Imperial Conquest, Violent Encounters and Women in the Colonies in Colonial Warfare, 1830s-1910s

From the 1830s to the 1910s, warfare characterized rapid imperial expansion and indigenous resistance. Aggressively expanding colonialism was structured by militarized violence that impacted on women, in places ranging from the British settler colonies of Canada and Australia, to crown colonies of several European empires including British India and Burma and the Netherlands East Indies. In British settler colonies, sexual conquest was a tool of colonial conquest, naturalized and unacknowledged as the violence it was. Rape was common, while bartering for sexual services shaped daily life for indigenous women and undermined traditional gender relations for the colonized. Aboriginal resentment of such abuse was one trigger for the recurrent staging of attacks and reprisals, the cycle of often-deadly skirmishes that constituted frontier warfare. In militarized colonial societies, official and semi-official forms of organized prostitution developed to service imperial troops. Racial hierarchies shaped daily life in and beyond army cantonments. Concubinage was practiced in European colonies in Southeast Asia, including the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina and British Burma. Indigenous women’s status was impacted by wars of conquest and militarily-enforced colonial rule. Racialized conceptions of colonized women centered on sexual services for colonizing men and the domestic labor of unsanctioned marriages and unequal household partnerships. This paper will address the contingent historical relationship between gender and warfare in globally-scattered contact zones; how war, militarism and the threat of force shaped gender relations under colonialism.