The process of empire-building and the influences it has postulated on the developments of world history has always been a fervent topic of discussion among scholars due to the magnitude of its scale and its far-reaching consequences. Imperialism reached its height from the 18th to the 20th century before it faded away against the backdrop of decolonization after the Second World War (WWII). Historians are in particular concerned about a myriad of issues pertaining to imperialism, tracking its manifestation and proliferation and finally to its decline. From political developments to economic trends to underlying currents of social and moral perplexities, imperialism offers a kaleidoscopic perspective of both the colonizers and the colonized …show more content…
Hyam situates the sexual escapades of white men in relation to the defence of their careers, providing various narratives of imperial elites who were inadvertently caught in and destroyed by the entanglement between their public and private lives. Hyam brings into the discussion the tragic endings of Charles Stewart Parnell, Sir Hector Macdonald and Sir Roger Casement, all of whom had been outstanding imperial elites whose meteoric rise and fall was characterized by their unrestrained sexual interests and maneuverings which cost them their entire career. Some crushed their reputation and destroyed their livelihood, while others lost their raison d 'être and died a broken man. It is easy to associate the decline of these white men to their sexual obsession with native women, as a Chinese idiom hongyan huoshui (红颜祸水) may illustrate: a beautiful woman is the cause of troubles. What is interesting about Hyam’s thesis is that he cleverly subverts this usual perception. As a matter of fact, these white men who have fallen from grace were not always obsessed with women. They were in fact obsessed with men, as Hyam detailed their sexual fantasies with rent-boys and native male partners which eventually became the defining blow to their careers. Hyam’s lengthy discussion about how men who could not resist their sexual urges sacrificed their careers ended with a caveat that these marital troubles were in essence reflective of the need for sexual compatibility where he asserts could be easily burdened by “misery of separation for imperial men and their wives, uncertainties of childbirth, ill health and juvenile attitudes of Victorian men towards women (pp.