Race, space and the regulation of prostitution in colonial Hong Kong

Urban History

Volumn 31, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 229-248

  Howell, Philip ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

PROSTITUTION; RACE; REGULATORY APPROACH; URBAN HISTORY; URBAN POLICY;

ASIA; CHINA; EASTERN HEMISPHERE; EURASIA; FAR EAST; HONG KONG; WORLD;

EID: 13944254782     PISSN: 09639268     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0963926804002123     Document Type: Article

References (102)

1. C. Munn, Anglo-China: Chinese People and British Rule in Hong Kong, 1841-1880 (Richmond, 2001).
2. See also T.-W. Ngo (ed.), Hong Kong's History: State and Society under Colonial Rule (London, 1999).
3. C. Munn, Anglo-China, 344.
4. On race, sex and disease, see: L. Manderson, Sickness and the State: Health and Illness in Colonial Malaya, 1870-1940 (Cambridge, 1987).
5. L. Manderson and M. Jolly (eds.), Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific (Chicago, 1997).
6. A.L. Stoler, 'Sexual affronts and racial frontiers: European identities and the cultural politics of exclusion in colonial Southeast Asia', in F. Cooper and A.L. Stoler (eds.), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, 1997), 198-237.
7. A.L. Stoler, 'Making empire respectable: the politics of race and sexual morality in twentieth-century colonial cultures', in A. McClintock, A. Muffi and E. Shohat (eds.), Dangerous Liaisons: Gender Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis, 1997), 344-73.
8. P. Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (London, 2003).
9. See also P. Howell, 'Prostitution and racialised sexuality: the regulation of prostitution in Britain and the British Empire before the Contagious Diseases Acts', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18 (2000), 321-9;
10. P. Levine, 'Modernity, medicine, and colonialism: the Contagious Diseases Ordinances in Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements', Positions, 6 (1998), 675-705;
11. K.L. MacPherson,'Caveat emptor! Attempts to control the venereals in nineteenth century Hong Kong', in L. Bryder and D.A. Dow (eds.), New Countries and Old Medicine: Proceedings of an International Conference on the History of Medicine and Health (Auckland, 1995), 72-8;
12. K.L. MacPherson, 'Conspiracy of silence: a history of sexually transmitted diseases and HIV/AIDS in Hong Kong', in M. Lewis, S. Bamber and M. Waugh (eds.), Sex, Disease, and Society: A Comparative History of Sexually Transmitted Diseases and HIVIAIDS in Asia and the Pacific (Westport, 1997),85-112;
13. N. Miners, Hong Kong under Imperial Rule, 1912-1941 (Hong Kong, 1987), 191-206.
14. For negotiation and resistance: C.W. Kwan, The Making of Hong Kong Society: Three Studies of Class Formation in Early Hong Kong (Oxford, 1991);
15. Ngo (ed.), Hong Kong's History;
16. J.-E Tsai, Hong Kong in Chinese History: Community and Social Unrest in the British Colony 1842-1913 (New York, 1993).
17. In particular, M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1979),
18. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I. Introduction (New York, 1980).
19. See K. Luker, 'Sex, social hygiene, and the state: the double-edged sword of social reform', Theory and Society, 27 (1998), 601-34;
20. P.W. Werth, 'Through the prism of prostitution: state, society and power', Social History, 19 (1994), 1-15.
21. For France, see A. Corbin, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850 (London, 1990),
22. J. Harsin, Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Princeton, 1985).
23. For Britain, J. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge, 1982), is the standard work.
24. P. Levine, 'Rough usage: prostitution, law and the social historian', in A. Wilson (ed.), Rethinking Social History: English Society 1570-1920 and its Interpretation (Manchester, 1993), 266-92.
25. For a recent review, see L. Bryder, 'Sex, race, and colonialism: an historiographical review', International History Review, 20 (1998 , 791-822.
26. The three most pertinent studies are C. Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai: A Social History 1849-1949 (Cambridge, 2001);
27. G. Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Berkeley, 1997);
28. J. Warren, Ah-Ku and Karayuki-san. Prostitution in Singapore, 1870-1940 (Singapore, 1993).
29. For example: D. Arnold, 'Sex, state, and society: sexually transmitted diseases and HIV /AIDS in modern India', in Lewis, Bamber and Waugh (eds.), Sex, Disease, and Society, 19-36;
30. K. Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and their Critics, 1793-1905 (London, 1980);
31. E.B. van Heyningen,'The social evil in the Cape Colony 1868-1902: prostitution and the Contagious Diseases Acts', Journal of Southern African Studies, 10 (1984), 170-97;
32. A. JanMohamed, 'Sexuality on/of the racial border: Foucault, Wright, and the articulation of "racialized sexuality"', in D. Stanton (ed.), Discourses of Sexuality: From Aristotle to AIDS (Ann Arbor, 1992), 94-116;
33. P. Levine, 'Venereal disease, prostitution, and the politics of empire: the case of British India', Journal of the History of Sexuality, 4 (1994), 579-602;
34. L. Manderson, 'Colonial desires: sexuality; race, and gender in British Malaya', Journal of the History of Sexuality, 7 (1997), 372-88;
35. J. Whitehead, 'Bodies clean and unclean: prostitution, sanitary legislation, and respectable femininity in colonial North India', Gender & History, 7 (1995), 41-63;
36. B.S.A. Yeoh, 'Sexually transmitted diseases in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Singapore', in Lewis, Bamber and Waugh (eds.), Sex, Disease, and Society, 177-202.
37. The best guide here is A.L. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, 1995).
