and