Catherine Hall Research Articles

Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, Keith McClelland, Katie Donington, and Rachel Lang, editors. Legacies of British Slave-Ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain

Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, Keith McClelland, Katie Donington, and Rachel Lang, editors. Legacies of British Slave-Ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain

Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain, written by Catherine Hall

Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain, written by Catherine Hall

Scandal of Colonial Rule: Power and Subversion in the British Atlantic during the Age of Revolution. By James Epstein. Critical Perspectives on Empire. Edited by Catherine Hall, Mrinalini Sinha, and Kathleen Wilson.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. xxiv+289. $99.00 (cloth); $32.99 (paper); $26.00 (Adobe eBook Reader); $26.00 (Mobipocket eBook).

<i>Scandal of Colonial Rule: Power and Subversion in the British Atlantic during the Age of Revolution</i>. By James Epstein. Critical Perspectives on Empire. Edited by Catherine Hall, Mrinalini Sinha, and Kathleen Wilson.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. xxiv+289. $99.00 (cloth); $32.99 (paper); $26.00 (Adobe eBook Reader); $26.00 (Mobipocket eBook).

Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain, by Catherine Hall

Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain, by Catherine Hall

Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism by Antoinette Burton (review)

Reviewed by: Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism by Antoinette Burton Nicole M. Mares Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism. By Antoinette Burton. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011. 416 pp. $94.95 (cloth); $25.95 (paper). Antoinette Burton’s latest volume, Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism, is, in part, a mid-career reflection on her evolution as a scholar and teacher. The collection, in a way Burton’s academic “autobiography,” also serves as an important retrospective of new imperial history’s development into a vital approach to British historical studies. While both Burton and the field have solidified their places in contemporary historiography over the past two decades, this anthology of her most important essays reminds scholars of British imperial studies, postcolonial studies, and gender studies that such has not always been the case. The work of new imperial historians like Burton, alongside Catherine Hall, Ann Stoler, and Tony Ballantyne, has faced challenges from empiricists eager to maintain a divide between the metropole and the “periphery,” and between the historian and his or her work (p. 7). What Burton does in this volume is show how historians’ experiences are central to the questions they ask and the critiques they offer. And not taking for granted that new imperial historians have achieved their aims of decentering the metropole, Burton reminds us that there is still much work to do if we are to critique “the certainty of the nation as an analytical category, as a cherished idea, and as a guarantor of the sovereign Western self as well” (p. 3). [End Page 704] This collection of essays is divided into two sections: new imperial historical theory and practice. Part 1, “Home and Away: Mapping Imperial Cultures,” revisits the debates surrounding concepts of the nation and the “periphery.” Just as Downton Abbey thrusts a nostalgic, seemingly empire-free Britain onto the television screens of Britons and Americans, reinforcing ideas of a homogenous island nation, Burton’s essays reveal the ongoing academic challenges to new imperial history as scholars of British history have lamented waning institutional focus on Britain. Burton demonstrates that Britain is alive and quite strong, both popularly and academically, but it remains too easy to sidestep the foundational role empire played in developing notions of Britain and Britishness. The essays included in this section, which focus on the utility and persistence of concepts of “nation” and “Britain,” reveal that while scholars of new imperial studies have made significant progress in analyzing networks of Britishness, there still remains a longing for, and popular celebration of, an archaic, aristocratic Britain. In part 2, “Theory into Practice: Doing Critical Imperial History,” Burton’s essays remind us just how much the methodologies of new imperial history have enriched scholarly understandings of the often false distinctions between imperial and metropolitan identities. The essays included in this section of the book demonstrate the interconnectivity of imperial and domestic debates and show how the imperial “periphery” significantly shaped debates about race, gender, and identity in the metropole. For instance, in Burton’s examination of the London School of Medicine for Women she establishes how debates about the role of British women doctors in India reveal “how [metropolitan] gender categories were reconstituted by imperialism even as they helped to determine how the very concept of empire performed the kinds of ideological work it was capable of later in the nineteenth century” (p. 153). Using debates surrounding women’s emancipation, women’s virtue, and Victorian discourses of democracy in Britain, Burton shows the mutually constitutive ideological work of imperialism. In the end, this volume asks scholars and students to consider what’s next for new imperial studies and British history. As global systems take center stage in historiography, Burton evaluates in an original essay the potential impact of a global approach to British imperial history, positing that “the global would … appear to represent a new horizon of possibility, the last frontier, perhaps even the highest stage of imperial history—one that makes doing British empire studies feel respectable, politically relevant, and even redemptive” (p. 276). But [End Page 705] this development in the historiography threatens to repeat...

