Ella C. Sykes's three books based on her travels through Persia, Canada, and Central Asia are no longer in print. Her name does not appear in the Dictionary of National Biography (though her brother's does), and she is not mentioned in critical studies of travel writing or women's writing. Nevertheless, Sykes's writings describe quite remarkable travels and demonstrate that the business of empire was conducted by middle-class families, the men employed by the government and stationed around the world and the women--their wives and sisters--often accompanying them. It was carried out village by village and district by district as well as in the halls of Parliament, the counting houses of commerce, and the fields of battle. Sykes affords a glimpse of late-Victorian and Edwardian colonization through both the political perspective of official representatives of the British Empire and the domestic perspective of the women who accompanied the men...