Is there anything left to be said about the New Imperialism? So much has been written since the seminal analysis of J.A. Hobson in 1902 that the law of diminishing returns has surely begun to apply. In fact there is a striking imbalance in the scholarly literature. Most studies have concerned the politics and economics of colonial expansion. Yet the novelty of the New Imperialism lay not only in the feverish pace of overseas annexations, or in the tense atmosphere of international competition, but in the marked appetite of the British public for conquest, combat and heroism. That popular appetite was not only culturally significant in its own right; it was one of the conditions of a confident imperialist stance by Britain overseas. As Hobson argued, imperialism at this period served the interests of only a small powerful elite, which made it all the more crucial that there was what J.S. Brat ton has called a 'psychological pay-off for the nation at large.1 Between the early 1880s and the conclusion of the South African War twenty years later, the empire occupied a more prominent place in the national psyche than before or since. This was the period when the death of Gordon evoked national mourning; when the relief of Mafeking was riotously celebrated in many cities; when military men like Roberts, Kitchener and Baden-Powell were household names; and when the advancing tide of pink on the map was a matter of widespread pride. Yet very little historical work has focused on what the empire really meant to the British people - on which social groups supported empire and why, and what impulses carried such large numbers of British people overseas. There has been an inconclusive and for the most part superficial debate about the impact of imperial propaganda on the lower classes,2 and there is now a voluminous post-colonial literature on the place of empire in elite literary culture.3 This is a scarcely adequate response to a major cultural theme with wide-ranging social implications.
In these debates gender has certainly not been ignored. A good deal is now known about the extent of women's commitment to - and revulsion from - the imperial project.4 But surprisingly little attention has been paid to the terms in which the empire appealed to men.5 More than most areas of national life, empire was seen as a projection of masculinity. As Joanna de Groot has put it, 'manliness and empire confirmed one another, guaranteed one another, enhanced one another, whether in the practical disciplines of commerce and government or in the escape zones of writing, travel and art'.6 Kelly Boyd concurs with regard to one of those 'escape zones', boys' story papers.7 There was a striking convergence between the language of empire and the language of manliness: both made much of struggle, duty, action, will and 'character'.8 Given that masculinities in Britain were being placed under a variety of pressures in this period, it seems highly improbable that men's support for imperialism was unaffected. This proposition needs to be tested against the recorded experience of those who emigrated to the colonies or pursued their careers there. That task is still to be done. My purpose here is to suggest a framework of interpretation through a reappraisal of the secondary literature.
Empire was a man's business. By this 1 do not mean that men possessed an imperial monopoly, or that the empire aroused no interest in the other sex. Both missionary work and female emigration attracted a great deal of attention from women in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain.9 Yet these concerns made comparatively few inroads on the construction of British imperialism, which, as Clare Midgley has pointed out,, was 'an essentially masculine project'.10 Empire was a man's business in two senses: its acquisition and control depended disproportionately on the energy and ruthlessness of men; and its place in the popular imagination was mediated through literary and visual images which consistently emphasized positive male attributes. Running through the history of the British Empire (as of other empires, no doubt) was the commonplace that overseas expansion depended on manpower, and on the supply of men of a certain type - practical, resourceful and self-reliant. Conversely, men who chose colonial careers or set off in search of adventure overseas were making a statement about their masculinity. Empire was, in a fundamental sense, a test of the nation's virility.
Two arguments can be made about gender and the New Imperialism. The first or 'weak' argument is that a heightened awareness of opportunities and threats overseas induced a harsher definition of masculinity at home; if the empire was in danger, men must be produced who were tough, realistic, unsqueamish and stoical, A sense of crisis overseas prompted efforts to increase the appeal of imperial careers in the eyes of the young, especially by recasting the approved attributes of manliness,11 The second or 'strong' argument reverses the relationship between imperialism and masculinity by locating the primary sense of crisis, not in the empire, but in the pattern of gender relations within Britain itself. According to this perspective, enthusiasm for the empire at the end of the century was a symptom of masculine insecurity within Britain. Anxieties which had their root at home could be displaced onto the empire as a site of unqualified masculinity, and both career choices and ideological loyalties were influenced as a result.12 My suggestion here is that paradoxically both of these dynamics were working at once - that pessimistic appraisals of masculinity and of the empire played off each other in mutually reinforcing ways which powerfully conditioned the popular response to empire.
During the era of the New Imperialism, the empire was widely perceived to be in danger. With the benefit of hindsight this may seem perverse. The empire had not yet reached its greatest extent; the first losses of territory did not occur until the 1920s; and the end of empire was scarcely in prospect before the 1940s. Contemporaries saw matters in a less sanguine light. The scale of colonial domination was now such that any failure to contain insurgency or attack called into question the imperial resolve of the British. Such failures came thick and fast between 1879 and 1B85. The Zulu, the Boers, the Afghans and the Sudanese all inflicted humiliating reverses on the British, while Fenian violence reached new heights in Ireland.13 General Gordon's death at Khartoum in 1885 was a catalyst for these anxieties. No imperial event at this time occasioned more alarm or soul-searching. The Sudan remained a running sore to British self-esteem until the 'reconquest' was accomplished thirteen years later. As one journal put it, 'There is the danger that not only in Africa, not only in Asia, but throughout the world, the idea should take root that England is too weak or too indifferent to hold her own.'14 Fears for the security of the empire prompted a backward glance to the greatest crisis of the previous generation - the Indian revolt of 1857. From the mid-1880s there was a proliferation of novels set in the Indian Mutiny, as if there were still lessons to be drawn from that most catastrophic failure of control.15
On top of these anxieties, Britain's colonies faced the most threatening international scene for nearly a hundred years. The most novel feature of the New Imperialism was the number of nations who signed up to it, in the anxious realization that few areas of the globe now remained for colonial expansion: this was the last chance to secure boundaries, to 'protect' commercial interests, and to stake out spheres of future exploitation. As the Pall Mall Gazette complained, 'whereas, since Trafalgar, the Englishman has never found himself confronted by any other opponent but the savage with his spear, or the pirate in his prah, we now find even? ocean highway furrowed by European ironclads, while over many a colonial frontier frowns the cannon of Continental rivals'.16 British manhood must now prevail not only over the 'low' races, but over competitors whose inferiority could not be taken for granted. The complex threat posed by the situation in South Africa during the 1890s arose from a local population of European origin (the Transvaal Boers) potentially acting in concert with one of Britain's leading rivals (Germany).
