Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents : Cleansing motherhood : hygiene and the culture of domesticity in San Francisco's Chinatown, 1875-1900 -- Modernity, medicine and colonialism : the contagious diseases ordinances in Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements -- White colonialism and sexual modernity : Australian women in the early twentieth century metropolis -- Local colour : the spectacle of race at Niagara Falls -- Unsettling settlers : colonial migrants and racialised sexuality in interwar Marseilles -- Wanted native views : collecting colonial postcards of India -- Racialising imperial Canada : Indian women and the making of ethnic communities -- Unnecessary crimes and tragedies : race, gender and sexuality in Australian policies of Aboriginal child removal -- Gendering the modern : women and home science in British India -- Gender and "hyper-masculinity" as post-colonial modernity during Indonesia's struggle for independence, 1945 to 1949 -- "Respectability," "modernity" and the policing of "culture" in colonial Ceylon -- Ancient wisdom, modern motherhood : theosophy and the colonial syncretic -- The lineage of the "Indian" modern : rhetoric, agency and the Sarda Act in late colonial India .