The scope of this book is much broader than its title suggests. Richards, a law professor at New York University, has written not only about gay rights and the British Empire, but also about the role of intimate personal choices in the struggle between democracy and domination, with stops in prehistory, ancient Rome, modern Britain, and contemporary America.

Richards asks why, if the findings of neurobiology and the evolutionary origins of mutual understanding indicate that an “ethics of care” is most natural to the human condition (12,16), individuals can be made to participate in the systems of violence inherent in imperial domination. The answer, carefully laid out on pages 46–48 (and again, almost verbatim, on pages 89–91) draws on the contemporary literature on trauma, and the consequences for the individual of suffering a traumatic loss. Richards indicates that “the crucial mechanism here is dissociation: the psychological process through which the surviving self separates itself from the self that was overwhelmed” (48, 90). He then reviews key texts related to the politics of ancient Rome, the militaristic ethos required of a Roman patriarch, and the highly gendered code of honor that sustained both. In these narratives, the sacrifice of life, property, love, or personal happiness for the good of the empire robs the individual of a genuine self, creating an “identification with the aggressor” at the core of the imperial subject. Emotionally shallow marriages and rigid codes of chastity were as much a part of the system as the extraordinary levels of personal, political, and military violence unleashed by it, most often because of affronts to patriarchal honor. Throughout the book, Richards uses this understanding of patriarchal politics to analyze British and American forms of imperialism as seen through policy, literature, and personal experiences.

The democratic tradition is similarly traced through the more liberal aspects of republican Rome, the development of Lockean philosophy, and the work of nineteenth century liberals such as John Stuart Mill. Despite the subtitle, only the third chapter focuses on the Bloomsbury Group; however, it is here that the theme of resistance to patriarchy on liberal feminist grounds comes through most strongly. Richards's analysis takes in not only the prohibitions against homosexuality, but also all of the “Love Laws,” as Richards memorably labels them, that potentially alienate individuals from their emotions and place love into hierarchies that serve the purposes of the state, including laws against sex for nonreproductive purposes, sex outside of marriage, and marriage across religious or racial lines (38–39). Richards then turns his attention to members of the Bloomsbury Group, and shows the relationship between their rejection of conventional Victorian sexual morality and their political convictions. The analysis is clear and nuanced, with insightful points made for each figure examined. The principled nature of Lytton Strachey's conscientious objection to the First World War comes through more strongly than in some other accounts, as does the power of Virginia Woolf's argument in Three Guineas over educated women's ability to resist fascism.

The book culminates with an analysis of the present debates in Britain, America, and other countries over gay rights, and the continuing struggles against political oppression. The last two chapters consolidate the overall project of the book, placing gay rights within the much broader liberal democratic struggle against patriarchy, domination, and empire, and demonstrating that the freedom of the individual to seek emotionally fulfilling relationships among equals is necessarily tied with creating systems of greater political freedom. Earlier in the book Richards acknowledged that he “certainly [does] not claim that what we explored in Chapter 3 as the rise of gay rights was the only or even the main explanation for the fall of the British Empire” (144). What he has done, however, is to provide an important historical grounding for the source of gay rights that challenges the argument by some contemporary political and religious leaders that its implementation in non-Western countries is the latest phase of Western imperialism.

In tracing an idea from the earliest times to the twenty-first century, Richards is pushing back against the scholarship on both imperialism and the history of sexuality that argues that causal connections over such a long period can be superficial, reading alternative meanings to a degree that obscures more than it enlightens. Although acknowledging these reservations, other scholars including Uday Singh Mehta in Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought have drawn resonant conclusions about the liberal critique of imperialism. It is a strength of Richards's work that he weaves together insights from a range of disciplines, cultures, and historic periods in a way relevant to contemporary political struggles. This is an important argument that deserves widespread consideration.