Vice is of ancient origin. So is its religious condemnation, apparent in Confucian, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim teachings. Yet it was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that anti-vice activism emerged as an important transnational movement led by a coalition of religious and secular reformers. This movement reached the peak of its influence in the first third of the twentieth century, an era in which many nations, states, colonies, and municipalities experimented with prohibition, whether of alcohol, cigarettes, nonmedical narcotic use, gambling, obscenity, or prostitution. Then, in the mid-twentieth century, the movement began to lose prestige and momentum. Except for the nonmedical use of narcotic drugs, the suppression of which remained an international priority, anti-vice activism assumed the air of an unfashionable “Victorianism.” Remnants of the movement survived, but as a part of a public health establishment that was more secular and narrowly focused than the first great wave of transnational reform. Public health authorities won some battles, notably against tobacco in developed nations. But they also encountered fresh political and technological headwinds, with the result that commercialized vice continued to flourish throughout the world.

In looking back at global anti-vice activism, three questions stand out. First, why did the reform wave build in the late nineteenth century and then crest in the early twentieth century? Second, why did anti-vice activism attract reformers of such diverse backgrounds and interests? How could the likes of Bishop James “Holy” Johnson, fitness entrepreneur Eugen Sandow, anti-imperialist Mohandas Gandhi, and nudist-eugenicist Caleb Saleeby pull at the same reform yoke? Third, why did vice prove so resilient, given that other international reforms produced more satisfactory and durable results?

As to timing, the most basic explanation is that industrialization, technological innovation, and globalization had released the genie of commercialized vice, alarming middle-class moralists, hygienists, and progressives of various stripes. At the time of the French Revolution, Paris had 3,000 drinking establishments. A hundred years later, in the late 1880s, it had more than 30,000. Rivers of cheap gin flowed from modern distilleries into steamships whose speed and gross tonnage doubled between the 1850s and 1890s. Even complacent colonial officials took notice, Charles Ambler observes, when spirits imports to Southern Nigeria more than doubled during a single decade, 1900 to 1910.