Michael Mason Boeken

This work chronicles the adventures of the last generation of British men and women who went East to seek their fortunes. Drawn into the colonial territories scattered around the South China Sea, they found themselves in an exotic, intoxicating world. It was a land of rickshaws and shanghai jars, sampans and Straits Steamers, set against a background of palm-fringed beaches and tropical rain-forests. But it was also a world of conflicting beliefs and many races, where the overlapping of widely differing moral standards and viewpoints created a heady and dangerous atmosphere.

A classic history of Britons' experiences of India in the last days of the Raj.

What did the Victorians think about sex? What was the reality of their sexual behaviour? What wider concepts - biological, political, religious - influenced their sexual moralism? A lively and fascinating synthesis of a wealth of new research, The Making of Victorian Sexuality expertly disrupts our present comfortable consensus on nineteenth-century society. Moreover, it persuasively argues that the Victorians may have much to teach the libertarian twentieth-century.