Macaulay and son: architects of imperial Britain

Thomas Babington Macaulay's History of England was a phenomenal Victorian best-seller defining a nation's sense of self, its triumphant rise to a powerfully homogenous nation built on a global empire and its claim to be the modern nation, marking the route to civilization for all others. In this book Catherine Hall explores the emotional, intellectual, and political roots of Zachary Macaulay, the leading abolitionist, and his son Thomas's visions of race, nation, and empire. The contrasting moments of evangelical humanitarianism and liberal imperialism are read through the writings and careers of the two men.

Emancipation, Slave-Ownership and the Remaking of The British Imperial World, University College London, 29-31 March 2012

This conference came out of the ESRC-funded Legacies of British Slave-Ownership Project (LBS) at University College London. Since April 2009 the LBS group has been investigating the legacies of British slavery, and in particular, the afterlife of the £20 million paid to slave-owners in compensation for the loss of their ‘property’ on the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833. Nick Draper has been exploring the financial and economic legacies of the £20 million, including its reinvestment in the railways and the financial City of London. Catherine Hall has been tracing the cultural memory of slave-ownership and the rewriting of histories of Britain’s involvement in slavery over the course of the nineteenth century, particularly in the writings of the descendants of slave-owners. Keith McClelland has been tracing the political legacies of the slave-owners, including the enduring power of those who had received compensation money in the British Parliament, their representation of themselves as victims of abolition, the rewriting of their history to align themselves with anti-slavery and their search for new forms of labour and work discipline. With Rachel Lang and Ben Mechan the group have also constructed an online public database of slave-owners at the point of abolition; held six public-engagement workshops across Britain to bring together academic, community and family historians of slavery; and curated an exhibition on the ‘Slave-owners of Bloomsbury’. Katie Donnington’s forthcoming PhD on the Hibbert Family is also a valuable part of this project as is the Encyclopaedia of British Slave-ownership, based on the group’s findings, which will be published shortly. The conference was thoughtfully constructed to share, discuss and extend some of the core questions raised by the LBS research group – What was the character of the British imperial state? What happened to the planters and slave economy after slavery had been abolished? What free forms of labour were established? And how can historians connect with the public, museums and artists to explore these issues?

Future Directions for Robert Browning Studies: A Virtual Roundtable

In the spring of 2011 Britta and Mary Ellis invited a number of scholars of Victorian poetry to engage in an email exchange directed to the future of Browning studies. Five scholars from three continents agreed to weigh in and over the summer of 2011 engaged in a lively discussion of various questions posed by way of provocation--rather than steady conviction--by the editors. Here is a lightly edited version of the colloquy, prefaced by our original letter to the participants. March 24, 2011 Dear Isobel Armstrong, Sandra Donaldson, Warwick Slinn, Herbert Tucker, and John Woolford: We are editing the special issue of Victorian Poetry commemorating the bicentenary of Browning's birth. We would be most grateful for your help. At the most recent North American Victorian Studies Association meeting (Fall, 2010) aside from Chip Tucker's keynote address, only one paper on Browning appeared on the program. Similarly, the British Association for Victorian Studies conferences over the past six years have never featured more than two papers on Browning, and sometimes none at all. In light of this fact, we ask ourselves what might be the future of Browning studies? It might be fun, we thought, to create a roundtable exchange of brief reflections. To get the ball rolling, we've suggested a few questions, but you may have questions of your own instead, and there is no need for each person to address them all. Here are our provocations. Feel free to suggest your own questions or to critique these. 1. Is there a future for Browning studies at a time when cultural studies and a focus on material culture dominate Victorian studies? 2. Many articles published of late are formulated along the lines of Robert Browning and ...; writers often engage in passing, en route to larger cultural or thematic ends. What happens to Browning studies if few critics have a deep/broad engagement with his work? From a slightly different angle, could we say there are Joyceans and Dickensians by the score, and there is a critical presumption that serious scholars are familiar with the whole oeuvre of these writers. Can that be said of Browning studies now? Will it be sayable in the future? 3. Related to the previous question: is a single author study on a poet publishable these days? 4. How is Browning teachable in the twenty-first century? 5. What's the point of studying someone who, to quote Catherine Hall, was white, male and middle-class in a time when the canon has, at least in theory, radically expanded? 6. What opportunities do you envision for Browning studies in the next 200 years? We would be most grateful if you would be willing to participate in this exchange. We value your ideas, your suggestions, and your opinions. We look forward to hearing from you. All best wishes, Mary Ellis Gibson and Britta Martens From: Warwick Slinn Professor Emeritus and Honorary Research Fellow Massey University, New Zealand April 14, 2011 Dear fellow e-roundtablers, Thanks to Britta and Mary Ellis for initiating this exchange. It looks as if I might as well open the batting. Response to question 1 One of the sharper consequences for literary scholars in the context of cultural studies and a material focus is the disappearance of the single literary artifact as an object of study. Given that in rejecting the political assumptions of new criticism, we've agreed that poems are not objects that should be isolated from their historical connections, the need to restore works to their material contexts is understandable. At the same time I think there are a couple of particular challenges that affect Browning studies. The first is to distinguish between, on the one hand, ideological underpinnings whereby literary works are only of value when they can be subsumed as propaganda in some sort of contemporary cultural war, and, on the other, efforts to explain the critical function of a work itself (its ability to critique its society). …

