Full 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, 1775-1930 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.
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Rosie Dias (University of Warwick, UK) and Kate Smith (University of Birmingham, UK)
Part I: Travel
1: The Travelling Eye: British Women in Early 19th-Century India
David Arnold (University of Warwick, UK)
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
Viccy Coltman (University of Edinburgh, UK)
3: Sketches from the Gendered Frontier: Colonial Women's Images of Encounters with Aboriginal People in Australia, 1830s-1860s
Caroline Jordan (La Trobe University, Australia)
Part II: Collecting
4: "Of manly enterprise, and female taste!": Mina Malcolm's Cottage as Imperial Exhibition, c. 1790s-1970s
Ellen Filor (University of Michigan, USA)
5: A Lily of the Murray: Cultivating the Colonial Landscape through Album Assemblage
Molly Duggins (National Art School, Australia)
6: Collecting the "East": Women Travellers New on the New "Grand Tour"
Amy Miller (Royal Museums Greenwich, UK)
Part III: Identities
7: Agents of Affect: Queen Victoria's Indian Gifts
Rosie Dias (University of Warwick, UK)
8: 'Prime Minister in the Home Department': Female Gendered Identity in 19th-Century Upper Canada
Rosie Spooner (University of Glasgow, UK)
9: Reconstructing the Lives of Professional Women in 1930s Zanzibar through Image, Object and Text
Sarah Longair (British Museum, UK)
Bibliography
Index
