Prostitution and racialised sexuality: the regulation of prostitution in Britain and the British Empire before the Contagious Diseases Acts

In this paper I examine the interplay of race and sexuality in 19th-century British colonial legislation concerning prostitution. I demonstrate that B ritish systems of regulation of prostitution predated the introduction of t he Contagious Diseases Act in 1864, and that rather than spreading from Bri tain to its colonies regulationist measures developed from the interplay of metropolitan-colonial relations. The example of Hong Kong serves to illust rate both the priority of colonial systems for the regulation of prostituti on and the explicitly racialised nature of this legislation. I argue that c olonial practice served as more than a merely legislative precedent for dom estic measures, however, as racial discourse and practice can be seen to ma rk all attempts at the regulation of prostitution, at home and abroad; and the conception of 'racialised sexuality' is useful for understanding both c olonial and domestic measures for the regulation of prostitution. Understan ding the historical geography of regulation therefore undermines convention al analyses of relations between imperial metropole and colonial periphery, and directs our attention to the articulated categories of race, class, se xuality, and gender in the complex colonial spaces of the British imperium.