“Can We still Use ‘Separate Spheres’? British History 25 Years After Family Fortunes”

AbstractHistorians of Britain often call the period between 1780 and 1850 the age of ‘separate spheres’ or ‘domestic ideology’ for men and women, and when they do, they are likely to reference Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Working Class, 1780–1850 (1987). This essay takes the 25th anniversary of Family Fortunes as an occasion on which to assess the book and its treatment of the ideology of separate spheres. Careful reading reveals that while Family Fortunes is often remembered as championing an historical focus on the emergence of separate spheres ideology, it is in fact an account of the formation of the English middle class that interprets separate spheres ideology in complex and nuanced ways. The principal contribution of Family Fortunes is its demonstration that notions of gender were central to class as it was constructed and as it was experienced and lived out. Gender was not merely an aspect of social life; rather, gender and class were mutually constitutive.

The Cultural British World: Asia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

This issue focuses on the British world and Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing most prominently on cultural dimensions. It takes as its starting point two prominent emphases in the recent historical scholarship on the British Empire. First, historians such as Catherine Hall and John MacKenzie, among many others, have made a strong case that the empire played a significant role in shaping domestic British culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Far from being simply a remote collection of overseas possessions, of interest only to traders and aristocratic second sons, Empire formed the subject of such metropolitan cultural products as advertisements, popular imagery of monarchy and boys’ story papers. London was experienced not only as the capital of the United Kingdom but also as an imperial centre, and colonial scandal helped to shape British legal culture. This ‘maximalist’ assessment of imperial influence on

Women, Religion and Agency in Modern British History

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Sue Morgan (2002) Introduction. Women, Religion and Feminism: Past, present and future perspectives, in Sue Morgan (Ed.) Women, Religion and Feminism in Britain, 1750–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 1–20 (p. 1). Sue Morgan (1999) A Passion for Purity: Ellice Hopkins and the politics of gender in the late Victorian church (Bristol: Centre for Comparative Studies in Religion and Gender), pp. 3–35. Callum Brown (2001) The Death of Christian Britain: understanding secularisation 1800–2000 (London: Routledge). Catherine Hall & Leonore Davidoff (1978) Family Fortunes: men and women of the English middle class 1780–1850 (London: Hutchinson). Additional informationNotes on contributorsLaura SchwartzDr Laura Schwartz is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick. She is the author of Infidel Feminism: secularism, religion and women's emancipation, England 1830–1914 (Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2012) and A Serious Endeavour: gender, education and community at St Hugh's College, 1886–2011 (Profile Books, 2011). She has also published previously in Women: A Cultural Review, the Oxford Review of Education, and in Women's History Review.

Fearful Symmetry: Hypocrisy and Bigotry in Thomas Carlyle’s “Occasional Discourse[s] on the Negro Question”