The language of degeneration, which became so fashionable during the 1890s, brought home these fears, for it pointed the finger of blame at inadequacies on the part of the British themselves. Imperial reverses were a reflection on the virility of the British people. 'Degeneration' was a catchall for pessimism about the birthrate, the nation's physical fitness, its mental and moral health, and its cultural vigour.17 Social Darwinism was an important - though certainly not the only - strand of degeneration thought, and it produced a heightened sensitivity to any indication that the British race might be losing its place at the top of the hierarchy. Degeneration also had its puritanical wing: the British Empire was held to be vulnerable to the same danger which had allegedly brought the Roman Empire down - sexual depravity at its core - and this view was voiced not only by the cranks of the Social Purity movement but by mainstream educationalists and youth experts (including Baden-Powell).18 The practical outcome of degeneration thought was an unprecedented scrutiny of the fitness of both sexes which had strongly imperial overtones: women as mothers of the race, men as the active, assertive element, As Lord Rosebery put it in 1900, 'An empire such as ours requires as its first condition an Imperial Race - a race vigorous and industrious and intrepid', exhibiting 'health of mind and body'.19 The defence of the empire required more men and better men.
It might be thought that the principal anxiety here would be the fitness of working-class men for imperial service, above all for the military. Yet despite expressions of official concern, very little was done to address this issue. Physical education in elementary schools was not a national requirement; it depended on the initiative of individual school boards, and it was intended to benefit school discipline as much as physical health.20 The warning bells were only sounded during the South African War, when two out of five recruits were rejected as unfit. After the war this led to numerous initiatives to improve the physique of working-class boys,21 and it also prompted the most ambitious youth movement in modern. Britain. But even the Boy Scouts would have far less success with the working class than with the lower-middle class, and Baden-Powell continued to fulminate against the urban blight of enfeebled manhood,22 In the period before the South African War, the most successful youth organization - and the model for all that followed - was the Boys' Brigade, founded in 1883. This is sometimes grouped with the Boy Scouts as a broadly 'imperial' organization, but the prime purpose of the Brigade was to continue with boys where Sunday school had left off: in the early years especially, the Brigade was far more concerned with promoting Christian manliness than imperial sentiment.23
The most material contribution made to the empire by the working class in this period was as emigrants. Nearly a million working-class people left for the colonies during the 1880s and 1890s.24 The era of large-scale assisted emigration was over, so most emigrants made their own way as paying steerage passengers. Guaranteed employment was rare, and usually confined to the highly skilled. In contrast to the earlier part of the century, emigrants were drawn not to life in the bush or on the prairies, but to waged work in the growing cities of Canada and the Antipodes. Despite the lack of historical work on the social dynamics of emigration during this period,25 it is likely that the motives of emigrants to the colonies were not greatly different from those who emigrated to the United States. The decisive consideration was the state of the labour market in Britain, and this was a particular concern during the mid-1880s when the Great Depression was at its most severe.26 The government proved largely immune to the arguments of emigration pressure groups for state-assisted emigration, and their case anyway rested on the relief of poverty at home rather than the cementing of links with the colonies.27 In this period what is remarkable about the working class is how little serious effort was made to mould them to the imperial project.
The main target for empire propaganda was not the working class but the 'service class' - the upper levels of society from whom colonial administrators and officers in the army and navy had traditionally been drawn. By the 1880s this grouping was nearly coterminous with the graduates of the public schools. During the period of reform and expansion of the public schools between the 1830s and 1860s, training boys for the empire had been incidental to the main purpose of the schools. Neither the curriculum nor the institutional ethos was consciously imperial. By the 1880s a major change had taken place. The schools vigorously recruited boys for colonial careers, and they laid claim to the role of educator for empire par excellence. Their contribution was not, by and large, educational in the narrow sense. The curriculum certainly reflected an imperial agenda - in history, geography, English literature and classics. But the public schools did not base their claim to service the empire on academic grounds. What they specialized in was manliness, or making men out of boys, and the agents in this process were not so much the school authorities as the boys themselves. Manliness was acquired through a process of physical hardening imposed by the often harsh living conditions at school. It was about renouncing the ministrations of women. And it was about learning to stand up for oneself in the company of men, both in the physical sense of showing courage, and in the social sense of finding one's place in a deeply hierarchical society,28 These qualities had an obvious relevance to life on the imperial frontier, where conditions were Spartan, respectable female company scarce, and survival often depended on an overstretched chain of command.
Superimposed on this bedrock of schoolboy culture was a more sophisticated understanding of manly character, articulated by teachers and educational experts. This rested on the notion that the individual was, if not master of his fate in the eternal sense, at least fully responsible for the mark he made on the world. A high value was set on energy, as displayed in resolute action, and on self-control, particularly in suppressing the appetites and emotions which might sap the will. Whether in business or the professions or public life, the 'man of character' was someone who set the claims of duty above personal gratification, and who could draw on his moral resources to prevail over adversity,29 These ideals still held true in the late Victorian era, but with one significant change, Compared with the age of Thomas Arnold, the character-talk of late Victorian Britain was much less individualistic. It redefined 'duty' as commitment to an overriding imperial loyalty and an identification with a set of collective imperial values. Teamwork subordinated the individual to the production of a 'type'.30
Two innovations of the late Victorian period confirmed the trend: the officer cadet corps and team sports. The origin of the cadet corps lay in the volunteer movement of the 1860s, but it was not until the 1880s that it became central to the school ethos, and not until the 1890s that membership became virtually de rigueur.31 The cadet experience prepared boys for the idea - if not the actuality - of war within a colonial frame; it emphasized not just marksmanship, hut physical and mental discipline. Team sports also dated back to the 1860s, when they had been promoted as a means of improving school discipline and as a channel for the academically less gifted pupil. By the 1880s they increasingly dominated school life, and their rationale had shifted. Team sports trained boys to obey (and later to give) orders; they subordinated the individual to the team effort; and they instilled stoicism in the face of pain and discomfort (hence the marginalization of undemanding sports like tennis and golf).32
By the 1890s the public schools were well focused on their imperial rationale. To the traditional training in survival skills had been added an explicit attention to physical fitness, military skills and team dynamics. The academic curriculum continued to be important, especially for boys seeking admission to the professions or the more technical departments of the army, but it was of declining importance in setting the tone of the school, and headmasters were more likely to worry about the dangers of swotting than about academic underperformance. As H.H. Almond (headmaster of Loretto) put it, in a future Indian Mutiny the scholar would be little use; it was 'the man of nerve, high courage, and animal spirits' who would make the difference.33 By the end of the century such men were produced by the public schools in large numbers. In the 1870s and early 1880s anxiety had been expressed in the highest circles about the physical robustness of British officials in India: too much cramming for the entrance exam was believed to undermine the constitution, leading to early retirement and even insanity.34 In 1894 Dr William Ord sought to put these fears to rest. The candidates he had examined, he said, 'have commended themselves as excellent specimens of the English youth of today: for the most part well set-up, clean-skinned, clean-limbed, and in all ways wholesome'.35 The promotion of empire appears to have hit home, for a significant proportion of school-leavers went overseas - as high as one third in some cases.36 The public schools, in short, had become adept at producing men for imperial service.
