Sex, politics and empire

A postcolonial geography

Richard Phillips

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780719070068
• eBook ISBN: 9781526118462
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Colonial governments, institutions and companies recognised that in many ways the effective operation of the Empire depended upon sexual arrangements. For example, nuclear families serving agricultural colonization, and prostitutes working for single men who powered armies and plantations, mines and bureaucracies. For this reason they devised elaborate systems of sexual governance, such as attending to marriage and the family. However, they also devoted disproportionate energy to marking and policing the sexual margins. In Sex, Politics and Empire, Richard Phillips investigates controversies surrounding prostitution, homosexuality and the age of consent in the British Empire, and revolutionises our notions about the importance of sex as a nexus of imperial power relations.

CHAPTER ONE

Spreading political knowledge: English newspapers, correspondents, travellers

Like people and schools of criticism, ideas and theories travel – from person to person, from situation to situation, from one period to another.¹

English purity campaigners saw their own country as a net exporter of the ideas, laws and movements that drove sexuality politics around the world. Josephine Butler claimed that ‘England has been sending forth to all these parts of the world two streams, one pure and the other foul’.² She echoed the words of Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano, who had asked many years earlier how ‘a fountain’ could ‘send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter?’³ Claiming and alluding to African political forebears, Butler tacitly acknowledged that the abolition of slavery had not simply been an English victory, and that slaves and other Africans had played a part. Nevertheless, she invoked the moral responsibility that many of the original abolitionists had shouldered and claimed for England. Other English purity activists made similar claims about the responsibilities and influence that went with power. For Ellice Hopkins, the new abolitionism was a metropolitan project that had been exported to the rest of the world, ensuring that ‘other nations followed the noble repentance of England’.⁴ William T. Stead (1849–1912), an English journalist equally convinced that the eyes of the Empire were fixed on England, and more specifically on himself, asserted that his interventions in metropolitan sexuality politics would result in a ‘shuddering horror . . . that will thrill throughout the world’.⁵ Claims such as these, laying moral responsibility at the feet of the English, but in the process reasserting English influence, betrayed a mixture of strategy and arrogance.

A form of diffusion?

Parallels and coincidences in global sexuality politics, past and present, have sometimes been attributed to the diffusion of ideas and identities. Michael Mason used this term to describe the spread of new forms of sexual morality through Victorian society,⁶ Dennis Altman, the spread of gay and lesbian identities through the modern world,⁷ Larry Knopp and Michael Brown, the spread of queer culture and politics within the contemporary USA.⁸ But what does the term mean? A standard dictionary definition of ‘diffuse’ is ‘to disperse or be dispersed from a centre; to spread widely, disseminate’.⁹ Some patterns – increases in the age of consent in England ahead of many other parts of the Empire, for example – seem to suggest that innovations were originating in England and then spreading to other parts of the Empire.

Geographers have elaborated more generally on this compellingly simple idea:

A stone is tossed into a pond. The consequent splash forms a large wave immediately around the entry point. Within a second, waves are starting to move out in a circular pattern across the surface of the water. Some seconds later, very small ripples are disturbing the weeds on the far side of the pond.¹⁰

Peter Haggett explains that the stone may take the form of a virus in a susceptible population or information in a communication system, and that the pond may be composed of individuals or social groups. The idea of diffusion can be modified and complicated to allow for waves moving at different speeds, originating off-centre,¹¹ mediated by human ‘hopes and fears’, and by ‘power, personality and relationships’.¹² Consistently, however, diffusion involves ‘the ability to spread outwards or to disperse from one or more limited centres to a wider geographical area’.¹³ In each case, an innovation spread from one place to another over time, advancing in ‘waves of adoption’,¹⁴ through a combination of simple proximity (a ‘neighbourhood effect’) and hierarchical connection.¹⁵

The idea of diffusion, structured as it is around centres and margins, places that respectively innovate and adopt, act and are acted upon, resonates with understandings and ideologies of colonialism. Some of the most powerful interpretations of colonialism, such as Carl Sauer’s analysis of the dispersal of cultural traits from origins, or ‘cultural hearths’,¹⁶ and Frederick Jackson Turner’s analysis of westward expansion as a ‘tide of innovations moving remorselessly outwards from the Eastern Seaboard’,¹⁷ revolve around ideas about diffusion. More generally, James Blaut identifies ‘diffusionism’ with ‘the colonizer’s model of the world’:

This belief is diffusionism, or more precisely Eurocentric diffusionism. It is a theory about the way cultural processes tend to move over the surface of the world as a whole. They tend to flow out of the European sector and toward the non-European sector. This is the natural, normal, logical, and ethical flow of culture, of innovation, of human causality. Europe, eternally, is Inside. Non-Europe is Outside. Europe is the source of most diffusions; non-Europe is the recipient.¹⁸

For Blaut, ‘diffusionism’ is broader than the more specific and abstract idea of spatial diffusion and more politically committed, more closely embedded in a Eurocentric worldview. But while he deconstructs its assertion that ‘Inside innovates, Outside imitates’,¹⁹ Blaut does not consider the possibility that sometimes this is precisely what happens, if only because the centre, constructed and self-appointed as it is, uses its power to invent and export. Though ultimately I follow Blaut in challenging the ideological underpinnings of diffusionism, I propose to explore the extent to which this notion does explain spatial and temporal patterns in the emergence of systems of regulation and forms of resistance. Did innovations in regulation and resistance emerge at central points and spread outwards? The mechanisms and processes by which English sexuality politics was exported might, for instance, involve channels of communication such as the postal service and inter-colonial and international media, and be channelled through personal and social contacts and networks. Without discounting the possibility that movements spread in multiple directions – such processes are considered in later chapters – this chapter examines the processes by which purity movements may have spread from England to other parts of the British Empire.

English purity campaigners were conscious of the importance, and in some cases the reciprocity, of their relationships with activists in other countries. As Butler put it ‘Our work is world-wide . . . No nation now “liveth to itself or dieth to itself”, any more than the individual.’²⁰ They not only cooperated with their counterparts on the Continent, but openly borrowed from them. For instance, regulation had been introduced in France much earlier on – in 1802 by Napoleon – and the French had an equally long history of resistance from which the English were able to learn. Butler, who worked with colleagues in France, Belgium, Switzerland and elsewhere, advised her countrywomen and men to learn languages and acquaint themselves with ‘the efforts and conflicts of reformers of other lands’.²¹ The leader of the National Vigilance Association (NVA), a leading English purity campaign group, ‘found that to keep the work on watertight national lines would at best achieve only partial success, and at worst might end in disillusion and collapse’.²² He argued that international cooperation was important, not only because European countries had similar experiences, but because those experiences were linked, notably by the inte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• General editor’s introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Mapping the tyranny
• 1 Spreading political knowledge: English newspapers, correspondents, travellers
• 2 Provincialising European sexuality politics: the age of consent in India
• 3 Colonial departures: Australian activists on the age of consent and prostitution
• 4 Heterogeneous imperialism: deciding against regulation in West Africa
• 5 Generative margins: introducing a stronger form of regulation in Bombay
• 6 Drawing distinctions: Richard Burton’s interventions on sex between men
• 7 Experimental and creative places: Creole interventions in Sierra Leone
• Conclusion: fields of understanding and political action
• Bibliography
• Index