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A though it was a commonplace for British travelers and colonial officials to claim that paid sex was rampant across the empire, they rarely acknowledged that the changes wrought by colonial rule had profound consequences on the shape of the prostitution. Trading in sex was certainly not a phenomenon brought east by British colonists, but the effects of colonialism were often visible in new forms of commercial sex which arose directly from the material circumstances that colonialism imposed. In Africa, for example, the sharp demographic changes which moved working men out of their customary lifestyles and into single-sex labor barracks created a range of new sexual markets, and indeed practices, by which men made the harsh and isolated life common to the new African economy bearable. Women living on the fringes of such camps or in nearby town and cities offered companionship in the form of sex, cooked meals, and company to such men, an arrangement the British dubbed wholesale as prostitution.2
The British saw prostitution wherever they looked. Colonial officials concurred with the casual assumption that, as one moved east, so prostitution became an increasingly common phenomenon. Prostitution, they were fond of asserting, "offends no native susceptibility."3 It was a routine part of life, and living evidence of native disorder. Colonists saw colonial cultures as looser, attaching less stigma to prostitution than the industrialized west. Burmese women, claimed a colonial doctor in 1875, were sufficiently unchaste that "if not prostitutes," they were "next door to it."4 C.P. Lucas at the Colonial Office knew that in China and thus in Britain's Chinese-populated colonies, "prostitution is more or less of a recognized character."5 In India, likewise, there were too many "phases and varieties of prostitution" to enumerate.6
For the British colonial state, prostitution was a problem but it was also both a necessity and a convenient canvas on which to illuminate the greater evils or dangers of uncivilized peoples. Prostitution was problematic in part because of the close associations, typically drawn in the nineteenth century, between the sex trade and sexually transmissible diseases. It also raised the specter of the working woman in an era dedicated to romanticizing a vision of idle, frail womanhood. The existence of prostitution was, moreover, a source of moral disturbance in...