Empire, Gender, and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century

This chapter examines the centrality of gender to British dominion and British modernity and to the categories of difference that Empire claimed to have 'discovered', vindicated, and sustained. Gender is not a synonym for women; neither is it a 'fact' of the past (or present) awaiting discovery. Historians have argued that gender was both a relation of power and a way of signifying relationships of power that produced and orchestrated the changing meanings of sexual difference in time, shaping social institutions, privileges, expectations, and experience. Gender was also a means of marking the body for cultural ends in 18th-century Europe, where vision was held to be an increasingly important way of ascertaining reality.