{"id":36146,"date":"2014-03-31T17:49:00","date_gmt":"2014-03-31T17:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=36146"},"modified":"2014-03-31T17:49:04","modified_gmt":"2014-03-31T17:49:04","slug":"empire-race-and-the-debate-over-the-indian-marriage-market-in-elizabeth-hamiltons-memoirs-of-modern-philosophers-1800","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=36146","title":{"rendered":"Empire, Race, and the Debate over the Indian Marriage Market in Elizabeth Hamilton\u2019s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/muse.jhu.edu\/login?auth=0&amp;type=summary&amp;url=\/journals\/eighteenth_century_fiction\/v026\/26.3.leffel.html\" target=\"_blank\"><em><strong>Empire, Race, and the Debate over the Indian Marriage Market in Elizabeth Hamilton\u2019s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800)<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/muse.jhu.edu\/journals\/eighteenth_century_fiction\" target=\"_blank\">Eighteenth-Century Fiction<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/muse.jhu.edu\/journals\/eighteenth_century_fiction\/toc\/ecf.26.3.html\" target=\"_blank\">Volume 26, Number 3, Spring 2014<\/a><br \/>\npages 427-454<br \/>\nDOI: 10.1353\/ecf.2014.0004<\/p>\n<p><strong>John C. Leffel<\/strong>, Assistant Professor of English<br \/>\n<em>State University of New York, Cortland<\/em><\/p>\n<p>In the late eighteenth century, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/East_India_Company\" target=\"_blank\">East India Company<\/a> stations were characterized as marriage \u201cbazaars\u201d in which Englishwomen were traded like any other merchandise. Women at the centre of such trafficking were depicted as complicit in their own commodification. In the face of such pervasive negative stereotyping, women returning to Britain after time spent on the subcontinent often found themselves ridiculed and shunned. In this article, I explore how author <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Elizabeth_Hamilton_(writer)\" target=\"_blank\">Elizabeth Hamilton<\/a> (1758\u20131816) responded to this potent imperial stigma. She absorbed and perpetuated popular negative stereotypes regarding these matrimonial \u201cspeculators\u201d in her own writing, but in her second novel, <em>Memoirs of Modern Philosophers<\/em> (1800), she subtly recalibrated her stance, in ways that illuminate the changing tenor of Anglo-Indian social, political, and sexual relations. By the turn of the nineteenth century, burgeoning discourses of racial difference and the perceived threat of sexual \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=450\" target=\"_blank\">miscegenation<\/a>\u201d in the empire became thoroughly entwined with debates regarding the \u201cIndian marriage market\u201d and female emigration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Empire, Race, and the Debate over the Indian Marriage Market in Elizabeth Hamilton\u2019s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800) Eighteenth-Century Fiction Volume 26, Number 3, Spring 2014 pages 427-454 DOI: 10.1353\/ecf.2014.0004 John C. Leffel, Assistant Professor of English State University of New York, Cortland In the late eighteenth century, East India Company stations were characterized as [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8,10],"tags":[3689,17151,1351,17149,17150],"class_list":["post-36146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-uk","tag-eighteenth-century-fiction","tag-elizabeth-hamilton","tag-india","tag-john-c-leffel","tag-john-leffel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36146\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}