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The operation of the British model of imperialism was never consistent, seldom coherent, and far from comprehensive. Purity campaigns, controversies about the age of consent, the regulation of prostitution and passage and repeal of contagious diseases laws, as well as a new legislative awareness of homosexuality, were all part of the sexual currency of the late Victorian age. Colonial governments, institutions and companies recognised that in many ways the effective operation of the Empire depended upon sexual arrangements. They devised elaborate systems of sexual governance, but also devoted disproportionate energy to marking and policing the sexual margins. This book not only investigates controversies surrounding prostitution, homosexuality and the age of consent in the British Empire, but also revolutionises people's notions about the importance of sex as a nexus of imperial power relations. The derivative hypothesis, which reads colonial sexuality politics as something England did or gave to its colonies, is illustrated and made explicit by the
regulation. The governor added, however, that prostitution was ‘so common’ and was ‘adopted at so early an age, that it would be impossible to carry out the measures recommended by Surgeon Major Gray’. 58 He may simply have meant that there were too many prostitutes to consider regulating, but this allusion to an ungovernable sexual world also betrays deeper European beliefs about Africa and Africans, as Luise White argues: It is possible that Contagious Diseases laws, or the regulation of prostitutes