Historians concerned to demonstrate women's increasing relegation to a private, domestic sphere in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have emphasized the extent to which married women's opportunities were restricted by the common law practice of coverture, which deprived wives of the ability to enter into economic contracts in their own right. Yet social and cultural historians have argued that women played an essential role as purchasers in promoting the consumer revolution of these decades. This article explores the devices used by married women consumers to evade the strictures of coverture. Focusing on three overlapping practices – wives' willingness and ability to pledge their husbands' credit to purchase a wide range of ‘necessary’ goods, their use of this tactic to secure a degree of independence from unsuccessful marriages, and their active participation in the deliberations of a variety of small claims courts – it argues that the purchase of coverture in the sphere of consumption was partial and contested, rather than monolithic.

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This essay explores the utility of individual and family biographies for British imperial and global history-writing. It begins by outlining social historians' ambivalent attitude to biography as a genre and then deploys a case study of the family of Sir Thomas Munro (1761-1827) to illuminate the demographic forces that drove propertied families into imperial ventures. It argues that malleable marital stratagems and collective social aspirations, rather than rigid political or racial ideologies, provided the primary impetus for British engagement with empire on the subcontinent under East India Company rule.

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