The Promiscuous State: The Contributions of Political History

Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire by Philippa Levine is a magisterial book. The book works at multiple levels, providing a masterly case study of the control of prostitution and of venereal disease in the British Empire from the 1860s to the First World War. The territory that the book traverses, the vast interconnected world of Britain and its empire, offers a rich, if, daunting, model to emulate. Its comparative and geographic sweep is sure-footed and comprehensive: it covers India, Hong Kong, the Straits Settlement, Queensland, and, of course, Britain, with pertinent insights drawn from other parts of the British empire thrown in for good measure. The story it tells is a heady mix of the military and the sexual; of prostitution and constitutional crisis; of medicine and morality; and of sex workers and proconsuls. In addition, Levine has trawled through a prodigious amount of material both secondary and archival to produce a rare bird: an empirically grounded theoretical book. Both sides of this equation are equally strong.

The most obvious way to read Levine’s ambitious book, perhaps, is along with the work of such scholars, as Antoinette Burton, Catherine Hall, Ann Stoler, and Angela Woollacott, as an exemplary model of what has been loosely termed the “new imperial histories.”¹ That it certainly is. However, there are multiple ways to read this book. In its disciplined eclecticism, it deliberately engages with, and pushes the boundaries of, a number of subfields: imperial history, British history, gender history, and political history, to name only a few. I am especially struck by the way this book works as political history par excellence. The comparative case study of colonial policy on the regulation of prostitution has theoretical and methodological implications for charting a new terrain for political history. Levine combines imperial history, gender history, and the histories of medicine and sexuality to offer a renewed case for attention to the state. This, for me, is ultimately the most interesting context for Prostitution, Race, and Politics.

The contemporary state of political history, as Susan Pedersen makes clear, is decidedly mixed. The pronouncements about the “end” of political history have certainly turned out to be premature. To be sure, “traditional political history” — with its top-down focus on “high politics” — is in retreat. Yet, as Pedersen and several others have noted, political history as such has not so much been “abandoned as rediscovered and redefined.”² In the wake of the “linguistic turn,” indeed, erstwhile social historians as well as cultural historians and gender historians have turned with new gusto to the study of such things as popular politics and political culture. There may even be a certain rapprochement in the air with the concerns of “high political” historians, gender historians, and historians influenced by the “linguistic turn” coming together in the expanded understanding of the political realm opened up by the “new political history.”³ Something, however, is still remiss. Whereas the “new political history,” as Pedersen notes, has made considerable advance in the study of political leaders and parties and of political culture and ideas, it falls short in a crucial respect. I agree with Pedersen that much contemporary work is marked by a relative neglect of structural interpretations and of comparative analyses, which were the strength of the once popular Marxist and comparative histories of the 1970s. This is where Levine’s salutary comparative case study of the policies of the state breaks new grounds for even the “new political history.”

The theoretical and methodological advance of Prostitution, Race, and Politics as political history, I believe, derive from two major sources. The first is the range of the book’s intellectual influences: the cross-pollination of various fields enables the radical contribution of the book’s argument. The second is the unusual bipartite organization of the book. The book is divided into a first half that recounts the twists and turns in the state regulation of prostitution and control of venereal disease; a second half that focuses on the enduring ideas, beliefs, and assumptions that underpinned these policy decisions follows. While clearly both these factors...