• Home
• Study
• Study Information
• Modules
• Module Information

Engendering Empire: Making the British Imperial World: Sources

Module description

On this module you will examine the centrality of gender to the making and remaking of the British empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well to the ways it was challenged and resisted. You will explore how ideas about gender underpinned the imperial project, and the roles played by men and women, colonisers and colonised, across both metropole and colony. You will explore how gender intersected with other markers of difference,most notably race and class, but also sexuality, religion and disability, investigating the ways these markers were constructed and maintained, subverted and exploited, as part of the process of colonial rule.

Module aims - intentions of the module

This module will interrogate a range of sources that will help you explore the relationship between gender and empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These will include, but are not certainly not limited: parliamentary and court records, correspondence, memoirs, images, and poetry. You will be expected to evaluate the impact of these sources for the study of history, as well as to explain their significance within the wider context of the subject.

Looking at sources produced by both colonisers and colonised, you will be encouraged to think about the nature and construction of the colonial archive itself and how this has shaped the writing of history. Considering how historians have attempted to recover and engage with the perspectives of marginalised actors, we will reflect on what it means to ‘read against the bias grain’ to tell histories of negotiation and resistance.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. Identify and understand the different sources available for the study of gender and empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
• 2. Differentiate between, and appreciate the specific uses of, the different sources studied
• 3. Critically evaluate a diverse and complex range of sources relating to gender and empire

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 4. Analyse closely original sources and assess their reliability as historical evidence.
• 5. Understand and deploy relevant historical terminology in a comprehensible and sophisticated manner
• 6. Comprehend complex historical texts.

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 7. Select, organise and analyse material for written work and/or oral presentations of different prescribed lengths and formats.
• 8. Present complex arguments orally.
• 9. Present an argument in a written form in a clear and organised manner, with appropriate use of correct English.
• 10. Demonstrate the ability to reflect critically on your own work, to respond constructively to feedback, and to implement suggestions and improve work on this basis.

Syllabus plan

Whilst the content may vary from year to year, some of the themes that we are likely to address are:

• Domesticity and family
• Imperial feminism
• Policing sexuality 
• Gender, slavery and anti-slavery
• Gender-based violence
• Queering empire
• Disability and the body
• Intimacy and the colonial encounter
• Gender, empire and the archive

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Formative assessment

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Re-assessment notes

The re-assessment consists of a 4000 word portfolio of source work, as in the original assessment, but replaces the individual presentation with a written script that could be delivered in such a presentation and which is the equivalent of 25 minutes of speech (2,500 words)

Deferral – if you miss an assessment for certificated reasons judged acceptable by the Mitigation Committee, you will normally be either deferred in the assessment or an extension may be granted. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of deferral will not be capped and will be treated as it would be if it were your first attempt at the assessment.

Referral – if you have failed the module overall (i.e. a final overall module mark of less than 40%) you will be required to submit a further assessment as necessary. If you are successful on referral, your overall module mark will be capped at 40%.

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

• Clare Anderson, ‘Writing Indigenous Women’s Lives in the Bay of Bengal: Cultures of Empire in the Andaman Islands, 1789-1906’, Journal of Social History, 45:2 (Winter 2011), pp. 480-496.
• Antoinette Burton, The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism (2015)
• Esme Cleall, Colonising Disability: Impairment and Otherness across Britain and its Empire, c. 1800-1914 (2022)
• Anindita Ghosh (ed.), Behind the Veil: Resistance, Women and the Everyday in Colonial South Asia (2008)
• Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: the Making of Empire (2006)
• Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (2019)
• Robert Hogg, Men and Manliness on the Frontier: Queensland and British Columbia in the Mid-Nineteenth century (2012)
• Marissa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence and the Archive 2016) 
• Philippa Levine (ed.), Gender and Empire (2004)
• Clare Midgley (ed.), Gender and Imperialism (1998)
• Diana Paton, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780-1870 (2004)
• Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: the ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (1995)
• Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (2002)
• T. J. Tallie, Queering Colonial Natal: Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in Southern Africa (2019)
• Angela Wollacott, Gender and Empire (2006)

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

• ELE – Faculty to provide hyperlink to appropriate pages
• Empire Online

Key words search

Empire; Britain; Colonialism; Gender; Race; Sexuality; Intersectionality