Bringing the Empire Home: race, class and gender in Britain and colonial South Africa (review)

This is an ingenious and ambitious book. Zine Magubane seeks not only to chart the circulation of constructions of race, class, gender and poverty around both colony and metropole, but also to add an economic dimension to issues that have often been surveyed primarily within anthropological and sociological contexts. She writes firmly within a post-colonial and marxist paradigm, but seeks to illuminate these approaches in fresh ways. In doing so, she puts together all sorts of material and ideas that have not previously been brought into conjunction. She is quite clear about the manner in which Britain and its empire were ‘mutually constitutive’ while significantly extending the scope of these reciprocities.

Magubane has relatively familiar starting points: the processes through which the Other serves to reconstitute the Self; language as essentially a terrain of power, expressing hierarchical and economic relations; notions of blackness as embedded within the rhetoric of capitalism; and the manner in which Christian missionaries act as significant agents for the transmission of the full panoply of economic, social and gendered forms of hegemony as part of their religious purpose. Among much else, she also deals with the transformation of black male functions in relation to the land; the ways in which the colonial indigenous and the metropolitan poor were conflated; and the manner in which approaches to white womanhood come to be locked into images of so-called ‘native’ peoples. This takes her into all sorts of areas, including the involvement of British women in Boer War controversies (on both sides), and in the extension of the franchise. The connections among the radicals (of the earlier nineteenth century), the evangelicals, British pressure groups, and the attitudes of trade unionists are all discussed.

It is unquestionably the case that the development of British ideas and policies have invariably been placed in the context of North America, the Caribbean, India, and occasionally (particularly in questions of land and emigration) Australasia. In such analyses the Cape Colony, and later South Africa, have tended to figure very little, except when the immense significance of its mining sector propels it into such prominence that much of the rest of imperial policy comes to revolve around it. But now we are increasingly aware of how significant the Cape could be in such debates before the mineral revolution, not to mention in many environmental and scientific matters (although these do not interest Magubane). The complexities of Cape colonial society; the prominent activities of missionaries there; the significance of slavery (after all Thomas Pringle returned from the Cape to become secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society); and the long-standing conflicts with both Africans and Afrikaners render it an indicative colonial situation with considerable effects upon imperial attitudes. It is, for example, very useful just to be reminded about the number of times that published works on the Cape are noticed and cited in works of the Scottish Enlightenment and after.

But while Magubane’s book is suggestive and stimulating in all sorts of ways, it is marked as much by its silences as by its overt ideas. At no point does she draw a contrast between commercial and industrial capitalism or the well-known distinction between domestic and international capital. Her failure to do so leads to a number of confusions. When dealing with Samuel Johnson’s references to Scots of the Highlands and Islands as ‘Hottentots’ she is led into sweeping assumptions that are simply erroneous. She argues that this reflects the manner in which the English (and they are the villains throughout; Afrikaners are treated much more sympathetically) constituted their internal others such as Scots or the Irish in a similar manner to colonial equivalents. Johnson’s abusive comments (reflecting on both Highlanders and Khoi) were of course geographically specific: they refer to a small minority of Scots...