Dias and Smith’s edited volume is a very welcome addition to more material- and visual-based approaches to understanding the everyday experiences and workings of European empires with a focus on the role of women and their cultural practices. British Women is structured through three sections on ‘Travel’, ‘Collecting’ and ‘Administering’, with a thoughtful and detailed introductory chapter by the editors to articulate their vision for the volume. The introduction indicates that the volume does not aim to be comprehensive but rather ‘seeks to begin the work of exploring practices at the disposal of women through which they expressed their responses to imperial sites in Indian, the Caribbean, America, Canada, Australia and Zanzibar’ (p. 3) and in doing so it aims to interrogate a range of sources that exist beyond the colonial archive. Given this volume is published under Bloomsbury’s Visual Arts division, there is a strong emphasis on art historical approaches and creative methodologies in dissecting white women’s collecting and musing on their experiences in various colonial contexts. The chapters’ focus on material ranges in date from Coltman’s discussion of a journal describing a journey from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina and Portugal (1770s) through to Filor’s study of Mina Malcolm’s cottage from the 1790s to 1970s, and so deftly deals with the enduring material nature of empire.
The volume takes a case-study approach to its subject by allowing each chapter to explore particular colonial contexts – such as Longair’s study of professional women’s lives in 1930s Zanzibar – or particular material forms – such as Jordan’s discussion of colonial women’s sketches of Aboriginal people in nineteenth-century Australia – and in doing so reveals a rich array of subject areas and material approaches. The volume explicitly rejects what they see as previous problematic approaches of portraying white women as either solely victim or aggressor or downplaying the role of race in how they, and by comparison colonised women, navigated the colonial world. This nuanced approach is welcome and has resulted in a number of extremely interesting chapters that reveal that in moving beyond the colonial archives of the traditional historian we are able to reveal ‘interconnection, permeability, mobility and hybridity’ (p. 5) to better understand not just people but collectives and place in the colonial world.
This volume engages meaningfully with the material remnants of women’s cultural practices and reveals that they often imbued meaning through negative comparisons to the imaginary of ‘home’ and their ideals of domesticity that contrasted with the colonial spaces they lived in and travelled through. The inclusion of contextual insights regarding degrees of privilege due to class, connections and ability to navigate specific colonised spaces ensures that the chapters do not absent the colonised people who were often the background and backdrop of these white women’s cultural products. In this way the volume acknowledges the specificity of status, time and place in shaping white women’s experiences alongside highlighting the power imbalances that often left colonised people as the misrepresented and obscured subject of the women’s colonial gaze.
While this collection does not aim to be comprehensive, its case-study approach does leave some unavoidable gaps and skews that may have been touched upon in more detail in the introduction. For example, the ‘British’ women who make up the bulk of the chapters are English or Scottish, with little reflection on whether Welsh and Irish women had different experiences, although there is a fleeting reference to Lady Dufferin (p. 33). There is also little explicit consideration of the role of women in Empire who were associated with gendered religious institutions – such as missionaries or nuns – nor those white women who may have been forcibly moved as working-class women and children to provide manual labour and possible offspring to white men. While enduring material outputs probably survive in more quantity from the upper classes, absences or skews due to the case-study approach would have been usefully articulated in order to indicate where future work could most productively focus. Overall, British Women is a fascinating and rich collection that provides a range of material culture-focused approaches that allow us to better understand colonialism and its legacies through a gendered lens. The volume allows for deep and detailed engagements with specific contexts, which are important studies in their own right, but also provides inspiration for further extending material-based approaches in future.
