Purifying Empire : Obscenity and the Politics of Moral Regulation in Britain, India and Australia

238pp. Black cloth-covered boards, gilt titles on spine. 8vo. Purifying Empire explores the material, cultural and moral fragmentation of the boundaries of imperial and colonial rule in the British Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It charts how a particular bio-political project, namely the drive to regulate the obscene in late nineteenth-century Britain, was transformed from a national into a global and imperial venture and then re-localized in two different colonial contexts, India and Australia, to serve decidedly different ends.