“I’ll liberate Africa with my penis,” declares Mustafa Sa’eed, a protagonist in Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, considered one of the most important works in Arab literature.

Sa’eed, whose life coincides with the period of British colonisation of Sudan, is a brilliant student who goes on to study in Britain, shines in academia, shows political promise in his leadership of the anti-colonial struggle, and writes scholarly tomes. But he has a fatal flaw: he uses his exotic charm to seduce English women. He destroys their lives in the process, three of them commit suicide. But for Sa’eed, it’s all for a cause – they are collateral damage in his quest to reclaim the masculinity that Sudan has lost to the British empire.

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In his perverse conquests, Sa’eed is seeking to reverse a sexualised power dynamics that has existed between empires and their colonies, new and old. From Rudyard Kipling to Theodore Roosevelt, imperial agency has always sought to justify colonial campaigns as “manly” civilising missions, citing the coloniser’s masculine superiority as the rationale for its right to control distant lands – a well-hung empire for the well-endowed colony.

The resistance to the imperial project has also, consequently, been mostly couched in muscular terms. Asia’s freedom struggles are replete with clarion calls for men to rise and stop the rape of the motherland, a universal nationalist trope. As Cynthia Enloe puts it in her Bananas, Beaches, and Bases, “nationalism has typically sprung from masculinised memory, masculinised humiliation and masculinised hope”. Look no further than Sa’eed.

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But phallic domination as a tool for power projection and control has got a lot subtler since the days of assembly-line rapes by Genghis Khan and his men, to the extent that it can go mostly undetected these days. Until its cover is blown now and then by an unsubtle practitioner such as Donald Trump, who recently tweeted that his nuclear button is “a much bigger and more powerful one” than that of Kim Jong-un, who he also fondly calls “Little Rocket Man”.

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Trump’s thinly veiled phallic bluster has distinguished precedents in US history. When Americans began to debate if the Philippines should be set free or become a colony after the US won the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the Philippine-American War broke out the following year, Theodore Roosevelt led the imperialist argument saying: “We of America, we, the sons of a nation yet in the pride of its lusty youth … We know the future is ours if we have the manhood to grasp it, and we enter the new century girding our loins for the contest before us.” He won the debate.

Roosevelt was channelling the prevailing politico-religious consensus. Anxieties about falling male attendance in churches and fears of dwindling manliness with “overcivilised” men losing touch with nature as a result of industrialisation and urbanisation had triggered the “Muscular Christianity” movement in England around the middle of the 19th century. Churches, for the first time, began to offer physical activities such as exercise and athletics. They also called on men to engage in the then male domains of military, politics and business, imperial adventures and international evangelism. The idea was that British manhood would save the world from barbarity and the world would save British manhood from civilisation.

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Muscular Christianity reached America in the 1870s and gathered pace around the turn of the century, leading to the establishment of boys’ and men’s lodges and fraternal bodies such as the Boy Scouts of America. These organisations embodied European and American male codes of honour such as valour, drive, virility, restraint and dignity. Going forth into the world, acquiring colonies and spreading these supposed white male values was the zeitgeist of the time.

But the exercise of masculinity would vary depending on geography. In Africa, where the inhabitants were perceived as savage, justification for colonial rule would need the creation of the myth of black primal and bestial sexual appetite to contrast it with the measured, civilised masculinity of the white man. The coloniser’s control over his urges would be the rationale for his right to control the land.

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In India, an advanced civilisation, legitimising imperial control would on the other hand necessitate the construct of the weak and effeminate native destined to be ruled by the strong, virile Englishman. Historian James Mill, for example, who wrote the History of British India – without ever visiting India – saw Hindus as possessing “a certain softness … that distinguished them from the manlier races of Europe”. For Colonel JSE Western, Hindus were “the non-fighting classes (who) never possessed the desirable virtue of courage”.

British writings of the time are particularly unkind to the inhabitants of Bengal, the nerve centre of the Raj and the site of the most extensive contact between the sahibs and their subjects. For historian and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay, who describes Bengalis as weak, timid and devoid of any masculinity, “There never perhaps existed a people so thoroughly fitted by habit for a foreign yoke.”

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Concurs journalist and writer George Warrington Steevens, “The Bengali’s leg is either skin and bone … or else it is very fat and globular … with round thighs like a woman’s. The Bengali’s leg is a leg of a slave.”

David L. Eng of the University of Pennsylvania calls this process of feminising Asian men “racial castration”, designed to perpetuate a racist and heterosexist structure to support colonial order. In the US – on its way to replace the 19th century colonial powers as the torch-bearer of western global leadership – this feminisation of Asians was to take other forms.

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The iconic photo taken to mark the completion of the historic transcontinental railway line in 1869, for example, doesn’t have a single Chinese face in this celebrated male achievement even though some 10,000 to 15,000 of them are estimated to have worked on the project. Instead, as resistance began to grow against Chinese immigrants taking the white man’s jobs, these immigrants found themselves increasingly refused factory work and finding employment in tasks then associated with women, such as cooking, washing and cleaning. Many found jobs as houseboys. Even in 1920, half the Chinese men in the US were employed as domestic help.

To extract more work from male Chinese workers and save American employers the cost of covering the upkeep of the workers’ dependents, laws were passed to restrict Chinese women from entering the US. Only about 1,300 Chinese women were allowed entry into the US between 1875 and 1882, compared with some 100,000 Chinese men. Simultaneously, miscegenation laws mostly applied only to Chinese men, while white men could marry Chinese women.