Response

What a pleasure to be invited to respond to four such generous, engaged and thoughtful readings of Prostitution, Race and Politics! Rare is the author amongst whose principal worries is not that she will be misread, misunderstood or misrepresented. That’s a claim I am happy not to have to make here for in these four discussions of my work, and whatever their reservations, it is clear that all four scholars have taken seriously my intent to reposition the comparative as a methodology vital to studies of imperialism.

I suspect all four of these respondents would agree with me in seeing its structure as the most controversial aspect of this work. The choice to divide the book into a synchronic and a diachronic section was made neither lightly nor swiftly. As anyone who has any familiarity with my work over the past decade and more already knows, this book took a long time to produce, and underwent dramatic metamorphoses until quite late in the day. The possibility of offering a colony by colony account of the legislation, its repeal and its effects was one I rejected very early on, ever knowing I was thereby adding years to the writing of the book and taking far greater risks. Yet it was an issue on which I felt – and still feel – strongly. Such an approach seemed to me not only to endorse a dominantly narrative approach to the topic and to the field, but also to run the risk of re-consolidating colonial case studies as emergent national histories, a tactic from which I wanted to distance myself. Moreover, and as pressingly, I thought such an approach would be – plain and simply put – boring, and would fail to illuminate the textures that thematic comparison offered. Why should the reader need to move across four chapters to know how the hotly debated business of paying for the Contagious Diseases Acts was handled in different sites? Why not say something larger about the variability of colonial practice and its implications by showing these contradictions in what struck me as a more immediate and revealing way?

But choosing the thematic over the geographically specific was not, as the critiques of Briggs and Sinha suggest, the only choice I made. The decision that ultimately separated what some will dub the ‘political’ from the ‘cultural’ chapters was a difficult one. How else to tease out such strands as the spatial anxieties thrown up by the colonial reading of prostitution as a brothel-oriented industry? Concern that such key topics as homophobia, sexual taxonomy, or the liminal Jewish woman would be otherwise swamped partly pushed me to this choice, but I also wanted to see what would emerge if these two very different modes of thought were folded together, made to speak to one another through a common topic and set of presuppositions. Would a different structure have produced a variant set of conclusions? I doubt it. For me the driving motivation for a multi-sited study (by which I mean not only looking at many places, but playing among different historiographical traditions) was how best to offer the complex of arguments – in different kinds of sites, methodological as well as political and topical – I wanted to make. My hope is that others will see more connection than have Sinha and Briggs between these differently-styled but ultimately linked readings.

Alison Bashford asks what difference an alternative choice of colonies would have made, another question which gets at methodology as much as at content. The possibilities, of course, were overwhelming and certainly other options were equally compelling. I was looking, however, to ensure that the colonies I did study had enough both in common and to differentiate them that they would stand comparison. I hope that the inclusion in the text of examples from elsewhere in the British imperial world serves to remind readers of the broader issues raised by the study.

Stephen Pierce asks for more on indigenous women, but notes at the same time that the kinds of local specificities entailed by that desire would be well nigh impossible in a “comparative work of this scope.” His pertinent and intriguing questions...