[The first half of this chapter is a revised version of a commissioned contribution to Sex (The Erotic Review, ed. Stephen Bayley, 2001), entitled ‘Does size matter?: African and Afro-American super-sexuality’; the second half has been written for this volume.

The chapter registers an extraordinary reversal. Male circumcision, from being regarded as a barbarous mark of ‘the Other’, was adopted for a full half-century as an emblem of the imperial elite. Although circumcision provides unusually clear evidence of a cultural connection to empire, it is ignored by cultural and post-colonial historians. Its significance, however, has been picked up by traditionalist historians such as Piers Brendon (The decline and fall of the British empire, 1781–1997 (2007), p. 206) and Anthony Kirk-Greene (Britain's imperial administrators, 1858–1966 (2000), pp. 11–12).]