Categories of Empire

In this unit, we focus particularly on gender, race and sexuality, in part because these became key categories by which the European empires were organised. As we will see throughout our analysis, what we now call gender, race and sexuality were not just cultural categories, but economic, social, legal and political categories. Whether a person was categorised as man or woman; as black, Indian, white or mestizo; as sexually pure, normal or deviant, would often determine

the labour that a person performed
the place that a person occupied in the social hierarchy
the person's legal status
the places the person could go, and
the power that a person was able to wield in relation to others.

These categories were therefore powerful but they were not stable - within different imperial systems, in different colonies and at different times, gender, race and sexuality were classified in different ways. Of particular significance for historians is the fact that these classifications changed over time. There are significant debates among historians about how important these distinctions were in different contexts. For example, see the book by Rappaport in the reference list below, as well as other sources listed in this week's reading list, for the debates over casta or race in colonial South America.

The categories of gender, race and sexuality were often deeply connected. For example, what it meant to be categorised as a black woman was very different from what it meant to be categorised as a white woman and sexuality was often a key element of these alleged differences. Black women were often represented within imperial ideology (and law) as sexually available or aggressive and white women were often represented as sexually unavailable or passive. The categories of sex, race and gender were also connected to other imperial categories, such as class and religion.

By recognising that gender, race and sexuality became economic, legal and political categories within European empires, we can start to understand the work that these categories did in maintaining and enabling imperial power. For example, as Patrick Wolfe discusses in his article 'Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native', in the American colonies Indigenous people of mixed descent were categorised as no longer Indigenous, which allowed colonial regimes to claim that Indigenous peoples were 'dying out', which enabled colonial claims to Indigenous land. By contrast, African-American people were categorised according to the 'one-drop rule', meaning that a person with any African-American ancestry at all was classified as Black. This ensured that the population of African-American people who could be exploited for their labour remained high. These racial categories were equally oppressive, but in one case they served to diminish the number of people counted, while in the other they increased. Throughout this unit, we will consider how the categories of gender, race and sexuality were never neutral, but performed important functions within imperial systems. As the needs of these systems changed, so did the ways that gender, race and sexuality were classified.

Imperial categories of gender, race and sexuality were unstable not only because they were connected to changing imperial agendas, but also because they were resisted. Colonised peoples had their own systems of understanding difference and organising their societies. They often strongly resisted attempts to impose new systems of gender, race and sexuality. Among European peoples too, there could be resistance to social norms.

References

Patrick Wolfe, 'Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native' Journal of Genocide Research, 8, 4 (2006), 387-409.

Joanna Rappaport, The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada (Duke University Press, 2014).