Understanding the British Empire

[The article thus entitled first appeared in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History in January 1986 (vol. 14, no. 2). It was not well received by feminists and others who found it did not conform to their own concerns about gender, racial and patriarchical domination, or emerging ‘queer theory’. A debate was conducted with Mark T. Berger in the pages of the Journal in 1988: ‘Imperialism and sexual exploitation: a response to Ronald Hyam's Empire and sexuality’, and my ‘Reply’ (vol. 17, no. 1). Two years later I published Empire and sexuality: the British experience (Manchester University Press). This was also criticised for being ‘undertheorised’, which was disappointing, as I had attempted to develop a ‘surplus energy’ theory of imperialism (however inadequate), and had written a good deal about the interpretation of sexuality, the theory of sublimation, and my own concept of the ‘parergal’ character of sexual activity. In the 1990s there were two review articles about my work: (1) by Margaret Strobel, ‘Sex and work in the British empire’ (Radical History Review, vol. 54 (1992), pp. 177–86), and (2) by Richard A. Voeltz, ‘The British empire, sexuality, feminism, and Ronald Hyam’ (European Review of History/Revue Européenne d'Histoire, vol. 3, no. 1 (1996), pp. 41–5). Voeltz amusingly demonstrated the ambivalence of a body of work which could be regarded both as a radically subversive critique of empire, and as phallocentric imperialist apologetics; he concluded, however, that evaluating my view of the subject ‘remains a daunting proposition’. […]