Prostitution, Race and Politics

Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire

Philippa Levine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135945015
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

In addition to shouldering the blame for the increasing incidence of venereal disease among sailors and soldiers, prostitutes throughout the British Empire also bore the burden of the contagious diseases ordinances that the British government passed. By studying how British authorities enforced these laws in four colonial sites between the 1860s and the end of the First World War, Philippa Levine reveals how myths and prejudices about the sexual practices of colonized peoples not only had a direct and often punishing effect on how the laws operated, but how they also further justified the distinction between the colonizer and the colonized.

Chapter

1

Comparing Colonial Sites

Everything is now grand and imperial!
—William Cobbett

Colonial contagious diseases (CD) legislation operated in almost all of Britain's overseas possessions, but this book will focus principally on such laws in four important colonies. In Hong Kong, formal regulation of brothels preceded the British law, introduced first in 1857. In India, the 1864 Cantonment Act brought regulation to military zones, while the 1868 Indian Contagious Diseases Act extended it to the cities. Queensland passed a Contagious Diseases Act in 1868 and the Straits Settlements adopted its first CD ordinance in 1870.

Each of these four colonies offers a different model of colonial rule and a different demographic profile, but a shared experience of colonialism. Comparing them provides a framework that offers a nuanced reading of how colonial power operated. Different policies—and not just in the arena of VD control— were at work in each of these colonial settings, but their shared characteristics make comparison viable. All had multiethnic and racially diverse populations, were of considerable significance to Britain, were part of, or proximate to Asia, and were often and severally compared to one another by British and colonial officials. These colonies had distinctive demographic make-ups and were ruled in a variety of forms, yet they share enough population characteristics to make comparison feasible. Above all, they offer a variety of forms of colonial governance, a diversity that helps us to see the complexities within British imperialism rather than allowing all policy to be filed under a simple and homogenous heading of colonial rule. While Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements were crown colonies, settler Queensland was self-governing from the mid-nineteenth century and British India experienced a unique form of direct rule, a combination of practices inherited in part from its East India Company history and by subsequent diktat from Westminster as well as by a multilayered local white population. The Straits, moreover, had been India's fourth Presidency for a couple of decades prior to Crown Colonial status, and had, as a result, a substantial Indian population. The palpable distinctions between white settler governance and the autocracies characteristic of dependent colonies underline the racial politics at work here. Such differences in rule hint at the impossibility in talking of “empire” or of “race” in a unitary way, while the common ground of their being colonial possessions, and along a common regional axis, offers sufficient connection to make comparison workable. What do the different versions of the CD laws in these settings suggest about race, about empire, and about gender in a period in which Britain's own national sentiment was so bound up with imperial prowess?

Comparing different colonies also makes sense in this era since the movement of migrant peoples within the colonial world meant that increasingly diverse populations complicated the business of ruling subject peoples. All these colonies experienced significant migration and shared many of the same immigrant populations, not surprisingly. The Indian population of the Straits may have been larger than the Indian population of Hong Kong, but both colonies had significant pan-Asian populations by the 1870s, even if their dominant populations (either numerically or politically) were southern Chinese. Queensland, too, took in a variety of Asian migrants (predominantly from China and India) for manual work alongside a large contingent of Pacific Island labor. All these factors, these overlapping networks of population and of migration, suggest that the colonial world was a highly mobile place in which groups moved from country to country, mostly in search of work. Their presence in each of these colonies offers us a point of comparison as well as of contrast, in determining how local officials chose to label, to understand, and to control each of these diverse subject populations.

