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  • Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857-1914
  • Stephen M. Miller
Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857-1914. By Heather Streets. Pp. xi, 241. ISBN 0 7190 6962 9. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2004. £50.00.

The 'Studies in Imperialism' series, edited by John M. MacKenzie for Manchester University Press, has produced a number of significant works of cultural history which have contributed to our better understanding of the full richness and diversity of the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Of particular interest to readers of the Scottish Historical Review is a new entry to this series written by Heather Streets entitled Martial Races. Streets' work is an important endeavour in integrating military studies into the broader realm of Great Britain's imperial history. Through a careful examination of the British military in India, Streets has demonstrated the military's ability to produce and shape Victorian perceptions of race and masculinity.

Streets concentrates on three groups in particular, Scottish highlanders, Punjabi Sikhs and Nepalese Gurkhas, who developed a reputation in Great Britain as passionate and effective warriors capable of overcoming any obstacle. Contemporaries believed these groups were biologically and culturally predisposed to the arts of war. These beliefs were strengthened and refined in the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Streets contends that the successful performance of these groups in India offered proof of this martial disposition to a Victorian society inclined to view race in a 'scientific' context. However, there was much more at work in shaping martial race discourse than the performance of an individual group on the battlefield. Race must be understood as a consciously manipulated tool. Qualities attached to race were constantly being negotiated. Race could mean one thing in a military context and another in a political or social context. Even what constituted a race was flexible and sometimes fictitious in Victorian Britain. Army recruits, for example, from the Scottish lowlands or even the English midlands could be reconstituted as highlanders. According to Streets, those who felt that Victorian values, such as loyalty, obedience, and masculinity, were under siege, deliberately proffered a martial race theory to insure that military qualities remained essential in British society. Hence Highlanders, Sikhs and Gurkhas were imagined as ideological counterpoints to perceived threats such as Irish nationalists and British feminist critics.

One of the most interesting themes in Streets' work is her analysis of how the army manipulated martial race discourse. In a recent conference held in Northampton examining new perspectives on British military history, a number of papers investigated the relationship of the army and the media. Gone are the days when the army and its campaigns were simply viewed as passive subjects of adventurous correspondents. It has now been shown that more often than not officers were the correspondents, the censors, and the sources of much of the information. Garnet Wolseley, H.E. Wood and Winston Churchill wrote significant campaign histories which informed popular attitudes on the late Victorian army. Not only did these writings earn them some extra money on the side, but they also provided them with a vehicle to cultivate their personal image and to [End Page 358] control public perception. As Streets shows, Frederick Roberts was one of the most talented artisans of this craft. He used the press, particularly Blackwood's,to push his views and garner his celebrity status. For example, when the Standard's reporter, Maurice MacPherson, wrote some uncomplimentary pieces about him during the first phase of the Second Afghan War, Roberts was able to get MacPherson removed from the war zone and convinced the paper to hire his own aide-de-camp as a replacement. As a result, in the second phase of the war, Roberts controlled the coverage of the events and, therefore, the promotion of his image. His autobiographical account, Forty-One Years in India, enjoyed a long life through numerous reprints, and played a great role in shaping mainstream cultural attitudes towards India, the British military and imperial defence.

Although Streets is mostly concerned with the British and how they understood and constructed martial race theory, she does briefly...

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