Abstract
Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India uses the interwar period for its focus on municipal and health legislation as it pertains to prostitution in colonial India. Using a “scalar methodology,” Stephen Legg scrutinizes the brothel in India as a “local, national, imperial, and international problem” (3) for the British India government. While work by feminist historians, literary scholars, and anthropologists has delved into the sexual lives of women during empire and illuminated the evolution of colonial miscegenation policy before and after 1857, fewer studies offer an insight into civil and judicial colonial apparatus that recognized, regulated, and thus restructured prostitution. Moreover, the book convincingly shows that colonial policy, projected as social reform, demonstrated instead a large degree of disengagement from the women whose lives it purportedly strove to improve