Prostitution and Racialised Sexuality: The Regulation of Prostitution in Britain and the British Empire before the Contagious Diseases Acts

Abstract

In this paper I examine the interplay of race and sexuality in 19th-century British colonial legislation concerning prostitution. I demonstrate that British systems of regulation of prostitution predated the introduction of the Contagious Diseases Act in 1864, and that rather than spreading from Britain to its colonies regulationist measures developed from the interplay of metropolitan-colonial relations. The example of Hong Kong serves to illustrate both the priority of colonial systems for the regulation of prostitution and the explicitly racialised nature of this legislation. I argue that colonial practice served as more than a merely legislative precedent for domestic measures, however, as racial discourse and practice can be seen to mark all attempts at the regulation of prostitution, at home and abroad; and the conception of ‘racialised sexuality’ is useful for understanding both colonial and domestic measures for the regulation of prostitution. Understanding the historical geography of regulation therefore undermines conventional analyses of relations between imperial metropole and colonial periphery, and directs our attention to the articulated categories of race, class, sexuality, and gender in the complex colonial spaces of the British imperium.