Global Women, Colonial Ports: Prostitution in the Interwar Middle East by Liat Kozma (review)

Liat Kozma's Global Women, Colonial Ports reconstructs a densely connected Braudelian Mediterranean in which southern and eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East are linked during the interwar period through prostitution. This meticulously researched study is an innovative contribution to recent trends in global and transnational history. By focusing on key nodes and interactions in the Mediterranean basin, Kozma shows how wide-ranging horizontal networks reached outward as far as Calcutta and Buenos Aires. This approach also enables her to vertically link microlevel interactions of individual prostitutes, brothel owners, procurers, and colonial officials to emerging developments at the international level, in particular the emerging humanitarian concern with trafficking, public health, and women's and children's rights.

The book centers on the 1920s and 1930s, when colonial officials, voluntary associations, and commissions formed by the League of Nations focused increasingly on "regulated prostitution." The history of the regulation or nonregulation of prostitution under the official control of colonial and metropolitan states is set within a valuable contextual background from the precolonial period that provides the reader with a sense of continuing trajectories during and after World War II. Tracing debates about prostitution during the interwar period, Kozma demonstrates how this pivotal issue served as an index measuring colonial progress and national civilizing missions for the British and French empires, as well as for local actors such as the Egyptians and the Lebanese. Gender was central to these conflicts, with the biopolitics of female and male bodies and their relationship to the institution of prostitution being linked to struggles over the boundaries between the colonizer and colonized, between classes, and over the national body politic.

The book comprises an introduction, five empirical chapters, and a conclusion. Kozma first situates the focus of her analysis—the discourses, practices, and conflicts surrounding the state regulation of prostitution—in terms of related literatures on interwar colonialism, transnational and international historiography, the League of Nations and international humanitarianism, and the literature on prostitution in metropolitan and colonial contexts. Chapter 1 centers on the "Advisory Committee on the Traffic of Women" (CTW), established by the League of Nations in 1921 to coordinate policies on the traffic of women and children. Though its policy impact was limited, the CTW did produce a wealth of information on prostitution—through surveys, questionnaires, and fact-finding traveling missions—which supports much of the book's analysis.

Chapter 2 turns to French and British colonial attempts to regulate prostitution. Here the analysis also highlights intriguing connections among the cases of Casablanca, Beirut, Haifa, and Tunis. Casablanca's planned brothel district, Bousbir, was unsuccessfully held up by the French as a model for Beirut and Tunis, for instance. Chapter 3, "Mapping Mobility," looks at the flip side: how interwar prostitution largely circumvented state attempts to contain and regulate it. Kozma sets out the larger push and pull factors of southward and northward mass migrations in the Mediterranean basin and beyond. This is one of most fascinating chapters of the book, as she uses League of Nations and colonial reports (particularly unpublished drafts of the American investigator Paul Kinsie) to vividly portray the motivations, mobility, and flows of procurers, prostitutes, and clients.

Chapters 4 and 5 delve into the intense debates over whether or not prostitution should be officially regulated. Chapter 4 draws on discussions in French and Arabic medical journals to analyze how the colonial encounter shaped differing stances on state-regulated brothels in North Africa, where the French-dominated medical community supported it, and in semi-independent Egypt, where Egyptian doctors saw it as a national disgrace and viewed its abolition as an important step toward decolonization. Chapter 5 looks at abolition efforts in Lebanon and Egypt, focusing on the activities of French and British abolitionist organizations and commentary in the French, British, and Egyptian feminist press to demonstrate how abolition was linked to national pride, notions of the colonial civilizing mission and its...