Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (review)

Peter Stearns recently maintained that the study of gender in world history "provides the basis for fundamental analysis about the directions of change" (Gender in World History [2000], 6). Changing directions in historical scholarship, and especially in the field of world history, is superbly presented in Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in Word History. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton proffer complex stories of colonialism by exploring two goals: to "emphasize the centrality of bodies—raced, sexed, classed, and ethnicized bodies—as sites through which imperial and colonial power was imagined and exercised," and to "focus on the material effects of geopolitical systems in every day spaces, family life, and on-the-ground cultural encounters" (6). Envisioning colonial empires as webs of innumerable interactions, Ballantyne and Burton want to display the "intricate strands" of these webs, which "helped to create hierarchies of race, class, religion, and gender" in colonial settings (3). Calling for scholars of world history to recognize gender and women as crucial to understanding their subject, they also want acknowledgment of colonial "empires as gendered projects" (13). To accomplish this task, the editors have gathered together the work of 20 scholars, most of them historians, who teach in a variety of geographic sites (Australia, Canada, England, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States) and research a multiplicity of topics (including gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, masculinity, health, culture, politics, sport, immigration, economics, nationalism, and globalization). The essays range in time period from colonial America to contemporary Asia. The volume is divided into three sections: "Thresholds of Modernity: Mapping Genders," "Global Empires, Local Encounters," and "The Mobility of Politics and the Politics of Mobility." An introduction and postscript, written by the editors, encase the essays.

Six articles in the first section of the book demonstrate the editors' goal to study gender as an integral part of colonial interactions. Whether it is Bangash nawabs manipulating masculinities to attain power in eighteenth-century Northern India, Chinese male travelers eroticizing Taiwanese women in the seventeenth century, or Franciscan priests striving to eliminate Nahua sexual practices in New Spain, gender relations and ideologies were central to these encounters. The nexus of colonial power also concerned race, ethnicity, and sexuality when mapping gender in the early modern period. Jennifer Morgan shows that "the development of racialist discourse"—constructed before the onset of African enslavement—was "deeply implicated in gendered notions of difference and human hierarchy" (57). African women especially caused disquiet in European men, who were both tantalized and repulsed by female bodies they labeled fertile, hardworking, and monstrous. Julia C. Wells explicates the career of Krotoa (a.k.a. Eva), a Khoena woman, who traversed the racialized and gendered environs of Dutch colonialism near the Cape of Good Hope. As translator and go-between, Eva provided invaluable service to early Europeans, who relied on locals for assistance in negotiating the colonial frontier. Sean Quinlan's article studies race, slavery, and bodily health in French medical debates of the eighteenth century. While some medical experts believed African bodies—as polluted, degenerate and abject—demonstrated the innate inferiority of slaves, others (who advocated abolition) argued that high mortality among French Africans was the result of their enslavement; only emancipation would cure their malaise.

Encounters between the colonized and colonizer are the subject of the book's second section, which contains eight articles. Many of these essays deepen historical understanding of colonialism with examples of agency by subordinate natives and adaptation by dominating rulers. Mary Ann Fay's "Women, Property, and Power in Eighteenth-Century Cairo" disputes traditional world histories that portray Islamic women as sexually oppressed and economically powerless. She showcases the experience of Shawikar Qadin, a former slave-concubine, who attained status and wealth through marriage and property ownership—a right ensured to all women under Islamic law. Egyptian women bought and sold property, made investments and endowments, and utilized ethnic and familial relations to exercise power within...