He received his M.A. in History from University of Missouri and his Ph.D. from University of Virginia, and he currently serves as Assistant Professor of History at Washington State University. He has published articles in Journal of the Early Republic, Diplomatic History, and American Review of Canadian Studies, among other places, and his current book project, Citizens of Convenience: Nationhood, Empire, and the Northern Border of the American Republic, 1783-1820 is under contract with University of Virginia Press, to be published as part of the Early American Histories series.
Dr. Ashley Wright’s article published
“Maintaining the Bar: Regulating European Barmaids in Colonial Calcutta and Rangoon” has been published in The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.
In 1902 the government of India banned the employment of European women as barmaids in Calcutta and Rangoon. This article examines this intervention, proceeding from the premise that a close look at this ban, and the women whose lives were affected by it, illuminates the entangled and at times contradictory ideas about gender, sexuality, mobility, labour and racial boundaries that characterised British imperial policy in India and Burma at the beginning of the twentieth century. This article argues that European barmaids, while seemingly marginal, in fact occupied a unique and important position within the British Empire, being at the heart of the recreational worlds of Calcutta and Rangoon. Read more here.