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.

Philippa Levine is Professor of History at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She is the author of the forthcoming A Short History of the British Empire and a contributor to the Oxford History of the BritishEmpire.

Introduction1. Comparing Colonial SitesPART I: CONTAGIOUS DISEASES LAWS2. Law, Medicine and Morality: Introducing Contagious Diseases Legislation3. Colonial Medicine and the Project of Modernity4. Diplomacy, Disease and Dissent5. Abolitionism Declawed6. Colonial Soldiers, White Women and the First World WarPART II: RACE, SEX, AND POLITICS7. Prostitution, Race and Empire8. The Sexual Census and the Racialization of Colonial Women9. White Women's Sexuality in Colonial Settings10. 'Not A Petticoat In Sight': The Problem of Masculinity11. Space and Place: The Marketplace of Colonial SexEpilogueBibliography