Purifying Empire: Obscenity and the Politics of Moral Regulation in Britain, India and Australia

by Deana Heath

Overview

Purifying Empire explores the material, cultural and moral fragmentation of the boundaries of imperial and colonial rule in the British Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It charts how a particular bio-political project, namely the drive to regulate the obscene in late nineteenth-century Britain, was transformed from a national into a global and imperial venture and then re-localized in two different colonial contexts, India and Australia, to serve decidedly different ends. While a considerable body of work has demonstrated both the role of empire in shaping moral regulatory projects in Britain and their adaptation, transformation and, at times, rejection in colonial contexts, this book illustrates that it is in fact only through a comparative and transnational framework that it is possible to elucidate both the temporalist nature of colonialism and the political, racial and moral contradictions that sustained imperial and colonial regimes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521194358
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	06/03/2010
Pages:	244
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Deana Heath completed her PhD in imperial and colonial and South Asian history at the University of California, Berkeley in 2003, following which she taught at Trinity College Dublin for five years. She is currently teaching in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta. Her research on British imperial and colonial and South Asian history focuses on a range of topics, including obscenity and censorship, modernity and governmentality, communalism and violence, globalization and Indian cinema. In addition to this book, she co-edited Communalism and Globalization in South Asia and its Diaspora (2010).

Table of Contents

List of abbreviations vi

Introduction: Books, boundaries and Britishness 1

1 Colonialism and governmentality 8

2 From sovereignty to governmentality: the emergence of obscenity regulation as a biopolitical project in Britain 35

3 Globalizing the local: imperial hygiene and the regulation of the obscence 65

4 Localizing the global in settler societies: regulating the obscene in Australia 93

5 Localizing the global in exploitation colonies: regulating the obscene in India 148

Conclusion: Retangling empire, nation, colony and globe 206

Bibliography 214

Index 237

Editorial Reviews

"There were always political, racial and moral contradictions in the British Empire and this excellent study demonstrates them with particular clarity.  This is an interesting book to read and shows just how heterogeneous Britain's imperial project was." -The Historical Association

"Heath has written an exceptional book on nineteenth century British colonial policy and the ways in which these came to impact policies in Australia and India and the governing of those nation states." -LIMINA: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies

Purifying Empire sets an agenda for future research in this field." -Simon J. Potter, H-Albion

"...this ambitious book is an important contribution to scholarship on colonial governmentality." -Alison Bashfor, American Historical Review

"Purifying Empire traces attempts to regulate obscenity in late-nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Britain, Australia, and India, making a convincing case for the importance of culture in destabilizing imperial power."
—Victorian Studies

From the Publisher