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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
did or gave to its colonies, is illustrated and made explicit by the Indian Spectator , which seemed simply to accept that India should follow English precedent. The Act recently passed, in England, for the protection of young girls has done a great deal for English women. It has been enacted almost in every colony and dependency of Great Britain, except India. But in India a monstrous law is still allowed to have its sway. That law legalizes slavery to lust. That law tramples on the innocence
dispensaries; there is no indication that they share the peasants’ suspicion of doctors. (Irwin, in contrast, remarked that he empathized with the vanished peasants, but he was joking. 132 ) When Ranjitsinhji first became the Jam, the Indian Spectator had encouraged him to initiate the expensive improvements that he himself liked to advertise: famine control, epidemic medicine, railways, ports, irrigation and scientific forestry. 133 Clearly, the content and cost of improvement are not at issue. What Indian critics of
favourable reviews in The Indian Statesman , The Indian Spectator and The Times of India , and, in Britain, in the Dundee Advertiser , The Asiatic Quarterly Review , The New Review and The Sunday Review . 62 In the course of the following decades, the Thakur Sahib returned to Britain not only for social occasions but also, quite possibly influenced by his first visit to its medical department in 1883, to attend the
replacement aircraft mechanic, a toolmaker by trade, was ‘a wonderful fellow with natives’? Leaving Bahawalpur, the mechanic trod on the hands of an over-eager ‘native assistant’ to stop him clinging onto the aeroplane floats during take-off. Elsewhere, Cobham repelled boatloads of Indian spectators by squirting them with water from syringes; they objected strongly to having their
separatist movements bent on similar goals would follow throughout the Empire. As an English contributor to the Indian Spectator put it, ‘if a Parliament in Ireland be given to it with the absolute power of granting the supplies or of raising taxes, a dismemberment of the Empire is a necessary and inevitable consequence sooner or later’. 25 This ‘domino theory’ exerted tremendous power in the
-day Jerusalem, some Indian potentates travelled to pay their respects. Their slate-grey elephants may have been lumbering, but their silk, silver, gold and gem coverings made them considerably more splendid than the flying machines opposite which they were photographed. Indian spectators were not the only people to swell the numbers of Purnea for a month. The expedition’s servants
‘Children of other lands: American Indians’, Spectator (12 January 1906), 70–1. ‘The North-American Indians’, CH , 25 (1891), 4. 53 A Scoutmaster, ‘The empire’, BS , 218 (1911), 180. 54 Winifred Spurling, ‘The cousins and I’, BS , 66 (1898), 131
India (London, 2016). 56 Attending this ceremony in 1982, I joined some Indian spectators standing on the low parapet of a fountain. They and I were knocked off by a policeman’s lathi, or long baton. It was a condign reminder that this treatment was formerly meted out by the British to supposedly errant Indians. 57 Maseeh Rahman, ‘Lutyens’ Delhi under threat from developers’, Guardian, 7 October 2003, p. 19. Also available at www.theguardian.com/environment/2003/oct/07/ india.conservationandendangeredspecies (accessed 7 July 2008). 58 Quoted in the same Guardian
positive or negative visions of the West. The film focuses not on the oppressed but on the unhappiness and alienation of the oppressors. At no stage does it give a voice to the insurgents, nor indeed to the black servants at the court or the Indian spectators to Camilla’s performances. Like The River before it, it uses the colonised to generate a moral rather than a political critique of Europe. The