The operation of the British model of imperialism was never consistent, seldom coherent, and far from comprehensive. Indeed, the existence of what were in effect several British empires rendered the emergence of such a model impossible. Yet ideas, administrative methods, and legal provisions did of course pass through its systems. This book reveals the manner in which these propositions can be followed through the exportation of aspects of sexual politics from the so-called metropole in the later nineteenth century. Purity campaigns, controversies about the age of consent, the regulation of prostitution and the passage and repeal of contagious diseases laws, as well as a new legislative awareness of homosexuality, were all part of the sexual currency of the late Victorian age. Proponents of these developments were invariably aware of the potential imperial dimensions of their concerns. Indeed, as in the case of the age of consent issue and the regulation of prostitution in military contexts, India was a prime locus of such anxieties. The imperial territory could be as much a central focus as domestic society.The strength of this work is that it deals in the complex spatial geographies of imperial sexual politics. By examining theorisation about the alleged sexual iniquities and purities of the urban and the rural, fears about supposed military debauchery and the related tendency towards inter-racial sex, as well as the quasi-anthropological debates about the sexual propensities of other 'races', the author demonstrates the manner in which the (often bourgeois and religious) alarm about the sexual habits of the age brought together metropolitan and colonial locations into a single, if complex, mental system. Yet both surveys and applications were patchy. Diverse patterns emerge from the analysis of the sexual politics of a West African colony (Sierra Leone), Australian territories (South Australia and New South Wales) and the largely separate 'empire' of India. As with so many other aspects of imperialism, these matters were largely interactive and reciprocal. Dominant rulers and settlers, as well as the indigenous peoples and subordinate classes at whom provisions were invariably directed, indulged in processes of acceptance, rejection, and modification. Concepts of imperial sexuality, while circulating and diffusing through a variety of media, travelling protagonists, and administrative instruments, were never truly replicated across the colonial spectrum.Thus, polemicists, journalists, religious and colonial authorities in a variety of colonial settings seldom slavishly followed the notions that emerged from London. Moreover, we should always remember the significance of the gulf between intention and effect, for example between legal enactment and its operation 'on the ground'. This is paralleled by the dangers in taking what can sometimes be seen as propagandist theorising at face value. Richard Burton's notion of the 'Sotadic Zone', so deeply implicated in his visions of the distinctions among different form...
