Description
Officially confined to red-light districts, brothels in British India were tolerated until the 1920s. Yet, by this time, prostitution reform campaigns led by Indian, imperial, and international bodies were combining the social scientific insights of sexology and hygiene with the moral condemnations of sexual slavery and human trafficking. These reformers identified the brothel as exacerbating rather than containing "corrupting prostitutes" and the threat of venereal diseases, and therefore encouraged the suppression of brothels rather than their urban segregation. In this book, Stephen Legg tracks the complex spatial politics surrounding brothels in the interwar period at multiple scales, including the local, regional, national, imperial, and global. Campaigns and state policies against brothels did not just operate at different scales but made scales themselves, forging new urban, provincial, colonial, and international formations. In so doing, they also remade the boundary between the state and the social, through which the prostitute was, Legg concludes, "civilly abandoned."
About the Author
Stephen Legg is Associate Professor in the School of Geography at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi's Urban Governmentalities and the editor of Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos.
Reviews
"This is an important book, one that refuses to accept the sexual contours of prostitution in the context of empire and insists instead on the legislative, spatial, judicial, disciplinary, and narrative aspects of colonial preoccupation with Indian morality.... The scalar reading the book employs is an elegant formulation of the need to consider the multiple trajectories of nation, city, gender, agency, and governance not only through the dualities of the colonial relationship between England and India but also within the expanded scope of the interwar period in Europe and Asia." -- Harleen Singh * American Historical Review *
"This book is crisp and compelling and will be read with interest by those studying colonial South Asia, the regulation of sexuality, governmentality, scale, and empire, among others....Legg convincingly and provocatively argues for a study of empire that reveals its 'nodes of violence, fragility, contradiction, and complexity' (p.38), and that in this case this included a scale-inflected shaming of sex workers and deployment of scandal to defend empire and intervention, even as these interventions deepened the suffering of many women." -- Sara Smith * Journal of Historical Geography *
"[A] smart and original contribution to the expansive literature on colonialism and prostitution.... Legg's efforts to interweave archival and theoretical insights-to write across scales-makes Prostitution and the Ends of Empire a bold, exciting and ambitious project." -- Renisa Mawani * Pacific Affairs *
"[T]his book sheds new light onto still occluded areas and evokes productive questions that reach beyond the specific areas and topics under discussion." -- Lesley A. Hall * Canadian Journal of History *
"Legg has produced a detailed and well-researched account of colonial governmentality offering novel insights into the relationship between the state and civil society which speaks to scholars across many disciplines." -- Amil Mohanan * Social & Cultural Geography *
"The fabric Legg weaves is indeed rich, and accessible to many different readerships, all of which will benefit from the important work undertaken here." -- Jessica Namakkal * Journal of International and Global Studies *
"Legg opens up the constitution of state/civil society, province/nation, international/national, and metropole/periphery.....Nimbly moving through a range of literatures, archives, and materials in a way that is itself multiply scaled, Prostitution and the Ends of Empire offers insights for scholars across disciplines." -- Tara Suri * H-Law, H-Net Reviews *
Book Information
ISBN 9780822357735
Author Stephen Legg
Format Paperback
Page Count 296
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 404g
About the Author
Stephen Legg is Associate Professor in the School of Geography at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi's Urban Governmentalities and the editor of Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos.
Reviews
"This is an important book, one that refuses to accept the sexual contours of prostitution in the context of empire and insists instead on the legislative, spatial, judicial, disciplinary, and narrative aspects of colonial preoccupation with Indian morality.... The scalar reading the book employs is an elegant formulation of the need to consider the multiple trajectories of nation, city, gender, agency, and governance not only through the dualities of the colonial relationship between England and India but also within the expanded scope of the interwar period in Europe and Asia." -- Harleen Singh * American Historical Review *
"This book is crisp and compelling and will be read with interest by those studying colonial South Asia, the regulation of sexuality, governmentality, scale, and empire, among others....Legg convincingly and provocatively argues for a study of empire that reveals its 'nodes of violence, fragility, contradiction, and complexity' (p.38), and that in this case this included a scale-inflected shaming of sex workers and deployment of scandal to defend empire and intervention, even as these interventions deepened the suffering of many women." -- Sara Smith * Journal of Historical Geography *
"[A] smart and original contribution to the expansive literature on colonialism and prostitution.... Legg's efforts to interweave archival and theoretical insights-to write across scales-makes Prostitution and the Ends of Empire a bold, exciting and ambitious project." -- Renisa Mawani * Pacific Affairs *
"[T]his book sheds new light onto still occluded areas and evokes productive questions that reach beyond the specific areas and topics under discussion." -- Lesley A. Hall * Canadian Journal of History *
"Legg has produced a detailed and well-researched account of colonial governmentality offering novel insights into the relationship between the state and civil society which speaks to scholars across many disciplines." -- Amil Mohanan * Social & Cultural Geography *
"The fabric Legg weaves is indeed rich, and accessible to many different readerships, all of which will benefit from the important work undertaken here." -- Jessica Namakkal * Journal of International and Global Studies *
"Legg opens up the constitution of state/civil society, province/nation, international/national, and metropole/periphery.....Nimbly moving through a range of literatures, archives, and materials in a way that is itself multiply scaled, Prostitution and the Ends of Empire offers insights for scholars across disciplines." -- Tara Suri * H-Law, H-Net Reviews *
Book Information
ISBN 9780822357735
Author Stephen Legg
Format Paperback
Page Count 296
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 404g