Well, it may be the Devil or it may be the Lord But you're gonna have to serve somebody --Bob Dylan Most if not all of Thomas Carlyle's peregrinations have exasperated readers in various registers and contexts, but none of them has given as much offense as his 1849 An Occasional on the Negro Question and its 1853 pamphlet-incarnation 'An Occasional on the Nigger Question. (1) Early responses immediately gravitated toward hostility or praise. In the United States, horrified abolitionists who felt that the great had defended the institution of slavery as a divinely mandated condition of humanity dueled intellectually with the forces who viewed as great because he had recognized the universal value of Anglo-Saxon destiny as the foundation of the southern way of life, that is a justification for slaveholding. In Britain, the responses were equally bifurcated, albeit on slightly different grounds. Those sympathetic with the abolitionists were duly outraged, while others contended that Carlyle's true rhetorical mission in the piece was to reveal the tragic brand of Telescopic Philanthropy instilled by the misplaced interests of hypercritical liberalism.2 During the intervening 160 years, various critics have struggled along yet another bifurcated track. They have explained Carlyle's vicious language and apparent support of slavery in various contexts and as a result have alternately apologized for him as a man of his times and/or vilified him on the grounds of universal moral outrage, all in the exasperating interest of understanding exactly what it was that was trying to say in the Discourse [s] . To illustrate, whereas Carol Collins interprets Carlyle's rhetoric as a demandingly esoteric use of metaphor, Catherine Hall views the work as a product of Carlyle's disturbed and enraged psyche (24; 12). Whereas Chris Vanden Bossche claims that Carlyle's shocking rhetoric stems logically from his despair at being unable to effect any meaningful change, Jude V. Nixon calls it an ineffectively crude concoction of sincerity, ignorance, contradiction, semi-misanthropism, exaggeration, and conceit, all blended with a Dickensian eye towards caricature (129; 101). The one apparent point of consensus in any review of the literature surrounding the essay/pamphlet leads to an overwhelming question: Why return to such a noxious declaration of Victorian racialism? Even in the context of Carlyle and the Totalitarian Temptation, there seems precious little grounds for temptation here. And yet here we are, dear reader, faced with yet another slog through the Discourse[s] justified by an assumption that no matter how distasteful and inhumane the text is interpreted to be, it exudes a set of meanings that require periodic revisiting, that is until the social construct becomes so utopian that it is no longer necessary to understand issues such as race. Further, in the context of Carlyle, it is altogether appropriate to view this connection between past and present, as David R. Sorensen so astutely points out, remembering that Carlyle had no interest in the past for its own sake (49). The undeniable truth is that humanity continues to suffer from racial and socioeconomic inequalities, although some prognosticators have claimed recently to see evidence to the contrary. After all, the United States is led by a black president. Racism is dead (see Bowden). How inconveniently tragic that on 26 June 2011 a black man in Jackson, Mississippi, was beaten by a group of teens chanting white power and then murdered, all because he was the first black man they could find) He is dead, and racism is, alas, very much alive. Yet another question remains. After 160 years of critics expressing their horror at violent, imperialistic, racist rhetoric such as Carlyle's in the Discourse[s], what has the allegedly progressive trajectory of liberal modernity accomplished in the end? Not enough, certainly. …

Response: Victorian History: Some Experiments with Syllabi

Victorian History:Some Experiments with Syllabi Antoinette Burton (bio) The week that I received copies of these three engaged and thoughtful responses to Empire in Question I was two-thirds of the way through the syllabus for my 400 level course, Victorian Britain, which I teach in the department of History at the University of Illinois. In fact, we were poised between General Gordon's vainglorious death in the Sudan—with its ramifications for both Gladstone's second ministry and the "scramble for Africa"—and the partisan political work of Irish nationalists at Westminster—that eventuated in the ill-fated Home Rule debate of 1885-86 and the rout of the Liberals from office for the better part of two decades. Inhabiting the world of that syllabus as one often does at the upper-division level of the curriculum, where you can dig deeply into primary sources and build narratives and counter-narratives and engage students in lively debate about the fate of, in this case, nation and empire in "Britain's imperial century," I was struck at once by the sheer generosity of my colleagues' comments, and by the limitations of my own syllabus as well. Had I ever mentioned, let alone thoroughly explored, the Anglo-Saxonism at the heart of much racial thinking in the nineteenth century that Elaine Freedgood references? One way to do so in the context of our syllabus readings would be to examine those Victorian suffragists who invoked Magna Carta and the relationship of "British cultures" to "Indo-Germanic races." Though the staging of Magna Carta pageantry was a prominent feature of Edwardian suffrage work, references to the superiority of Anglo-Saxon civilizations to Norman counterparts were all over early Victorian feminist periodicals as well, and were especially evident in the work of Helen Blackburn.1 Identifying what's at stake in conceiving Victorian Britain as a story about "islands of whiteness" and [End Page 305] its counter-narratives is a pedagogical preoccupation for me, and it's salutary to be reminded of the many ways that the colonial rule of racial difference—to echo both Partha Chatterjee and Catherine Hall—can be approached. Do I sufficiently address the inter-imperial rivalries and cross-imperial pressures that shape so many of the major imperial events—and with them, the rise and fall of governments—of the later nineteenth century, from the Crimean War to the South African War? I typically end my course with the 1905 Alien Act and the founding of Sinn Fein that same year. But following Joanna de Groot's observations it would be interesting, and provocative, to situate those confessional acts alongside the Russo-Japanese War, as a way of truly globalizing the end of Victoria's reign and anticipating the conflagrations of 1914-1918. The specter of an aggressively imperializing Japan laying claim not simply to a place at the table at Versailles but to a kind of racial equivalence with white Europeans on the basis of its imperial success over Russia fifteen years before would make for an instructive complement to similar Victorian-era claims and presumptions.2 If this seems a temporal stretch for a Victorian history course, it is in part because determining the beginning and ending dates of "Victorian Britain" is an ongoing challenge of the syllabus, which I used to take to the threshold of World War I but which I now end, effectively, with the afterlives of what was formerly known as the Boer War on a variety of imperial and domestic fronts. And last but certainly not least, do I pay enough attention to the political economy of the imperial nation-state in this period, moving beyond the metaphor of "flow" that some critics of the cultural emphasis of the imperial turn have suggested, both implicitly and explicitly, is insufficient for getting at the relationship of consumption and trade and "material processes" to citizenship and imperial political culture in a global frame? Though this may not be what Susan Pennybacker had in mind, recent scholarship makes these counter-arguments with various degrees of intensity, and they have yet to be taken up as widely as they should be in Victorian studies.3...

