Purifying Empire: Obscenity and the Politics of Moral Regulation in Britain, India and Australia (review)

Purifying Empire traces attempts to regulate obscenity in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth- century Britain, Australia, and India, making a convincing case for the importance of culture in destabilizing imperial power. As growing networks of travel and trade eroded boundaries between the centre and peripheries of the British Empire, the movement to define obscenity and regulate obscene texts and ephemera was transformed from a national British project to an imperial and global one. This shift, as Deana Heath shows, had some fascinating consequences. Based on archival research in India, England, and Australia, Purifying Empire combines comparative history with Foucaultian analysis to examine obscenity regulation in the imperial metropole, a settler society, and a colony. Heath rightly insists on the value of such multi-sited scholarship to our understanding of the plural and contingent nature of imperial rule, and her work reveals striking similarities and differences between three places that are usually studied separately.

Using Alison Bashford’s concept of “imperial hygiene,” Heath begins by examining the emergence of obscenity as a “biopolitical project” in early-nineteenth-century Britain (3, 1). Whereas in the early nineteenth century obscenity was understood as a “lower-class social problem imported by itinerant foreigners” (58), Heath argues that by the late nineteenth century Britons had come to see it as a medical, racial, and hygienic issue. Concerns about purity, racial fitness, and the increasing instability of metropolitancolonial boundaries coalesced in the well-publicized obscenity trials of Henry Vizetelly, a British-born publisher who specialized in translations of realist novels by Émile Zola. Heath shows how the Vizetelly trials spurred the creation of a project of imperial hygiene through which the British state, medical authorities, and voluntary organizations sought to police the traffic of obscene texts and goods throughout the Empire. She argues that this regulatory campaign had a number of unintended effects, the most notable of which was the notion that instead of being a pure society threatened by foreign filth, Britain and its imperial networks actually formed “a vast system for the purveyance of ‘obscenity’” (80).

The Vizetelly trials also reverberated—albeit in different ways—in Australia and India. Heath writes that Australia, which by the late nineteenth century had become “the largest single market for British books and periodicals” (93), initially accepted British guidance with respect to obscenity regulation. By the early twentieth century, however, attempts to police the obscene were subsumed under the newly federated nation’s so-called White Australia policy—a set of laws usually associated with racially restricted immigration but that, as Heath demonstrates, also included the construction of a cultural cordon sanitaire to protect Australians from the floods of allegedly impure publications that were thought to be coming from Britain.

Heath turns next to a discussion of India, another lucrative market for British publishers. She notes that unlike the Australian government, the British Indian government did little to regulate obscenity; instead, Indian elites sought to preserve national purity by transforming the regulation of obscenity into a biopolitical project. As a source of obscene texts whose governing authorities had failed to modernize India, Britain was reconceived (as it had been in Australia) as a backward and degenerate place whose cultural exports threatened “the fashioning of a pure, clean and hygienic Indian modernity” (205).

Purifying Empire will appeal to scholars interested in moral regulation and colonial governmentality; obscenity and censorship; print culture; imperial, comparative, and transnational histories; and the histories of Australia, India, and Britain. Dealing with these three very different places in a single analytic frame is a difficult task and Heath manages it admirably, tracing connections and divergences within and between her three chosen locations. This study is strongest on internal divisions in Britain and India, however, which makes especially jarring Heath’s relative neglect of differences in class and status in Australia. The book’s theoretically informed prose also occasionally obscures an interesting...