Masculinities,Race and Nationhood – Critical Connections

Books reviewed in this article: Hazel V. Carby, Race Men Gillian Creese, Contracting Masculinity: Gender, Class, and Race in aWhite‐Collar Union, 1944‐1994 Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and theImagined Fraternity of White Men     

Competing Masculinities: Fraternities,Gender and Nationality in the German Confederation, 1815–30

Immediately after the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon (1815), university students, particularly the nationalist fraternity, the Burschenschaft, sought to connect the German nation with martial values. They practised gymnastics, duelled and commemorated veterans of the Napoleonic wars. The era after the Wars also illustrates greater mediation in the discourse of masculinity than has generally been acknowledged, however. University students never achieved consensus on what masculine identity or German identity entailed. By applying enlightened principles to notions of honour and the practice of the duel, Burschenschafter also articulated a new, more moral vision of the German man, one based more on rationality and self‐discipline than on martial values.     

‘The White Wife Problem’: Sex,Race and the Contested Politics of Repatriation to Interwar British West Africa

Based on archival research in Ghana and Britain, this article documents the sustained but failed attempts of working‐class West African seamen to repatriate to the colonies with their European wives during the interwar years. Colonial authorities crafted policies to prevent these couples from making British West Africa home because they feared that the presence of European women living ‘in native fashion’ with their African husbands would destabilise colonial race relations. After discussing the origins of this policy in the context of the 1919 race riots that swept Britain's port cities, the article draws on the case of a West African man married to a German woman to illuminate how concerns about race, sex, gender, nationality and class informed the politics of repatriation to British West Africa during the interwar years.     

George Weekes: Rogue Missionary to New England Indians, 1731–1755

During the mid‐1700s, an uneducated layman named George Weekes began preaching to Native Americans in the town of Harwich, Massachusetts. Weekes’ missionary activity triggered a passionate response from Nathaniel Stone, the local minister, and inaugurated a debate regarding ministerial qualifications within the community. Scholars who study English missionary activity in colonial New England tend to focus upon the careers of trained clergy, such as John Eliot or Josiah Cotton. Other individuals, who possessed questionable moral character and little education, also preached to New England Indians, however. In this instance, the career of George Weekes, a rogue missionary, reveals that contact with Native Americans could shape ecclesiastical life in colonial Massachusetts. It also suggests that Native Americans encountered popular, as well as elite, English religious culture when they interacted with English missionaries in early New England.     

Imperialism and nationalism: The Home Rule struggle and border creation in Ireland, 1885–1925

This article explores relationships between imperialism and nationalism, illustrated by their interactions in the struggle over devolved Irish ‘Home Rule’ and partition between 1885 and 1925. Ireland's partition border was primarily an imperial creation shaped by the prolonged, complex and unequal interactions between Irish nationalism and British imperialism. But partition was by no means an inevitable outcome of a mutually constitutive and ambiguous relationship where British imperialism had long characterised Ireland as a frontier zone but one within the core of empire. The Irish case serves as a reminder of the role of imperial arbitration in modern state and nation-building, and also in sowing the seeds of contemporary conflicts. This argument draws on the recent ‘re-discovery of imperialism’ and is advanced as a corrective to reading history backwards through the lenses of contemporary national states. It challenges the tendency to draw overly sharp temporal and spatial distinctions between imperialism and nationalism as rival ideologies and practices.