38. L. McNay, Foucault: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, 1994), 99;
39. H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Brighton, 1982), 195-6.
40. Stoler, Education of Desire, 34.
41. For this spatial theme in Foucault's work, see in particular S. Elden, Mappin the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History (London, 2001).
42. P. Howell, 'Prostitutional space in the nineteenth-century European city', in I.S. Black and R.A. Butlin (eds.), Place, Culture and Identity: Essays in Historical Geography in Honour of Alan R.H. Baker (Quebec, 2001), 181-202.
43. Levine, 'Modernity, medicine, and colonialism', 683.
44. M. Vaughan, Curing their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford, 1991).
45. J.W. Cell, 'Anglo-Indian medical theory and the origins of segregation in West Africa', American Historical Review, 91 (1986), 307-35;
46. A.D. King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power, and Environment (London, 1976). The latter's discussion of colonial urbanism remains the standard account but it surely must be considered particularly problematic that King's very definition of the colonial city is with reference to segregation.
47. Howell, 'Racialised sexuality'.
48. Levine, 'Modernity, medicine, and colonialism', 692.
49. See in particular S. Gronewold, Beautiful Merchandise: Prostitution in China, 1860-1936 (New York, 1982).
50. L. White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago, 1990), 34.
51. See for instance L. Manderson, 'Migration, prostitution and medical surveillance in early twentieth-century Malaya', in L. Marks and M. Worboys (eds.), Migrants, Minorities and Health: Historical and Contemporary Studies (London, 1997), 49-69,
52. Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Working of the Contagious Disease Ordinance, 1867, in Hong Kong (Hong Kong, 1879),
53. Macpherson, 'Conspiracy of silence', 88.
54. Manderson, 'Colonial desires', 380.
55. T. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge, 1988), 40, 42-3.
56. Munn, Anglo-China, 280-9.
57. Ibid., 325.
58. Report of the Commissioners, 56.
59. Ibid., 57.
60. Howell, 'Racialised sexuality';
61. K. Lowe and E. McLaughlin, 'Sir John Pope Hennessy and the "native race craze": colonial government in Hong Kong, 1877-1882', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 20 (1992), 223-47;
62. J. Pope Hennessy, Verandah: Some Episodes in the Crown Colonies 1867-1889 (London, 1964).
63. For the ambiguities of Pope Hennessy's liberalism, see D. Lambert and P. Howell, 'John Pope Hennessy and the translation of "slavery" between late nineteenth-century Barbados and Hong Kong', History Workshop Journal, 55 (2003), 1-24.
64. Report ofthe Commissioners, 3.
65. Ibid., 5.
66. Ibid., 255-6.
67. Stoler, Education of Desire, 39.
68. Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, 241;
69. Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai.
70. Vaughan, Curing their Ills, 10.
71. Report of the Commissioners, 3.
72. Ibid., 5.
73. Parliamentary Papers 1871 (C.108) XlX, Report from the Royal Commission on the Administration and Operation of the Contagious Diseases Acts 1866-9, 17.
74. Report of the Commissioners, 6.
75. See the evidence of Deputy Inspector General Samuel Wells, ibid., 319.
76. Compare the inconclusive proposals of 1869 in Shanghai's International Settlement: Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai, 276.
77. Report of the Commissioners, 5.
78. Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics, 299.
79. See E. Sinn, Power and Charity: The Early History of the Tung Wah Hospital, Hong Kong (HongKong, 1989).
80. In Ordinance 12 of 1857, registered brothels were confined 'within one of other of the following districts or portions of districts, namely, - Ha-wan, from Spring gardens, eastward, - Sei-ping-poon, from the junction of Hollywood Road and Queen's Road West, westward, and Tai-ping-shan, except such parts of such districts or portions of districts as face the Queen's Road': see Hong Kong Acts, National Archives (NA) CO 130/2. The Ordinance 10 of 1867 simply stipulated that'the Registrar General may grant to any person to whom he shall think fit to keep a brothel in such district or other locality as the Governor in Council may from time to time appoint': NA CO 130/3.
81. See Munn, Anglo-China, 341-57.
82. History of the Po Leung Kuk Hong Kong 1878-1968 (n.d., Hong Kong Public Records Office);
83. H.J. Lethbridge, 'The evolution of a Chinese voluntary association in Hong Kong: The Po Leung Kuk', Journal of Oriental Studies, 10 (1972), 33-50.
84. Report of the Commissioners, 226-7.
85. Ibid., 2,
86. Ibid., 2.
87. Ibid., 8. Levine, in Prostitution, Race and Politics, rightly notes that visibility and concealment were twin aims of colonial regulation. I prefer here to stress a certain shift in emphasis from concealment to visibility.
88. Ibid., 13.
89. Ibid., 27, 33.
90. Ibid., 28.
91. Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics, 244.
92. Ibid., 25-7.
93. Ibid., 31, 256-7.
94. Munn, Anglo-China.
95. See also: U. Kalpagan, 'Colonial governmentality and the public sphere in India', Journal of Historical Sociology, 15 (2002), 35-58;
96. U. Kalpagan, 'Colonial governmentality and the "economy"', Economy and Society, 29 (2000), 418-38;
97. D. Scott, 'Colonial governmentality', Social Text, 43 (1995), 191-220.
98. M. Foucault,'Governmentality', in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (London, 1991).
99. M. Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London, 1999);
100. M. Dean, 'Liberal government and authoritarianism', Economy and Society, 31 (2002), 37-61.
101. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 75.
102. B.S.A. Yeoh, Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial Singapore (Kuala Lumpur, 1996), 67.