"In the Cheapest Way Possible...": Responsibility and the failure of improvement at the Kingston Lunatic Asylum, 1914-1945

"In the Cheapest Way Possible...":Responsibility and the failure of improvement at the Kingston Lunatic Asylum, 1914-19451 Darcy Hughes Heuring When British psychiatrist Dr. Dale Hewson arrived in Kingston, Jamaica in 1927 to take up the post of head of the colony's only insane asylum, he was shocked by what he found. Open drains with dirty water and sometimes sewage were within easy reach of patients. Some wards had no latrines or washing places, and upstairs latrines leaked into patient wards below. In the years before his death in 1937, Hewson repeatedly tried to improve conditions. And yet his replacement arrived to find that little had changed. How do we explain this lack of progress? This article traces the complex ways in which social perceptions of the insane, a dearth of colonial funds, and the actions of Jamaican politicians on behalf of their middle and upper class constituents stymied attempts to improve conditions at the asylum, and informed conflicts among authorities in Britain, British colonial officials in Jamaica, and Jamaican politicians over who was financially responsible for the island's 'lunatics.' An analysis of the role these factors played in attempts to improve the asylum reveals the ways in which local colonial problems and conflicts shaped British political concerns about the maintenance of empire and its declining position as a global power in the interwar period. This examination departs from current scholarship on colonial asylums in its focus on Jamaica as a site of contestation over responsibility for the insane. This reveals much about the inner workings of colonial rule, rather than the history of institutional psychiatric practice or manifestations of mental illness, the usual historiographical concern.3 Like other colonial institutions for the insane, Jamaica's asylum was a locus of conflicts over economic and moral responsibility between and among British officials and Jamaican politicians, and so it provides a site for studying the intricate dynamics of colonial rule in one context. Furthermore, it helps us better understand the ways in which colony and metropole were "mutually constitutive," as Catherine Hall and other scholars have argued.4 Events in Britain directly impacted Jamaica's affairs. But conversely, Jamaica's problems did not stay "conveniently over there."5 This article demonstrates how the failure of improvement at Jamaica's asylum was in part the fallout of British policies, and helped to shape British imperial policy in a much broader way. An analysis of problems of improvement at Jamaica's asylum demonstrates the complexities and instabilities of governance at the British imperial, colonial, and local Jamaican levels. "The colonizers" were not a unified, homogeneous group who governed a united and uniform group of "colonized" peoples in a consistent and organized manner. Divergent motivations, goals, beliefs, lifestyles, contests over race and class, and even individual pride and selfishness divided the allegiances of British colonizers as well as colonized Jamaicans. As Richard Price argues, while the empire may have appeared unified to those in the metropole, at the local level it was an on-going "untidy" process of negotiation and struggle.6 The Problem of Improvement at the Kingston Lunatic Asylum More than four decades ago, Michel Foucault located the rise of the public insane asylum within a broad narrative of the growing dominance of Enlightenment reason and the rise of scientific surveillance in which a system of penal, medical, and moral regulation was introduced in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Europe.7 This required expert knowledge to discipline the errant individual. Historians of insanity and psychiatry have since challenged, refined, and qualified Foucault's account of the rise of the asylum, but they have also remained profoundly influenced by the Foucauldian narrative.8 Historians of empire have shared Foucault's understanding of modernization as the introduction of a rational institutional order that marginalized and disciplined the deviant, as well as his view that any institution must be understood in the context of social rules of behavior. However, they have shown that, unlike Europe, Britain's colonies did not experience a "great confinement." Colonial asylums generally confined only a fraction of those considered insane by their families and/or communities, and were underfunded, overcrowded, and neglected by the colonial...

