Colonialism and Contagious Diseases

Abstract

Colonialism and Contagious Diseases Alison Bashford This is a book that matters. At the dual levels of information and interpretation — equally important — we learn much from Levine in Prostitution, Race and Politics. And in methodological terms, this book will stand for many years unsurpassed: it is a model for a fresh kind of comparative history. Ambitiously tackling not just the classic comparative ‘two’ cases, but four distinct colonies of the British Empire – Hong Kong, the Straits Settlements, Queensland and India – Levine traces carefully the regulation of prostitution for the prevention of the spread of venereal diseases and, most significantly, the debate and practice around colonial Contagious Diseases Acts. Levine’s major intervention is to demonstrate and illustrate how crucial the regulation of sexuality was to every level of governance in the colonial domain: from Westminster, to the Colonial Office, to colonial governors, local administrators and experts. She reminds her readers continually that if historians have overlooked sex-as-high-politics, historical players certainly did not. Levine’s well-known work on constitutional crisis and the colonial recrudescence of Contagious Diseases Acts in the 1890s is now fully contextualized as the most extreme moment in a much longer history, where sex continually disrupted and challenged the public world. Part of a broad shift in British feminist historiography, Levine has complicated and enriched her earlier work on politics and Victorian feminism, with considerations of race, colonialism and Empire. Several decades of feminist history about the relatedness of the private, including sexual conduct, and the public political world, is the scholarly antecedent which makes this intervention possible. In the tradition of Davidoff and Hall’s 1987 Family Fortunes, Prostitution, Race and Politics is a landmark book in the feminist historiography of modern Britain: it inherits and dramatically extends the feminist theorisation and the historicisation of the gendered constitution of the public, by the private. And like Catherine Hall’s own research move from Birmingham of Family Fortunes to the Midlands-Jamaica relations of Civilizing Subjects, Levine adds so many rich sites and lines of enquiry by incorporating the colonial project into study of the ‘Contagious Diseases Acts’, as to lift the complexity of the issue to another plane altogether. This is both a fine example of, and may well mark a high point in, the dovetailing of feminist and colonial studies. Levine’s basic research question is brilliantly straightforward: if the controversy around the domestic Contagious Diseases Acts crystallized classic Victorian liberal concerns about the state, commercial sex and regulation of private conduct, how was this all connected to, shaped by, and/or different from equivalent (but as we learn never identical) colonial acts? Exactly what difference did colonial contexts and questions of race make to the manifold issues pressed into public debate by the CD Acts, venereal diseases and the regulation of prostitution? The research question begs a comparative method which is the strength of the book. The next methodological question then becomes: which colonies to select, and why? Levine states that CD legislation operated in almost all colonies in the period, implying a representativeness of these cases, but at the same time showing clearly how different were local practicalities of rule. Yet, at least in the Australian colonies, CD Acts were more unusual than usual. Queensland and Tasmania had CD legislation comparable to the British Acts of the 1860s, but New South Wales did not (apart from a slightly different Prisoners’ Detention Act of 1909). One wants to know a little more about how and why these particular colonies were selected and not possible others. Would the same arguments stand if, for example, the selection were Victoria, Fiji, Cape Colony and Jamaica? Perhaps future scholarship will take up further comparisons. Levine is doing something quite unusual in interrogating these colonies in one study. We see the distinct difference between the colony of white ‘settlement’— Queensland – and the others. On the one hand, historians of the Empire are well schooled in this, sometimes problematically, sometimes critically. But rarely do we have the evidence so carefully laid out before us. It mattered constantly that the Contagious Diseases Act in Queensland was aimed in the first instance at regulating white women, while in India...