After what seems like a dizzying array of topics, time periods, and historical actors, the transnational focus of Moving Subjects lives up to its promise of expanding the history of intimacy and empire. Tony Ballantyne, Antoinette Burton, and their contributors focus transnationally on the intersection of intimacy and empire, an unlikely juxtaposition for traditional historians of empire. This focus balances the actions and movements of European subjects with the great catalog of peoples whose own actions and movements intersected with Euro-imperialists.
Reminiscent of their 2005 work, Bodies in Contact, Ballantyne and Burton attempt to stretch the boundaries of the historiography of empire once again. The essays that follow originated at a 2004 conference centered on gender, mobility, and settler colonialism held at the University of Otago. The contributing fifteen authors are so diverse that their combined scholarship defies easy labeling, but most deal with intimacy and mobility in work that is conscious of the effects of an imagined nationalism and influenced by the legacy of feminist theoretical approaches. These essays expand the definition of intimacy to include violence, the written word, and even political symbolism. Most important, the focus on mobility and interaction negates the tendency of empire history to privilege European agency (5–6). Many, including the editors, found the work of Ann Laura Stoler on “Tense and Tender Ties” in 2001 in the Journal of American History inspiring.
In their essays, David Haines, Michael McDonnell, Katherine Ellinghaus, and Adrian Carton examine the relationship of indigenous women to their European male partners and how those relationships were interpreted, circumscribed, and manipulated by the political and economic forces of empire. However, from Ngai Tahu women in New Zealand to Portuguese Eurasian women in colonial India, the women in these histories are not simply unwilling pawns in the drive for colonization. They are actors in their own right, defining and shaping empire as it expanded.
Other scholars in the book, including Rachel Standfield, Frances Steel, and Michelle Moran, add to the growing history on the intimacy of violence, especially masculinity and violence. Standfield's analysis of Captain James Cook's emphasis on the Maori as a warrior culture as justification for his initial violence highlights the historical role of ethnography. Likewise, Steel's examination of Suva, Fiji, near the turn of the century demonstrates the fine line between accepted masculine behavior that preserved European business decorum and hierarchies and overly permissive company officers who threatened it. Moran's essay also highlights the contested nature of masculinity in emerging colonies with the many variations on the history of Koolau and the implications interpretations of that history had for Hawaiian nationalism and imperialism.
Although their essays are varied in their historical and geographic settings, Elizabeth Vibert, Charlotte MacDonald, Fiona Paisley, Dana Rabin, and Adele Perry all highlight the importance of relationships within genders and how intimacy could be a realm of contested power (Rabin, Perry) or create its own “space” across oceans through the writings of close friends or family members (Vibert, MacDonald). Paisley takes on the difficult topic of early twentieth-century transnational feminism and the role envisioned by Eurowhites for “native” women in the Pan-Pacific Conference of 1934.
The quality of the work of all of the contributors is a testament to their own research and the strong support of their editors; however, a few essays stand out for the ways in which they meet the specific goals set forth in the introduction of the collection. Kerry Wynn, Christine Skwiot, and Kirsten McKenzie's essays demonstrate the slippery nature of defining imperial or national space and the importance of “meeting up places” (3) in the attempt to “negotiate, contest, and reconfirm the boundaries of rule” (2). Beginning with a symbolic marriage between “Indian Territory” and “Mr. Oklahoma Territory,” Wynn argues how these seemingly intimate relationships had far-reaching political meanings, and her analysis of citizenship, nationality, and legal changes is itself the perfect “marriage” between the history of intimacy and the realm of more traditional history (the legal and the political). Similarly, Skwiot shows the difficulties faced by promoters of Hawaii as an island paradise when faced with realities of the subversion of native Hawaiian power, contesting with the need to “preserve” that culture in terms of framing tourism. Jumping hemispheres, McKenzie's arguments about and close reading of the correspondence of an English lady and her servant (who became a colonist himself) transplanted to South Africa reveals just how unstable social and geographic categories became at the most far-flung points of empire. It is at these points of conjunction that the scholarship in Moving Subjects reveals the importance of its theoretical approach.
Pushing the boundaries of both traditional imperial study and existing gender analyses of the age of empire, this work complements texts like Philippa Levine's Gender and Empire (Oxford, 2004; also a collection of essays) and Ballantyne and Burton's previous Bodies in Contact. However, Levine's work is more oriented toward the British Empire, whereas this collection interprets empire more broadly and looks at points of intersection across the globe. Less suited for an introductory course than Gender and Empire, this text would fit well in an upper-level undergraduate or graduate course on empire, imperialism (including U.S.), transnationalism, gender, or nationalism. The strengths of the collection include its eclectic mix of topics and time periods—for example, the setting for Dana Rabin's contribution is eighteenth-century Britain—and its inclusion of North American frontiers and Polynesian cultures. Also, its expanded definition of “intimacy” ranges from friends writing letters to the symbolic conjoining of territories and the creation of nationalisms.