X Marks the Spot: Women Writers Map the Empire for British Children, 1790–1895 (review)

Reviewed by: X Marks the Spot: Women Writers Map the Empire for British Children, 1790–1895 Ellen Boucher X Marks the Spot: Women Writers Map the Empire for British Children, 1790–1895 By Megan Norcia. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010. Since the 1990s, feminist geographers have highlighted the role women played in defining and mapping imperial spaces for European audiences. The most influential of these works, like Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose’s edited collection, Writing Women and Space, and Cheryl McEwan’s Gender, Geography, and Empire, have focused on those few women travelers who ventured into the empire to encounter the colonized world first-hand.1 But what of those who stayed at home, the “armchair geographers” (10) who produced imaginative accounts of Britain’s overseas realms for children? In X Marks the Spot, Megan Norcia offers a thought-provoking, critical reading of nineteenth-century geography primers authored by women. Strongly informed by postcolonial theory, her aim is both to illuminate the ways in which primer writers produced and transmitted imperial systems of knowledge, and to recapture the agency, resistance, and “subterranean instabilities” buried within these texts. (110) If Norcia overreaches in her claims about the impact of geography primers on the British cultural consciousness, her study is nevertheless valuable for the light it sheds on middle-class women’s fraught intellectual relationship to the empire in the decades leading up to the late Victorian high imperial moment. At heart, Norcia is engaged in a recovery mission. Too often, she argues, primers have been dismissed as inconsequential children’s literature. The result has been to misconstrue imperial geography as a wholly masculinist discipline, the realm of the “geography militant” who triumphantly mapped the globe.2 By according the primers sustained and careful consideration, Norcia is able to uncover an alternative imperial language that depended less on the masculine tropes of conquest and penetration than on domestic metaphors of hearth and home. As she demonstrates, women primer writers used their “particular knowledge base and gendered skills in the household” to craft a vision of the empire as an interdependent “family of man,” one directed not by an austere patriarch but by a firm yet loving mother Britain. (21) While Norcia makes much of the novelty of this familial model, it will be familiar to historians of British missionary culture, especially if they have read Catherine Hall’s Civilizing Subjects.3 Yet she is certainly right to call attention to how this gendered imagery of the imperial terrain allowed women writers to assert the importance of maternal authority at a time when women’s cultural influence was closely circumscribed. Those restrictions on women’s status also turned the primers into sites of resistance. As Norcia stresses, although penning these texts gave women an opportunity to showcase their talents and to make some money, it equally pointed out their position as “limited subjects.” (137) She is sensitive to the frustrations of women who spent their days sifting through tales of derring-do from an empire that was mostly off limits to them, and she teases out instances when their disappointments bubble up in the texts: when mother figures get testy with their children, for instance, or appear jealous of their sons’ mobility. In line with trends in postcolonial scholarship, she also argues that primer writers’ own dissatisfaction with the constraints of imperialism made them able, consciously or not, to pinpoint and preserve the resistance of indigenous peoples. She thus highlights instances of Africans appearing amused, rather than awed, by missionary teachings, or of colonizers coming across as “bestial.” (160) Of course, as Norcia acknowledges, it is impossible to tell if any of these anecdotes had any basis in fact, and given her stress on the women’s authorial agency and interpretative license, it seems rather doubtful. They do, however, provide evidence for her contention that these women “endorsed imperialism yet resisted its restrictive closures.” (27) Given this close scrutiny to the authors’ mental and emotional engagement with the “empire,” it is surprising that Norcia never clearly defines what she means by the term. At times, it seems to imply any land that lay beyond Britain’s shores. Primers on places as varied...

&lt;em&gt;The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain since 1800&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Lucy Delap, Ben Griffin, and Abigail Williams

Reviewed by: The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain since 1800 Tanya Evans (bio) The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain since 1800, edited by Lucy Delap, Ben Griffin, and Abigail Williams; pp. xi + 291. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, £55.00, $90.00. This edited collection emerges from a conference organised by the book's editors and held at Kings College, Cambridge during the summer of 2006. This event showcased some of the most interesting work being researched and written by scholars, established and new, on the history of the modern household and family in Britain, and this collection is a testament to much of that innovative work. The volume is prefaced by an excellent introduction that outlines recent historiography on the domestic sphere and demands us to think about the many forms [End Page 570] of familial authority in new ways. The book's editors ask us to pay careful attention to the negotiation of power relations between members of household units (familial and not), growing state intervention into the family, and the ways in which domestic authority extended beyond the home. In so doing they aim "both to acknowledge the flourishing nature of the study of authority practices and to enable a broad historical review of the household as a site of the 'micropolitics' of the negotiation of authority—the power to speak, to spend, to consume, to name, to command, to trespass and cross boundaries. The concept of domestic authority helps us to reconceive the home as an arena of active negotiation, agency and remembering" (4). This volume shows us how far many scholars (if not students) have come from a dependence upon a simplistically utilised concept of separate spheres, incorporating the analyses and critiques provided by Leonore Davidoff, Catherine Hall, and their respondents into their research and writing. It is nevertheless clear that we need far more research on the domestic world in order to better understand the relationship between public and private and the wider history of domestic authority. The editors agree that despite powerful arguments for long-term continuities in the history of domestic authority, gender relations changed from 1780: the history of domesticity and the meaning of terms such as family, public, and private were transformed as "companionate marriages" became more common (though the editors rightly urge caution when using such a slippery concept as companionate), as contracts rather than deference came to define household power relations for servants as well as family members, and as "expertise" on the family spread among state and non-governmental authorities (13). Most of the articles collected in this volume, however, chart the history of the post-1850 period; it would have been perhaps more convincing to include further evidence from the earlier period. While alert to the impact of regional specificity on the history of the family—Sian Pooley's chapter, for instance, highlights the different impact of childrearing discourses on two separate working-class communities, Auckland and Burnley, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—the editors argue that large-scale trends nonetheless affected all domestic units across the country. One of the most important was the evangelically defined mode of domestic authority that predominated among the culturally dominant educated classes throughout Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century. The volume shows that this model was to come under greater pressure from 1850 as family size decreased, women's employment rose, domestic service declined, knowledge of sex, the body, and the family grew, and people lived through the transformations resulting from two world wars. In a compilation of this breadth, which includes twelve separate chapters, it is inevitable that some of the essays are stronger than others (some, such as the first two, though excellent, seem very short in comparison with the rest). Though it is clear that some of the writers engage with each other's work, there is perhaps not quite as much conversation between authors as readers might wish for. The volume is split between five subjects: violence and the law, poverty and the state, domesticity, domestic service, and parenting and childhood. Most of the authors in each section explore the disjuncture between cultural representations of...

