A welcome recent addition to the field of American history has been more sustained attention to the critical role of humanitarian efforts and private philanthropic groups in expanding the global reach of the American empire. Eva Payne’s Empire of Purity broadens this approach to include American anti-prostitution campaigns during the World War I era. Drawing on archival sources from social hygiene organizations and government committees, as well as periodicals, personal papers, and extensive secondary source literature, Payne argues that sexual reform efforts, primarily anti-prostitution movements, should be considered an important part of American imperial expansion in the early twentieth century.

Payne’s first chapter surveys the landscape of anti-prostitution efforts in both the United States and England in the late nineteenth century. She highlights two broad responses among the largely white, middle-class female reformers of the period: abolition (a term retooled by activists from its antislavery roots) and regulation. Payne also emphasizes the growing influence of the abolitionist position and the widening international scope of reformers’ interests. Chapter two follows this thread overseas to newly controlled U.S. spaces like the Philippines. Of special note in this chapter is Payne’s discussion of the more globally oriented lessons drawn from a visit to British-ruled India by two female American anti-vice reformers.

Much of the third chapter is devoted to the familiar story of white slavery and the Mann Act, although Payne adds a brief discussion of the racialized policing of prostitution in the Panama Canal Zone. Chapter four turns to similarly well-known sexual hygienists such as John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Abraham Flexner, in addition to groups like the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA) and the Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA), while the fifth chapter focuses on prostitution policy in U.S.-managed areas of Panama, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico during and after World War I. That chapter views this policy largely through the eyes of American officials and relies on their accounts for much of the primary source material discussed in the chapter. The sixth chapter returns to the activities of groups like ASHA and CTCA, especially in France, where Payne frames U.S. prostitution policy as part of American imperial ambitions.

The immediate postwar era is the focus of chapter seven—namely, efforts by American social hygienists to investigate prostitution on a global scale. At the center of the chapter is another committee, the newly-formed League of Nations’s Enquiry into Traffic in Women and Children, and the two reports compiled by the committee, in 1927 and 1930, with extensive American leadership. Payne is especially strong in her analysis of the committees’ descriptions of prostitution, including racialized differences, homosexuality, and a range of “heterosexual perversions” (212). Payne also argues convincingly that the second report, which examined “conditions in the Far East,” reinforced longstanding racialized distinctions between the West and the East (219).

For the American social hygienists at the center of the book, World War I offered a new opportunity to act as agents of state power and to continue that role globally after the war. This development is skillfully presented by Payne, and the book is at its best when it guides readers into less familiar areas in the history of prostitution, such as Panama, the Dominican Republic, and India. Ultimately, while an empire of purity remained (and remains) out of reach for American reformers, Payne convincingly argues that in the World War I era, it was certainly within their sights.