Gender and Empire Politics

Empire both reflected and produced particular kinds of gender relations. At first glance, most empires appear as masculine endeavors that fostered myths of valor and control on the battlefield, in positions of command, and in remote outposts of civilization.

Miscegenation was characteristic of most empires, especially when it was men without families who ventured forward. Marriage with foreign royals was an an­cient way of shoring up alliances and incorporating conquered elites; Antony and Cleopatra are salient exemplars of this practice and its potential problems. In as brutal a situation as that of the Spanish among the Inca, marriages of conquistadors and Inca princesses did take place. The famous chronicler of the Inca, Garcilaso de la Vega, was the proud product of such a union. There was nothing egalitarian about these marriages, but they were part of what produced creole societies that might or might not recognize the complexity of their origins. An entire genre of painting— known as “Castas”—from eighteenth-century Spanish America illustrated the diverse combinations of people of Indian, European, and African origin.

Biological mixing did not necessarily produce a distinct category, especially when status was reckoned strictly in the male line, but in some contexts the ques­tion of miscegenation was fraught. In late nineteenth-century European colonies in Africa, many European men allotted themselves the privilege of liaisons with African women and claimed the right to recognize or not the legitimacy of chil­dren as a masculine prerogative. In Germany, women tried to put a stop to such practices, on the grounds that miscegenation produced the wrong kind of people and that only true German women could forge a colonial society that was sustain­able and civilized. Meanwhile, missionaries led the attack on the gender practices of African or Asian communities, criticizing polygamy and making the putative European family the model to which all people were supposed to aspire—and whose unattainability could be a marker of colonial hierarchy.^[986]

Colonial situations often made family life difficult for workers: male African migrants to gold or copper mines lived in single-sex barracks, leaving wives in villages caring for the young and the old. At times, women found new niches for their skills and resources; they were active in marketing in urban areas, for example. Until the late 1950s in South Africa, women's mobility was less policed than that of men. After World War II, when French and British administrations tried to turn a new leaf and encourage economic development and more stable societies, they insisted that the key to reform was the African woman and her children. Their plan was that oscillatory migration would give way to labor stabilization, based on a wage-earning man who lived with his family at the place of work, under the watchful eyes of nurses and teachers, away from the backwardness of village life.

That tension was mirrored among colonized people themselves: should they try to make their way in a world that others had defined, or find their own ways of doing things? Some scholars have distinguished between a domestic world where South Asian people could defend a distinct way of life and a public realm where political and social movements were most likely to achieve success if they operated within institutions set up by the colonizers. Others have argued that the private and public realms were more intertwined and contested.^[988] Leopold Sedar Senghor, in 1945, told Africans that they should assimilate—taking what was good out of European culture—but not be assimilated. They should retain what was valuable in African cultures and contribute thereby to universal humanity.^[989] He was insisting that there were different routes out of the colonial politics of difference.

Women and men, young and old, political leaders and people who had long suffered as colonial “subjects” were exploring the possibilities in their daily lives, in their writings, in their political activities. What they came up with was varied, and did not necessarily conform to images of mimicry of Western culture or autonomous cultural conceptions, of assimilation or incommensurability. More sa­lient are ongoing arguments about values and behavior. To take one example in a particularly harsh context, some Zulu in South Africa have hitched their future to the African National Congress’s egalitarian and multiracial values, while others be­lieve that they need to defend gender- and age-based hierarchies that are considered “crucial to collective well-being.”^[990]

An Empire of Liberty and Likeness

The United States provides a particular variant on the politics of difference, al­though it bears close comparison with other territories of large-scale settlement, like Australia and Canada.^[991] At the beginning, Thomas Jefferson proclaimed the new state “an empire of liberty,” but this liberty would be enjoyed only by some— not by slaves or Indians.

Slaves were also excluded from the American polity, although they were counted as three-fifths of a person in allocating seats in the House of Representatives to different states. But the United States had trouble with the notion of governing different people differently. There was only one kind of fully integrated subunit in the country—a state—as opposed to the mix of colonies, protectorates, and other forms of incorpo­ration in the British and other empires. The distinction between “slave” and “free” states and the question of how to allot new territories between these categories led to a civil war that almost destroyed the polity. In the war’s aftermath, a stronger federal government and a more “national” view emerged, one of whose effects was the drive to subdue Indian communities and confine them to reservations.

The American system offered little space between complete exclusion and homo­geneous inclusion; once slaves were freed, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution seemed to suggest that the only way forward was to submerge ex-slaves in an undifferentiated (except by sex) American citizenry.

Ideology in the United States slowly shifted from a self-acknowledged imperial project on the North American continent to a more homogeneous national polity. The civil rights movement after World War II was to a large extent conducted in the name of an inclusionary American society. Its partial success gave way in recent decades to attempts to combine egalitarian ideals with recognition of difference— of the distinct life experiences that African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, and immigrants of many origins have had, among themselves and in their relationships with the state and with other Americans. This recognition has given rise to a backlash among some white Americans, challenged in turn by large­scale protests against ongoing racism and inequality.

Along the way, the United States had acquired the resources of continental em­pire, vast enough to give the government considerable choice in where and how it could intervene in the world. In the late nineteenth century, when other powers like Britain, Germany, France, and Japan were colonizing vast stretches of the world, the United States helped itself to several overseas territories, largely at the expense of the flagging Spanish Empire. But counterarguments against incorporation of these territories emerged, not just from critics of American power, but out of a racist anti­imperialism at home. Many Americans did not want more black, brown, or yellow people in the polity, even in a subordinate position.^[994] The United States never created its own version of the British Colonial Office or the French Ministere des Colonies— bureaucracies that ratified the subordinate place of different people within structures of governance. In the twentieth century—and into the twenty-first—the United States repeatedly conducted occupations, but it was reluctant to acquire colonies, imperial responsibilities, and challenges to its strict insider/outsider boundaries.^[995]