A review of the book 'She-Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen: British Women in India' written by Katie Hickman.
Long before the Raj, British women were sailing to India to trade, perform, paint, bake and reinvent themselves. We review Katie Hickman's She-Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen: British Women in India, a lively history that recovers three centuries of forgotten lives, from a seventeenth-century cloth trader to survivors of 1857. We look at what the book gets right about the memsahib stereotype, and where its reliance on British voices leaves India itself in the background.
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Coming up: A review of the book 'She-Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen: British Women in India' written by Katie Hickman.
Namaste Friends. My name is 'Shinil Subramanian Payamal' and you are listening to the Historylogy podcast.
Before I proceed, a full disclosure: This book was bought with my own money and not been provided to me by the author or publisher.
Little bit about the author:
Katie Hickman is the author of nine previous books, including two bestselling works of non-fiction, Daughters of Britannia - in the Sunday Times bestseller lists for ten months and a twenty-part series for BBC Radio 4 - and Courtesans. She has also written a trilogy of historical novels - The Aviary Gate, The Pindar Diamond and The House at Bishopgate - which between them have been translated into twenty languages. Her other books include two highly acclaimed travel books. Travels with a Mexican Circus (originally published as A Trip to the Light Fantastic) was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, and was one of the Independent's Books of the Year. This book, her history of British women in pre-Raj India, She-Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen, was published in 2019. Born into a diplomatic family, Katie Hickman had a peripatetic childhood, growing up in Spain, Ireland, Singapore and South America. She lives in London on a converted barge on the River Thames.
Let me read a brief description of the book:
QUOTE
The first British women to set foot in India did so in the very early seventeenth century, two and a half centuries before the Raj.
Women made their way to India for exactly the same reasons men did - to carve out a better life for themselves. In the early days, India was a place where the slates of 'blotted pedigrees' were wiped clean; bankrupts given a chance to make good; a taste for adventure satisfied - for women. They went and worked as milliners, bakers, dress-makers, actresses, portrait painters, maids, shop-keepers, governesses, teachers, boarding house proprietors, midwives, nurses, missionaries, doctors, geologists, plant-collectors, writers, travellers, and - most surprising of all - traders.
As wives, courtesans and she-merchants, these tough adventuring women were every bit as intrepid as their men, the buccaneering sea captains and traders in whose wake they followed; their voyages to India were extraordinarily daring leaps into the unknown.
The history of the British in India has cast a long shadow over these women; Memsahibs, once a word of respect, is now more likely to be a byword for snobbery and even racism. And it is true: prejudice of every kind - racial, social, imperial, religious - did cloud many aspects of British involvement in India. But was not invariably the case.
In this landmark book, celebrated chronicler, Katie Hickman, uncovers stories, until now hidden from history: here is Charlotte Barry, who in 1783 left London a high-class courtesan and arrived in India as Mrs William Hickey, a married 'lady'; Poll Puff who sold her apple puffs for 'upwards of thirty years, growing grey in the service'; Mrs Hudson who in 1617 was refused as a trader in indigo by the East Indian Company, and instead turned a fine penny in cloth; Julia Inglis, a survivor of the siege of Lucknow; Amelia Horne, who witnessed the death of her entire family during the Cawnpore massacres of 1857; and Flora Annie Steel, novelist and a pioneer in the struggle to bring education to purdah women.
For some it was painful exile, but for many it was exhilarating. Through diaries, letters and memoirs (many still in manuscript form), this exciting book reveals the extraordinary life and times of hundreds of women who made their way across the sea and changed history.
UNQUOTE
Histories of British India are usually told through governors, soldiers and merchants. When women appear, they tend to be reduced to one figure: the snobbish, insulated memsahib. Katie Hickman's book sets out to break that stereotype. Its premise is simple and persuasive. British women reached India in the early seventeenth century, two and a half centuries before the Raj. They went for the same reasons men did: necessity, ambition, scandal, curiosity and the chance to start again.
The five-part structure tracks how those lives narrowed over time. The seventeenth century, "a series of preposterous gambles," and the eighteenth are full of improvisers and reinventions. By the first half of the nineteenth century, Company power has expanded and social distances have hardened. The book then slows sharply for 1857. Julia Inglis at the siege of Lucknow and Amelia Horne, who saw her family killed at Cawnpore, make for harrowing reading. The final part follows the shift to Crown rule and figures such as Flora Annie Steel, the novelist who worked to bring education to women in purdah. The arc from adventurer to memsahib to reformer is itself an argument about how the empire reshaped what women could do.
Hickman writes with a novelist's eye, and she is best at texture: the voyage, the heat, the sickness, and the sudden grandeur available to women who would have lived modestly at home. Her sources are diaries, letters and memoirs, many unpublished, and she lets these women speak in their own voices.
The weaknesses come from the same method. Because the book is built from British women's own writing, Indian people appear mostly as these women saw them: servants, neighbours, zenana curiosities, rebels, backdrop. Hickman acknowledges prejudice, but her framing that it "was not invariably the case" leans toward rehabilitation. This is most visible in the 1857 chapters, where British suffering is vivid and the causes of the revolt and the brutality of its suppression get far less weight. The approach is also episodic, a gallery of remarkable lives rather than a sustained analysis of gender, race and power. It draws little on the substantial scholarship on women and colonial India. Some of its best-known figures have been covered before. And by stopping in the late nineteenth century, it leaves out the high Raj, where the memsahib stereotype actually took shape.
As popular history, the book succeeds. It is lively, well researched within its chosen sources, and makes early Company India feel strange and contingent rather than inevitably imperial. It is less successful as a challenge to the wider history of gender and empire, and it is best read alongside works that centre Indian perspectives.
Final Verdict:
For anyone interested in the social history of British India, women's history, the East India Company, colonial society, or simply the extraordinary lives of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times, Katie Hickman's ‘She-Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen’ offers a fascinating journey.
Hickman balances academic rigor with vivid storytelling, presenting a portrait of women who were far more adventurous, resourceful, and complex than history has typically allowed them to be. Engaging, richly sourced and valuable for its range, but it sees India largely through British eyes.
I give this book 3.5/5.
The book is currently available in Paperback, Kindle and Audible formats on Amazon India. And the book is available only in Hardcover and Paperback formats on Amazon USA and yet to be made available in Kindle and Audible formats. I have given the respective buy links in the show notes. Please check them out for the latest prices.
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