This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion of the historical geography of modernity. It is argued that the exclusive focus on social theory has detrimental effects on the appreciation of normative political concerns and that it ignores the resurgence of normative political theory. Habermas's concept of the public sphere, and its place within his theoretical and empirical studies, is, by contrast, commendably concerned with linking the social and historical work with normative political theorising, and its usefulness for geographical investigation is applauded. However, the criticisms directed from, in particular, communitarian political theorists and contextualist social researchers would seem to make his attempt to bring a ‘strong’ theory of public political life back within the remit of a reconstructed social theory less plausible. One set of responses to this criticism comes in the form of the attempt to build geography into this normative political theory, turning public spheres into public spaces; Arcndt's political theory, in conclusion, is thus held to be a significant contribution to the historical geography of modernity.

The recent 'animal turn' in geography has contributed to a critical examination of the inseparable geographies of human and non-human animals, and has a clear ethical dimension. This paper is intended to explore these same ethical issues through a consideration of the historical geography of petkeeping as this relates to the death and commemoration of favourite household animals. The emergence of the pet cemetery, towards the end of the 19th century, is a signi cant step in itself, but this was only one element in a radical reappraisal of the place of non-human animals in human sensibility and spirituality. For some bereaved pet-owners, the old question of the immortality of animal souls was retrieved and transformed, and sustained by a raft of unorthodox theological and spiritual speculation. The signi cance of this late Victorian and Edwardian response to non-human animals is assessed and treated as a problem of ethics, as a counterweight to the dominant anthropocentrism of past times and ours.

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.

The geography of the regulation of sex work in colonial Hong Kong is examined as a contribution to the historiography of the colonial city. Particular attention is paid to racial and sexual segregation and their relation to Foucauldian concepts of discipline and regulated sexuality. The introduction and revision of Venereal Disease Ordinances, and the landscape of regulated prostitution that resulted, are read as part of a mid-nineteenth-century crisis of government. Ultimately, the political and discursive construction of Chinese racial/cultural difference reveals the limits of ‘imperial governmentality’ as much as the ambition of colonial sexual discipline.

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