Too often analysis of the link between the public schools and the empire stops at this point, as if the attraction of empire were self-evident.37 Yet it is not enough to identify and describe a propaganda drive. What needs to be explained is why this attempt to promote the empire with young men of the upper and middle classes was so successful. Why was the frontier image so appealing? Why did it seem plausible to so many that empire might be the making of them as men? Once imperial sentiment is placed in a gendered framework, it becomes evident that the empire in turn answered to profoundly felt masculine needs. The empire needed men; but men also needed the empire, as a resource, as a refuge and as an object of desire.38
In popular imagining empire was synonymous with adventure. The colonial world symbolized the freedom which was in theory available to men (unlike women) of cutting a lone path, of deviating from the norm, of fashioning their own destiny. For the black sheep, the misfit and the tearaway, life overseas held out the possibility of great personal riches, an exotic lifestyle, military escapades or the excitement of operating effectively beyond the law. The identification between empire and adventure might break down on the ground: where was the excitement in back-breaking farm work in Canada or an office job in a Bengal trading company? But in the metropolitan imagination the association of empire and adventure was well established. Martin Green has identified a tradition of imperial adventure in popular fiction dating back to Defoe's Robinson Crusoe,39 From the mid-nineteenth century the volume of work in this mould increased dramatically, first as a rival to the moral fable for children, and then by the 1880s as the preferred reading-matter for adolescent boys, and for many adults too. Adventure fiction presented its readers with a romanticized picture of the overseas world, in which pluck and guts always won through.40 Patrick Brantlinger maintains that in reality opportunities for overseas adventure were waning in the late nineteenth century, as the big problems of geography were solved.41 This is to confuse personal with public objectives. There were fewer prizes for the headline-seeking explorer, but on an individual level the challenges were many and various. What produced the biggest surge of adrenalin was big-game hunting. As John MacKenzie has shown, this was a new preoccupation in the nineteenth century.42 It fed on what purported to be reliable travel literature about the penetration of Africa, and on its embellishment in the hunting yarns of Mayne Reid and W.H.G. Kingston (also a propagandist for colonial emigration).43
This ronianticization of the frontier had important implications for the popular image of the military. In late Victorian Britain firsthand knowledge of war was confined to a small proportion of the male population. But its pleasure and excitement could be vicariously enjoyed in a romanticized form. Soldiering was associated primarily with small-scale, fast-moving operations which allowed maximum initiative to young officers. Well before Scouting for Boys a frontier myth was in the making. Baden-Powell himself first gained public notice as the author of books about irregular warfare during the 1890s.44 When public-school headmasters (and chaplains) spoke of the games field as a preparation for the battlefield, it was this kind of warfare they had in mind. School magazines in the 1890s regularly itemized the military achievements of men who had once excelled on the playing field; no greater honour could be brought on the school than death in action - the epitome of imperial 'sacrifice'.45 A heroic, sanitized death was both the ultimate duty and the final chapter in a life of adventure.46
But 'adventure' is not an adequate framework for interpreting popular attitudes towards the empire, Taken at face value, it obscures both the strength of the 'push' factors involved, and the harsher and less romantic 'pull' factors. In the first place, adventure only made sense when set against the conditions at home from which it represented an escape. The appeal of adventure rested not just on the allure of the exotic and the dangerous, but on renunciation of the mundane. It promised escape from custom and convention, from the chains of matrimony and from respectable pieties about sex. Overseas adventure was, in Green's phrase, 'a breaking of the social contract', an appeal against moral reason.47 Colonial postings had attracted men on these grounds for generations, but in the nineteenth century the gap between metropolitan respectability and colonial licence grew wider than ever. For any man who fretted against 'Victorian' conventions of domesticity and sexual continence, the colonies offered the promise of release, and the chance to explore alternatives ranging from concubinage to pederasty.48 Since 'respectable' white women were still very thin on the ground in many colonies, there was less countervailing censure, and less chance of deviant behaviour being reported back home. In gender terms the other side of the coin was the homosocial culture of the colonies, appealing especially to young men. For the soldier, the administrator, the trader and the frontiersman, the empire was a site where comradeship was valued, domesticity disparaged and sexual escapades overlooked or approved. These traits were particularly appealing to graduates of the public schools, who embraced the opportunity to continue living in the homosocial culture they knew so well49 Empire represented an intensified version of the bachelor world which most young men inhabited between their late teens and marriage in their late twenties or early thirties.
