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

In her remarkably ambitious book, Philippa Levine focuses her attention on the establishment and trajectories of contagious disease (CD) regulations in the British Empire from the 1850s through the end of World War I. These highly controversial laws provided for the regulation of prostitution in Britain and in most of the British colonies by the mid-1870s. In defending the significance of her project, Levine insists that efforts to control venereal disease by regulating prostitution deserve more than a historical footnote. She challenges the customary interpretation of these laws as mere efforts to protect the health of soldiers. Instead, she argues convincingly that the battles over CD regulation engaged the central issues of the empire—sexual regulation, disease control, racial hierarchy, gender distinctions, and the civilizing mission. In other words, she claims that the politics of venereal disease control capture the very essence of the British Empire.

The scope of Levine's project is astonishing. She covers roughly seventy years and examines CD regulations in the metropolis and in four colonial contexts—Hong Kong, Queensland, the Straits Settlements, and India. These colonies differed in their racial make-up, their bureaucratic relationship to Britain, and their strategic role in the empire. Levine documents the unique history of CD regulations in each of these places and describes the tensions between colonial needs and imperial dictates. Through her exhaustive research and her careful analysis, Levine convincingly illustrates that the nature of the empire was influenced both by the particular demands of the local cultures and by the imperial desire to control sexual behavior, deploy racial hierarchies, and manage gendered ideology.

Levine is at her best in demonstrating how the surveillance and regulation of prostitution was part of a larger colonial project of constructing both racialized colonial subjects and sexualized colonial subjects. Both strategies, she argues persuasively, were crucial to establishing and legitimating colonial rule. By viewing CD regulation as central to the structure of the British Empire, she also nicely illustrates that medicine played a crucial role in the "imposition of colonial power" (p. 9). Disease control provided justification for the surveillance, isolation, and regulation of colonial bodies in the name of progress and modernity.

Levine divides her analysis into two parts. The first part examines chronologically the fortunes of CD regulations in the British Empire. The second section approaches the material more thematically, identifying continuity of thought and action in the interlocking histories of sex, gender, race, and empire. As a practical measure to organize her voluminous material, this division works well. Nevertheless, the decision also limits the success of some of her intentions. By separating the chronological approach from the thematic, for example, she weakens her own attempt to eliminate the distinctions between political, military, and medical history on the one hand and cultural and social history on the other. Furthermore, the book would have benefited from the integration of the two sections, reminding the reader of the cultural issues at stake in establishing and protesting the regulations and providing some chronological specificity to the thematic material. But this is a minor quibble in an otherwise outstanding book.

In Prostitution, Race, and Politics, Levine looks at venereal disease regulation and finds the British Empire. This book, remarkable both for its scope and its analysis, contributes significantly to our understanding of colonial history. Historians of women, medicine, and sexuality will also benefit from its insights.