When Sara Crewe arrives at Miss Minchin's Seminary, she is not only new to the school. She is also new to the country of England. Sara has been born and raised in India, which was, at the time of this novel's setting, a British colony. While the "first British Empire," ranging from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, revolved around creating British settlements in the Americas, the "second British Empire" was built up during the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries after the British lost control of their American colonies. It was during this second era of colonization that British forces took control of India through a mixture of negotiation and military force. Rather than permanently settle in their new colonies, as they had commonly done during the first British Empire, British citizens by and large plundered their new territory for exports. Chief among these actors were members of the British East India Company, which traded spices and tea between India and Europe. The British populace came to associate their largest and most prized colony with these "exotic" goods, and tended to view India through a romanticized lens. As a matter of fact, A Little Princess tends to describe India as a place of tropical delights and fanciful possibilities. While civilians did not, for the most part, settle in India, a military and bureaucratic apparatus was necessary to maintain control over the land and to establish a hierarchy with colonists at the top. For young men in Sara Crewe's England, a career in the colonies promised adventure, steady income, and respect from one's peers. Sara benefits from this herself in the novel, though it is her father who is a member of the colonial bureaucracy. She fondly recalls her adventures in childhood, her many servants, and her material comfort. For colonized peoples in India and elsewhere, this reality looked far less rosy.
While careers in the colonies were generally reserved for men, these men often brought their wives with them to India, and, in many cases, had children. These families then might employ a robust household staff drawn from the local population. In many cases, they might even bring these servants back to England for visits, just as the character Mr. Carrisford brings Ram Dass with him to London. Often, the children of colonial bureaucratic workers were largely raised by servants, to such an extent that they were able to speak these servants' native languages as well as their parents' English. Though many aspects of Sara's upbringing in India are presented without critical examination of colonial structures and their impact on Indian populations, Sara's nostalgia for her first home is not unrealistic. Many British children raised in India were sent to European boarding schools at a young age for the same reasons as Sara: to get an education, as well as to escape the warm South Asian climate, which was considered unhealthy for them. Like Sara, these children often missed their homes and particularly the domestic servants their families employed.
What, though, would it have been like to live under British colonial rule in India? The wealth created from imperialism went almost entirely to a small group of colonists and Indian princes, who benefited from serving the crown as well. Relations between colonists and the native peoples deteriorated over the course of the empire, becoming outright hostile after the anti-British uprising in 1857-58. Colonists exploited previously existing inequalities in India, as well as the subcontinent's sheer religious, cultural, and linguistic diversity, to sow division among colonized peoples and head off the possibility of further rebellion. In the meantime, while mainstream British attitudes maintained that colonialism was essentially a charitable act necessary for the improvement of everyday life in India, the truth is that Britain gained a great deal economically while most Indian people suffered. A number of famines in the late nineteenth century, for instance, were partially caused and certainly worsened by colonial policies. Ultimately, the British were expelled from India in the mid-twentieth-century, decades after Sara Crewe's fictional arrival in London. This departure, though, followed a long and tumultuous independence movement in India: the British empire was not eager to give up India's literal or symbolic value.