In the second place, the attractions of the overseas world were about more than high spirits and heroism. The prospect of personal authority was fundamental. One of the measures of manliness in common understanding was the degree of mastery exercised over others within or outside the home. This was most true of the upper class, for whom the exercise of paternalist, face-to-face authority was a defining masculine attribute. Younger sons had traditionally been packed off to the colonies where they could fulfil the role which their cadet status denied them in Britain. The gentry provided the majority of officers in both the British army and the Indian army, and they had the edge in appointments to sought-after civilian posts. Real responsibility was given to individual officials, often with minimal supervision: decisions were made and enforced on the spot, supported by the consciousness of being part of a ruling caste not unlike the traditional sense of rank among the English gentry.50
The adventure genre tended to gloss over the extent to which that personal authority was underpinned by violence. The empire could not be run with kid gloves. It had been acquired by the use of force, and force would continue to be needed to extend the frontiers and to deal with troublemakers. With its skeletal or non-existent, administration the frontier was a by-word for lawlessness, often met with summary justice. Since the moral and social complexities of the local situation were usually unknown, opinion in Britain could applaud the smack of firm government and the 'resolution' of the man on the spot. Fantasies of violent reprisal which were completely inadmissible in England could be freely indulged in a colonial setting - as in 1857 and again in 1865 during the Jamaican rebellion.51 in the atmosphere of crisis which prevailed in the 1880s and 1890s there were renewed calls for a stiffening of masculine resolve, an unflinching readiness to take whatever steps were necessary - to behave in short as an -'imperial race'. When the chief secretary of Ireland was assassinated in Phoenix Park, Dublin, in 1882, Sir Alfred Lyall reflected on the appalling message this sent to Indian nationalists. What was needed, he remarked, was 'a little more fierceness and honest brutality in the national temperament'.52 The journalist George Steevens was no less blunt: 'we became an Imperial race by dealing necessary pain to other men, just as we became powerful men by dealing necessary pain to other animals'.53 Popular literature for boys echoed the same concern. Since the 1850s 'penny dreadfuls' had featured bloodthirsty yarns for boys and had been much criticized for it. Towards the end of the century, however, these magazines began to be seen in a much more positive light, and to influence writers like Rider Haggard and G.A. Henty.54 As Richard Phillips observes, 'never before, in respectable Victorian literature, was violence so graphic, gratuitous and light-hearted, so calculated to entertain'.55 Readers were reminded that 'honest brutality' was indeed expected of men.
This validation of violence was not, of course, the only moral tradition of British imperialism. Against it we're pitched the humane methods which had been championed by the anti-slavery movement,, and which were symbolized above all by the memory of David Livingstone and his appeal for Christianity and commerce. For imperialists cast in the missionary mould the appropriate model of manliness was one of patient endurance rather than bravery in battle. The antagonism of these two positions was made very clear in a number of public controversies, notably the sharply divided reactions to H.M. Stanley's blunt methods of African exploration.56 But the great days of anti-slavery were long over. The Governor Eyre controversy on the eve of the Second Reform Act (1867) had signalled the turn of the tide. As Catherine Hall has put it, the 'manly citizen' now thought less of the plight of the oppressed and more of the need for authoritative rule in the empire.57 Hobson's interpretation of popular jingoism has not enjoyed a very good press in recent years, but it is hard to dissent from his complaint that current events were 'falsified in coarse glaring colours, for the direct stimulation of the combative instincts',58 After all, this was a society which could take in its stride the 11,000 Sudanese slaughtered at the battle of Omdurman (as against a mere 48 killed in Kitchener's army).59
The association of the empire with personal wealth, unchecked indulgence of the appetites, personal authority and boisterous homosociality assured its appeal to middle- and upper-class men. To what extent did these attractions register with the working class? The extent of popular imperialist sentiment is particularly difficult to gauge. The scope and variety of empire propaganda directed at the working class is well documented. It embraced the daily press, music hall, advertising, leisure reading, youth organizations and the curriculum of state elementary schools.60 Broadly speaking the jingo tone became more pronounced as the century drew to a close.61 But all this begs the question of reception. Current scholarship amounts to little more than conflicting statements largely unsupported by research, Positive evidence of working-class imperial sentiment is surprisingly slim.
As the earlier discussion suggested, emigration was viewed primarily in an economic frame, ranging from the skilled engineer attracted to railway development overseas to the unskilled man trying his luck on the goldfields. The excitement of emigrating could hardly be denied, but the need for a secure livelihood was the first priority: 'adventure' usually required time and means. Music-hall song suggests that in popular culture emigration was associated as much with the human pathos of leaving home and family as with any active sense of colonization.62 The association between empire and masculine authority may have been rather more telling. Racially stratified dependencies promised the satisfactions of personal authority to men whose authority in the normal run of things would have extended no further than a wife or an apprentice, John MacKenzie has surmised that service in the Indian army was attractive because soldiers from the poorest background in Britain were no longer at the bottom of the pile once they reached their postings.63 The cheap black labour anticipated by prospective emigrants to South Africa promised not only prosperity but a real gain in personal status.64 The privilege of race was available to all whites, no matter how lowly their social origins at home.
There was probably also some popular understanding of the military dimension of empire. By 1898 more than 22 per cent of the entire male population between the ages of seventeen and forty had previous military experience (though only a minority had actually served overseas).65 It is reasonable to infer a considerable identification, with martial values, as represented both by the big names and by the common soldier who in the late Victorian era was much more respectfully treated than ever before,66 But that favourable view of army life did not translate into buoyant recruitment. Not even during the South African War was there a rash to the colours, Richard Price has shown that the pace of enlistment was determined more by the ebb and flow of unemployment than by patriotic fervour. The war fever whipped up by the press had least impact on the working class, who took little part in pro-war demonstrations or in attacks on anti-war meetings. Not even 'Mafeking Night' - the most enthusiastic public affirmation of empire during this period - can be seen, as proof of working-class jingoism. Price shows that the crowds on the streets were composed predominantly of middle-class youth: students, lawyers and clerks.67 'The truly jingo crowd', he writes, 'was not a working-class phenomenon.'68
The argument so far has turned on the varied appeal of empire as a marker of manhood, through its association with adventure, sexual licence, personal authority and violence. These activities were pursued in the company of other men, or were intended to earn respect in their eyes; they were the currency in which masculinity was conferred or withheld by one's peers. But masculine status also depended on maintaining a dominant position with the opposite sex, through privileged access to the public sphere, domestic authority and the double standard of sexual conduct. The connection of these aspects of gender relations with empire is less obvious. But indirectly their implications for imperial commitment were important, particularly when relations between the sexes were perceived to be in flux. If men's power was called into question, the attraction of empire as an unequivocal indicator of masculinity was likely to be intensified. That several categories of men were thrown onto the defensive in their relations with women during the 1880s and 1890s is highly relevant to understanding the popular appeal of an assertive imperialism.
