NATION AND EMPIRE IN MODERN BRITAIN

Nation and Empire in Modern Britain

Introduction

In this archaically wealthy, geographically far-reaching and admirably comprehensive study, Philippa Levine boasts us the first authentically transnational account of how and why sexuality was regulated in the up to date British Empire. Grounding her clearing annals in four colonial sites, Levine boasts irrefutable clues that the administration of sexuality was centered to, if not constitutive of, British imperial direct in both ideology and practice. Prostitution, Race and Politics verifies without a shaded of a question that disquiet about colonial bodies and more expressly, about the meet of European topics with them was basic to administrative and political methods at the largest grades of imperial government (Warren, 1987).

Discussion

Sexuality and Prostitution

Sexualities globalized, infection avoidance internationalized, foreign infantry interventions rationalized--in this spectacular work of feminist annals, Philippa Levine discloses how these politically-charged methods, so salient for us today, threaded their modes through the British Empire. Levine values her enquiry of colonial principles on sexuality, especially prostitution and venereal infections between the 1860s and 1918, to discover the fragilities and achievements of colonial direct over the British Empire.

Prostitution, Race, and Politics covers the advent and elaboration of contagious diseases legislation in four British colonies India, the Straits Settlements (Singapore), Hong Kong, and Queensland (Australia). The attempt to police sexual relations in these key colonial sites centered on the regulation of prostitution, the registration of prostituted women, their inspection for venereal disease, and their sanitary detention if found to be in a contagious state. Pioneered in the early nineteenth century, this way of managing sexual relations across the gender, class, and/or racial divides was by the second half of the century a systematic and characteristic feature of British imperial rule (Warren, 1987).

Modern medical science was accompanied not only by the inevitable authoritarianism, but also by ...