This dissertation examines the troubled history of law and prostitution in colonial India from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century across contexts of statewide regulatory laws, cantonment codes, municipal rules, and border regimes. It explores how legislation on prostitution was translated from letter into practice, and crucially, how this process of translation was mediated, negotiated, and even appropriated by the targets of law—primarily subaltern Indian women—amid an inconsistent and dispersed everyday imperial state. In doing so, this study frames this history as one of routine disruption whereby a range of ordinary women and men confronted, stymied, and evaded laws around prostitution on the scattered ground of empire. Moreover, it pushes against a historiography on the colonial state, law, and gender in India that has broadly focused on governmental power and its mandate via legislation and codification. Instead, "The Scatter of Empire" foregrounds notions of trouble and disruption to present a new reading of colonial interventions into sexuality as they unfolded on the ground. Drawing on a range of colonial correspondence and reports, alongside newspapers, institutional records, and previously unexplored oral histories, this dissertation is structured around four episodic moments of legislative and regulatory interventions—evasion, reform, ‘traffic,’ and memory—that are a means to examining creative confrontations with law and empire among various groups of troubling agents. These include subaltern Indian women engaged in prostitution, who appear across this dissertation in terms of their popular legal knowledge, jurisdictional shifting, filing of petitions, evading of surveillance, and refusals to be relocated in the face of multiple scales of coercive measures that placed capacious categories of criminality over them. French women similarly emerge in this dissertation as disruptors of late colonial border regimes as they strategized their travels to India to engage in sex work from the point of visa applications to the point of border-crossing into British jurisdiction. British soldiers, on the other hand, appear in this dissertation situated differently to trouble, for they did not trouble law and regulations as much as they troubled empire’s account of itself through oral histories after the end of empire, which revealed elaborate official worlds of sexual commerce that military authorities had consistently denied during the twentieth century. This dissertation ultimately makes two key arguments: one, that trouble, challenge, and confrontation—including acts of evading arrest, refusing orders, contesting expulsions, and negotiating borders—characterized encounters with colonial laws on prostitution, even when the threat of coercion, discipline, and punitive action was on the cards. And two, that reading colonial projects to regulate gender and sexuality, and more generally the lives of colonial subjects, in terms of the trouble and confrontation they provoked presents a vastly different reading of empire—one where empire is not a homogenizing and unchallenged force from above, but instead a ‘scatter’ of legal enforcement, inconsistent communication, clashing laws, and dueling narratives on the ground below. The case for centering the scatter in empire is to, in one sense, puncture the self-regard of empire in imperial histories, and in another, to highlight the trouble, turbulence, and fragility that marked its daily workings.