Prostitution and Trafficking in the Age of Empire: Global and Scalar Approaches to Migration and Sexual Labor

It is a little recognized and yet fundamental reality about prostitution that the sale of sex is very much tied to human mobility. Rural women escaping family poverty have long turned to paid sex after arriving in the city. Male labor migrants are frequent clients, along with students, soldiers, and others relocating without families. Sex workers often move from town to town or abroad to avoid police harassment, in search of higher wages or better working conditions. Police rolls in countries that regulate venal sex are replete with the names of recent migrants from surrounding villages or neighboring states. This intersection of commercial sex and population movement is particularly striking in the context of imperial rule, where prostitution was regulated in the interest of health, sanitation, population control, and the overall civilizing mission of the metropole. All of the works under review address the overlay of racial tensions and colonial power relations in an industry already riddled with complex gender and social hierarchies. Beginning in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, thousands of imperial agents, officers, and military personnel relocated en masse to the Indian subcontinent, East Asia, Africa, and the Middle East during the height of colonial rule. They, along with the largely male population of tourists, scientific investigators, and entrepreneurs who followed, served as the client base for Indigenous women working in brothels designed to serve the needs of the new occupiers. Later, during the decline of empire after World War II, American occupation authorities flooded former imperial cities, and their soldiers overwhelmed the informal brothel scene.

But what can the study of transactional sex and colonial mobility tell us about the structure of imperial rule? How does a focus on regulated prostitution in colonial settings and across broad global networks shift our understanding of sex worker experiences, their motives, the ways they interacted with clients, or how they were embedded in local communities? Did efforts to reform and eventually abolish systems of regulated prostitution play out differently away from the European metropole? The authors of these books argue that the system of state-monitored prostitution lay at the very heart of the colonial mission and encapsulated the racial hierarchies that underpinned it. For these authors, understanding the ways imperial governments and their representatives intervened in the world of paid sex is key to appreciating the complexities of the colonial project as a whole. Each of the books under review considers space, mobility, and the distribution of power within and between colonial holdings or overseas migrant communities in the realm of sexual commerce. Collectively, they trace the impact of paid sex on the lives of women and men in the trade, on the urban landscape in which they operated, and on local and colonial politics. They also explore the wave of European social reformers and sexologists, whose efforts to abolish tolerated prostitution paralleled the global growth and expansion of red-light districts. They address mobile sex workers in Mediterranean port cities, across the British Raj, in the North American West, and in occupied post-imperial Japan, demonstrating overlapping patterns of state control and networks of opposition. Their reach extends from the dramatic uptick in labor migration in the 1880s through the decline of empire in the aftermath of World War II.

Liat Kozma's Global Women, Colonial Ports: Prostitution in the Interwar Middle East takes a broadly transnational perspective in its...