We asked what these acts of remembering and retelling might signal about
the duties and dispositions that went with domestic work, and what it meant to
be in the service of those who were themselves often inept at "being colonials":
provincial brides on their first trip to the Indies, recently transferred government
bureaucrats, plantation supervisors climbing the corporate ladder, young
doctors on philanthropic missions, and crusty old colonial hands who might just
be learning what it meant to be self-consciously European