Imperialism led to a massive African and Asian migration to Europe to supply labor for European factories. c. Most migrants were women, as Europeans only wanted to give jobs in mines and plantations to cheaper female laborers. d. Imperialism led to the migration of millions of indigenous workers to work in mines or on European-financed plantations.
European colonizers welcomed men of other races as equals. c. Nearly half of European colonizers were women, and their strong, forceful role led to a rethinking of gender attitudes at home. d. Native peoples condemned European colonizers as effeminate, mocking them for relying on superior technologies rather than bravery to win their battles. a.
As gender is key to the construction of imperial hierarchies, the experiences of women offer especially important insights. Gender is essential to an understanding of the social impacts of colonialism on the rulers as much as on the ruled and thus to the social history of empire.
c. Nearly half of European colonizers were women, and their strong, forceful role led to a rethinking of gender attitudes at home. d. Native peoples condemned European colonizers as effeminate, mocking them for relying on superior technologies rather than bravery to win their battles.
In India they were able to go out freely, to assert greater independence, to shape and control their life situation, to increase their personal power, and to become socially more mobile than they were in Britain.
Gender is essential to an understanding of the social impacts of colonialism on the rulers as much as on the ruled and thus to the social history of empire. The British imperial system in India functioned by means ...
The nineteenth-century British empire in India provided unique opportunities for British women to compare their social positions to those of the indigenous population of the subcontinent. Victorian feminists viewed Indian women both as passive subjects and as examples against which to gauge their own progress.
India provided British men not only with career opportunities; in metropolitan society men gained influence and prestige because the British government viewed them as contributing to Britain's international eminence and power. Imperialism, as has become clear, was also beneficial to British women.
Among all the European imperialist nations, Great Britain controlled the largest colonial empire until the end of World War II. Imperialism, as many scholars argue, became the foundation of British national identity after the mid-nineteenth century, and India became the jewel in the crown of the British Empire.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the swelling impetus of the imperial mission began to draw women in great numbers—for instance, over one thousand arrived in 1875, and over sixteen hundred in 1895.