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This chapter provides an overview of key parts of the field of gender for historians accustomed to thinking that questions about women or gender in the British Empire are not pertinent to what they do, or of the view that such studies are still ‘stuck in a specialized subbranch of historical explanation’. A comparative framework drawing together the varieties of metropolitan and colonial experience from the late 19th century also suggests new insights. The new models for bourgeois morals and racial segregation spread across the Empire, often in response to the sharpening of local political resistances to European penetration. The Empire equally represented a ‘field for action’ for women of more secular and socially radical persuasions. At many levels, gender formed a critical dimension of the British Imperial system and of colonial social relations.

Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Frantz Fanon challenged the way that authoritative reason and disciplinary methods had contributed to the advance and normalization of colonial relations. Unlike Rousseau, however, Fanon framed himself as a man of his times and emphasized how difficult it was to reject the offerings of French modernity in a world where to be human was racialized as white. To assure that science and reason were not simply additional instruments of imperial endeavors, Fanon therefore developed creolized humanistic psychiatric practices and approaches to studying and writing about how societies and human beings could be decolonized. Driven by the imperative of disalienation, he drew on resources traditionally disparaged in fields of psychology and psychiatry that in fact advanced both. The chapter argues that although not intentionally, Fanon critically engages some of Rousseau’s core ideas through creolizing them or by revisiting their problematics in light of the contradictions of seeking mental health within colonial conditions. He does this by reemploying language, concepts, and aspirations borne of a much older European world and making them speak anew as he grappled with challenges that were fresh and familiar, distinctive and broadly shared.

This essay explores the difficulties faced by interracial couples - primarily West African men and British or German women - in gaining acceptance in society in the interwar years in Britain and West Africa. It considers the impact of the 1919 race riots in Britain during the postwar economic downturn that left maritime, immigrant, and working class communities particularly impoverished and led to a surge in racism and backlash against non-British labourers. West African men were accused of ‘stealing’ both jobs and women, and white women accused of betraying their nation through interracial marriage. This hostility led to efforts at repatriation to West Africa, which colonial governments would often prevent through legislation. The second half of this essay is a case study of West African husbands and German wives, who caused tremendous legal difficulties to governments looking to cease repatriation. The case studies demonstrate that notions of sex, gender, class, nationality, and religion informed colonial policies that heavily impacted the migration efforts of interracial couples.

This chapter examines representations of Englishness and the British Empire in the writings of W. Somerset Maugham and Anthony Burgess. It suggests that Maugham's representation of Europeans in Malaya is troubled by a reservation expressed in the work as to the authority of Englishness. Burgess, on the other hand, harbours an anxiety as to the role of the Englishman in the tropics. Taken together, the works of these two authors depict a Malaya that is gradually becoming socially and politically uninhabitable to its colonial occupants.

The word “Iberia” and the ethnonym “Iberes” were used by the ancient Greeks to designate a relatively vast region on the Mediterranean edge of the Iberian Peninsula that extended to the north of Cartagena to the Pyrenees, or even farther. In the second century BC, the term acquired a more general signification and tended to name the whole peninsula. This chapter offers a brief account of the colonial relations that developed in Iberia from the seventh century BC, when Phoenician traders coming from the Straits of Gibraltar area visited its shores for the first time, until the last years of the third century BC, when, as a result of the Second Punic War, the whole area came under the rule of the Roman Republic. It examines the role of colonial trade in the transformation of indigenous Iberian societies in different regions during the period. It emphasizes especially the complex, contingent, and regionally variable relations that developed among Phoenicians, Greeks, and indigenous peoples.

This concluding chapter reiterates that the circumstances in which the war broke out at Tiamou in April 1917 provided an opportunity to examine the place of fear, rumor, and violence in attempts to maintain colonial power relations. War was not the result of an innocent misunderstanding or mutual incomprehension. Nor was it a product of wild settler imaginations, unprovoked Kanak aggression, or a “savage” reflex. Threats by colonial administrators and their intermediaries during recruitment for the war in Europe were one immediate catalyst. For those on the receiving end, threats were heightened by the specter of arbitrary arrest and grievances accumulated over six decades of French colonization as well as personal and collective enmities, rivalries, and insults.

This chapter is about French politics and law against headscarf use. Socio economic conditions of French Muslims and France’s colonial past, the ideology of cultural assimilation and strictly implemented laicite principle of the Republic provided a special circumstances for Muslim in France different than rest of the Europe. Especially, French concept of laicite is an important component of the current headscarf debate. Besides Turkey, France is the first country in Europe that a major headscarf controversy took place, and received global attention. The French law of 2004 that prohibited religious symbols from public middle and high schools is an important turning point in Europe as the first legislative action against Muslim school children, more so than other minority religions. The Chapter end with the discussion on the new law that prohibits Islamic dress (burqa) from public space.

Grounded mainly on the historic aspects of Mainland ties and the country's colonial and post-colonial relations between Britain, Hong Kong cinema during the period between the 1980s and the 1990s was characterized as “crisis cinema” since it gave way for the rise of new patterns of time and space, language, place and identity, and even meaning. Filmmakers recognized the return of Hong Kong to the mainland as text and subtext, and Hong Kong people were found to participate more actively in terms of politics after the 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square. Chan's gender bending can be perceived in the light of illiberal Mainland laws as well as commercialism within the Mainland's slowly changing economy. This chapter emphasizes how the film entails globalization and explains some economic aspects of the country's film industry.

Nearing the end of the journey through the minds of travelers in central Africa, this chapter comes back to choices made at the outset, and looks at one genre of writing: The travelogue addressed to a wide readership. The explorers' reports of ethnographic practices in turn allow one to take part in the epistemological critique of ethnography. The discussion aims to understand metonymic connections between exploration and ethnography. There are contiguous, albeit not necessarily continuous, links between past and present research practices and discursive habits. Both have been part of the history of economic and political relations between Africa and the nations where most work in the profession today. Colonial relations are present now in routines and conventions of research and writing. The chapter ends with comments on illustrations and the myth of exploration kept alive, above all, in visual images.

This chapter further examines the Sports Illustrated case, focusing mainly on two things. The first argument deals mainly with the touristic travel context of the swimsuit issue. This context alone reflects racial conceptions that posit Africans as inferior to Westerners. This notion is seen in representational practices that perpetuate colonial relations. In a way, the photo shoot created a sense of colonialism because it placed contemporary American identity in relation to the rest of the world. At the same time, the meaning for the Ndebele audience and participants was different. For them, the photographs speak to autonomy, cultural pride, and economic power, more so because they relate to the postapartheid moment in which the shoot took place. This meaning for the Ndebele audience, then, is what constitutes the second discussion of this chapter. The chapter explores these contrasting meanings as well as the intersections of various localities in these representations.

This concluding chapter argues that the privatization of the Medicare and Medicaid programs in Puerto Rico failed despite promising more efficient care management and expanded access to pharmaceuticals and specialists. Rather than producing a health system that was rational and easy to navigate, privatized managed care created new barriers to accessing care through eligibility requirements, enrollment processes, and administrative procedures. The chapter provides four reasons why privatized managed care failed to deliver. First, privatized for-profit managed care is far better at making and managing money than managing health (or people). Second, neoliberal health programs are based on asocial and ahistorical understandings of human subjects and behavior. Third, these programs are undermined by their own hubris. And lastly, in Puerto Rico, colonial relations of rule have contributed to the failures of managed care and the creation of a health system that is largely unmanageable.