Book Review: Gender and imperialism

Abstract

ing particular versions of ecological imperialism that were specifically Afrikaner, Australian and Scottish, whilst ‘Economy and ecology’ highlights the varied reactions and resistances over time to imported systems of exchange and production. The final section, ‘Comparing settler societies’, offers both a commentary on the themes discussed in previous chapters and a critique of broader issues in environmental history. This text confirms for the environmental field the findings of a growing number of studies, from religion to medicine, that empire tended to be a more unified concept at home than overseas. By the opening years of this century settler societies were, in the British case, intended as the core, the heart, of a Greater Britain overseas. In practice, they represented not only the literal but also the metaphorical edge of empire, the ‘unsafe’ margin, to use the phrase of bell hooks, where knowledge, identity and power were unstable and negotiated in and through a variety of places. In seeking to reconceptualize the relations between metropoles and colonies, the themes running through this text share some common ground with the priorities of some postcolonial scholarship. They do not explicitly subscribe to this kind of position. Nor do they present a single coherent alternative. The detail within the various chapters nevertheless serves to guard against some weaknesses of the postcolonial. As John MacKenzie points out, the British empire, ‘vast and apparently despotic as it seemed’, was ‘in reality a ramshackle conglomerate’ (p. 222). Echoing this view, the concluding chapter by David Lowenthal provides an important reminder that ‘we cannot understand the ecology of empire without chronicling its particulars’ in space and time (p. 229). This is a welcome text. Its strength lies in its presentation of some of these ‘particulars’ within a single collection.