The Civilising Mission and the English Middle Class, 1792-1850: The 'Heathen' at Home and Overseas

The concept of a civilising mission, which was so central to the religious discourse of the English middle class in the early nineteenth century, had a dual reference. It was applied interchangeably to two tasks: that of bringing the Christian gospel to the ‘heathen’ overseas; and the parallel enterprise of reaching those sections of the working classes closer to home whose irreligion and lack of civilisation appeared no less marked than those which characterised the Hottentot or South Sea Islander. Surprisingly few historians have taken this duality seriously by attempting to produce integrated studies of the interrelationship of overseas and domestic Christian philanthropy, although Frank Prochaska, Susan Thorne, and Catherine Hall are at least partial exceptions. Alison Twells's book stands out by the consistency with which it pursues the evidence (ignored by most imperial historians) that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the language of savagery and civilisation was, at least in principle, racially neutral. Hannah and Patty More in the 1790s were shocked to find the poor of the Mendips no less savage than they imagined the aboriginal inhabitants of Botany Bay or Sierra Leone to be, and in 1804 the Methodist missionary advocate, Thomas Coke, described the Scottish highlanders and islanders as ‘little better than the rudest barbarians’.

Recent Work on Gender and Empire

Recent Work on Gender and Empire Lora Wildenthal (bio) Janice Boddy . Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. xxx + 402 pp. ISBN 0-691-12305-5. Antoinette Burton . The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. xii + 214 pp. ISBN 0-8223-4071-2. Lisa Chilton . Agents of Empire: British Female Migration to Canada and Australia, 1860s–1930. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. xii + 240 pp. ISBN 0-8020-9474-0. Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose., eds. At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ix + 338 pp. ISBN 0-521-67002-0. Nancy L. Stockdale . Colonial Encounters among English and Palestinian Women, 1800–1948. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. xii + 246 pp. ISBN 0-813-03163-X. Angela Woollacott . Gender and Empire. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. viii + 164 pp. ISBN 0-333-92645-5. All of these books take up in some manner the theme of gender relations in the British empire, but they do so in divergent ways and create correspondingly divergent accounts of what that theme can tell us. Lisa Chilton and Nancy Stockdale take women as their subject: British women and to a limited extent Palestinian women in Stockdale's case. By contrast, Angela Woollacott's focus is on gender, and she makes a point of applying it to a wide range of women as well as to men and boys, all as actors as well as subjects. Antoinette Burton focuses on an individual woman, Santha Rama Rau, but her subject's femaleness is just one of many factors that make Rama Rau an exemplar of "Cold War cosmopolitanism" (4). In the volume of essays edited by Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose, as with Burton, women and gender are two of many issues on the table; in half of the essays, they are not issues at all. Finally, Janice Boddy has written a history of colonial Sudan from which stories of gender emerge. [End Page 194] Let me turn first to the monographs on women's history by Chilton and Stockdale. Each has written a carefully argued monograph on a well-defined subject. Chilton seeks to reveal the identities and motivations of "emigrators" (their own term), that is, clubwomen who organized mostly working-class women's emigration as servants from Britain to Canada and Australia from the 1860s into the interwar period. She shows that these emigrators strove to increase female emigration, exclude women they saw as less-than-respectable from the pool of emigrants, and make emigration more safe (9). Chilton stresses that these emigrators believed that only women could successfully implement these changes, and concludes that the emigrators were successful in their aims and in fact did exert "authority and power" (11). As was typical of so much of Euro-American middle-class women's social activism, these emigrators gained prestige by establishing themselves as the arbiters over other women's lives. They moreover promoted a conception of Canadian and Australian societies as white and British, by ignoring in their publicity work the indigenous and settler women and men of various non-British origins who populated Canada and Australia. Chilton contextualizes the emigrators' activism in labor-market and political controversies at the emigrants' destinations. In chapter 5 she examines the controversies surrounding local clubwomen's attempts to use their insider knowledge to secure newly-arrived domestic servants for themselves before the latter could enter the general labor market. Chapter 6 explores the role of imported British servants in establishing the new Australian capital of Canberra that was to be a showcase for local Australian labor. Chilton follows the emigrators' work over about seventy years, and so can show changes over time; above all, the clubwomen's success had the ironic outcome that after the First World War the state took over the emigrators' now well-recognized work. Nancy Stockdale surveys an even longer period of time in her book on "colonial encounters" between British and Palestinian women between 1800 and 1948. Unlike Chilton's book, this book gives the reader little sense of any change over time, and that seems to...

