For Marxist, functionalist and feminist historians alike, the family figures as a cornerstone of capitalist modernity. From Friedrich Engels's Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, through Talcott Parsons's theorisation of the nuclear family's role in sustaining industrialisation to Hall and Davidoff's analysis of the gendered construction of Victorian class identities, the close nexus between family formations and economic development has remained a constant of the historical analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British society. To be sure, scholars have disagreed fundamentally as to the nature of this pivotal relationship. For Alan Macfarlane, it was precisely because its marriage system was highly individualised and dis-embedded from kin networks that capitalism flourished in England; for Richard Grassby, in sharp contrast, capitalist development required the property of London's business classes to be ‘vested and consolidated in the family, not the individual’.

Although older traditions of imperial history remained largely insulated from these historiographical debates, the emergence of ‘new’ imperial histories has fostered an efflorescence of scholarship on the part played by family relationships in shaping the conflicted modernities of the British empire. In this context, arguments about the pivotal role of the family as an instrument of ‘bourgeois’ capital formation have gained new purchase, becoming imbricated with Foucauldian histories of race, biopower and colonial governmentality. Enriching our understanding of the social origins of economic and political change, the new imperial history of the British family has focused overwhelmingly on problems of racial alterity and exclusion.