Married to the Empire: British wives and British imperialism in India, 1883-1947

Although many recent historical works on the Raj examine issues of race and gender in the imperial context, historians have largely ignored the role of European women in defining, directing and maintaining imperialism. This dissertation analyzes the role played by British wives of civil and military officers in India in creating and sustaining British imperialism in India from the late-nineteenth century through Indian independence in 1947. Wives\u27 contributions to British imperialism started out in relatively safe and predictably feminine arenas, such as reimagining the home as the locus of imperial activity, imbuing quotidian interactions with Indian domestic servants with imperial significance and even reformulating the marital relationship itself to serve the empire better. Gradually, however, women began to assert themselves in less traditional ways, participating in public political debate about the aims and methods of British imperialism in India and, eventually, actively working to sustain the Raj. This dissertation examines in detail several significant events in Indian history (i.e., the Ilbert Bill controversy of 1883-1884, the 1919 Amritsar Massacre and nationalist violence of the interwar period, Indianisation of the imperial services in the 1920s and 1930s, and World War II) as jumping-off points to explore the different ways that women supported the empire and created their own view of British imperialism in India. Drawing on diverse sources, including published and unpublished diaries, memoirs and letters, cookbooks, government records and fiction, the dissertation argues first, that British wives made significant contributions to British imperialism, some of which were encouraged and sanctioned by the government, some not, and second, that women became increasing aware of the importance of their contributions to the empire in India and committed to the continuation of imperial power

Married to the Empire: British wives and British imperialism in India, 1883-1947

Although many recent historical works on the Raj examine issues of race and gender in the imperial context, historians have largely ignored the role of European women in defining, directing and maintaining imperialism. This dissertation analyzes the role played by British wives of civil and military officers in India in creating and sustaining British imperialism in India from the late-nineteenth century through Indian independence in 1947. Wives\u27 contributions to British imperialism started out in relatively safe and predictably feminine arenas, such as reimagining the home as the locus of imperial activity, imbuing quotidian interactions with Indian domestic servants with imperial significance and even reformulating the marital relationship itself to serve the empire better. Gradually, however, women began to assert themselves in less traditional ways, participating in public political debate about the aims and methods of British imperialism in India and, eventually, actively working to sustain the Raj. This dissertation examines in detail several significant events in Indian history (i.e., the Ilbert Bill controversy of 1883-1884, the 1919 Amritsar Massacre and nationalist violence of the interwar period, Indianisation of the imperial services in the 1920s and 1930s, and World War II) as jumping-off points to explore the different ways that women supported the empire and created their own view of British imperialism in India. Drawing on diverse sources, including published and unpublished diaries, memoirs and letters, cookbooks, government records and fiction, the dissertation argues first, that British wives made significant contributions to British imperialism, some of which were encouraged and sanctioned by the government, some not, and second, that women became increasing aware of the importance of their contributions to the empire in India and committed to the continuation of imperial power

Kipling's famine-romance: masculinity, gender and colonial biopolitics in “William the Conqueror”

This essay concentrates on one of Kipling’s short-stories, ‘William the Conqueror’, first published in an American women’s magazine, and speculates on how a female audience might have caused Kipling to modify his (conventional) depiction of Anglo-Indian gender-relations. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s work and reviewing the history of colonial famine-relief, I suggest that the formal conjunction of the romance genre with the unusual setting of a famine-relief camp is the key to Kipling’s ‘gender-transactions’ in this story, and can be read as an indicator of the ‘biopolitical’ logic of the camp as a space of sovereign exception