Global Anti-Vice Activism, 1890-1950: Fighting Drinks, Drugs, and 'Immorality'

Description

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. Cover Half-title Title page Copyright information Table of contents List of figures List of tables Notes on contributors Acknowledgments 1 Introduction Toward a “vicious turn”? Vices’ archeology of knowledge Notes Part I Health and the body 2 Modernity, vice, and the problem of nakedness Notes 3 “Godless Edens” Cranks, marginals, and marginals in memory Ideal communities and anti-vice activism Hostility to land communes Religion, mysticism, and land communes Moral opposition to land communes Conclusion Notes 4 Physical culture as “natural healing” Life reform and the dangers of being labeled a “crank” “No teetotal crank”: Sandow and the temperance movement Naturalness as virtue “A craving for drugs”: patent medicines and pharmaceutical drugs as vices “Curing illness without medicine”: taking on doctors and the pharmaceutical industry Conclusion and epilogue Notes Part II Drinks and drugs 5 The specter of degeneration Race and the liquor traffic controversy The Liquor Trade Committee Alcohol, fecundity, and degeneration The geography of drink and difference Notes 6 A question of social medicine or racial hygiene? Temperance and the tapestry of social hygiene Eugenics, “racial poisons,” and temperance: a global discourse Echoes of the racial degeneration discourse in the Balkans Race and racial hygiene in the 1930s Conclusion Notes 7 Threats to empire American evangelicals and the Anglo-Saxon moral reform movement, 1880s–1920s Temperance, liquor legislation and the rise of illicit distillation in West Africa Besieged within and without: illicit distillers, prostitutes, and internal disorder in British West Africa during World War II The age of akpeteshie (illicit gin) A diseased fighting force: VDs and British troops Conclusion Notes 8 Medical and criminological constructions of drug addiction in late Imperial and early Soviet Russia Scientific perceptions of drug addiction in late Imperial Russia Radical changes after World War I Constructing the social problem: drug addiction in medical and legal texts of the early Soviet period Conclusion Notes 9 Cigarette smoking in modern Buenos Aires Notes Part III Prostitution and sex trafficking 10 The FBI’s White Slave Division The white slavery crisis The White Slave Division Implications Conclusion Notes 11 Anti-vice lives “Calcutta Vice: The Dragon of Calcutta Lust” Geneva’s distant intimacies Fictional facts and anti-vice lives Notes 12 China’s prostitution regulation system in an international context, 1900–1937 The diffusion of regulated prostitution to China Application of the regulatory model in China The Chinese style of prostitution regulation Domestic transmission of prostitution regulation New meanings and consequences of regulation in China Structural divergences from the European and Japanese models Implications for women’s autonomy Motivations for choosing a regulatory strategy Notes 13 “Hey, GI, want pretty flower girl?” Occupations and prostitution: Japan and Korea in the early Cold War Moralizing the soldier’s body: education, VD prevention and hygienic regulations Prophylaxis and surveillance: pro stations and VD contact tracing Recovery and research: Venereal Disease Rehabilitation Center and VD lab Conclusion Notes 14 Global anti-vice activism: a postmortem Notes Index