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Racialized Legalities: The Rule of Law, Race, and the Protection of Women in Britain’s Crown Colonies, 1886–1890

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2023

Jack Jin Gary Lee
Jack Jin Gary Lee*
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Sociology, The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, New York, NY, USA. Email: jackjin.lee@newschool.edu
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Abstract

This article enquires into colonial officials’ invocations of the “rule of law” and the persistence of racial difference in the modern British Empire. To unravel this contradiction, I examine the debates over the freedom of women during the repeal of the Contagious Diseases ordinances in the directly ruled Crown Colonies of Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements (Singapore, Penang, and Malacca) between 1886 and 1890. Although the apparent purpose of these laws was the containment of venereal diseases, officials employed them to police prostitution and subject working-class, “native” women to medical surveillance. Despite the repeal of the Contagious Diseases ordinances across the empire, officials in both colonies continued to regulate prostitution in the name of native women’s freedom, invoking the rule of law. Through the historical ethnography of the rule of law, I demonstrate how the language of this ideal rendered an evocative frame of beneficence, legality, and protection against which officials articulated social difference in racialized, and intersectional, ways—what I call racialized legalities. In comparing the colonized in terms of racialized legalities, officials designed a differentiated sovereignty in determining the protections granted to native women. Expressing the cultural power of law, the rule of law was a constitutive myth.

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Articles
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Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 49 , Issue 3 , August 2024 , pp. 1396 - 1425
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Bar Foundation

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Footnotes

Department of Sociology, New School for Social Research, 79 Fifth Avenue, 9th floor, New York, NY 10003, USA. Lee’s scholarship explores how race and law shape the social logics and processes of governance in modern empires and (post)colonial states. For their generous insights, support, and critical engagement with this work, Gary thanks Benoit Challand, Rishad Choudhury, Elisabeth Clemens, Hardeep Dhillon, Carlos Forment, Terry Halliday, Carol Heimer, Elzbieta Matynia, Keally McBride, Alastair McClure, Ann Orloff, Isaac Reed, Chris Roberts, Hanisah Sani, Mitra Sharafi, Rachel Sherman, Tad Skotnicki, John Skrentny, Nick Wilson, Fadzilah Yahaya, and the participants of the 2017 ABF Summer Internal Workshop and the Transnational Legal History Group Seminar at CUHK Law. Special gratitude is due, above all, to Nick Cheesman, Lynette Chua, Kwai Ng, and Jothie Rajah for formative conversations and advice that were pivotal in the framing and development of this article. The author would also like to acknowledge the anonymous reviewers of this article for their thoughtful critiques and constructive feedback—they improved the article significantly. This project was, in part, supported by Oberlin College’s H.H. Powers Travel Grant.

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