Of Morals, Sex, and Theory

Last June, the New York Times, ran a blurb on the magazine cover for an article about “AIDS, Africa and Monogamy.” The article argues that in southern Africa, people who are unfaithful to their partners are likely to have ongoing, concurrent relationships that might contribute more to spreading HIV than one-night stands, which people in the U.S. tend to have when they are cheating. There’s no particular data to uphold either side of this claim about cross-cultural differences in infidelity, only impressions from a small sample of people with AIDS. This unrevealing article, which wouldn’t pass critical muster if anyone were skeptical of its assumptions, together with the lurid tag line (referring to the entire continent as if it were a singular place, where AIDS and sex are exotic) suggests something of the absurdities of what it is still possible to say in a serious news source about race, sexuality, and disease in the former British Empire—“they” are a homogenous mass, with different morality than “ours,” in need of help.

Philippa Levine’s Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire provides a thoughtful account of how this state of affairs came to be. From the second half of the nineteenth century on, she writes, “the assumption of a direct link between promiscuity and disease, between sexual desire and racial characteristics, remained stable. Doctors writing early in the twentieth century were just as likely to blame the filth and loose morals of natives for the spread of disease as were their counterparts sixty and seventy years earlier. The sexual fecundity of the tropics, the fear of contagion, the associations between race and sex changed very little...” (323) up to the present, as she says several pages later, when these anxieties are translated into the discourse of AIDS. In itself, this insight is not entirely earthshaking, although Levine says it with more authority and with more research than many previous monographs. What makes this book particularly helpful, though, is that she explores this attribution of exotic sex and disease across a significant period of time and multiple colonies—India, Australia, Hong Kong, and the Straits Settlements—and in relation to specific histories of politics, governance, labor, and migration.

Prostitution, Race, and Politics is divided into two parts. The first is a chronological study of the fate of the Contagious Diseases (CD) acts in the four colonies, with some discussion of their stories in England and in other possessions, including South Africa, Egypt, and Malta. The second part is organized thematically, exploring topics like masculinities, racialization, the geographies of sex, and the “problem” of white prostitutes in the colonies. The first half expands what we know from others’ work primarily as an Indian and English story, the fight between regulationists, repealers, colonial officials, and the military to regulate venereal disease through medical examination of prostitutes—their segregation, if healthy, into licensed brothels or barracks, generally for commerce with British soldiers; and if ill, into lock hospitals. Levine’s extensive archival research adds tremendous detail and depth to this account. The addition of material from Australia (particularly Queensland), the Straits, and Hong Kong suggests both continuities and discontinuities—sometimes reiterating the India story, and sometimes veering off wildly in another direction. In one riveting chapter, “Diplomacy, Disease, and Dissent,” Levine narrates the outcome of the repeal of the CD Acts in the metropole in the 1880s. First, efforts in London to repeal the Indian version of the CD Acts provoked stiff resistance from the colonial government in India, to the point where it very nearly engendered a constitutional crisis. Even in the face of outright repeal, however, regulationists in India (and Hong Kong and the Straits) changed their practices but little. This provided considerable fodder for English repealers, who were able to embarrass a government that claimed to have repealed its endorsement of “vice,” with reports from the field of ongoing inspection and regulation. “The fact that public opinion about empire could be shaped by sex was an extraordinary development that repealers used to their advantage,” writes Levine. (91) In Queensland, in contrast, “a settler colony enjoying...