Vital to this comparative project are ideas of nation and of race, and their inextricability in the rise of the modern national/imperial state.¹ Comparative work, though it comfortably encompasses the prospect of changes in the contours and identity of the nation, has seldom put the question of nation as itself a historical category under scrutiny. Rather, comparative work often assumes rather than historicizes the idea of nation, providing what Robert Gregg calls “extra layers of cement,” fixing people in “columns of transhistorical meaning.”² In traditional comparativist readings, the nation as a fixed point of historical reference (“British” history, “Indian” history, “French” history) holds steady, even while the frontiers of the nation might change. In other words, comparative history has sometimes taken the nation to be somehow a natural as well as obvious site for historical enquiry, and thus outside and irrelevant to the analytical lens. Relatedly, as Edward Said has pointed out, comparative literature, at least, was born of imperialism, with its assumption of the sovereign western commentator privileged to view the totality.³ This transhistorical position, in which the idea of nation is fixed and stable, the natural subject of historical investigation, necessarily relies on a notion of national difference, that nations and their peoples display certain characteristics that allow the historian to recognize them as such. The danger here, of course, is that nation and race become synonymous. The binding together of biology and politics that this association made possible served British colonial needs, as many of the following chapters will demonstrate. This preference for a universalist reading of events and hierarchies also normalized the nation-state as the proper site of politics and governance, delegitimizing tribal and communal forms of rule that were not formalized in ways understood by the colonizers. This position made the claim that colonized nations needed guidance and education before self-rule could be granted seem self-evident; “lesser” peoples needed schooling in modernity before they could be let go. This attachment to what Bill Readings has identified as an “enlightenment pattern in which local superstition is replaced by universal theory,” illuminates the claims to wisdom, to universalism, and to rationality that the British claimed their colonial rule represented.⁴ The nation, thus, was inextricably bound to colonialism.

Such a methodology also presupposes that nations precede empires, that the spread of colonialism can only follow from a nation's expansion. This top-down view renders imperialism a phenomenon which is catalyzed by and viewed from the metropolis. In many instances, it is an emphasis that results in a one-way reading of empire, in which ideas and policies flow from the center to the periphery. Empires, in this reading, are merely the foot-soldiers of metropolitan progress and action. My reading is a more fluid one, which contends that changes in nations are as much the product of influence from empires as from internal and domestic pressure, dissent, and debate. Certainly, an empire cannot be claimed or founded by something that has not already claimed for itself nationhood (at least, not in modern terms), but this by no means precludes the possibility that empires constitute the nation as much as they are constituted by it. This is not simply to argue that culture and politics as well as material goods move in two directions, influencing at either end, but that the identity of the nation in its modern dress is intimately linked to ideas around empire. Nations, from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, have seen the absence or presence of empire as a measuring stick of power and influence; the very quality of nationhood cannot thus be separated from imperialism. I would therefore argue that we cannot as historians assert a chronological and linear progression from nation to empire, but must rather engage the two as simultaneous.⁵ It is to avoid this unilinear trap that Inderpal Grewal dubs her comparative stance “transnational,” examining cultural “flows” rather than only marking difference.⁶

Clearly, I seek a comparative approach that can reject fixed categories and which does not assume national commonality. I am not, I would stress, ready to abandon the comparative, since it surely need not deal in universals. My comparative base specifically challenges the idea of the universal by exploring the specificities and historical contingencies that shaped the application of CD laws in the different arenas described below. As important here as recognizing the ways in which colonial power could profit from the equation of nation and race, is an insistence that we cannot speak of the colonial world, in this case the British Empire, as a single entity. Universalizing the experience and forms of colonialism would merely replicate a methodology that has served colonial power productively for many years. Instead, this study specifically and centrally compares within the spectrum of colonialism, as well as across the metropole-colony divide. Significantly different modes of colonialism clearly shaped the histories of the various colonies under study here.

