Builders of Empire: Freemasonry and British Imperialism, 1717-1927, by Jessica L. Harland-Jacobs

Abstract

Reviewed by: Builders of Empire: Freemasonry and British Imperialism, 1717–1927 Mary Ann Clawson (bio) Builders of Empire: Freemasonry and British Imperialism, 1717–1927, by Jessica L. Harland-Jacobs; pp. xiv + 384. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007, $39.95, £25.50. Responding to the challenges of contemporary global and transnational histories, as well as to calls for the rethinking of the British imperial project, Jessica Harland-Jacobs identifies British Freemasonry as a revealing, indeed inspired, entry point into the history of the British Empire as a global formation. In its most assertive formulation, the book argues that the “British Empire was a fraternal enterprise” (17), with Freemasonry operating as an “institution that paralleled (and enabled) expansion of empire and beyond” (2). The book’s range of conceptual vision, geography, and time-span is exceptional. With ideological origins in eighteenth-century Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, British Freemasonry articulated values of universal brotherhood, religious tolerance, and openness to political diversity. Yet during the nineteenth century it evolved an ever-closer identification with the monarchy and the Empire, “an unquestioning ally,” Harland-Jacobs argues, “of the British imperial state” that helped to sustain the Empire as a workable supra-national entity (6). Within this framework, Freemasonry’s contributions were threefold: it operated as an internal social lubricant, an externalized performance of public power, and a means of co-opting indigenous elites. Most convincingly, Harland-Jacobs portrays Masonic lodges as a social and cultural infrastructure of empire that offered “convivial society, moral and spiritual refinement, material assistance, and social advancement” to Empire functionaries, both military and civilian (3–4). One of the book’s many strengths is this account of innovative governance structures that enabled Freemasonry to reproduce itself globally by defining systematic procedures for the formation of new lodges and establishing credentialing mechanisms to verify Masonic membership. As a result, Freemasonry operated as a kind of passport that newly arrived Masons could use to gain social entrée throughout the Empire. Harland-Jacobs’s emphasis on the significance of cultural institutions as a supplement to the typical focus on trade and government as a force of globalization is an especially important contribution, as is her demonstration of how this cultural life was grounded in organizational innovation. The hospitality of the lodge was of course reserved exclusively for men; Freemasonry’s character as an all-male organization was an important component of its identity. Here Harland-Jacobs expands our understanding of the history of masculinities by emphasizing the “significance of homosociality to imperialism (itself a predominantly male environment)” (15). Women were significant as both presence and absence [End Page 517] in these colonial sites, but Harland-Jacobs’s most interesting point is that the homosociality of empire, reproduced in part through Freemasonry, contributed to women’s continued subordination since, “transforming oneself, through Masonry, into a cosmopolite or an imperial citizen was an opportunity available only to men” (16). Finally, Harland-Jacobs greatly advances the analytic reach of both Masonic and British Empire histories in her argument that Freemasonry helped sustain imperial power not only by offering homosocial community and day-to-day amusement to Empire functionaries, but also by contributing to the production of consent in the societies that Britain ruled. If British overseas power, given the relatively small size of the force and personnel it was able to deploy, rested as much on performance and pageantry as on the exercise of force, then Freemasons’ role as “the shock troops of imperial ceremony” (14) was surely significant in conveying the mystique of authority and invulnerability to both supposedly awestruck indigenous populations and its own military and civilian personnel. This valuable insight could be strengthened with documentation that Masonic performativity achieved its desired effect. Here the author’s reliance on not just Masonic sources but a particular kind of Masonic source is limiting. It is not surprising that speeches by visiting dignitaries to Masonic audiences would tend to glorify, and perhaps to overstate, the Masonic contribution to the imperial project. It would be useful to confirm or complicate this picture from the vantage point of sources that could tell us how others, in more candid, less guarded moments, saw and evaluated the Masonic...