Introduction

If scholars rightly emphasise the abstract social, economic and political forces moving the levers of historical change, empires were ultimately made by individuals. In the decades since the ‘cultural turn’ of the 1980s, historians have also increasingly emphasised the reverse, demonstrating that the processes of empire were fundamental to the construction of individual identities.

In their different ways all four of these chapters emphasise this point. The story of European expansion can easily become a hyper-masculine endeavour in which all women, and indigen­ous women in particular, are presented as reactive rather than proactive forces. Blanca Tovias’ account places such women centre stage, using their role as the starting point for an account of indigenous women’s exercise of power and authority within the new orders brought forth by European empire-building in the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Cindy McCreery similarly chooses a familiar imperial topic and turns it on its head. Her account of western navies in the Asia-Pacific region insists that this is a story about people rather than just about ships. While sea power has long been a focus of imperial historiography, the navy has traditionally been studied through the lens of strategic and diplomatic history. McCreery brings an understanding of cultural factors to this topic, returning people to the forefront of her narrative. Using primarily French, British, American and Russian examples, she under­scores the need to extend the analysis beyond a national framework centred on one particular imperial power. Cooperation and mutual dependence, she argues, were key to the relations that individual mariners created between western navies in the long nineteenth century.

Taking the construction of Greek identity as his focus, Nicholas Doumanis challenges the established opposition between obsolete dynastic empires and new nation-states.

If empire made people as much as people made empire, the coloniale emerged out of a par­ticular moment in French imperialism. Marie-Paule Ha’s study of this variant of French colo­nial womanhood demonstrates the central role that women played in new conceptualisations of empire under the Third Republic (1870—1940). From being ‘no woman’s land’ in the minds of French authorities, colonial lobbyists and theorists came to promote female emigration as the solution to a large number of social and economic ills troubling both metropole and colony. As a result, the coloniale emerged as a feminine incarnation of the French civilising mission.