In 1888, two American missionaries traveled through British military cantonments in India, documenting an atrocity committed in the name of public health. What they found was a system where thousands of Indian women had been forcibly registered as prostitutes, subjected to invasive weekly examinations, and locked into a life of servitude to protect British soldiers from venereal disease. The Contagious Diseases Acts, first passed in Britain and then extended to India, had created a machinery of exploitation that legally enslaved women under the guise of sanitation. Andrew's account reads like an indictment: she recounts girls trafficked into cantonments as young as twelve, women examines with brutal instruments by military doctors, and a bureaucracy that treated bodies as liabilities to be managed. The book was weaponized by abolitionist Josephine Butler, who championed its revelations as proof that the British Empire was committing slow violence against women in its colonies. This is not comfortable history. It is a 19th-century feminist polemic that pulls no punches about the sexual and racial violence baked into imperial governance. It remains essential reading for anyone interested in the roots of feminist activism, anti-colonial resistance, and the long arc of justice for women in South Asia.
