Clare Midgley

British Women, Women’s Rights and Empire, 1790–1850

Most research on the history of the relationship between British feminism and imperialism has focused on the period between the 1860s and the First World War.1 This is understandable: this was both the period of ‘first wave feminism’ — of the first organized women’s movement — and the period of high or ‘new’ imperialism, when imperial concerns came to the fore in British politics. In the late Victorian and Edwardian period empire also arguably had its greatest impact on the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain: as John MacKenzie has concluded, ‘the values and beliefs of the imperial world view settled like a sediment in the consciousness of the British people’.2 But what, then, of the period which Jane Rendall and others have identified as seeing the origins of modern feminism in Britain, the 1790s to 1850s?3 This was, after all, a time of immense expansion in British dominion overseas. Around 150 million people came under British control between 1790 and 1820 alone, in territories as widely dispersed as southern Africa, India and Australia. In addition, Christopher Bayly’s persuasive argument that ‘the Regency empire was in an important sense an extension of domestic social change overseas’ alerts us to the importance of exploring the relationship between domestic and imperial developments at this period.4 What, then, can be said about the relationship between Britain’s imperial concerns and British women’s feminist preoccupations during the early nineteenth century?

Mary Carpenter and the Brahmo Samaj of India : a transnational perspective on social reform in the age of empire.

This article, offering a transnational perspective on Mary Carpenters promotion of female education in colonial India, seeks to foster the writing of new histories of social reform in the nineteenth-century world and fresh analyses of global womens history in the age of empire. It roots Carpenters engagement with India in her involvement in a transoceanic web of British, Indian and American religious liberals and social reformers and explores the ways in which her promotion of Indian womens education was shaped in interaction with members of an influential Bengali socio-religious reform movement, the Brahmo Samaj. Presenting the resultant push to found training schools for women teachers as a project of cross-cultural collaboration, it argues that this cannot be adequately subsumed under the rubric of colonial reform, and did not simply relegate Indian women to the position of silent victims who needed to be saved.

TRANSOCEANIC COMMEMORATION AND CONNECTIONS BETWEEN BENGALI BRAHMOS AND BRITISH AND AMERICAN UNITARIANS

This article traces the history of the commemoration in Britain, India, and America of leading Bengali religious and social reformer, Rammohun Roy, from his death in Britain in 1833 through to the publication of the first substantial account of his life and work in 1900. It reveals the vital part that commemorative processes played in creating a sense of imagined community among liberal religious groups who were in the vanguard of social reform movements in India, Britain, and the United States. The groups under consideration are the Brahmo Samaj, an organization founded by Roy to reform Hinduism, and Unitarians, Protestant dissenters who rejected the orthodox Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity and the evangelical approach to missionary work. Bridging the study of transatlantic and imperial networks, the article explores a culture of commemoration that emphasized affinity rather than difference between groups whose members were unequally positioned in colonial discourse as on opposite sides of the colonizer–colonized, Hindu–Christian, and East–West divides. It exposes the commemoration of Roy as a complex and contested process, creating both ‘localized’ and ‘globalized’ collective memories. These reveal the possibilities for, and limitations on, cross-cultural interchange in an age of global Christian mission and British imperial power.

Bringing the Empire home: women activists in imperial Britain, 1790s–1930s

This chapter focuses on womens metropolitan-based activism on imperial issues in the period between the 1790s and the outbreak of the Second World War. The women concerned are mainly British-born, white and middle or upper class as it was from this sector of the population that the leadership for most empire-focused campaigns came. However, there is also some consideration of white working-class womens relationship to these campaigns, and of both white colonial women and black and Asian women who were active within or without these movements, and often challenged hegemonic discourses. Discussion concentrates on womens activism within organisations with a specifically imperial focus, rather than imperial activism within the organised feminist movement or the relationship between feminism and imperialism, aspects of which are covered in chapters by Jane Rendall and Keith McClelland and Sonya Rose. The chapter covers a long time-span, which saw major developments both in the politics of empire and in womens relationship to public life and politics. It explores the interconnecting dynamics of these two arenas of change through discussing womens involvement in movements aiming to reform the Empire and the colonised, in organisations promoting support for imperialism, and in anti-imperial and anti-racist activism. Chronologically, these campaigns overlapped with each other, but they peaked in succeeding periods: the nineteenth century, the Edwardian period and the interwar period respectively.

From Supporting Missions to Petitioning Parliament: British Women and the Evangelical Campaign against Sati in India, 1813–30

Between 13 February 1829 and 29 March 1830 a total of fourteen separate groups of women from around England sent petitions to Parliament calling on it to abolish sati, or rather what they described as ‘the practice in India of burning widows on the funeral piles of their husbands’.1 Amongst the earliest examples of female petitioning, and directly preceding women’s more extensive petitioning for the abolition of colonial slavery, this intervention in the political process was taken not by women who identified themselves as radicals or supporters of the ‘rights of women’ but rather by women associated with the evangelical missionary movement. The petitions formed the climax of a broader campaign against sati linked to women’s support for missionary activity in India and to the first coordinated attempt to provide Christian education for Indian girls and women.

