Introduction

Mrinalini Sinha, in her groundbreaking article “Britishness, Clubbability, and the Colonial Public Sphere,” argued the imperial nature of the club as an institution in the colonial public sphere and that the notion of clubbability resided within a Eurocentric logic which valued the colonizer as uniquely clubbable and recognized the potential clubbability of the colonized. This chapter builds upon Sinha’s work by analyzing how subscription libraries, books and reading contributed to the core and peripheral criteria of clubbability utilized by the clubbable settler elite – the ‘select people’ – to find potentially clubbable members of the indigenous elite – the ‘proper sort.’ It also assesses what prompted this study to be conducted – noticeable gaps in the following historiographies: imperial networks, colonial subscription librarianship, the British Council and colonial clubland in Jamaica, Malaysia and Nigeria. This chapter provides an overview of all primary and secondary sources consulted for this work.