This chapter revisits some of the individuals and families we have encountered throughout the text, following these families past their time in India. Thinking about the forces that compelled families and individuals to make these choices, or foreclosed possibilities, provides an answer to the question of what happened to popular and historical memory of the working-class Raj. Back in Britain, men and women who had enjoyed an elevated social status could find it difficult to reintegrate into their communities of origin, which reinforced conformity rather than difference. As a result, returning Britons purposefully forgot tales of Indian service and elite pretensions in efforts to manage family relations. In contrast, those men and women who settled with their families in India or other parts of the empire – or who chose to abandon their families of origin – had a greater incentive to embrace a new class status and create family histories celebrating their climb up the social ranks of the British Empire.

Chapter 1 recovers the history of an Iberian family involved in royal service across Portugal and Spain during the first decades of the Iberian Union (1580–1640). It shows how family memory and political loyalty became professional assets for young, university-trained jurists. By moving back and forth between courtly and university stages across the two monarchies, some of these young letrados came to think of themselves as political polymaths. Ultimately, they found opportunities to reach out and receive support from transnational networks of neo-stoic thinkers and practitioners which was fundamental for articulating the composite social and political life of the Iberian monarchies within and beyond the Iberian Peninsula.

In this chapter, I reconceptualize the twin concepts of “comparison” and “case,” by rethinking what political scientists often call a “single-case study.” I propose that much of the disciplinary ambivalence about so-called single-case studies is a product of a misconception regarding their nature, and that this methodological label is a misnomer for such studies. Drawing on my own research, I propose the term “site” rather than “case.” A site is a conjunctural intersection of various and heterogeneous processes, relations, and scales of political activity, some relatively enduring and some relatively ephemeral. The constitutive multiplicity of a site and the detailed empirical engagement it enables offer both inspiration and leverage for analytical claims. Conceptualizing the objects of our research as sites mitigates against the social scientific tendency to regard ongoing social processes in reified, monolithic, and static terms. In-depth empirical engagement with research sites draws our analytic attention to the social processes that provisionally result in spatial boundedness, enduring institutionalization, and individual and group identity formation – or, on the contrary, the events and processes that disrupt, modify, innovate, and transform them.