Queensland

Queensland, the northeast quadrant of the Australian continent, was first settled by Europeans in 1824. The establishment of an isolated and harsh penal institution for repeat and serious offenders at Moreton Bay marks the start of its white history. In the far south of the colony, Moreton Bay would become the site of Queensland's capital, Brisbane, whose growth paralleled the shift in white settlement from convicts to free migrants and settlers in the 1840s. This shift lent Australian historiography its fundamental shape, one in which indigenous Aboriginal peoples had little place, classifiable neither as migrants nor as settlers.⁷ Once prolific, indigenous Aboriginal communities were pushed farther and farther to the margins of this rapidly expanding area of white settlement. In 1859 the colony's Aboriginal population stood at around 100,000, with white settler numbers at about 30,000.⁸ By the 1890s, the Aboriginal population had been reduced to less than 25,000 out of a total population of over 400,000.⁹

Gender imbalance in the colony was striking. Among Pacific Islanders, men outnumbered women ten to one. The non-Aboriginal population in 1891 was about 224,000 men and about 170,000 women, with the north more heavily male.¹⁰ From the 1890s, a gradual balance between men and women began to emerge in the white population, but not among the migrant populations where the nature of the work and the restrictions on immigration kept the inflow predominantly male.

After separating from New South Wales in 1859, Queensland took on the typical characteristics of a settler society. Its parliament followed the bicameral model of a crown-appointed upper house (the Legislative Council, abolished in 1922) and an elected lower house (the Legislative Assembly). Legislative Council members held office for life, while Assembly members were elected to five year terms. The electorate was exclusively male until 1904. A year later, an Australia-wide federal Elections Amendment Act excluded Aboriginals, Pacific Islanders, and those of African or Asian birth from voting.

More than 50 percent of the colony was tropical, a geography with profound effects on the state's economic development. At 667,000 square miles, Queensland accounted for 22 percent of the total area of the continent. Though the denser and more settled areas were principally in the temperate south, the tropical north grew rapidly from the 1870s and was critical to Queensland's overwhelmingly pastoral economy. Settlement moved slowly northward in the 1870s and 1880s though sparse numbers and small frontier-style towns were dominant beyond the southeast. Sheep and cattle farming began in earnest in the 1840s. Wool dominated Queensland's exports into the twentieth century, though there was greater diversification from the 1870s.¹¹ The discovery of gold in 1867, as well as rich mineral veins, made mining a lucrative activity. Gold was mostly found in the north, though the earliest discoveries were at Gympie, only a hundred miles north of Brisbane. As gold faltered, tin, lead, and copper mining grew in significance. At the coast, pearling and the bêche-de-mer industry (an edible sea slug prized in some cuisines) employed considerable numbers, mostly in the Torres Strait in the far north.¹² Above all, however, it was the growth of the sugar industry that dominated northern Queensland.

Sugar was an increasingly powerful commodity in the nineteenth century, an era of rapidly increasing consumption. First grown in Queensland in the 1860s, sugar production developed quickly. The area around the coastal town of Mackay, 625 miles north of Brisbane, was the most active sugar region with plantations in the Pioneer Valley and sugar mills in Mackay. Sugar stretched all the way from a small area under cultivation immediately north of Brisbane near Caboolture to Cairns, some one thousand miles to the capital's north.

Sugar's history, of course, was inextricably tied to that of slavery, and most especially the mass and nonconsensual resettlement of Africans to the plantations of the West Indies. The abolition of slavery in British possessions in the 1830s forced sugar magnates to explore alternative forms of labor. For most of the nineteenth century, as a result, sugar was reliant on indentured labor; it remains “one of the massive demographic forces in world history.”¹³ Queensland's sugar plantation owners looked principally to Pacific Islanders, mainly Melanesians, for their workforce. They were aided by the depletion of the sandalwood industry in which many Pacific Islanders had found employment before the 1860s.¹⁴ Between 1863 and 1908 (the final year of deportation, recruitment having been banned in 1904), thousands of islanders flocked to Queensland's sugar plantations under indenture.¹⁵

This northward agrarian expansion spearheaded by, but not exclusive to, sugar also made the north demographically distinctive, not only as a male frontier environment (a narrative that would become central in white Australia's stories of its early years) but in its considerable racial and ethnic diversity. Raymond Evans estimates the aboriginal population as 4 percent of the total and the non-European segment as 5.05 percent of Queensland's population at the end of the nineteenth century.¹⁶ Pacifi...