In the 1880s and 1890s few men could recall a time when women had been so free or so subversive. The label 'first wave feminism' is mistaken if it suggests there had been no feminism at an earlier date; but it is apt in implying an unprecedented level of consciousness on questions of gender. 'The woman question' was all the more disturbing because it was not confined to a single issue but touched on a number of sensitive areas. The most material of these was employment. Office work was a traditional route into the middle class for the upwardly mobile working-class man. But in the late nineteenth century large corporations and some sections of the Civil Service began to recruit female typists and telegraphists as a cheaper and more 'docile' workforce. By 1901 women comprised 11 per cent of clerks, and in some cities like Birmingham the proportion was as high as 20 per cent by 1891. Male clerks opposed this trend not only because they feared redundancy or wage reduction, but because the gender status of their occupation was at stake. Office work had long had overtones of effeminacy: 'born a man, died a clerk' went the old saying. The point seemed proven by the entry of women into office work. Gregory Anderson's work on Manchester provides suggestive evidence of how male clerks reacted to this feared slur on their manhood. One correspondent in the Manchester Guardian in 1886 complained of the spectre of a world turned upside down: of girls 'unsexing themselves by taking men's place at the desk', of men driven to 'seek employment in drapers' and milliners' shops and restaurants'.69
These tensions in the lower middle class had imperial implications in at least two ways. In the first place, emigration became a much more attractive option. The YMCA administered a scheme in which they provided unemployed clerks with letters of introduction to farmers in Manitoba. The fact that 13,000 clerks applied from Manchester alone certainly testifies to the impact of clerical unemployment; but given the complete lack of agricultural experience that these men must have had, it also suggests a determination to embrace an unequivocally 'masculine' life.70 In the second place, the social character of popular jingoism points to a masculine overcompensation on the part of lower-middle-class men. As we have seen, the working-class element in popular jingoism was much less than earlier studies supposed. The key constituency was lower-middle-class men, with clerks well to the fore, particularly during the Mafeking celebrations. This same group was strongly represented in the City Imperial Volunteers and the Imperial Yeomanry who fought in the South African War.71 Volunteering was in part a means of demonstrating the patriotism of those on the borderline of respectability, but it was also a specifically masculine assertion. The clerk who cheered on the army, or better still enlisted, was less vulnerable to the charge of having soft and useless hands. Noisy enthusiasm for the empire allowed him to rise above the demeaning feminine associations of his occupation.
The gender turbulence of the fin de siècle was not only about employment; it also affected sexuality and marriage. It was these areas which occasioned the greatest amount of feminist polemic - and the greatest degree of anxiety on the part of men. Partly because of the expansion in female employment, unmarried young women had greater freedoms than before. Smoking and cycling - symbols of the New Woman stood for more fundamental challenges to patriarchal convention: women who lived alone or in all-women households, and who chose their own male company, and in some cases dispensed with it entirely. In the cities spinsterhood ceased to be automatically associated with personal failure; it was now recognized to be for some a preference. At the same time, the terms of marriage were visibly changing in women's favour. The Married Women's Property Act of 18B2 gave wives control over the funds they brought into the marriage, while the courts were gradually liberalizing the terms on which wives could secure a marital separation or sole custody of their children.72 These changes were reflected in a spate of outspoken feminist polemic by journalists and novelists, who attacked the institution of marriage and castigated the sexual practices of men. As portrayed in the press, the New Woman was engaged in not merely self-improvement but also sex warfare. One did not have to accept the New Woman at face value to see a failure of masculine authority in the most intimate areas of life.
Of course the response of many men was to engage in an unyielding defence of patriarchal marriage. They were supported by fashionable writers on science who tried to shore up traditional wisdom about sexual difference by adapting the theory of evolution to their ends.73 But in the context of empire the most telling male reaction was to vacate the disputed ground altogether by disparaging domesticity. Middle-class culture of the period was moulded by the experience of two - and sometimes three - generations of masculine domesticity. What had appealed to the early Victorians as a necessary retreat from the often alienating world of work now tended to appear routine-bound and stifling. This reflected the tastes of a younger generation for whom the allure of the city outweighed its more negative features. It also reflected the way in which the conventions of domesticity had become more formulaic and more constraining, policed by etiquette manuals of increasing complexity. Men's boredom was tinged by sometimes overt sexual antagonism, the wife carrying the blame for this more intrusive routine. It was she who demanded punctuality and at least outward deference. On this view domesticity for men meant submitting to a feminized ambience. Many writers commented on how such a life made men dull and spiritless.74 As Robert Louis Stevenson put it, 'the air of the fireside withers out all the fine wildings of the husband's heart'.75
It is important not to exaggerate the extent of the 'flight from domesticity',76 The turn away from marriage was class-specific. It did not affect the working class, nor the lower middle class, for whom the close of the century was the acme of domesticity.77 But among the business and professional classes the trend was clear. An increasing proportion of young men postponed marriage until they were on the threshold of middle age; others remained bachelors all their lives, in some cases placing the survival of the family name in doubt.78 Professions like the army or public-school teaching which either precluded marriage or presumed the attraction of an alternative all-male society acquired a higher profile. Gentlemen's clubs and passionate (or 'Uranian') male friendship flourished as emotional alternatives to marriage.79 The personal histories of empire-builders include many references to the trammels of domesticity: the most prominent were either single for life (Gordon, Rhodes, Kitchener), or else married well after their empire-building days were over (Milner, Baden-Powell, Lugard).80 The equivocal standing of domesticity was perhaps best symbolized by Kitchener's refusal to accept married officers under his command in the Sudan campaign of 1897-8 - the most coveted military posting of the day.81
In this context the traditional image of the colonies as pre-eminently a man's world was greatly reinforced. Of course the reality of empire included the settler wife and the missionary couple, but they did not figure prominently in popular representations of the empire, which was equated with the complete antithesis of feminine domesticity. This message came over loud and clear in the work of Stevenson and Rider Haggard, which spanned the gap between high-bow and low-brow, and in the hugely successful novels of G.A. Henty, read primarily by adolescent boys. Their stories were exciting, full of action, bracingly masculine, and staged in a real or invented colonial setting. Their heroes hunted, plundered or conquered, shored up by the silent bonds of men's friendship; and they were unencumbered by the presence of females: 'there is not a petticoat in the whole history', Allan Quatermain reassures his audience in King Solomon's Mines.82 The message of male panic is particularly clear in Kipling's early novel, The Light That Failed (1891), in which death in a desert battle is presented as a wholesome escape from a degenerate London and a rejecting New Woman sweetheart.83 A generation of boys and young men (not to mention many of their sisters) was brought up on an image of masculinity which was self-reliant, extrovert, achieving and entirely detached from women,
