Historians and Empires: A Personal Odyssey

While historians rarely need prodding to engage the past, the Journal of Women’s History and Elisa Camiscioli have encouraged me to reflect temporally beyond the critical question of how scholarly literature on women, gender, and modern imperialism has evolved during the past decade or so. In order to do so, I began unpacking the years preceding the publication of Domesticating the Empire, the volume on women, gender, and family life in the French and Dutch colonial enterprises that I coedited with Frances Gouda in 1998.¹ If the book represented a scholarly curiosity at the time, it was not because it was interdisciplinary and foregrounded women and gender, but because it compared imperial lands not fully on the historians’ compass and juxtaposed historiographical traditions not yet conversant with one another. These reflections, in turn, set me on a longer quest into my doctoral years at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) during the 1980s. The intent of my essay is to share a journey that is not merely personal or individual, but one that demonstrates how convergences in disciplines and fields came about so that today research and teaching about women, gender, and global empires has a recognized place at the table. This was not always the case. My story, moreover, reveals the play of chance and the torque of serendipity in the historian’s intellectual odyssey.

I applied for the PhD at UCLA because its faculty included one of the few North African historians in the country, but he soon departed. I first worked with scholars at the Gustave E. von Grunebaum Center for Islamic Studies, which emphasized Arabic and other Middle Eastern languages over the disciplinary theories and practices of history. From there I made my way to the Department of History, where I was considered somewhat of an oddity. When I suggested to the chair of my PhD committee that I should study North Africa and the French empire, the response was one of bewilderment. In the conventional wisdom of that period, the only important modern European empire was the British one. As for the Maghrib, or northwest Africa, it was like a dark star orbiting around but never in the “true” Middle East, meaning the Ottoman heartlands and Egypt. My doctoral committee characterized focusing on an empire that had not yet been fully named in the American academy, and which French scholars and the public were trying desperately to forget in the aftermath of the Algerian War, as career suicide. My foolish choice of a region defined as not quite Arab, African, Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, or European was deemed a pathway to double or triple oblivion. And what if one added women to the mix?

Before my graduate studies in Los Angeles, I had done a stint in the Peace Corps in Tunisia and had traveled far and wide throughout the Maghrib, so I knew that it existed. I subsequently spent a life-changing year in Paris beginning in 1976, enrolled at the École des Hautes Études in the French anthropologist, resistance member, and Ravensbrück survivor Germaine Tillion’s (1907–2008) graduate seminar, “L’ethnologie du Maghreb.” Tillion placed women, or in her words, “Mediterranean women,” at the heart of our class discussions. But her 1966 book on that topic had not yet appeared in English translation, and few Middle East historians at UCLA or elsewhere had even heard of her.² Fewer still in my “field” considered women a topic worthy of serious research, with one notable exception.³ In some sense, my travails mirrored those of the scholars who sought to launch the French Colonial Historical Society beginning in 1974, but it took me awhile to detect the society’s existence because I had been coded as “of the Middle East.”⁴ There were, however, stalwart fellow historians of the Maghrib of a slightly older generation—such scholars as Edmund Burke III, Ross E. Dunn, and Nancy E. Gallager—but they too experienced varying degrees of marginalization.⁵

In the early 1980s, subdisciplinary boundaries in the historical sciences remained fairly impermeable due to the dominance of Western civilization...