When the five volumes of the much-touted Oxford History of the British Empire (OHBE) were published between 1998 and 1999, many scholars of the Empire were dismayed to find that the contributors had almost completely ignored the history of gender. Indeed, hardly any of the essays reflected an acknowledgment—much less a serious attempt to incorporate—more than two decades of sustained research on the ways in which ideologies of gender, sex, and sexuality were fundamental to the maintenance of imperial rule. Scholars from many research specializations openly criticized the OHBE for its failure to include such important work as an integral part of the series. One result of such criticism was the creation of an OHBE Companion Series, which, according to editor in chief William Roger Louis, was designed to “pursue themes that could not be covered adequately in the main series” (foreword). Gender and Empire, edited by Philippa Levine, is the first volume to appear in the series. It is a welcome addition to the first five OHBE volumes and provides a rigorous introduction to the state of the field.
The purpose of Gender and Empire is not simply to add gender to a preset history of imperialism. Rather, it is premised on the view that “the very idea as well as the building of empires themselves cannot be understood without employing a gendered perspective” (1). Like gender historians in all fields, then, the contributors to this volume share the conviction that gender, when used as a key analytic for exploring the past, can fundamentally change our understanding of history as well as the questions we ask of it.
Gender and Empire is an anthology of thirteen chapters, including an introductory essay by editor Levine, three chronological essays, and nine essays devoted to a variety of themes. The introductory essay is especially useful to those new to the study of gender history, as Levine carefully explains how gender cannot be understood in isolation from other analytics such as race or social class, and how ideologies about gender change over time in response to historical events.
The rest of the book approaches the history of gender in the Empire in two different, but complementary, ways. The first takes a chronological approach, dividing the history of the Empire by century. While this approach may seem somewhat conventional, in this context attention to chronology provides unity and substance to the rest of the essays. Indeed, Kathleen Wilson, Catherine Hall, and Barbara Bush (writing on the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, respectively) present readers with a broad overview of the intersections between gender and empire over a long period. In so doing, they demonstrate that ideologies of gender were not fixed and in fact changed considerably over time. In the eighteenth century, for example, Wilson argues that frequent European wars and excesses in consumer trade items precipitated renewed concern over the meanings of manliness and effeminacy. In the nineteenth century, Catherine Hall shows that concerns over gender were increasingly interwoven with “scientific” understandings of racial difference, and with gendered notions of conquest and procreation. By the twentieth century, Barbara Bush demonstrates that the World Wars feminized the Empire by allowing more room for women's participation, while at the same time they diminished British male confidence in the virtues of war and conquest.
In addition to change over time, however, these chronological essays also highlight many gendered themes that remained remarkably similar over time—including the ways that women were consistently used as markers of “progress” and “civilization,” the ways that gender was used as a tool to police the boundaries between rulers and ruled, the importance that sex management played in maintaining the structure of imperial rule, and the close connection of gender ideologies with coercion and violence. These continuities provide a unifying foundation for the essays that follow, as they are echoed time and again in an astonishing variety of contexts throughout the Empire.
The second approach of Gender and Empire is thematic, with nine essays that explore the intersections of gender with medicine, sexuality, migration, nationalism, decolonization, violence, childhood, missionary life, and the construction of colonial archives. Taken as a whole, these essays explore gender as a multifaceted, theoretical approach to the past and take as their focus men as well as women, masculinities as well as femininities, ideas as well as practice, and sexualities as well as gender roles. Their geographical and topical breadth testifies to the ways in which gender ideologies were inseparable from individual and collective worldviews about social order, science, nation, and race. Moreover, these essays devote ample attention to the “white settler” colonies as well as to the nonwhite “conquest” colonies, allowing readers to juxtapose a variety of imperial locales and gendered practices. In addition, some of the essays expose understudied areas of gender history. For example, in “Empire and Violence, 1900–1939,” Jock McCulloch argues that historians need to understand the violence of empire not just in terms of war and conquest, but also in terms of privatized imperial labor regimes and the ways in which ideologies of gender gave rise to—and perpetuated—everyday brutalities that have often been ignored in imperial histories. Antoinette Burton's “Archive Stories: Gender in the Making of Imperial and Colonial Histories” uniquely exposes the highly gendered nature of imperial archives themselves and the ways that these gendered institutions can shape our experiences as historians as well as the stories we are able to tell. Whether exploring new terrain or revisiting older terrain, however, each of the thematic essays point repeatedly—albeit in different ways and in different contexts—to the ways in which practices and ideologies of gender undergirded the imperial enterprise in nearly every possible way.
All histories have their limitations, and few studies can answer all the questions they raise. Some may argue that Gender and Empire is too heavily weighted toward the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; others may wish that the book were longer so that it could incorporate an even wider variety of themes. What is most disappointing, however, has little to do with the overall excellent quality of the book in its own right. Rather, it has to do with the very idea of a separate volume on gender and empire within the OHBE series—an idea that tends to reinforce the notion that the history of gender exists somehow outside “the rest” of British Imperial history. Such a notion could not be further from the basic theoretical premise of Gender and Empire. In an ideal world, every one of the themes that appear in Gender and Empire would have been incorporated into the very warp and weave of the OHBE at the outset, and the separate Companion Series would never have been needed.