It is worth considering what bearing this analysis has on emigration. The majority of emigrants from Britain in the Sate nineteenth century were indeed young single men, travelling without family ties,84 But this does not mean that they were in flight from domesticity. Most working-class bachelors seem to have regarded emigration as a step towards independence of the traditional kind. They expected either to many and settle in the new country, or to make enough money to sail back to England and set up home there (in the era of cheap steamship travel, this was an increasingly realistic prospect). That continuing link between emigration and marriage prospects accords with working-class notions of manliness, and it is also reflected in the changing character of the colonies themselves. In Australia especially, the folk emphasis on the gold rushes has tended to obscure the fact that it was the same period which saw the rapid growth of settled urban society in the colonies, and this was the ultimate destination of most emigrants from Britain.85
But there was another kind of emigrant - the man who was positively attracted to the homo social life of the frontier - whether it be a mining town in British Columbia, a ranch in the Canadian West, a sheep station in. New Zealand, or a paramilitary force in southern Africa. In these regions the demographic preponderance of men in the colonies was even more pronounced, and there were few white women of any description. For such emigrants all-male society was not so much a priyation to be endured as a glamorous attraction. The bachelor emigrant bound for the frontier interpreted 'independence' differently from the married man. For him it meant independence from women - living outside the family nexus, being free to 'up sticks' and move on. As one New Zealand itinerant explained in 1890, 'we do not marry because we prefer to spend our money in other ways, because an establishment is a nuisance; because a wife is not so necessary to our happiness as other luxuries; because there is no good like independence'.86 Significantly, this aspect of colonial life was over-represented in Britain itself, where the colonist tended to be identified with the bushman ideal: rough, self-reliant, independent, rejecting domesticity and instead prizing the values of 'mateship'.87 The bushman and his equivalent in other colonies included many men of proletarian origins in Britain, but the strongest evidence we have of the appeal of a men-only life overseas relates to the upper and middle classes. These classes were disproportionately represented among emigrants to colonial destinations, In the 1890s the middle class accounted for 26 per cent of all emigrants, and 38 per cent of those going to Australia.88
For middle-class men a large part of the attraction of the colonial world was its distinctive gender regime. A spell in the colonies promised a homosocial paradise, governed by clear-cut masculine values. Life there was not subject to constant negotiation with the opposite sex. The New Woman would not be encountered overseas (how many Olive Schreiners were there in South Africa?). For those who were bored by feminine domesticity, or frightened of being drawn into marriage, the wide-open spaces of prairie and bush and the rough democracy of the frontier stood for a world which was free of the constraints of respectability. Instead there was the prospect of a much more relaxed sexual regime. In major all-male concentrations like the goldfields there was unregulated prostitution, while in racially stratified colonies like Natal domestic servants were much more vulnerable to sexual liberties from their masters than servants in Britain. In both cases there was far less risk of social exposure than at home.89 Marriage was not necessarily renounced, but it was projected into the distant future, after life had been lived to the full and a fortune had (hopefully) been made, In the meantime the colonies provided a space in which sexual difference appeared to be clear-cut and unchallenged, and masculinity could be lived out without compromise.
The New Imperialism, it is now widely recognized, was not so much an assertion of strength as a symptom of weakness. The excesses of imperial fervour may have looked like the high point of national self-confidence, but they were in reality an overwrought reaction to an increasingly perilous international situation. Except between 1899 and 1902 Britain did not consider itself at war, yet the need to 'defend' the empire and to be vigilant against foreign rivals was repeatedly articulated during the 1880s and 1890s. Psychologically this situation called for a heightened awareness of empire within Britain; materially it demanded an increase in the quantity and quality of manpower available for imperial service. The failure to vigorously promote this programme with the working class became a cause of serious alarm after the South African War. In the middle and upper classes, on the other hand, a determined effort was made to remoralize manhood for imperial service, and with considerable success. By 1900 empire had become central to the identity of an expanded service class, and imperial attributes underpinned the prevailing myth of British national character.
That class distinction applied also to the 'gender panic' in fin-de-siède Britain. Among the working class the gender balance in employment was less disturbed than in the lower middle class, and there is no reason to suppose that marriage was any less central to masculine self-realization than it had been in the past, or that domesticity was more burdensome to men. But considerations of this kind had considerable weight at other levels of society. Changes in employment, marriage and the lifestyle of young women demonstrably caused anxiety among men of the lower middle and middle classes, and some of this anxiety was displaced onto the empire, partly as an unequivocally masculine loyally, and partly as an actual destination where men might lead manly lives. Thus on the one hand men in Britain were being recast to fit them for an imperial role; on the other hand the empire itself had become a widely recognized means of 'making men', It is a measure of the complex interpenetration of the imperial and the masculine that both these functions were pursued at the same time. Together they account for much of the metropolitan character of the New Imperialism,
Published here for the first time.
1 J.S. Bratton et al, Acts of Supremacy: the British Empire and the Stage, 1790-1930 (Manchester, 1991), p. 18.
2 The debate began with Gareth Stedman Jones, 'Working-class culture and working-class politics in London, 1870-1900: notes on the remaking of a working class', Journal of Social History 7 (1974), repr. in his Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832-1982 (Cambridge, 1983). The most recent contribution is Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class (London, 2001), ch. 10,
3 The seminal works are Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca, 1988), and Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, 1993). Critical work on Kipling has, perhaps not surprisingly, come closest to an understanding of the popular springs of imperialism. See esp. Robert H. MacDonald, 'The Laureate of Empire - and his chorus', in his The Language of Empire: Myths and Metaphors of Popular Imperialism, 1880-1918 (Manchester, 1994).
