In an innovative exploration of how everyday activities can shape an empire, this book uses leisure, spare time, and social life as a new lens through which to view the construction and maintenance of imperial power in British India. Foregrounding the daily lives of the colonial military, Erica Wald argues that many seemingly trivial social interactions were, in fact, central to the construction, negotiation, and understanding of colonial hierarchies. Through the pastimes of empire's servants, from Indian sepoys attending wrestling matches to British officers on pigsticking hunts, Wald reveals the relationship between leisure and power in the daily operation of empire.
Drawing on a wide range of archival materials--including official records, letters, diaries, and scrapbooks--Wald traces experiences of leisure among elite soldiers and lower ranks, across mess halls, social clubs, and theaters. She shows how leisure activities operated as means of projecting rank, status, and martial masculinity; as informal mechanisms of colonial control and racial boundary-making; and as a paradigm through which the experience of empire was digested and justified. Considering the tensions around notions of 'respectable' activities, she shows how leisure could also surprise and subvert colonial structures. Bridging military, social, cultural, and anthropocene histories of British India in a compelling new framework, this book shows how the empire itself evolved through everyday social transformations.