Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (review)

Research on the history of venereal disease (VD) has flourished in recent years. To this body of literature Philippa Levine's Prostitution, Race, and Politics makes a rigorous, sophisticated, and original contribution. Her study examines the ways in which race and sexuality, in conjunction with gender and class, were expressed in the British colonial legislation that aimed to slow the spread of VD in various colonies. While the Contagious Disease (CD) Ordinances were conceived as a mechanism to protect the health of British soldiers, Levine argues that the laws governing prostitution throughout the empire were also a calculated instance of British colonial efforts to regulate sexual practices, especially the "sexual disorder" of the colonized. In their scrutiny of prostitutes, who were viewed as the principal conduits of sexual and moral disease, colonial officials deliberately managed the dynamics of "interracial" sex to ensure the strength of the British Empire, nation, and race.

Part 1 of this ambitious book examines in detail the specific policies that were introduced between the 1860s and the end of World War I to regulate contagious diseases in four British colonial settings: Hong Kong, India, Queensland, and the Straits Settlements. The specific goal of these laws was to protect imperial soldiers from contracting disabling sexually transmitted diseases; the larger aim was to defend military power. Levine's prodigious research—using never-before-examined primary archival sources—and painstaking referencing shows that this goal was met by controlling prostitutes, especially indigenous women, who were considered to be the source of VD due to their putative moral and racial inferiority. Women working as prostitutes, particularly those serving British soldiers and sailors, were compelled to register with colonial authorities and undergo regular exams for VD by military physicians. Curiously, women alone were held to be responsible for disease transmission; they alone were liable to legal and medical surveillance. While this system of VD inspection was codified throughout the British Empire by the mid-1870s, its implementation differed in interesting and salient ways from colony to colony. By carefully outlining these functional differences, Levine demonstrates the complexity and diversity of the British colonial project as well as some of its inherent contradictions.

Part 2 contains a more theoretical discussion of the interrelationships among colonialism, gender, race, and sexuality that the author hopes will stimulate dialogue among historians of different subdisciplinary stripes. She draws on medical, military, political, social, and cultural studies, including much feminist scholarship, and integrates them in her comparative examination of the colonial laws and practices established to regulate prostitution and control disease. Her intent is to investigate "the effects, material and discursive, of assumptions that racial difference existed and mattered" to both supporters and enemies of regulated prostitution and to demonstrate that "the fact of racial ideologies had profound implications for both the understanding and the practice of colonialism" (5-6).

With its potential to weaken the British race, undermine its alleged superiority, and ruin the colonial enterprise, the prospect of the spread of VD throughout the empire induced fear in colonial authorities, a fear that materialized in VD legislation. But while such legislation was largely accepted and enforced by officials, it was fiercely debated by indigenous people and British abolitionists. Church representatives and "feminists" alike argued that the colonial state encouraged vice by regulating prostitution. Although abolitionists eventually succeeded in having VD laws repealed, Levine argues that contentions about sexuality changed very little. Even today, the politics of prostitution, race, and disease are entwined in global concerns about AIDS in Africa, keeping colonial era racial and sexual hierarchies intact.

Levine's range of concerns should draw to this book a broad set of potential readers, including historians of the British Empire, postcolonial theorists, women's studies scholars, feminist historians, sexuality and venereal disease specialists, and those interested in the role that British women played in the colonialist project (in this case, as regulatory abolitionists and prostitutes). Although the book will provide stimulating...