Syphilis and ‘Sons of Empire’: The ‘Prostitute’ and Britain's Fighting Arm in Nineteenth ̵ Century Colonial Punjab

ABSTRACT

The British army in India took great care to provide European troops with facilities for sexual relations while anxiously managing venereal disease. Examining archival evidence, political debates and medical discourse from the nineteenth century, this article examines the colonial military enterprise of regulated prostitution in colonial Punjab – the ‘Garrison State’ – and the casting of the ‘prostitute’ as a colonial bogeyman and vector of disease. Driven by fears of racial and political subversion, the state expanded mechanisms of control against women it viewed as ‘vulgar’ but a ‘necessary evil’. Beyond generalities of correlation between virility and empire, this study analyses constructs of race, class and sexuality, which undergirded imperial politics in colonial Punjab.