Women of Empire: Nineteenth-Century Army Officers’ Wives in India and the U.S. West by Verity McInnis (review)

Women of Empire is a comparative study and analysis of the roles of military officers’ wives in British-controlled India and on the American western frontier. While the comparison may seem arbitrary, McInnis situates her work firmly within the scholarly literature and field of imperialism studies. In doing so, she joins the ranks of those who consider American westward expansion a form “informal imperialism” that has been largely overlooked. McInnis argues that even though these officers’ wives lived and worked in radically different contexts, the many similarities in their work, and even some of their differences, culled from extensive archival and secondary source research, reveal that both groups of women “understood they held an imperial role” (p. 5).

The book is effectively organized by topic. A brief introductory chapter outlines the author’s main argument and provides a useful historiographical overview. Chapter two, “Imperial Esprit de Corps,” defines and explains the “commitment to military duty” and “sense of imperial purpose” shared by both the British Army in India and the American military in the West, through an examination of military academies in both countries (p. 16). Their training evolved into an “esprit de corps” that the officers then took into the field, and when they married, they expected their wives to contribute to the shared sense of mission. For their part, both British and American wives “identified themselves as integral members of their husband’s units” (p. 34). Chapter three examines the “shared similar transnational experiences” of army officers’ wives through the lens of travel and travel writing (p. 58). Through the crossing of multiple borders, wives exhibited nostalgia for home, which often manifested in extreme prejudice toward the “others” with whom they now lived, and highlighted their potential as the gatekeepers of the civilizing mission of both formal and informal imperialism. Chapter four focuses on the roles an officer’s wife played in enhancing not only the imperial mission but her husband’s status and reputation. As “imperial agents” themselves, “officers’ wives clearly understood themselves as belonging to, as well as representing, the nation” (p. 67).

Chapter five, “Imperial Pageantry,” examines the important part officers’ wives played in the social and ceremonial duties that took place on imperial outposts. Adherence to protocol, whether in the formal context of British imperialism in India or the more informal “public sociability” of the American West, was essential for a successful mission (p. 100). Chapter six builds on the theme of social protocol with a specific examination of the importance of dress and homemaking. Specifically, officers’ wives used the visual representations of dress and homemaking to transmit middle-class American/British norms to the imperial outpost. Chapter seven outlines the myriad ways in which wives networked, not only with each other, but with “male power players” (p. 149). It was often the wife who controlled personal access to her husband and who held considerable “social power” through entertaining and participating in the ritual of “calling” in society (p. 151). Finally, chapter eight covers the topic of “Imperial Intimacy,” which refers to wives’ control over and interactions with indigenous domestic servants in their homes.

McInnis places her work within the growing body of literature on gender and imperialism, and she smartly includes secondary work on women’s travel narratives into her analysis. The book would be even richer if she had connected more firmly with the growing secondary historical literature on the roles of wives as “unofficial ambassadors” to other countries, as military wives (not just officers’ wives), diplomat’s wives, or political wives. Overall, however, McInnis uses her many primary sources effectively and creatively, and has produced a highly readable narrative, filled with relevant anecdotes that effectively bolster her argument about officers’ wives’ duties to uphold the imperial design.