Angela Woollacott's Gender and Empire is both more significant and more useful than its slim proportions might suggest. Woollacott assigned herself a daunting task—to address questions of gender in nearly three centuries of British imperial history, providing synthesis and interpretation of relevant scholarship as well as her own analysis, all in a brief study. The results of her efforts are impressive.

The book's chronological focus spans roughly the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century, though its organization is thematic rather than strictly chronological. In six succinct chapters, Woollacott examines subjects including women and systems of unfree labor in the British Empire, narratives of sexual assault, masculinities, and imperial adventure, gender and everyday life in colonial regimes, women and gender in nationalist movements, and gender in empire in the metropole. In each chapter, the text provides a brief introduction to scholarly literature on the subject at hand as well as examples of case studies that illustrate the gendered nature of British imperialism. For this reason, Gender and Empire should be useful to both students and established scholars alike. The text will be especially useful to graduate students seeking a guide to the growing body of scholarship relating to gender and empire, as well as a thoughtful and clear introduction to the subject.

The second chapter is a fine example of the book's overall strength. Titled “Narratives of Interracial Sexual Assault,” the chapter is a brief but insightful blending of historiography and analysis. Informed by recent scholarship and employing the analytical framework of gender, Woollacott presents the reader with a fresh look at familiar topics like the Indian “Mutiny,” the Governor Eyre Controversy, and colonial captivity narratives. With regard to the latter, Woollacott explains well the historical shift in colonialist sexual anxieties, from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century male fears of sodomy and circumcision to nineteenth-century concern for the sexual purity of white women. In discussing the prevalence of such narratives, and their relationship to their metropolitan audiences, Woollacott illustrates her book's two most important themes. The first is that understanding the culture and practice of colonialism requires an examination of the intersection between hierarchies of gender and hierarchies of race. The second is that the history of the empire is best understood not as separate from, but inexorably linked to, the history of the metropole. Neither of these points is entirely new, of course; but in her discussion of captivity narratives, and throughout the book, Woollacott makes clear the importance of gender analysis to the study of modern Britain and the British Empire. In this way, Woollacott succeeds in her goal “to make plain the central role of gender in the imperial enterprise, both as one of the forces driving and shaping the empire, and as a set of ideologies produced at once in the colonies and the metropole that constituted shifting and pervasive imperial culture” (1).

Woollacott's book both contextualizes and builds upon the groundbreaking work of historians such as Catherine Hall and Mrinalini Sinha. Like Hall and Sinha, Woollacott is helping to move the field of British and imperial history beyond the outdated notion that gender is something “added” to history. Gender and Empire is based not on the attempt to insert “women” into traditional historical narratives, but rather, as Woollacott puts it, “to establish the systematic operation of gender” (3). In this way, Woollacott shows, for example, how Victorian concepts of masculinity motivated African exploration, how symbols of the feminine operated in anticolonial movements, how British missionaries were influenced by their ideas of gendered domesticity, and so on. Both in her examination of scholarly literature, and in her use of case studies and primary sources, Woollacott illustrates the centrality of both masculine and feminine ideologies to the imperial project. And if past definitions of “gender” tended to focus almost solely on women and the feminine, recent work by scholars like Paul Deslandes and Patrick McDevitt, among others, indicates the extent to which the construction of masculinity is becoming a more integral part of British studies. Woollacott's book will further help to establish a balanced and thoughtful use of gender as a crucial element of the study of empire.

Some readers may wish that Woollacott had developed some of her chapters and discussions further; the sections on gender in nationalist movements in Ireland, Palestine, and Canada, for example, are interesting but very brief. But this text is not intended to be an exhaustive interpretation of specific events or themes, and its brevity is one of its virtues. Angela Woollacott's Gender and Empire is a brief, clear, and compelling introduction to the relationship between the construction of gender and the history of the British Empire.