Writing of the influence of religion in the United States, Tocqueville pointed to the well-ordered family as a supposed source of stability and temperance. The regulated sphere of domesticity, as shaped by religious habits and beliefs, was where Americans, unlike Europeans, learnt to manage the tumult of democracy. Tocqueville might well have articulated what Eva Payne (6) calls “sexual exceptionalism.” A distinctive ideology of American empire, “sexual exceptionalism” is “the belief that American national character was rooted in – and visible through – the superior sexual morality of the people and their government.” (ibid) For American officials and humanitarian advocates, imperial power and hierarchy depended on, and was justified by, sexual discipline. The extension of state power in the US-led international order of the twentieth century appeared to hinge on the exercise of moral self-control in one of the most intimate of human relations: sex and its exchange.

Payne’s Empire of Purity: The History of Americans’ Global War on Prostitution draws a throughline between sex and empire, demonstrating how the link between the two was channeled through a malleable ideology of sexual restraint, moral governance, and civilization within and beyond the US empire. From the Anglo-American social purity movement of the 1880s to the international anti-trafficking efforts of American social hygienists after WWI, this finely crafted global history charts the shifting alliances, ideological orientations, and geographic reach of an emerging empire entangled with the seeming specter of commercial sex. In the eyes of the American reformers looking to curb sexual license, sex and sexuality were the fulcrum upon which claims of order, hierarchy, and virtue could be established (or denied). Sexual discipline was seen to be essential to the foundations of US-style democracy and capitalism, tying matters of bodily conduct to the health of the polity. In Payne’s (228) pointed formulation, “Sexual self-control and a state that did not accept vice made for good democracy; a marketplace free of sex, contained instead the heterosexual male-headed family, made for good capitalism.” This paradigm has cast a long shadow: witness how US-based anti-trafficking campaigns today seek to punish those linked to “trafficking” – defined to include voluntary sex work – in the name of the protection of women and girls (Conclusion). Payne’s comprehensive, critical account of this imperial formation thus follows the expansive, but uneven, reach of the “sexual exceptionalism” that bound its subjects and those living beyond the empire’s borders.

For socio-legal scholars, Empire of Purity invites renewed inquiry into the significance of law in empire, particularly concerning the normative categories and relations that define gender and sexuality. As Payne carefully narrates, law was one of the means through which American reformers directed the policies of the mainland, colonized territories, and even those of other countries. Most prominently, the model laws of the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA), framed in relation to the wartime crackdown on venereal diseases and prostitution, formalized a policy approach later called the “American Plan” in contrast to the “European Plan” that licensed and regulated prostitution (123). Punitive legislation that targeted sexually “loose” or less respectable women as “prostitutes” then underpinned the prohibition of prostitution across US municipalities and states (Chapter 4). These laws became the basis of the “Porto Rican Experiment” that inflicted police and medical violence against Puerto Rican women – an experience repeated in the US-controlled Dominican Republic and Panama Canal Zone (Chapter 5). Echoing Merry’s (Reference Merry2000) pathbreaking scholarship on the “civilizing” process in nineteenth-century Hawai’i, “women’s bodies” were a “crucial tool of empire” as the selective imposition of the “American Plan” in territories under direct rule carried a rationale of civilizational progress and racial hierarchy (136). It is worth returning to Merry’s prescient observations (Merry Reference Merry2000, 257): “Clearly, there are deep connections between control over the body and control over the state; between the transformation of a gender order and the construction of modernity…” Mediating these profound connections was, of course, law and its transmutable cultural logics.

In Empire of Purity, the ideological frame of American “sexual exceptionalism” took on a wide array of meanings. To wit, contrast the paternalistic language of the “American Plan” propagated by predominantly male social hygienists to those of their predecessors, the women-driven “social purity” activists. An example of early feminism, the abolitionist campaign against the state regulation of prostitution in Britain and continental Europe found expression in the US as the “social purity” movement – so-called in repudiation of regulationist “social evil” laws and activists’ aims to “purify society” of vice and male sexual license (31). Criticizing the lack of discipline among White men and soldiers and the deprivation of women’s liberty in a regime of compulsory examination, “social purity” reformers fought against the regulation of prostitution across US states and in colonies such as the Philippines (Chapters 1 and 2). This mode of combatting vice acquired an American accent in the subsequent panic over “White slave traffic” (78), which introduced federal legislation and powers in 1910 to police the movement of women and girls across state and international borders for (sexually) “immoral purposes” (Chapter 3). By this point, the stage was set for a new set of actors, the Rockefeller-funded social hygienists, to take up the war against prostitution in ways that, in an ironic turn, reimposed punitive controls on women in the form of the “American Plan.” Working with the sanction of the US military and the League of Nations, ASHA representatives, most of whom were White men, sought to foist the ready-made “American Plan” on wartime France and insert its carceral, gendered logic into international law (Chapters 6 and 7, respectively).

It is a mark of Payne’s exemplary methodological craft then that the book brings into focus the reconstructed narratives of the women who were otherwise typified as victims or targets of control. The displacement of women in the evolving global campaign against prostitution was not only reflected in the disappearance of concerns about women’s rights in ASHA’s investigative work for the League of Nations (219), but also left its mark in how the subjects of the League’s reports, the women involved in sex work, “became not individuals, but statistics” that supported a standardized story of forced prostitution and trafficking (231). Even in the eye-witness accounts of the predominantly male investigators, the women they encountered were reduced to sensational, stereotyped details that spoke more of the former’s racialized biases and stock knowledge (206–212). Reading against this grain, Payne’s deft archival analysis points to a differing set of perspectives on sex work as work – viewpoints and utterances that were also contained in investigators’ notes and interviews with women, or, in other contexts, disputes over the arrest and deportation of women for prostitution (212–215, 160–163). We find it telling that it was the bodily encounters between women and the agents of state power that produced traces of the political economy of sex work under the shadow of “sexual exceptionalism.”

Tracking the shifting and contested meanings of concepts like “trafficking,” “white slavery,” and “prostitution,” Empire of Purity reveals the varied ways in which intimacy became a terrain for empire-building. Driven by “sexual exceptionalism,” American reformers crafted a hegemonic model of sex and its exchange through images, regulations, and educational programs that authorized the surveillance and carceral management of (mostly women’s) bodies. Even so, we note that their efforts also resulted in the patchwork governance of intimacy across the empire and its frontiers, as the “American Plan” was adapted, reworked, or even jettisoned in different places and times. This was enabled, in part, by sex and sexuality’s dual nature: at once personal and intimate, but yet inherently social and thus always subject to power. Building on the foundations laid by this book, future scholarship might pursue on-the-ground intimacies, practices, and contestation between bodies in developing new histories of sexual relations and labor in empire. If “sexual exceptionalism” insists on an imperious model of intimacy and punitive governance, we might further inquire into the ways deviant intimacies – in the plural – offer glimpses into the limits of its persistent ideological hold.