Sisters under the skin: imperialism and the emancipation of women in Malaya, c. 1891–1941

‘White women were the ruin of Empire’ is an opinion that has been confidently asserted by various commentators seeking to explain why the sun set on ‘the greatest Empire the earth has known’. Charles Allen records that all the worst faults of the British Raj were said to stem from the ‘memsahib’, including, Ballhatchet suggests, the introduction of racial exclusiveness. ¹