Managing Sex, Safeguarding the Soldier: Gender, Race, and Regulationism in Nineteenth Century Colonial Punjab

Abstract

Managing sex was an important part of Britain’s imperial project in the colonies. Using a wide range of archival materials and examining the political debates and medical discourse from the nineteenth century, this study delves into the colonial military enterprise of regulating sexual recreation for British troops, and the processes through which the sexualised native woman was configured in colonial Punjab. I argue that paradoxical attempts to make sex available, while simultaneously emphasising imperial social mores of sexual respectability, led to the casting of the ‘prostitute’ as a colonial bogeyman; a vulgar but necessary evil, and a vector of disease.