Empire of Purity: The History of Americans’ Global War on Prostitution

In this impressive debut, historian Payne demonstrates how the U.S. utilized the “ ‘problem’ of commercial sex” abroad as a means of furthering its imperial ambitions. In the 1870s, as a battle played out on U.S. soil among government officials and activists over whether to regulate prostitution or ban it outright, a notion of American “sexual exceptionalism” was promoted by the reform-minded activists who eventually won out. According to Payne, the idea that Americans were uniquely able to regulate their sexuality came to serve as justification for American colonial projects as “civilizing” missions involving the regulation of prostitution. Tracing numerous such examples through the 1930s—mainly in the Philippines and several Caribbean colonies—Payne shows that these efforts were less about actually improving conditions for women (in fact they rarely did so, driving women into more dangerously illicit working conditions) but were instead about preserving racial hierarchies between U.S. troops and local women of color, as well as promoting a false “moral” distinction between the U.S. empire and the European empires it was replacing. Payne also uses this history as an intriguing window into how American imperialism functioned as a partnership between government and private philanthropic interests. Rigorous and well articulated, this is an enlightening new perspective on U.S. imperial history. (Nov.)