Global Anti-Vice Activism, 1890–1950
Global Anti-Vice Activism, 1890–1950
Robert Kramm, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich
Harald Fischer-Tiné, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich
Vice was one of the primary shared interests of the global community at the turn of the twentieth century. Anti-vice activists worked to combat noxious substances such as alcohol, drugs and cigarettes, and 'immoral' sexual activities such as prostitution. Nearly all of these activists approached the issue of vice by expressing worries about the body, its physical health, and functionality. By situating anti-vice politics in their broader historical contexts, Global Anti-Vice Activism, 1890–1950 sheds fresh light on the initiatives of various actors, organizations and institutions which have previously been treated primarily within national and regional boundaries. Looking at anti-vice policy from both social and cultural historical perspectives, it illuminates the centrality of regulating vice in imperial and national modernization projects. The contributors argue that vice and vice regulation constitute an ideal topic for global history, because they bridge the gap between discourse and practice, and state and civil society.
- Brings vice, which previously has been largely absent, into the study of international history
- Incorporates race, gender and sexuality into discussions of transnational history
- Contextualizes the discourse of vice and practices of vice-regulation at the turn of the twentieth century
Product details
October 2019Paperback
9781107500754
349 pages
230 × 153 × 20 mm
0.51kg
6 b/w illus.
Available
Table of Contents
- 1. Introduction Jessica R. Pliley, Robert Kramm-Masaoka and Harald Fischer-Tiné
- Part I. Health and the Body:
- 2. Modernity, vice and the problem of nakedness Philippa Levine
- 3. 'Godless Edens' - surveillance, eroticized anarchy and 'depraved communities' in Britain and the wider world, 1890–1930 Antony Taylor
- 4. Physical culture as 'natural cure' - Eugen Sandow's global campaign against the diseases and vices of civilization, c.1890–1920 Carey A. Watt
- Part II. Drinks and Drugs:
- 5. The specter of degeneration - alcohol and race in West Africa in the early twentieth century Charles Ambler
- 6. A question of social medicine or racial hygiene? Temperance discourse in Bulgaria, 1920–40 Nikolay Kamenov
- 7. Threats to Empire - illicit distillation, venereal diseases and colonial disorder in British West Africa, 1930–48 Emmanuel Akyeampong
- 8. Medical and criminological constructions of drug addiction in late Imperial and early Soviet Russia Pavel Vasilyev
- 9. Cigarette smoking in modern Buenos Aires - the sudden change in a century-old continuity Diego Armus
- Part III. Prostitution and Sex Trafficking:
- 10. The FBI's white slave division - the creation of a national regulatory regime to police prostitutes in the United States, 1910–18 Jessica R. Pliley
- 11. Anti-vice lives: peopling the archives of prostitution in interwar India Stephen Legg
- 12. China's prostitution regulation system in an international context, 1900–37 Elizabeth Remick
- 13. 'Hey, GI, want pretty flower girl?' - venereal disease, sanitation, and geopolitics in US-occupied Japan and Korea, 1945–8 Robert Kramm-Masaoka
- 14. Afterword David Courtwright.
