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She-Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen: British women in India, 1600—1900 by Katie Hickman     {Reviewed by STELLA} There have been plenty of histories about the British in India, but Katie Hickman’s She-Merchants, Buccaneers & Gentlewomen takes a slightly different tack. It starts earlier (the focus being the late 1700s and the first half of the nineteenth century), with the very first few women to venture forth on the long and perilous sea journey. Some were accompanying husbands, others were mistresses of recalcitrant aristocrats, and yet others, women of daring, saw an opportunity in trade in the early days of the East India Company. It also has a female focus, drawing on the letters, diaries and reminiscences of these women. While Hickman does mention the orphans and lower-class women sent to bolster the female numbers in this male-centric military society, the records are few and far between for these less literate classes. So, aside from the past prostitutes/mistresses (many of whom were mixing with the upper classes and as such knew the benefits of brushing up on their letters) now posing as gentlewomen, our stories are firmly fixed in the middle classes and gentry categories. As with many colonial histories, it is the early years that seem more flexible, with marriages of military soldiers (although most often the Indian wives were abandoned, usually with their children, when their supposed husbands left) and officers to Indian women and a few British women in relationships with local men. Not surprisingly this was not necessarily what society back home wished for. A policy was employed to encourage more women, ostensibly to become wives to the increasing number of British troops and civil servants, to travel to India as colonisation ramped up. Hickman sticks with the accounts of daily life, the routines of British society increasingly transplanted (even when they were nonsensical), and the long overland journeys that many women made—some following their military husbands when they were sent to a new posting; others venturing out alone (with servants and the occasional lover), wishing to escape their husbands and the confines of  British society. The accounts of great entourages (hundreds of animals—elephants, horses—and thousands of people—servants and soldiers) larger than many of the villages they passed by seems strange now, but was a reality of the aristocratic travellers making their mark on this place. Power and pomp. Hickman recounts the 1875 uprising near the end of her book, signposting the reasons it happened obliquely, rather than head-on, laying out the attitudes of the women through their letters, comments and memoirs. The viewpoint of the rebellion is clearly from the women who were hunkered down in (often inadequate) fortresses under great distress or who narrowly escaped death. Yet it is here that you clearly see the sticky problem—while these women as individuals were diverse in their attitudes, social positions and enlightenment (or not), some of them admirable (many not), they were nevertheless all part of the wider project of colonisation. She-Merchants, Buccaneers & Gentlewomen is a fascinating look at the individual accounts of women—there are plenty of intriguing tales, both troublesome and diverting—who ventured to India in this period, but it will raise more questions about the role of these women and the imprint they may have left than are answered here.