This reflection on the field of Settler Colonial Studies uses the "big tent" metaphor to ask what is seen to be encompassed in the field; who is left out and how attached its practitioners are not just to teleology but to the dialectic logics of colonialism itself. Drawing on Burton's 30 years of work in the field of colonial and imperial history, it queries some of the premises of settler colonial studies' remit asks how attention to gender and sexuality impacts the direction of the field and posits the dialectic alongside telos as a site of critical tension for thinking about approaches to subject and method.

Abstract This chapter tracks the role of the foundational journal in the field, Gender and History, as an archive of how historians have understood the categories of both “gender” and “history” in the two decades following the journal’s establishment in 1989. The journal was founded to address the work of gender as a site of historical experience, meaning, and significance. The chapter also addresses the significance of Joan Scott’s work, as well as how structures of class and race, and voices from beyond the United States and the West, have impacted gender history. The chapter emphasizes a variety of challenges to the study of gender history, as well as the primacy of gender as a category of historical analysis.

This volume is designed to introduce readers to the scholarly field of gender history: its origins, development, reception, recalibrations, and frictions. It offers a set of working definitions of gender as a descriptive category and as a category of historical analysis, tracing the emergence, usage, and applicability of these entwined subjects across a range of times and places in the scholarship of the last five decades. Inevitably political, gender history has taken aim at the broader field of historical narrative by asking who counts as a historical subject and what difference gender difference makes. The book explores how gender history as a practice subverts reigning assumptions of what power, culture, economics, and identity have been in the past—with ramifications, of course, for what they are today.

Abstract This chapter questions the grand narrative of progress that undergirds some accounts of gender history as a field, showing that far from displacing women’s history or being supplanted by intersectional, queer, and trans methods, gender history has exerted an ongoing influence at the confluence of these scholarly practices. It tracks the origins of US thinking about the simultaneity of gender and race through the work of the African American legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, who brought intersectionality into the US scholarly lexicon; the impact of multiracial scholarship on teaching in the United States; and the manifestation of these trends across histories in a variety of times and places.

Abstract Gender history emerged as a professional practice and a subfield of the discipline in the Western academy during an extended moment of global conflict and change. This chapter takes up the presumption that the modern Western past is the universal site of gendered histories through examples of scholarship which grapple with that legacy and seek to make visible how gender works as a historical phenomenon before the modern era and beyond the United States or Europe. The binary logics of gender as masculine-feminine do not necessarily hold up in these times and places, raising questions about the colonizing work of gender itself in some historiographical traditions.

Abstract Gender history took root in academic writing in predominantly English-language publications after the 1980s. This chapter moves beyond early debates in the field of gender history to explore how historians of a variety of subjects—Islam, enslavement, the history of science, the French Revolution, colonialism—put gender to work in the context of social and cultural history. It surveys some of the major publications of the first 20 years of the field, showcasing the wide variety of archives and methods that shaped the development of gender history as a practice. The history of masculinity and sexuality is addressed, as are as the ways that gender has remained entangled with the question of women.

This essay introduces the themes of the special issue, with particular attention to the work of gender in restructuring social, economic and political histories.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsAntoinette BurtonAntoinette Burton (aburton@illinois.edu) is professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she directs the Humanities Research Institute. Her Very Short Introduction: Gender History is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Antoinette Burton focuses on the experiences of three Victorian travelers in Britain to illustrate how "Englishness" was made and remade in relation to imperialism. The accounts left by these three sojourners—all prominent, educated Indians—represent complex, critical ethnographies of "native" metropolitan society and offer revealing glimpses of what it was like to be a colonial subject in fin-de-siècle Britain. Burton's innovative interpretation of the travelers' testimonies shatters the myth of Britain's insularity from its own construction of empire and shows that it was instead a terrain open to continual contest and refiguration. Burton's three subjects felt the influence of imperial power keenly during even the most everyday encounters in Britain. Pandita Ramabai arrived in London in 1883 seeking a medical education and left in 1886, having resisted the Anglican Church's attempts to make her an evangelical missionary. Cornelia Sorabji went to Oxford to study law and became the first Indian woman to be called to the Bar. Behramji Malabari sought help for his Indian reform projects in England, and subjected London to colonial scrutiny in the process. Their experiences form the basis of this wide-ranging, clearly written, and imaginative investigation of diasporic movement in the colonial metropolis.