Incest and Influence: The Private Life of Bourgeois England (review)

Reviewed by: Incest and Influence: The Private Life of Bourgeois England Ginger Frost (bio) Incest and Influence: The Private Life of Bourgeois England, by Adam Kuper; pp. 304. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2009, $27.95, £20.95. The laws of consanguinity and affinity in Victorian England were notably peculiar. English law prohibited marriages between close kin both by blood and marriage, yet first-cousin marriage was not only legal but positively encouraged. In other words, one could marry one’s first cousin but not one’s deceased wife’s niece. A book-length exploration of this anomaly has long been needed, and Adam Kuper, an anthropologist, has taken on this task. Kuper limits his study to the “upper bourgeoisie,” a group that emerged from the Industrial Revolution. (His definition of this group is largely the same as “upper middle class,” except he excludes landed gentry.) Kuper argues that “marriage within the family—between cousins, or between in-laws—was a characteristic strategy of the new bourgeoisie, and that it had a great deal to do with the success of some of the most important Victorian clans” (27). Twenty years ago, in Family Fortunes (1987), Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall asserted that relationships between brothers- and sisters-in-law and between cousins were vital to the success of the family enterprise, but few subsequent studies have explored this connection in depth. Incest and Influence, based entirely on secondary sources, unfortunately, does not focus exclusively on family marriage and business and is clearly geared toward a popular audience. The first part of the book is a good example of its impressionistic approach. Chapter 1 offers a brief survey of literary descriptions of cousin marriage from Jane Austen to Anthony Trollope; the summaries are well executed but include little analysis. The second is a discussion of the law of incest, which argues in part that the oddities of England’s marital law emerged both from its tortured history (Henry VIII’s marital troubles, for example), and the fact that England continued to have both ecclesiastical and secular control of moral issues for far longer than revolutionary states. Kuper then briefly surveys the arguments for and against marriage with a deceased wife’s sister, the major controversy of the Victorian period, and ends the chapter with the criminalization of incest in 1908. The “greatest hits” approach continues with the next chapter, which discusses the idea of intermarriage and heredity, primarily focusing on the efforts of Charles Darwin and Francis Galton to determine any ill effects from cousin marriages (both found very few). This chapter is the most disappointing of the book. The topic offers an opportunity to analyze the contradictory and overlapping ideas of Victorians on intermarriage, heredity, and degeneration, but Kuper simply describes their various studies superficially. The author does not give a satisfactory explanation of the change from incest as a category that included in-laws and stepfamily to one that was based solely on blood (as in the 1908 Incest Act). Why did this happen? And what does it say about Victorian and Edwardian ideas of family? The rest of the book concentrates on intermarriage as a business strategy, the ostensible focus of the work. This part of the book begins with a chapter that describes the intermarriages of famous banking houses—both Quaker (the Barclays) and Jewish (the Rothschilds). This section clearly demonstrates the interconnection between cousin marriage and business success in the age before corporations and limited liability, though one must wonder how typical the author’s examples are. Both of these family groups had small minority religions as an additional tie, one that excluded them from a large number of possible marriage partners. It is not clear, [End Page 499] however, if such strategies worked in Anglican families who did not have as many reasons for endogamy. Answering this would require a much broader research sample. Kuper then turns to a number of case studies of famous groups of people who intermarried (or had sexual affairs) within a small cadre of like-minded individuals. The Clapham Sect had evangelicalism and reform to bind them together, and remained a strong group for several decades, in part...

Catherine Hall et Sonya O. Rose (éd.) At home with the empire: Metropolitan culture and the imperial world. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, 347 p.

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