Liberal Religion and the ‘Woman Question’ between East and West: Perspectives from a Nineteenth‐Century Bengali Women's Journal

British and American Unitarians and members of the Brahmo Samaj of India belonged to liberal religious groups that played leading roles in movements to improve women’s education and social position in Britain, the United States and colonial India.1 Their engagements with the ‘woman question’ were informed by a shared conviction that human progress could be achieved through combining a rational or intuitive, rather than an authoritarian or dogmatic, approach to faith with a radical agenda of social reform. Unitarianism and Brahmoism did not develop in isolation from each other, but rather in the context of a long history of cross-cultural interchange and co-operation. This article, focused on analysis of articles published in the first Bengali women’s journal, Bamabodhini Patrika, presents new evidence about the nature of the intercultural liberal religious milieu within which debates on the ‘woman question’ were shaped in the nineteenth-century world. In the process, it offers a fresh perspective on the role of religious movements in the global development of modern feminism. From their consolidation in the 1820s as distinctive liberal religious groupings, Unitarians and Brahmos identified each other as kindred spirits. Unitarians in Britain and America formed national organisations in 1825, which brought together heterodox Protestant congregations who questioned the Trinitarian belief in Christ’s divinity and rejected the Calvinist doctrine of original sin. United by a belief that ‘true religion’ was marked by good deeds rather than adherence to orthodox Christian dogma, they formed close-knit transatlantic networks promoting the abolition of slavery, social reform and women’s rights.2 These Unitarian networks inter-meshed with transoceanic webs of connection with the Brahmo Samaj (Society of Worshippers of the Supreme Being), founded in Calcutta in 1828 by Rammohun Roy to promote monotheistic religion and social reform among Hindus.3 Rammohun Roy engaged in extensive correspondence and exchange of tracts on religion and social reform with leading British and American Unitarians, and he cemented and extended these personal connections during an extended visit to Britain prior to his death in Bristol in

The Cosmopolitan Biography of the English Religious Liberal, Feminist and Writer, Sophia Dobson Collet

This chapter explores the cosmopolitan life of the little-known English religious liberal, feminist and writer, Sophia Dobson Collet (1822–1894). It examines Collet’s close connection with members of the Brahmo Samaj, a movement founded in 1820s Calcutta by Ram Mohan Roy to promote religious and social reform among Hindus. It shows her pivotal role in shaping a ‘cosmopolitan thought zone’ connecting Brahmos with British and American Unitarians, Transcendentalists, Theists and liberal Christians. Collet, it argues, enacted spiritual fellowship and a shared commitment to social reform within a respectful trans-racial and trans-faith affective community. Although she did not articulate an anti-imperial politics, she was committed to bridging the racialised divisions and hierarchies that characterised the ‘imperial social formation’ between Britain and India.

The Limits of Cosmopolitanism on the Cusp of Empire

The lives, friendships and encounters charted in this book reveal partial, uneven and contradictory processes at work in individual lives and across political and social movements. Engaging with knowledge and culture from around the globe at the same time as mediating its impacts through the spiritual and ethical consciousness that emerged out of everyday life was both a practical and a utopian pursuit. It was undertaken, as we have argued, in ways that were not straightforwardly derivative of Europe but which called into question the West’s claims to provide a universal template of rights and conditions that was beneficial and applicable to the world as a whole.

Friendship, Faith and Cosmopolitan Thought Zones on the Cusp of Empire

The legacies of colonialism continue to resonate, in a new era of intensified globalisation that once again places race and religion at the centre of a search for peaceful co-existence. This book looks back to the period 1860–1950 in order to grasp how alternative visions of amity and co-existence were forged between people of faith, within but resistant to imperial contact zones. This chapter contextualises our argument that networks of faith and friendship played a vital role in forging new vocabularies of cosmopolitanism that presaged the post-imperial world of the 1950s.

Provincialised Cosmopolitanisms: Jehangir P. Patel and Marjorie Sykes

Sometime in the 1980s, two elderly people embarked on a collaboration; a collaboration that affirmed half a lifetime of political fellowship and personal friendship. The result was an English-language book Gandhi. His Gift of the Fight. The lives of Marjorie Sykes and Jehangir P. Patel gain historical timbre in the interstices of the larger tale they seek to tell. Two lives take shape in ways that unravel the binaries informing taken-for-granted assumptions about the colonial. They offer a case study of cosmopolitanisms that provincialises the European concept. These provincial cosmopolitanisms did not need to reject a sense of patriotism as a pernicious parochialism. Instead, they inscribed patriotism and nationalism into universalisms that challenged the assumed universalism of European imperialism.