The Construction of Empire: Gender, Race, and Nation in Europe's Imperial Past

Catherine Hall, ed. Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 2000. x + 390 pp. ISBN 0-415-92906-7 (cl); 0-415-92907-5 (pb).

Elsbeth Locher-Scholten. Women and the Colonial State. Essays on Gender and Modernity in the Netherlands Indies, 1900-1942. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000. iii + 251 pp. ISBN 90-5356-403-9 (cl).

Adele Perry. On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race and the Making of British Columbia, 1849-1871. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. viii + 286 pp. ISBN 0-8020-4797-1 (cl); 0-8020-8336-6 (pb).

The "great game" of empire has often been represented as a boy's adventure story—the plucky all-male and all-white team supported by faithful "native" retainers meets and beats recalcitrant rebels, ferocious tigers, and impenetrable jungles. Maleness certainly was constitutive of the imperial enterprise, but as feminist historians have long recognized, that maleness was forever in need of consolidation and substantiation. It may have had material effects upon the lives of both men and women, including colonial subjects, but in some senses maleness was fleeting. Historians of empire have noticed the same characteristics for colonial rule —a constant need to confirm and secure and a nervousness at all the potential ways in which colonial and racial prestige might be undermined and power thus lost. Perhaps nowhere more than in investigations of gender categories and roles does the instability of imperial control seem so obvious, and the gender-inflected analyses reviewed here offer a rich way to explore both colonial power and the hierarchies associated with gender roles. Masculinity and femininity were constructs central to colonial structure and, as these books argue, they were learned roles. But all three of these books also stress that gender cannot be read in isolation, that a feminist reading of the imperial state will simultaneously acknowledge the sexual, racial, and national hierarchies which critically underpinned the forms of imperial rule so dominant across much of the nineteenth and twentieth century globe. The three books under review here deal with a variety of geographical sites as well as with two empires (the Dutch and the British), and each of the books uses the insights of feminist theory to present richly textured accounts of colonialism and its contradictions in the heyday of colonial expansion.

Adele Perry's study of mid-nineteenth-century British Columbia, On the Edge of Empire, persuasively argues that the effort to tame British Columbia into a replica of polite Britain was a project doomed to failure. She is, of course, by no means the first historian to highlight the rough-and-ready frontier personality of this most westerly of the Canadian colonies, but in her work this "pioneer" lifestyle occupies an imaginative analytical role that is central to her reading of the instabilities of empire. For Perry, it is a potent combination of race, class, and gender status that makes British Columbia so fascinating and so slippery a case study. In many of Britain's nonsettler colonies, manual labor was the province almost exclusively of nonwhite locals. The white working class in such places was almost entirely military and often passing through—sailors in port and soldiers increasingly serving short-service contracts. In white settler lands, however, a white proletariat jostled for position, caught between the white elites who employed them and the local indigenous laborers, a potential source of competition. In some settings (such as Australia and many of the southern African colonies), an effective apartheid in jobs fast became the norm, with whites and indigenes slotted into racially segregated fields of work and white labor often lobbying to restrict or prohibit nonwhite immigration. In British Columbia, however, there was a considerable diversity of workers engaged in the colony's most populous trades. The colony never had a...