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Reviewed by:
  • Gender and Empire
  • Tammy M. Proctor (bio)
Gender and Empire, edited by Philippa Levine; pp. xiv + 306. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, £37.00, $55.00.

In an article entitled "Beyond Complicity versus Resistance: Recent Work on Gender and European Imperialism" for the Journal of Social History (1995), Malia Formes called for an end to oversimplified categories of male/female, colonized/colonizer, victim/villain, and resistance/complicity in studies of imperialism. She pointed out what may now seem an obvious idea, namely that historians of gender and of empire are both concerned with power—its formulation and articulation. Now, a decade later, Formes's call has been definitively answered with the most recent volume in the Oxford History of the British Empire series.

Gender and Empire is a much-needed overview of more than twenty years of scholarship on the topic. Bringing together some of the of most accomplished scholars of the history of gender and imperialism, this book provides insight into the contribution gender analysis makes to the study of empire. All the authors have published extensively on the subject, and all have been innovators in asking imperial historians to put gender at the center of their inquiry, rather than on the margins. As editor Philippa Levine notes in her introduction, the authors argue that "the very idea as well as the building of empires themselves cannot be understood without employing a gendered perspective" (1) .

Organized around three broadly chronological chapters and nine thematic essays, the book aims for both coverage and depth. The authors have succeeded in providing a real comparative context, not simply relying on India, the white Dominions, or any single region within the British Empire. For example, Catherine Hall's exceptionally fine chronological essay on the nineteenth century analyzes Canada, India, the Caribbean, New Zealand, and South Africa. Similarly, Levine's own essay draws several connections between colonial contexts to explain the impact of sexuality on the articulation and maintenance of racial policies and imperial power relationships.

Another strength of the book is its focus on both the British colonizers and the indigenous colonized. The authors move beyond a simple dichotomy to unravel the complex negotiations that occur between and among different constituencies in the imperial context. In this regard, Alison Bashford's chapter on medicine and empire is exemplary. In her discussion of women medical practitioners, for instance, she juxtaposes Jamaican-born Mary Seacole's attempts to find medical work for herself in the empire with the Scottish James Barry, a woman who impersonated a man in order to practice medicine in the Cape Colony. Bashford demonstrates the gendered dialogue at work in developing imperial medical practice, but also in linking imperial medicine with that of the metropole.

In general, scholars of Victorian Britain will find much of the book useful for teaching and research purposes: each chapter provides a survey of recent historiography and the volume as a whole provides a handy overview of some of the most important recent history in the field. Several of the essays focus almost entirely on the eighteenth or twentieth centuries, but the bulk of the chapters deal directly with Britain's long nineteenth century. [End Page 705] One of the framing chapters for the project comes quite late in the book—Mrinalini Sinha's exploration of "Nations in an Imperial Crucible." Sinha uses this venue to plead for a more intentional meshing of gender, nation, and empire in historical study. She demonstrates quite effectively how the narrative constructions of nation and empire have been built around gendered discourse, but also to what extent understandings of family, "woman," and "man" have depended on national contexts and elaborations. Sinha's chapter is in many ways the theoretical framework upon which most of the other chapters rest.

Like any edited collection, the weakness of this one is in what it leaves out. The authors do incorporate many of the major debates in imperial history into their thematic chapters, and slavery, missionary work, childhood, sexuality, and migration are treated at some length. Nonetheless, while race and class pervade many of the chapters, these are also areas where a more systematic and separate treatment would have...

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