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.

This book places vice and vice regulation in their global social and cultural contexts at the turn of the twentieth century.

This book examines alcohol production, consumption, regulation, and commerce, alongside the gendered, medical, religious, ideological, and cultural practices that surrounded alcohol from 1850 to 1950. Through analyzing major changes in alcohol's place in society, contributors demonstrate the important connections between industrialization, empire-building, and the growth of the nation-state. They also identify the diverse actors and communities that built, contested, and resisted those processes around the world. Overall, this book proposes a new global framework that is vital to understanding how deeply alcohol was involved in central processes shaping the modern world. It shows how empires were partly built through alcohol, in both economic and ideological terms, yet alcohol production, trade, and consumption were also sites for anti-colonial resistance. Contributors also discuss how alcohol regulations and public health discourses increasingly revealed the intent and reach of state power to monitor and police citizens, as well as the legitimization of that power through nationalism. Illustrated with over 50 images, the book will be a valuable resource for students and researchers studying the history of alcohol, as well as the cultural history of the 19th and 20th centuries more broadly.

This book examines the local manifestation of the global temperance movement in the Balkans. It argues that regional histories of social movements in the modern period could not be sufficiently understood in isolation. Moreover, the book argues that broad transformations of social movements – for example, the power centers associated with moral/religious temperance and the later, scientifically based anti-alcohol campaigns – are more easily identifiable through a detailed regional study. For this purpose, the book begins by sketching the historical development as well as the main historiographical themes surrounding the worldwide temperance movement. The book then zooms in on the movement in the Balkans and Bulgaria in particular. American missionaries founded the temperance movement in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The interwar period, however, witnessed the proliferation of new, professional organizations. The book discusses the various branches as well as their international and political affiliations, showing that the anti-alcohol reform movement was one of the most important social movements in the region.

Volume IV examines the intersections of modernity and human sexuality through the forces, ideas, and events that have shaped the modern world. Through eighteen chapters, this volume examines connections between sexuality and the defining forces of modern global history including capitalism, colonialism, migration, consumerism, and war; sexuality in modern literature and print media; sexuality in dictatorships and democracies; and cultural changes such as sex education and the sexual revolution. The volume ends with discussions of the difficult issues we in the modern world continue to face, such as restrictions on reproductive rights, sex tourism, STDs and AIDS, sex trafficking, domestic violence, and illiberal attacks on sexuality.

Women, Islam and Familial Intimacy in Colonial South Asia offers an account of Muslim feminism in an age of nationalism and reform, and how it shaped debates on family, morality and society.

How the US crusade against prostitution became a tool of empire Between the 1870s and 1930s, American social reformers, working closely with the US government, transformed sexual vice into an international political and humanitarian concern. As these activists worked to eradicate prostitution and trafficking, they promoted sexual self-control for both men and women as a cornerstone of civilization and a basis of American exceptionalism. Empire of Purity traces the history of these efforts, showing how the policing and penalization of sexuality was used to justify American interventions around the world. Eva Payne describes how American reformers successfully pushed for international anti-trafficking agreements that mirrored US laws, calling for states to criminalize prostitution and restrict migration, and harming the very women they claimed to protect. She argues that Americans’ ambitions to reshape global sexual morality and law advanced an ideology of racial hierarchy that viewed women of color, immigrants, and sexual minorities as dangerous vectors of disease. Payne tells the stories of the sex workers themselves, revealing how these women’s experiences defy the dichotomies that have shaped American cultural and legal conceptions of prostitution and trafficking, such as choice and coercion, free and unfree labor, and white sexual innocence and the assumed depravity of nonwhites. Drawing on archives in Europe, the United States, and Latin America, Empire of Purity ties the war on sexual vice to American imperial ambitions and a politicization of sexuality that continues to govern both domestic and international policy today.