Jamie Stoops's The Thorny Path is a fascinating and much-needed addition to scholarship on the social history of pornography and its regulation. As Stoops points out in her introduction, investigations of this history in the British context have largely focused on the nineteenth century. Little scholarship has addressed the practicalities of making, distributing, and consuming pornography in Britain during the interwar period or examined the extent to which authorities attempted to regulate it within the country. Over six chapters, Stoops addresses these practicalities, outlining (1) the structures of pornography production, distribution, and consumption in Britain between 1900 and 1945; (2) the British pornography trade's relation to producers and consumers in other countries; (3) the content of British pornography during this period; (4) the British press's representation of the trade; (5) anti-vice societies’ role in policing pornography within and outside British borders; and (6) the British state's approaches to policing pornography. Stoops employs a broad definition of “pornography,” covering material of varying degrees of explicitness and a variety of media, including film, photography, published and unpublished literature, pulp magazines, and comics.

The limitations of the historical record—producers, distributors, and consumers of this kind of material had few motives to document their activities, and often worked hard to conceal them—can make tracing the social history of pornography quite a challenge. Stoops does a commendable job of hunting down relevant archival sources, and of informing readers about inevitable gaps in the record. Most of the book's information about pornography production, distribution, and consumption is gathered from government and court records and newspaper reports. These sources tell us a great deal about an aspect of the trade that has largely been overlooked: the important role of part-time, local pornography producers and distributors in its operations and how many of them conducted business in loose networks while also working as hairdressers, door-to-door salespeople, or grocers—that is, in any number of occupations not directly connected with the media industry. However, as Stoops points out, these sources tell us little about some important aspects of the production process, such as who the models for pornographic photographs and films were, how they were recruited, and how they were treated. These sources also provide relatively few details about who consumed pornography, though it is possible to ascertain that consumers varied fairly widely in terms of age, gender, and marital and socioeconomic status.

The Thorny Path’s strongest critical contribution is its examination of the British state's approach to policing pornography in its final chapters. Here Stoops offers up compelling evidence that government authorities were less interested in stamping out pornography production and consumption than they were in protecting the state's reputation for moral purity and their own reputations for competence, and that they experienced little public pressure to crack down on local producers and distributors. In this context, the distribution of foreign pornography within Britain's borders, and the distribution of British pornography in its colonies, became the focus of policing efforts, while homegrown pornography was often ignored or denied to exist at all. This section also offers an interesting explanation of why the British state's attempts to suppress transnational traffic in pornography were largely ineffectual. Stoops contrasts the state's international approach to battling influxes of foreign pornography during this period, which depended on its ability to work cooperatively with authorities in other nations, with the pornography trade's transnational networks of exchange, which operated outside the bounds of the law and national interest, and were much more flexible and responsive as a result. Although aspects of this argument have been made before, Stoops's emphasis on the important structural differences between international and transnational cooperation is enlightening.

Less strong, perhaps, is the book's overall theoretical framework, which situates the pornography trade as a queer space that acted as a site of resistance against a heteronormative state and civil society. Stoops devotes considerable space to making and defending this point, outlining it in the introduction and returning to it in subsequent chapters. Although the argument is well supported at a theoretical level, it is not developed beyond the basic claim that the trade operated as a site through which visions of alternatives to the narrow bounds of so-called normative sexual behavior could flourish. In the absence of detailed information about how pornography producers, distributors, and consumers saw themselves and their activities, or compelling evidence that the trade did much to change how Britons understood sexuality or behaved sexually, it is difficult to ascertain the stakes of this point from the standpoint of social history.

At times, I would also have appreciated a more granular approach to telling the history that Stoops has so painstakingly pieced together. The introduction to The Thorny Path opens with a wonderful narrative about British intelligence operatives’ struggle to manufacture fake Japanese pornographic photographs during the Second World War, which brilliantly illustrates the illegibility of the pornography trade to the state during the first half of the twentieth century. For the majority of the book, however, Stoops eschews close case studies in favor of overviews of what the archival evidence tells us about pornography's production, consumption, distribution, and regulation, illustrated with brief examples from the archives. Although this style suits the book's ambitions as a broad social history, there are a number of places where drilling down deeper into that history would be illuminating and welcome to readers interested in getting a better sense of the real people involved in, and opposed to, pornography networks during this period.

Although it leaves room for future investigations of some of its claims, The Thorny Path is a conscientious and welcome addition to scholarship on the social history of sexuality and media, and a must-read book for historians of pornography.