4 See esp. Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 (Chapel Hill, 1994).
5 The most recent survey of imperial culture in this period does not deal with masculinity at all. John M. MacKenzie, 'Empire and metropolitan cultures', in Andrew Porter (ed,), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. Ill (Oxford, 1999), pp. 270-93.
6 Joanna de Groot, '"Sex" and "race": the construction of language and image in the nineteenth century', in Susan Mendus and Jane Kendall (eds), Sexuality and Subordination (London, 1989), p. 122.
7 Kelly Boyd, Manliness and the Boys' Story Paper in Britain: a Cultural History, 1855-1940 (Basingstoke, 2003), p. 125.
8 H. John Field, Toward a Programme of Imperial Life: the British Empire at the Turn of the Century (Oxford, 1982) provides a sensitive commentary on these terms, but does not place them in a gendered context. § Julia Bush, '"The right sort of women": female emigrators and emigration to the British Empire, 1890-1910', Women's History Review 3 (1994), pp. 385-410; Lisa Chilton, '"A new class of women from the colonies": The Imperial Colonist and the constr uction of empire', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History
9 (2003), pp. 36-56; Judith Rowbotham, "'Soldiers of Christ?" Images of female missionaries in late nineteenth-century Britain', Gender & History 12 (2000), pp. 82-106.
10 Clare Midgley (ed.), Gerlder and Imperialism (Manchester, 1998), p. 14.
11 This argument runs through the recent secondary literature on manliness, but is most clearly stated in Field, Toward a Programme of Imperial Life.
12 An interpretation along these lines is sketched in Leonore Davidoff, 'The family', in F.M.L. Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Modern Britain, vol. 2 (1990), p. 105, and in Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (1991), pp. 4-6, 78-95.
13 For the impact of these reverses, see Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians: the Official Mind of Imperialism (London, 1965), chs 3-5, and Peter Marshall, 'The imperial factor in the Liberal decline, 1880-1885', in J. Flint and G. Williams (eds), Perspectives on Empire (Harlow, 1973), pp. 134-5.
14 The Statist, Feb. 1885, quoted in Bernard Porter, The Lion's Share (London, 1975), p. 116.
15 Mary A. Procida, Married to the Empire: Gender, Politics and Imperialism in India, 1883-1947 (Manchester, 2002), p. 120,
16 Pall Mall Gazette, 4 Feb. 1885, quoted in Porter, Lion's Share, p. 118.
17 Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: a European Disorder, c. 1848-c. 1918 (Cambridge, 1989).
18 See for example J. Ellice Hopkins, The Power of Womanhood: or Mothers and Sons (London, 1899), pp. 161-6.
19 Lord Rosebery, Questions of Empire (London, 1900), pp. 23-4.
20 Peter C. Mcintosh, Physical Education in England since 1800, rev. edn (London, 1968).
21 Anna Davin, 'Imperialism and motherhood', History Workshop Journal 5 (1978), pp. 9-65.
22 Michael Rosenthal, The Character Factory: Baden-Powell and the Origins of the Boy Scout Movement (New York, 1986); Robert H. MacDonaid, Sons of the Empire: the Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement, 1890-1918 (Toronto, 1993); Allen Warren, 'Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the Scout movement and citizen training in Great Britain, 1900-1920', English Historical Review 101 (1986), pp. 376-98.
23 John O. Springhall (ed.), Sure ami Steadfast a History of the Boys' Brigade, 1883-1893 (London, 1983),
24 The figures for emigration cannot be broken down in class terms, but the overall figures give some indication of the: scale of increase. Total emigrants from England, Wales and Scotland to British North America, Australasia and South Africa were 650,800 during the 1880s and 452,600 during the 1890s. P.J. Cain, 'Economics and empire: the metropolitan context', in Porter,, Oxford History, p. 47.
25 For an impressive exception, see Rollo Arnold, The Farthest Promised Land: English Villagers. New Zealand Immigrants of the 1870s (Wellington, 1981).
26 N.H. Carrier and J.R. Jeffery, External Migration: a Study of the Available Statistics, 1815-1950 (London, 1953), pp. 95-6.
27 H.L. Malchow, Population Pressures: Emigration and Government in Late Ninetemth-Century Britain (Palo Alto, 1979).
28 J.R. de S. Honey, Tom Brown's Universe: the Development of the Victorian Public School (London, 1977), pp. 209-17.
29 Stefan Collini, 'The idea of "character" in Victorian political thought', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 35 (1985), pp. 29-50.
30 Field, Toward a Programme of Imperial Life.
31 Hugh Cunningham, The Volunteer Force (London, 1975).
32 J.A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School: the Emergence and Consolidation of an Educational Ideology (Cambridge, 1981).
33 H.H. Almond (1897), quoted in J.A, Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal (London, 1986), p. 28.
34 Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: the 'Manly Englishman' arid the 'Effeminate Bengali' in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester, 1995), pp. 107-8.
35 Dr W. Ord (1894), quoted in W.J. Reader, Professional Men (London, 1966), pp. 89-90.
36 This proportion also includes a significant number of public schoolboys who emigrated to the colonies to sample a frontier life under their own steam. F. Musgroye, The Migratory Elite (London, 1963), pp. 19-21; Patrick Dunae, Gentlemen Emigrants: from the British Public Schools to the Canadian Frontier (Vancouver, 1981), p. 60.
37 For example, Mangan, Games Ethic.
38 Thus for Kipling, empire-building was valued less for the sake of the empire than for the qualities which it nurtured in the empire-builder. Andrew Rutherford (ed.), Kipling's Mind and Art (Edinburgh, 1964), p. 185.
39 Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (London, 1980).
40 Jeffrey Richards (ed.); Imperialism and juvenile Literatim (Manchester, 1989).
41 Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, pp. 37-45.
