Philippa Levine's book is a dense and detailed book that has two objectives. The first is a survey of the British Empire's contagious disease (CD) laws and the changes and challenges made to them. The second is an exploration of the ideas that lay behind those laws, changes, and challenges The author is to be commended for the way in which she tackles the former task. However, there are considerable problems with her approach to the latter.

The first half of the book looks at the range of laws that were devised in India, Hong Kong, Australia (Queensland in particular), and the Straits Settlements (Singapore). After briefly introducing the reader to each colony, she tells a story that starts late in the eighteenth century with a range of ad hoc policies devised to deal with a problem that could see up to 30 percent of European troops hospitalized at any one time with venereal disease. Early initiatives could be elaborate affairs, and questions of cost and effectiveness quickly surfaced. These criticisms failed to check the development of elaborate systems, and between the 1860s and the 1890s all of the colonies developed procedures for regulating prostitution that involved the same broad strategies: a register of prostitutes, their compulsory examination at regular intervals with certification for the healthy and hospitalization for the infected, and punitive measures for those failing to attend.

After 1886 and the repeal of the United Kingdom's own Contagious Disease Acts, a more complex set of critiques was made. Colonial governments were represented as immoral whoremongers, and some colonies quietly abandoned their regulations. Others, such as Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements, “strenuously protested the prospect of losing the system they had operated, in some cases for thirty years” (92). The issue troubled Parliament between 1888 and 1897, and in that year compulsory examination was abandoned. World War I reinvigorated the regulatory systems as prostitutes in the United Kingdom and throughout the Empire were constructed as an enemy of the war effort. Defence of the Realm Regulation 40D made it illegal for a woman with venereal disease to copulate with a member of the British armed forces, and defendants were forced to submit to the doctor's examination to provide trial evidence. A royal commission was established to decide the postwar fate of this approach, but its chair successfully persuaded the Home Office to abandon the policy before the commission made a report.

This reconstruction of the story of the CD laws throughout the Empire is a thorough and well-executed project. The second half of the book, in which the origins of the laws are traced, is rather less convincing. In discourses of gender, race, Orientalism, and imperial anxiety Levine points to the usual suspects and shows how the political tensions between the metropole and the colonies, the rise of medical techniques of government, and the contested and changing definitions of public and private all served to drive changes in and challenges to the CD laws. The key problem with her analysis lies in the fact that the book simply traces the politics and discourses employed by elites about prostitution; this is a catalog of the ways in which lawmakers, military officers, and those with medical degrees or the education and wealth to publish moral and religious tracts constructed a wide range of human behaviors that were almost always conducted by someone else other than those writing. There are very few prostitutes and even fewer paying customers found in these pages.

Even where they do appear they are not allowed to distract the author. On page 241, for example, Levine recounts the tale of Fanny Epstein, who disappeared from her father's home in London and reappeared in a Bombay brothel insisting that she was “entirely her own mistress.” Levine is concerned to show how this story was used to construct difference as such women were represented as “still white and the vestiges of civilization thus clung to them” (242). Levine shows no interest in seeing if she can read the woman's story in such a way as to rescue some hint of Fanny's ideas about her own situation; rather, her story is simply harnessed to Levine's overarching theoretical project.

It strikes me, however, that there would have been no need for the CD laws and no place for all the hubbub that Levine so painstakingly sifts through if it had not been for women engaging in prostitution and men in paying for sex. In other words, if she is tracing the discursive origins of the CD laws she needs to look at the ideas that drove women to sell their sexual services and men to buy them. Yet we learn little about the traders and consumers from this book. She does devote the occasional page to “Women's Resistance,” does note that officers worried about the aesthetic attributes of local women, and includes references to events such as the Wazza riots when soldiers protested about the Cairo prostitutes. However, she rarely stops to wonder about the ideas or discourses driving these episodes or stories, and, as the example of Fanny Epstein suggests, when the opportunity presents itself to explore the discourses employed by those who are selling the sex she fails to grasp it.

This is troubling as, despite the lengths that the author has gone to in order to demonstrate her theoretical sophistication, she may well simply be reproducing the power relations of the imperial archives in which she has delved so energetically. Those selling and paying for the sex were denied a voice then and are denied a voice once again now in this book. The attention to “subaltern” positions and the methodological demand to “read against the grain” of so much recent historical work seem not to have impacted on the way in which Levine has approached her subject.

This is not simply the disappointment of a reviewer who had expected a more salacious read. It is all very well to want to show how discourses about sexuality, masculinity, femininity, race, and so on, shaped the CD laws and discussions about them, but when there is no attempt to show how those engaged in the prostitution trade themselves imagined their actions and interacted with these discourses then surely the crucial sets of ideas and agents that drove the trade and necessitated the laws are missing from the book. Indeed, these ideas do not simply explain the perceived necessity for the laws in the first place, but they also account for the continued failure that she notes in the conclusion; “while the management of sexuality has indubitably affected the lives of many women and men, governmental policies around this issue more often than not fail in their intentions” (327). The author approvingly acknowledges the wisdom of Patrick Wolfe in her introduction and reproduces his observation that “our goal should be a unified historical field” (11). Sadly, in forgetting to find out why people were having these sexual relationships across the British Empire she falls far short of this goal as she produces a partial account of the CD laws that tells us only what Anglicized elites around the world were thinking.