Verity McInnis. Women of Empire: Nineteenth-Century Army Officers’ Wives in India and the U.S. West.

Abstract

In Women of Empire: Nineteenth-Century Army Officers’ Wives in India and the U.S. West, Verity McInnis compares the lives of military officers’ wives in British India and in the western U.S. in the nineteenth century and concludes that they aided in “designing, directing, and maintaining national ambitions” in both places (xii). Imperialism, she notes, “is not simply a masculine preserve” (3). Although one hopes that traditional imperial historians will take notice of this argument, it is hardly a new one in the history of gender and empire. This book is a welcome and unique addition to the mountain of historical evidence that reveals how elite white women benefited from their gendered support of imperial regimes. Drawing mainly on letters and journals penned by officers’ wives and the soldiers around them, McInnis nicely demonstrates their myriad contributions to imperial projects in seven chapters. These include analyses of their journeys to military posts; the spirit of mission among officers’ wives; their ceremonial roles as representatives of civilization; the imperial prestige they enacted through fashion, home decorating, and their roles as social gatekeepers; and their relations with nonwhite servants. Their voices are, unsurprisingly, frequently elitist, nationalist, and racist. McInnis finds the most consistent difference between British and American officers’ wives was the British adherence to the formal codes outlined in The Queen’s Regulations, while the Americans operated under a less formalized set of rules for social hierarchy (38).