The Construction of Empire: Gender, Race, and Nation in Europe's Imperial Past

Abstract

The "great game" of empire has often been represented as a boy's adventure story—the plucky all-male and all-white team supported by faithful "native" retainers meets and beats recalcitrant rebels, ferocious tigers, and impenetrable jungles. Maleness certainly was constitutive of the imperial enterprise, but as feminist historians have long recognized, that maleness was forever in need of consolidation and substantiation. It may have had material effects upon the lives of both men and women, including colonial subjects, but in some senses maleness was fleeting. Historians of empire have noticed the same characteristics for colonial rule —a constant need to confirm and secure and a nervousness at all the potential ways in which colonial and racial prestige might be undermined and power thus lost. Perhaps nowhere more than in investigations of gender categories and roles does the instability of imperial control seem so obvious, and the gender-inflected analyses reviewed here offer a rich way to explore both colonial power and the hierarchies associated with gender roles. Masculinity and femininity were constructs central to colonial structure and, as these books argue, they were learned roles. But all three of these books also stress that gender cannot be read in isolation, that a feminist reading of the imperial state will simultaneously acknowledge the sexual, racial, and national hierarchies which critically underpinned the forms of imperial rule so dominant across much of the nineteenth and twentieth century globe. The three books under review here deal with a [End Page 202] variety of geographical sites as well as with two empires (the Dutch and the British), and each of the books uses the insights of feminist theory to present richly textured accounts of colonialism and its contradictions in the heyday of colonial expansion.