Slavery and Empire-Making:Vincent Brown's Tacky's Revolt Antoinette Burton, Kathleen Wilson, Matthew J. Smith, Daniel Domingues da Silva, James Sidbury, and Vincent Brown Introduction to the Book Forum Antoinette Burton University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Histories of slavery tend to be unevenly distributed in studies of anglophone empire. Imperialism is typically an explanatory force in histories of enslavement: acknowledged as a conditional context in accounts about its reach and significance and typically interwoven in and through its foundational narratives. Conversely, histories of empire, especially those that operate at scale, rarely take slavery fully into account, if at all—as the most recent blockbuster in the field, Caroline Elkins' 2022 Legacies of Violence, powerfully testifies.1 That is to say, it's relatively uncommon for scholars of modern empire to start with slavery and track its longitudinal effects on British imperial histories beyond abolition—save perhaps where the afterlives of antislavery movements and ideology or the material reality of indenture is concerned. With few exceptions, work that actively narrates either the episodic or recurrent connections between enslavement as a violent, extractive practice of racializing capitalism and the emergence of British imperial power as a globalizing project is not the norm in contemporary scholarship.2 The same is true for studies which center the role that enslaved peoples have had in shaping what British "slave-empire" configurations looked like by going beyond the confines of the established archive. With the publication of Vincent Brown's Tacky's Revolt, the impossibility of segmenting slavery from empire-making in imperial history is directly challenged. As is the notion that the archive places insurmountable limits on imagining the consequential part enslaved men and women played in directing how the interdependence of these histories and their contribution to colonial world-making on a global stage should be told. The book lays down a set of interpretive gauntlets that historians of empire eager for a re-mix of historiographies of slavery and imperialism will welcome. Key to the recalibration the book calls for, is an argument about the urgency of making the frame of war and rebellion—indeed, of historicizing rebellion as war—constitutive of our apprehension of the eighteenth century Atlantic world. Brown calls this "the martial geography of Atlantic slavery" (2), a description that reminds us that rebellions against enslavement were militant responses to its atrocities, and that such militance compels us to re-suture the Caribbean and West Africa anew. This, in order to fully appreciate "the hemispheric reach" of slave revolts. It is well-known that by the middle of the eighteenth century, the Caribbean was the focus of a deliberate British imperial strategy. But through a vigorous rereading of a wide variety of historiographical work in both slavery and empire history and studies (and beyond) Brown materially links, for example, the Jamaican slave uprising of 1760-61 to histories of war and conflict on the African continent—conflicts between and among indigenous communities (as well as in opposition to slavers) which had a bearing on the way that rebellion unfolded in the recesses of St Mary Parish. Seeing slave rebellion as a species of military campaign underscores how "war and slavery nourished each other as the histories of Europe, Africa, and America became increasingly intertwined," thereby revealing Tacky's revolt and others to be protagonists in the making of the transoceanic history of slavery, to be sure, but of empire as well. Readers will not want to miss the "animated thematic map" of slave revolt that accompanies Brown's book, not least because it dramatizes in visual terms the combination of geographical re-integration and spatial re-orientation that his study offers to those who may be familiar with Caribbean rebellions or Atlantic world slavery but may not fully grasp their interconnectivity.3 Meanwhile, critical to his project as a whole is Brown's investment in reconstructing histories of key rebels—rebels whose specific identities are elusive but whose composite profiles Brown is especially skillful in building out. The book opens with the story of Wager, whose African name was Apongo and who was a major player in Jamaica in 1760-61. There is a lot we can know...

This essay reads Phyllis Naidoo's 1990 Waiting to Die in Pretoria as a radical requiem for Black death under apartheid. Naidoo builds her case against the death penalty through a roll of Black death row inmates that anticipates contemporary racial crises with an uncanny feel for the trauma of white supremacist violence.

Introduction to the Book Forum on Ishita Pande’s Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891–1937

This essay introduces the special issue, "Digital Methods, Empire Histories," by offering both a gloss of the essays collected and a critical take on the limits and possibilities of digital history for the project of decolonizing global histories of empire.

Barbara Pym’s fiction has been viewed as an anthropological approach to the social mores of postwar Britain. In this article, I use one of her last novels, Quartet in Autumn, to sharpen that reading to think through how Pym articulated an aesthetics of decline by trumpeting the dying world of the White English spinster. Quartet fictionalizes the agony of what Ramon Soto-Crespo calls “decapitalized Whiteness,” that is, where economic loss and a sense of racial disenfranchisement go hand in hand. The transatlantic desire it satisfied for a world that was lost yet redeemable through good old-fashioned English “women’s” literature prefigures the nostalgia for a preglobal Britain that has underwritten much of Brexit’s affective appeal.

This introductory article lays out the stakes of thinking through the temporalities of Brexit history across multiple fields of vision. It makes the case for books as one archive of Brexit subjects and feelings, and it glosses all the articles in the special issue.

Scholars who have admired Kevin Grant’s earlier research on the subject of hunger strikes will welcome this book, Last Weapons: Hunger Strikes and Fasts in the British Empire, 1890–1948, which does a magisterial job of showing how entangled Russian, English, Irish, and Indian histories of the subject are, helping us understand the ways that the modern imperial world out of which it emerged made this practice truly transcolonial in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Those coming to Grant’s work for the first time will appreciate how deeply researched and historically grounded it is: how, in other words, the work of history writing can take a powerful, even archetypal, motif and make manifest the profoundly human contexts and conditions we need to fully appreciate what it means. And readers curious about the genealogy of hunger-striking and fasting today, when political prisoners and detainees the world over seize upon this weapon...