Racialized Legalities: The Rule of Law, Race, and the Protection of Women in Britain’s Crown Colonies, 1886–1890

This article enquires into colonial officials’ invocations of the “rule of law” and the persistence of racial difference in the modern British Empire. To unravel this contradiction, I examine the debates over the freedom of women during the repeal of the Contagious Diseases ordinances in the directly ruled Crown Colonies of Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements (Singapore, Penang, and Malacca) between 1886 and 1890. Although the apparent purpose of these laws was the containment of venereal diseases, officials employed them to police prostitution and subject working-class, “native” women to medical surveillance. Despite the repeal of the Contagious Diseases ordinances across the empire, officials in both colonies continued to regulate prostitution in the name of native women’s freedom, invoking the rule of law. Through the historical ethnography of the rule of law, I demonstrate how the language of this ideal rendered an evocative frame of beneficence, legality, and protection against which officials articulated social difference in racialized, and intersectional, ways—what I call racialized legalities. In comparing the colonized in terms of racialized legalities, officials designed a differentiated sovereignty in determining the protections granted to native women. Expressing the cultural power of law, the rule of law was a constitutive myth.