Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (review)

This is an excellent collection of essays, bound into a coherent whole by the thoughtful introduction and epilogue from the editors, and with individual contributors engaging both with the issues signposted by the editors and with those raised in their co-contributors’ chapters. It makes an important intervention into the histories of imperialism and globalisation, with the consistently well-written, engaging, and theoretically nuanced essays increasing our understanding of issues of mobility and intimacy.

The authors of these essays are in the main located within history departments, but they draw their conceptual frameworks from anthropologist Ann Stoler’s pioneering work on intimacy and empire and geographer Doreen Massey’s influential reconceptualisation of space. The interdisciplinary reach of the collection is limited, however, by the range of sources selected for analysis: official records, memoirs, and letters figure large, but none of the essays makes use of literary sources and, while a watercolour sketch of a sleeping British soldier watched over by a Maori woman adorns the front cover, none analyse visual imagery. Perhaps more surprising, given the collection’s focus on global and imperial mobilities, is the absence of maps, historical or contemporary.

The book is arranged in three parts, dealing respectively with movements across imperial spaces, sexuality and the uses of intimacy, and scandals of imperial space. Chronologically, the essays span the period from the sixteenth century to the 1930s, though the dominant focus is on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Geographically they cover Britain, North America, the Indian subcontinent, the Pacific Islands, Australia and New Zealand, and southern Africa, focusing on port cities and islands as hubs of mobility and intimacy in the age of global empire. Key zones including the islands of the Caribbean and the European forts and creolised towns of the West African coast are not included, however, losing the opportunity for some interesting comparisons across and between empires. In addition, the space of ships themselves, as they voyaged between such hubs, is not discussed—for that, one needs to turn to the work of Peter Line-baugh, Marcus Redicker, and Emma Christopher. These limitations are partially compensated for, however, by the useful inclusion of the United States within the scope of the study in terms of white settler-Native American relations, including a focus on the crossborder area of the Great Lakes and comparison with Australia.

Seven of the fifteen essays in this collection deal in whole or part with the British Empire during the Victorian period, paying particular attention to the white settler colonies (there are no essays dealing with Britain’s Empire in Africa or India in the Victorian period). In adopting the conceptual framework of “mobility” rather than “migration,” they open up the space to consider the intimacies of individual lives in ways that migration studies are perhaps less open to, with their tendency to focus on the social history of mass movements of peoples. More importantly, the framework of mobility, as several contributors point out, calls into question scholarship that presents indigenous peoples as static victims acted on by incoming European settlers: several essays discuss the intimate mobilities of indigenous peoples and their mixed-heritage families, while eschewing any over-simplistic celebration of the agency of the colonised. The ways colonial and patriarchal structures of authority underpinned white men’s use of coercion and violence in intimate relationships are, however, not a central preoccupation of the essays. There are no essays here on the slave trade, colonial slavery, or the black diaspora, where enforced mobility brutally severed intimate family ties and replaced them with bodily intimacies enforced for the benefit of white men seeking sexual gratification and the reproduction of their enslaved African labour force.

The essays usefully move away from an earlier tendency in historical study to equate intimacy with sexuality or deal with it solely in terms of...