British Women and Cultural Practices of Empire, 1770–1940

Description

Correspondence, travel writing, diary writing, painting, scrapbooking, curating, collecting and house interiors allowed British women scope to express their responses to imperial sites and experiences in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Taking these productions as its archive, British Women and Cultural Practices of Empire, 1770-1940 includes a collection of essays from different disciplines that consider the role of British women’s cultural practices and productions in conceptualising empire. While such productions have started to receive greater scholarly attention, this volume uses a more self-conscious lens of gender to question whether female cultural work demonstrates that colonial women engaged with the spaces and places of empire in distinctive ways. By working across disciplines, centuries and different colonial geographies, the volume makes an exciting and important contribution to the field by demonstrating the diverse ways in which European women shaped constructions of empire in the modern period. Title Page Copyright Page Contents List of Illustrations Colour Plates List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction British women and empire Practices and productions The pictorial arts and the female colonial gaze Producing empire Notes Part 1: Travel Chapter 1: The Travelling Eye: British Women in Early Nineteenth-Century India Writing home The female gaze India envisioned Conclusion Notes Chapter 2: Paper Trails of Imperial Trav(a)ils: Janet Schaw’s Journal of a Journey from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina and Portugal, 1774–1776 Species Place Race Dress Notes Chapter 3: Sketches from the Gendered Frontier: Colonial Women’s Images of Encounters with Aboriginal People in Australia, 1830s–1860s Absence in Tasmania Accommodation in South Australia War in far North Queensland Conclusion Notes Part 2: Collecting Chapter 4: ‘Of Manly Enterprise, and Female Taste!’: Mina Malcolm’s Cottage as Imperial Exhibition, c. 1790s–1970s Building the cottage A semi-public museum Commissioning and collecting From cottage to museum Conclusion Notes Chapter 5: A Lily of the Murray: Cultivating the Colonial Landscape through Album Assemblage Transplanting the language of flowers Cultivating a native picturesque Conclusion Notes Chapter 6: Collecting the ‘East’: Women Travellers on the New ‘Grand Tour’ Annie Brassey: Voyage in the Sunbeam Annie Russell Cotes: Westward from the Golden Gate Nora Beatrice Gardner: Rifle and Spear with the Rajpoots Conclusion Notes Part 3: Administering Chapter 7: Agents of Affect: Queen Victoria’s Indian Gifts Imperial regalia? Exhibiting imperial bonds Notes Chapter 8: ‘Prime Minister in the Home Department’: Female Gendered Identity in Colonial Upper Canada Beginnings Labours Arranging the genteel self Conclusion Notes Chapter 9: Reconstructing the Lives of Professional Women in 1930s Zanzibar through Image, Object and Text Women at work in Zanzibar in the 1930s: Professionalism, gender and the colonial world Appointment to Zanzibar Wilson: Navigating Zanzibar’s professional and social world Nicol Smith: Negotiating colonial Zanzibar as a ‘lady curator’ Conclusion Notes Biliography Manuscript sources Periodicals and newspapers Printed sources Secondary sources Other sources Index