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

As the title of the book suggests, Verity McInnis's Women of Empire: Nineteenth-Century Army Officers' Wives in India and the U.S. West, published by University of Oklahoma Press in 2017, focuses on nineteenth-century army officers' wives in the imperial contexts of British India and the U.S. West. Specifically, it is a comparative survey of wives of officers in the British Army, the army of the Honorable East India Trading Company, and the United States Army. As McInnis rightly argues, and in contrast to their American sisters, British officers' wives remain "on the fringe of historical analysis" (pp. 211–12). This book represents the first definitive attempt to rectify this.

The author addresses the topics of imperial education (of army officers); journeys and arrivals; sisterhood; wives' roles in pageantry; dress and homemaking; wives' roles as social arbiters; and finally, the nexus of race, ethnicity, and class within the home. With this, McInnis seeks to answer several questions in this book. Does the rank or officer husband provide status for wives in both peripheries? Do the American and British core societies signify class status using similar values, symbols, and social rituals? How does the model translate/operate in both peripheries? What are the similarities/differences in the two territories? Finally, as officers' wives "enjoyed no officially recognized status," McInnis examines how they were able to construct "an empowered role that held legitimacy across the male terrain of the army garrison" (p. xi).

The author's writing style is accessible and her presentation of the army wives, their experiences, the actions they took, the influencing factors, and their environments is engaging. McInnis' work is unique in that it affords the ability for illuminating comparison within the broader, existing and now long-established gender and colonialism historiography. She makes good use of the women's own memoirs, travelogues, and a large bibliography. However, her speciality in American history is evident from the clear disproportion between American and British secondary works. McInnis only uses the two foremost monographs on the British wife, but far more on the Americans. She also fails to utilize some foremost contributors to the field, namely Erica Wald, Durba Ghosh, and Douglas Peers.

Despite these positives, the book is beset by a deeply engrained caveat. It fails to properly situate itself within or even properly acknowledge its true historiographical field: gender and colonialism. This perpetuates the book's constant qualifications that the actions of officers' wives in the imperial/colonial context and their responses to the same were exclusive to them. While they represent a unique case study, the now thirty-year-old scholarship in the field of gender and colonialism shows that their experiences were common to most imperial/colonial women. She also overuses the term "imperial" by describing many standard tropes of army life, such as rank and standard responsibilities, as such.

Despite this, it is a worthwhile and needed piece of historical scholarship that will be useful to persons interested in the social history of the military. Although a comparative study, owing to the substantial amount of work already done on the American army officer's wife, the principal beneficiary will be the British historiography. For Americans, though, this has three benefits. First, it will show people today that nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Americans did see the U.S. as an empire. Second, it provides a useful comparison for the established historiography of … officers' wives and lastly, it is a useful comparative case study for the gender and colonialism historiography.