Governing prostitution in colonial Delhi: from cantonment regulations to international hygiene (1864–1939)

Legg, Stephen

doi:10.1080/03071020903257018

Cited by 42 publications

(14 citation statements)

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“…According to Lal [44] (p. 32), these concerns about venereal disease in the "Home Quarters" gave rise to the regulation and frequent medical inspection of female prostitutes, known among the British officers as "disreputable women," at military cantonments (cf. [58,59]). This level of surveillance for military purposes was also justified as improving Indian women's health.…”

Section: Besieged At the "Home Quarters"mentioning

confidence: 99%

Guarding the Sons of Empire: Military–State–Society Relations in Water, Sanitation and Health Programs of mid-19th-Century India

Halvorson

Wescoat

2020

Water

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Drinking water supply and sanitation have had a strong association with military institutions in South Asia from the colonial period to the present. This paper shows how military-state-society relationships created spaces of differential water access and sanitation burdens in mid-19th-century cantonments in ways that involved complex gender relations. In comparison with previous research, we argue that privileged military enclaves were segregated but never fully separated from larger urban water and sanitation systems. We use historical geographic methods to review the evolving role of military sanitation regulations in cantonments from late-18th-century policies of the East India Company (EIC) through mid-19th-century rule by the British Crown, during which time military cantonments, regulations, and formal monitoring reports were established. Close reading of the British Army Medical Department’s Statistical, Sanitary, and Medical Reports (Sanitary Reports) in the 1860s then shows how military-state-society relations diverged from civilian public health programs in ways that persist to some extent to the present day. Health advisors, some of them women, pursued an ideology and tactics to “guard the sons of empire”, from what they perceived to be a disease-filled landscape of “lurking evils”, “choleric attacks”, and “native offensives”. We conclude with a discussion of both continuities and change in the relationships between military and civilian public health reforms beyond the barracks.

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Section: Besieged At the "Home Quarters"mentioning

confidence: 99%

Guarding the Sons of Empire: Military–State–Society Relations in Water, Sanitation and Health Programs of mid-19th-Century India

Halvorson

Wescoat

2020

Water

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“…Public health was a multi‐scalar linked set of knowledge that was made local in particular ways in colonial cities (Legg, ). The local effects of imperial discourse on disease showed the colonial city as a relational space within larger networks of regulation, localized within particular contexts of a politics of place (Legg, ). Operating on bodily epidemics, public health was part a colonial urban civil society that was the product of dense overlapping networks linking metropole and colony in cities (Legg, ; Lees, ).…”

Section: Problematization Mobility and Urban Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

Controlling Mobility and Regulation in Urban Space: Muslim Pilgrims to Mecca in Colonial Bombay, 1880–1914

Lombardo

2016

Int J Urban Regional Res

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The meanings and practices of space shape how cities are understood and governed. This article argues that space is central to understandings of mobility and practices of regulation in the city. Undertaking an analysis of the regulation of Muslim pilgrims (Hajis) in colonial Bombay (Mumbai) from 1880 to 1914, this article explores urban governance discourses around race, religion and public health at a variety of scales. It investigates the way that Hajis were problematized through these discourses, and targeted as threats to elite power and prosperity in the specific context of Bombay as a global shipping and economic hub. I conclude that elite conceptions of the city shape the governance of problematized bodies in ways which reinforce the meanings and politics of mobility and space. Elite understand ings of movement and the city itself shape the practices and targets of urban regulation and control.

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“…Overlapping the eugenics movement was a perennial project to abolish prostitution, in part to eliminate venereal disease as one of the principle biological threats to white reproduction. Abolition (self-consciously named after the movement to end slavery) countered regulationist approaches that were either official, as in the British Empire (Howell, 2009;Legg, 2009;Levine, 2003), or de facto, as in many US cities (Clement, 2006;Donovan, 2006;Pivar, 2002), and relied upon managing prostitution as a necessary evil through measures such as spatial containment in red light districts or medical inspection of prostitutes.…”

Section: Sexualitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Eliminating vice everywhere, not just around training camps, was needed to ensure the health of soldiers in the short term, but also their families when they resumed their civilian lives. Thus in common with efforts at sexual regulation elsewhere (Howell, 2009;Legg, 2009), the anti-vice mission of the CTCA expanded spatially and temporally over the course of the war from an exclusive concern with soldier health to a more general concern for civilian health.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Multiple racial futures: Spatio-temporalities of race during World War I

Olund

2017

Environ Plan D

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Abstract:Using the example of the WWI-US Commission on Training Camp Activities, I argue that racialized biopolitical projects entail multiple, specific spatio-temporalities that seek to enact different racial futures within and between racial categories. What I call 'victorious whiteness', 'infinite whiteness' and 'static blackness' assembled by the CTCA, and an 'advancing blackness' pursued by black elites in opposition, interacted in a complex topology of early 20 th -century efforts to protect trainee soldiers from venereal disease, and efforts to prevent racial violence, both of which endangered the war effort and thus the future of the white nation. This counters a tendency in much current literature on racial biopolitics to assert a stark binary between and homogeneity within the facilitation of white futurity and black risk failure within individual biopolitical projects.

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Governing prostitution in colonial Delhi: from cantonment regulations to international hygiene (1864–1939)

Cited by 42 publications

References 10 publications

Guarding the Sons of Empire: Military–State–Society Relations in Water, Sanitation and Health Programs of mid-19th-Century India

Guarding the Sons of Empire: Military–State–Society Relations in Water, Sanitation and Health Programs of mid-19th-Century India

Controlling Mobility and Regulation in Urban Space: Muslim Pilgrims to Mecca in Colonial Bombay, 1880–1914

Multiple racial futures: Spatio-temporalities of race during World War I

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