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Engendering Empire: Making the British Imperial World: Context

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 exlore 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 explore the dominant gender ideals of the period, and the different ways they were promoted and reinforced across Britain and empire. This was, of course, a process that was unstable, partial and incomplete. We will thus also investigate the variety of ways that metropolitan gender norms were manipulated, ignored, and disrupted in the ‘troubled ground’ of empire. We will examine a range of case studies from a variety of colonial sites, including the Caribbean, India, West Africa, Australia, and Ireland, as well as metropolitan Britain. You will be encouraged to think broadly about the ways that identities, meanings, and practices were transmitted across different metropolitan and colonial spaces, while also paying to attention to the locally specific ways these were both understood and contested. Taken as a whole, the module will demonstrate thatgender was integral to the imperial project, moulding the attitudes and experiences of the men and women who imagined, built, challenged, and resisted the eighteenth and nineteenth-century British empire.

Through engaging with the complex historiographies concerning the relationship between gender and empire, the module aims to develop research, analytical, interpretative and communication skills that can be applied in further academic studies or in graduate careers.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

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

• 1. Identify and evaluate the diverse and complex themes that pertain to the study of gender and empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
• 2. Understand key developments within that context, developed through independent study and seminar work

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

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

• 3. Analyse the key developments within a particular historical environment.
• 4. Understand and deploy relevant historical terminology in a comprehensible and sophisticated manner.
• 5. Comprehend and explain complex historical texts and debates.

ILO: Personal and key skills

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

• 6. Select, organise, and analyse material for written work and/or oral presentations of different prescribed lengths and formats.
• 7. Present an argument in a written form in a clear and organised manner, with appropriate use of correct English.
• 8. 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
• 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

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