ABSTRACT
Prostitution regulation has rightly come to be recognized as a critical prop of imperial rule, vital not only to the campaign against venereal diseases but in a wider sense to the maintenance of racial and sexual privileges upon which colonial authority depended. Hong Kong has the distinction of having the earliest formal imperial legislation for the regulation of prostitution in the British Empire. By contrast, the repeal vision, produced by international and empire-wide humanitarian networks, authorized a geography of the British imperial system, in which colonial sites lost their specificity in their connections to each other and to the metropolis. Certainly, the regulation of prostitution in Hong Kong was far more openly coercive and thoroughgoing than anything that could be contemplated in Britain at the time. The British rulers of Hong Kong were little more than pimps and slave-masters.