42 John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester, 1988).
43 J.S. Bratton, The Impact of Victorian Children's Fiction (London, 1981), pp. 115-33.
44 MacDonald, Sons of the Empire, pp. 62-3, 68-70, 82-7.
45 Mangan, Games Ethic, pp. 58-70.
46 See for example the instant mythologization of Allan Wilson's stand against the Ndebele in 1893: MacDonald, Language of Empire, pp. 131-5.
47 Martin Green,- The Adventurous Male (University Park, PA, 1993), p. 71.
48 Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: the British Experience (Manchester, 1990).
49 Dunae, Gentlemen Emigrants.
50 On the personal way in which authority was exercised in the colonies, see Kathryn Tidrick, Empire and the English Character (London, 1980).
51 Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 243-64, 406-24.
52 H.M. Durand, Life of Lyall (London, 1913), p. 264.
53 George W. Steevens, The new humanitarianism', Blackwood's Magazine 163 (1898), p. 104.
54 Patrick Dunae, 'Boys' literature', Victorian Studies 24 (1980), pp. 105-21; Boyd,, Manliness and the Boys' Story Paper, p. 124.
55 Richard Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire (London, 1997), pp. 69-70. Note however that Louis James has identified the 1870s as the high point of violence in adventure writing for boys. Louis James, 'Tom Brown's imperialist sons', Victorian Studies 17 (1973), p. 99.
56 See Iain R. Smith, The Emm Pasha Relief Expedition (Oxford, 1972).
57 Catherine Hall, 'A response to the commentators', Journal of British Studies 12 (2003), p. 538.
58 Hobson, Imperialism, p. 234.
59 P.M. Holt, The Mahdist State in the Sudan, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1977), p. 240.
60 See in particular John M. MacKenzie (ed.), Propaganda and Empire (Manchester, 1986); John O. Springhalt, Youth, Empire and Society: British Youth Movements, 1883-1940; Paula M, Krebs, Gender, Race and the Writing of Empire: Public Discourse and the Boer War (Cambridge, 1999); Valerie Chancellor, History for their Masters (Bath, 1970); Kathryn Castle, Britannia's Children: Reading Colonialism through Children's Books and Magazines (Manchester, 1996); Boyd, Manliness and the Boys' Story Paper, ch, 7.
61 Chancellor, History for their Masters, pp. 124-30, 137-8; Krebs, Gender, Race and the Writing of Empire, pp. 4-22.
62 Penny Surnmerfieid, 'Patriotism and empire: music-hall entertainment, 1870-1914', in MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, pp. 17-48.
63 John M. MacKenzie (ed.), Popular Imperialism and the Military, 18S0-19S0 (Manchester, 1992), pp. 111-12.
64 Simon Dagut, 'The migrant voyage as initiation school: sailing from Britain to South Africa, 1850's-1890s' (unpubl. conference paper, University of Western Australia, 1999), p. 12.
65 Michael Blanch, 'British society and the war', in Peter Warwick (ed.), The South African War (Harlow, 1980), p. 215.
66 MacKenzie, Popular Imperialism and the Military.
67 Richard Price, An Imperial War and the. British Working Class (London, 1972).
68 Ibid., p. 176; Blanch concurs: 'British society and the war', p. 235.
69 Gregory Anderson, Victorian'Clerks (Manchester, 1976), pp. 56-60.
70 G.L. Anderson, 'The social economy of late Victorian clerks', in Geoffrey Crossick (ed.), The Lower Middle Class in Britain (London, 1977), p. 122.
71 Richard N. Price, 'Society, status and jingoism: the social roots of lower middle-class patriotism, 1870-1900', in Crossick, Lower Middle Class in Britain, pp. 89-112. See also Blanch, British society and the war'.
72 A. James Hammerton, Cruelly ami Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Married Life (London, 1992).
73 Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: the Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, 1989),
74 John Tosh, A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (London, 1999), pp. 172-82.
75 Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisqim (London, 1918), p. 5,
76 My view has been criticized for generalizing from too few examples: A. James Hammerton, review of A Man's Place in journal of Family History 25 (2000), pp. 552-4, and Robert Morrell, 'The family man and empire; Sir Albert Hine of Natal, 1875-1903', Journal of Natal arid Zululand History 18 (1998), pp. 20-44.
77 A. James Hammerton, 'Pooterism or partnership? Marriage and masculine identity in the lower middle class, 1870-1920', Journal of British Studies 38 (1999), pp. 291-321.
78 The families of W.E. Gladstone, Edward Benson and Francis Rhodes (father of Cecil Rhodes) are cases in point.
79 Hammerton, Cmelty and Companionship, ch. 5; Tosh, A Man's Place, pp. 178-82.
80 Margery Perham, Lugard: the Years of Adventure (London, 1962), pp. 61-73; Tim Jeal, Baden-Powell (London, 1989), pp. 26, 345, 411, 569; Janet Adam Smith, John Buchan (London, 1965), pp. 45, 68-9, 165.
81 G.W. Steevens, With Kitchener to Khartum (Edinburgh, 1898), p. 50.
82 H, Rider Haggard, King Salomon's Mines (London, 1885), p. 9.
83 Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed (London, 1891). For perceptive commentary, see Preben Kaarsholm, 'Kipling and masculinity', in Raphael Samuel (ed.), Patriotism (London, 1989), vol. III, pp. 215-26; and Joanna de Groot, ' "What should they know of England who only England know?" Kipling on the boundaries of gender, art and empire', in Geoffrey Cubitt (ed.), Imagining Nations (Manchester, 1998), pp. 173-89.
84 Dudley Bairies, Migration in a Mature Economy: Emigration and Internal Migration in England and Wales, 1861-1900 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 84-5, 130-6.
85 Geoffrey Sherirxgton, Australia's Immigrants, 1788-1978 (Sydney, 1980); Arnold, Furthest Promised Land.
86 Quoted in Jock Phillips, A Man's Country? The Image of the Pakeha Male - A History, 2nd edn (Auckland, 1996), pp. 37-8.
87 Marilyn Lake, 'The politics of respectability: identifying the masculinist context', Historical Studies 22 (1986), pp. 116-31.
88 Musgrove, The Migratory Elite, pp. 19-21.
89 Hyam, Empire and Sexuality, pp. 106-10; Norman Etherington, 'Natal's black rape scare of the 1870s', Journal of Southern African Studies 15 (1988), pp. 42-3.